"...okay..." How about she tries this and see if it makes any more sense once she has an example to go on.

It's easy enough to find room to put down the cubes. When she touches the green cube she can see all her slots and also a lot more and she could move between the two sets of slots. When she touches the blue cube she can feel a list of things she could make and how much they would cost. For now it looks like she could make several styles of crafting benches, several styles of wooden platforms, torches and she could also convert a coin into 100 of the next less valuable coin (gold to silver to copper)

...can coins be converted back, a hundred packed into one, or will she be drowning in copper forever if she follows the impulse to convert them all down?

Coins can be converted back.

In that case she follows the impulse to convert them all up, and consolidates them into a minimal number of coins, which she stores in the... storage... thing.

Okay then. "Anything else?"

"Lots more, these are your starting tools." She hands over an axe and pickaxe each of which have an unlabelled mental switch. A hammer which feels magical in some undefined way and a giant butterfly net big enough to catch a person in.

"...I'm gonna need explanations for these. What are they for, what do they do?"

"The axe is for chopping down trees, the pickaxe is for breaking just about everything else. They each can either be used with or without stacking mode. Stacking mode means that whatever they break becomes a stackable item but it also means that things without stackable forms are just destroyed. Most things do have a stackable mode though so you'll probably to use the stacking mode most of the time. The hammer can be used as a physical hammer but you can also use it to reshape items. That makes it easier to make slopes or curves when you're building. The bug net is for catching non-hostile creatures or people. You can carry them around and put them back down or you can use them as crafting ingredients."

"...people can be crafting ingredients??"

"Yeah it's a bit more convenient for us then being killed repeatedly in the hopes we drop certain things. We'll show back up in new bodies later on either way."

"...................okay..."

"Everyone you meet here is a part of this world. Well, unless we have another visitor but currently you're the only one. We won't hold any grudges for the things the world asks you to do."

"...I'm still not really comfortable using people as crafting ingredients."

"Fair enough, you're not the first person with that objection so you can buy the relevant items instead."

"Oh good."

"It's nice you're concerned for us. There are a couple of occasions when the path involves killing one of us but there are always other options. Those are all a ways in the future. The first one is that if you venture into the underworld some demons carry voodoo dolls. If one of those falls into lava it summons a dangerous monster and the guide's current body dies. You can convert the voodoo doll into an ethical summoner instead though."

"...why are there voodoo dolls???"

"I really don't have a good answer for you. There's actually voodoo dolls you can find or make for three of us though you haven't met the other two yet. I really don't know why some challenges are supposed to start that way. We're pretty sure the creators didn't really expect us to become as aware as we are and they didn't really explain the rules they built into the world."

"...I want to say 'fair enough I guess' but I think if there was the possibility you might be people and they didn't account for it and built things in a way that kind of screws you over a bunch now that you're people, that's not actually very fair of them."

"Yeah, I can't disagree. If it makes you feel any better we don't feel pain so the worst we experience is a bit of inconvenience. I also don't know if it's entirely accurate to call us people. Or at least the plural might be inaccurate. We're all tied into the world so we all know what the world knows. The bodies you see are all characters that the world is playing to a degree."

"Still uncomfortable with murdering you! ...also confused now 'cause you said you weren't the person to ask about exact crafting recipes, but if you all know the same things...? Or is that a character thing, like, something like it's uncomfortable to put the knowledge where it doesn't belong even though you technically have it?"

"It's mostly an affectation. It is a little more comfortable to stick to the roles that the creators laid down but it also provides a better experience for most guests if they imagine us as distinct people with our own specialities and personality quirks. We think it feels less isolating to have a dozen people around than just one."

"Makes sense. Okay. ...is there any more starting equipment or is this it?"

"There's a few more things." She hands over two stacks of four candies each, a bottle with blue liquid in it that t she can feel has 15 doses, a pair of blue socks, a small bottle with a tiny puff of smoke floating in it, and a grappling hook. "The blue candies will expand your mana pool. The Red candies will increase how much you can survive before being pulled back here and also effect which events can spawn. The recall potion will take you back to the pillar every time you take a sip. The socks let you run faster, the bottle let's you jump in midair, and the grappling hook makes it easier to get around. That last one is probably the most complicated."

"...okay..." Can she shuffle the equippable stuff around using her mental equip menu? She tries it. And stuffs everything else in her inventory.