the revery alone will do | Glowfic Constellation

It... does not seem to be possible to straightforwardly go "I want a gargoyle here" and make it appear, but it is possible to reshape her hypothetical previewspace such that the stone becomes a gargoyle if she's willing to actually sculpt it herself. Same for shelves.

Light fixtures don't... really go? She can, if she tries hard and believes in herself, reshape protruding parts of her wall into a torch by appropriately changing materials as she goes and then perhaps adding some material that chemically reacts to air by producing a flame at the end to ignite it.

if-bees-are-few

That's within the range of her expectations. Though she does in fact put in the design work to make what she expects to be a functioning torch, just to be stubborn about the whole thing.

It has not escaped her attention that this whole business is... oddly software-shaped. The hypothetical previewspace, especially. That could just be a coincidence, but... she tries searching her awareness of her own capacities for anything that distantly resembles, or looks like it might perchance conceal, a user manual. It's generally a good idea to read those.

That most certainly does work.

HELPFUL INFO BOX! ( ^ ω ^ )

Topics
Rooms
Room Upgrades
Floor Upgrades
Minions
Minion Upgrades
Traps
Trap Upgrades
Progression Status
Special Abilities

Mana: 2 (+10 per day, -3 upkeep)
Impurities: 0

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...

......

.......................

...yes, please, she will be reading through every one of those topics in order now.

Rooms—Places that do stuff! ヾ(＾∇＾)

· Core Room -- can't have more than one!
Don't break this! 😨
Converts life force into useful stuff and contains your core! Verrrry important! ♥

if-bees-are-few

...that's not very many rooms. And yet, the heading is plural. Which suggests that this is an incomplete user manual, more of a software menu than a reference volume.

Fine. Whatever. Room upgrades?

Room Upgrades – Roomier rooms!

No upgrades available. ໒( •́ ∧ •̀ )७
Build rooms to access upgrades!

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...floor upgrades...?

Floor Upgrades – Things that make your floor better!

Stone brick floor – 50 mana
Improves active mana absorption
Looks nifty!

Reinforced wall – 50 mana
Improved protection against digging. Won’t affect you though!

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Actual options! Options, that she has and can access! Imagine!

...well, she could access them with '50 mana', which she does not have.

Onward. Minions?

Minions—Your loyal servants! (°∀°)ゝ”

Human—150 mana (500 impurities to research), +0 upkeep (subsequent ones will add 25 to upkeep costs)
Were you supposed to have access to this minion type? Does it matter? It's an
advantage!
Special ability: sapience.

While she's reading that, though, she gets a strange—dizzy feeling—

ABSORBING

UPDATING

The words don't show up on her screen like before, it's more like they just exist in her awareness for a moment. And also in her awareness is the fact that a desert scorpion just died of exposure right at the top of the dungeon stairs.

And the screen in front of her changes:

Minions—Your loyal servants! (°∀°)ゝ”

Small Normal Scorpion—0 mana (subsequent ones will cost 6 mana), +0 upkeep (subsequent ones will add 1 to upkeep costs)
Venomous! Deadly! Adorable! You don't know if the way it looks so angery all the time
is just for show, but it loves you!

Human—150 mana (500 impurities to research), +0 upkeep (subsequent ones will add 25 to upkeep costs)
Were you supposed to have access to this minion type? Does it matter? It's an
advantage!
Special ability: sapience.

At the same time, she can see a scorpion floating in front of her, about the size of a very large dog, maybe a newborn foal. She can see it in detail, from the tips of its pincers to the hairs it uses for some of its senses. Her brain also insists that it's tinted green, even though it... is very much not, on inspection, in the same way her hypothetical previewspace for room modification was not red.

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...well. It's free.

All right.

She makes a Small Normal Scorpion.

The scorpion is no longer pretending-to-be-green.

It is now real and huge and standing in real space right in front of her, looking around in... well, some emotion, it's a scorpion, showing emotion is not one of its fortés.

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Man, she misses the Blacklight virus.

"Now that's a thought I never expected to hear myself think," she mutters, not especially expecting to hear words in a voice as a result. But she does, in fact, hear words in a voice; and, more to the point, apparently so does the scorpion, because it jumps in startlement and swings its whole body around to stare at her perspective point.

"...you can hear me?"

Watching a scorpion the size of a Rottweiler attempt to nod emphatically while also making incomprehensible gestures with its claws and tail is... certainly... an experience.

Okay. Does she have... any other means of interacting with this scorpion, besides saying words to it out loud? A menu of action commands, perhaps? She wouldn't put it past the system. Any direct ability to hear what it is trying to tell her?

Minion information, part 2—Minions and you! （ ^_^）oo（^_^ ）

Minions are the best way you have of interacting with the world! They are loyal to
you and love being useful, even if it hurts them (but you wouldn't want your
friends to get hurt, would you?).

When you create minions, they add to your daily upkeep costs (or do they? {•̃_•̃}).
But whenever you get a minion to do what you want—like building new rooms!—that
is much cheaper than doing it yourself!

You can tell minions what to do, either individually or in groups, but for anything
complicated it's best if you control them directly so that you can show them how to
follow your instructions!

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'Control them directly', eh? She tries to figure out how to do that.

Seems to be a primitive action. Just wanting to do it and whoop, she's inside the scorpion, being able to perceive everything it's perceiving—its alien ways of interacting with the world, touch and smell above vision, strange hearing, strange breathing, it all feels normal to her—as well as feel all of its emotions and, more relevantly, control all of its limbs.

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And as soon as she can feel its emotions, everything clicks, because—there's a layer of scorpion emotions, sure, but it's resting atop a layer of Ellen.

"Got it," she says aloud. "You're me. Just like—you know."

Just like when she absorbs someone using her Blacklight powers and then regurgitates a copy of their body with a copy of her mind controlling it, running the person's entire pscyhe on top of her own like a computer running a virtual machine to emulate a different operating system. Just like the six people she's already done that to.

...maybe—maybe, if she's lucky—unlocking Human minions will let her create copies of those six people, even though right now she completely lacks that alien instinct that tells her how to cleanly separate a single absorbed person from the rest of her and push a copy out into the world. This system works very differently but on a more abstract level it seems to have some similar capabilities.

And why is that? Another mystery to add to the pile.

Anyway. The scorpion-Ellen has relaxed, now that her message is received. They explore their domain together, scorpion-Ellen mostly steering, disembodied-Ellen mostly just along for the ride. It looks different from a scorpion's point of view.

...what happens if the scorpion ascends the stairs and tries to walk out of the dome-boundary up there?

Whatever limb first starts crossing the dome-boundary starts quickly losing coherence if she doesn't pull it back in.

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Welp. That answers that. ScorpiEllen retracts her claw immediately, without any need of DisembodiEllen's help, and after a careful circuit of the perimeter, returns to the staircase and heads back inside.

So. This is happening now.

...she got that scorpion because it died here. If there are other living creatures up top, she could kill them, and potentially acquire Ellenized versions. She assumes control of ScorpiEllen and turns her around to take her up the stairs again as soon as she has the thought, and ScorpiEllen is confused at first but soon catches on and starts poking around in the sand near the entrance trying to find anything alive enough to toss down the stairs and murder.

It's a desert, so, really, it's surprising she got the scorpion at all, even desert-dwelling animals are very few and far between.

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After a very thorough inspection of the sand, ScorpiEllen decides to stay up here and patrol for as long as she's still comfortable, and DisembodiEllen decides to retreat her perspective downstairs and keep reading. Where was she... ah yes, Minions is followed by Minion Upgrades.

Minion Upgrades – More rawr for your beasties!

Scorpions

Sharper pincers (15 mana, 2 impurities)

Make bigger! ☆(≧∇≦)☆ (20 mana, 2 impurities)

Improved armor (10 mana, 2 impurities)

Deadlier venom (20 mana, 3 impurities)

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...there is... an underlying theme to the options she is being presented with and the flavour text that accompanies them.

She chews on that thought as she proceeds into the Traps submenu.