Everyone dreams.

Tonight, she dreams about being given a hammer. It is not a particularly fancy hammer — an ordinary flat face on one side and nail-remover on the other, the head of good tool steel and the shaft of oak wood — but it feels right in her hands. There is someone there, the gifter of the hammer, who shows her how to use it to build simple things. And then more complex things, and even more complex. By the end of the dream, from the hammer in her hand there has somehow emerged a towering city built into the face of a mountain, decorated all over with flowing fountains and hiding deep secrets.

A tap of her hammer gathers materials up to some place inside her where they are refined, shaped, and then released again through the hammer that is the focus of her ability to Build.

When she wakes up, the hammer is resting on her chest.

She blinks away the morning fuzziness and blurriness, solidifying into something vaguely resembling her usual self. 

She lets out a little contented sigh, stretching back into bed. That was a pretty cozy dream... Seeing all those details and all the work and just... having everything bloom up around her was really shiny and...

She blushes, and rubs her hand against her chest. 

Ehh???

There's the hammer from her dream. With a little bit of finangling, she can pop out of bed and heft it in her hand, stepping carefully past her bedside stool to just swing it around a little. It looks basically ordinary, but there's a little... niggling intuition that there's something she can do with it. Most of the details of the tricks slip away like an ordinary dream, but there's a little... tactile sense of a power that she can reach out with and do something with, at least. She pokes at the feeling in her head a little, and hums in thought. 

She examines the hammer with her fingers a little in the light of the bedside table - is there a maker's mark or anything special marking it? Is the head detachable? She also has a bit of a silly desire to just try to whack it at things and see what comes naturally...? Well, there's also the other end of it to think about, and that's... probably safer to fuck around and find out with? 

Yeah, okay. 

She's got a pull up bar secured just by her doorframe, and there's some door hinges... Would screws even count for magic back-of-a-hammer powers? She's got a girlband poster or two she's got laying fallow that she meant to install - never felt like she found the right space for it, but it wouldn't hurt to try to see if anything special happens when she tries to install it again, would it...? 

The makers mark is a simple hammer in a circle. That hammer has a maker's mark on it too — another hammer in a circle, and so on ad infinitum.

The head doesn't seem to want to come off, although it's not particularly clear why not; it looks like a simple press-fit join. Maybe she just needs some more leverage.

Pulling out her poster and gently holding it against the wall ... she starts feeling a craving for iron. Or for glue, maybe? Her pull-up bar honestly looks very tap-able ...

She wonders momentarily if this is when she gets the DLC that actually tells her when she has a dietary problem she needs to fix, then notices that it's asking after glue of all things. And it does feel more like it's more than just the kind of iron you would need in a diet... 

Glue though... She's got a decent amount of that! She's never been the best at keeping on top of these things, so she's got a crusted up bottle of superglue or two that's decently full but a pain in the arse to use that she can try tapping, then...? 

She's got a few random cans and stuff in her recycling? She doesn't mind sacrificing the little container of nails she's got, too, if she can get something interesting out of it... Is there a particular sense of how picky it is, or what if anything it's picky for, besides just 'metal'? 

It doesn't seem to be particularly picky; there are lots of things that she could use. Metal or glue or maybe even string?

If she decides to try something more specific than 'affix the poster to the wall', the feelings will sharpen up.

If she taps the glue or the nails with her hammer, they will dissolve into motes of light that fly into her, and the cravings will go away, since she has the materials she needs.

Aww that is a shiny feeling. Hopefully it's not one of those things that gets too - negative motivationy. 

- The dream said the materials are more than just stored. Is there any particular feeling of - what she can refine them towards? 

She'll go and affix it - she was wanting to do that anyways. Probably just something simple with glue, if it's as... 'abstracted' as she's hoping? 

Now the question is more about... what else can she do? There's a bunch of cardboard and paper and plastics in her recycling, too, so she might as well scoop that up if possible.

 Can she make... a small cube made out of cardboard, bigger than any of the constituent bits would allow on their own? Different colors of plastic than she's got represented? Origami cranes made out of the paper? She's never really gotten her fingers cooperative enough to make them look good, but she's gone through a college try at them a time or two before.

A tap with her hammer fixes the poster to the wall, perfectly straight, just as she had pictured it.

Absorbing the cardboard and paper is just as smooth and natural as the glue was. If she pays close attention to the feeling, she can feel the absorbed materials slowly converting to ... raw-er form. She only absorbed processed tree fibers, but she could make a very tiny woodchip right now, if she wanted to.

And she can absolutely make a cube out of cardboard and cranes out of the paper. Trying to make different colors of plastic gives her a craving feeling again, this time for ... metal complexes and organic pigments?

Oh tricky tricky tricky... 

Can she make idk, sheets of raw cellulose, or raw carbon, or things like that? She'll nab her garbage while she's at it, too - any luck absorbing the glass she broke a few days ago (...and the mug she broke a few days ago. She's a little clumsy, okay?) and the rest of the sundry things that ended up in there? 

As for what can she do with the metal... The nails were steel. Could she say, do aluminum nails? Nails with a different balance of carbon and iron in them? 

The speed at which her absorbed materials are being "refined" isn't very high. She can make a sheet of cellulose the size of her hand, and a little patch of graphene, but the majority of her paper stock is still paper. If she doesn't seem to be trying to make anything in particular, the refinement is spread out across all the materials she has absorbed. If she focuses on trying to make something specific, the refinement concentrates on whatever is needed to get the pieces for that.

And all of her garbage is easily absorbed.

Aluminum nails just give her aluminum cravings. Nails with more carbon are easy — some of the carbon from her cardboard gets used. Nails with less carbon make her rendering focus on pulling raw iron out of her stored steel, and trying to actually make the nail feels a bit like trying to lift something too heavy, or maybe like reaching the bottom of a drink and having your straw start to pull air instead of tea, at least until enough raw iron is available.

The feeling of what-all she has stored and what is happening to it gets much clearer with practice.

She'll mess around a bit with it, and check if she can reabsorb the things she makes? 

It doesn't seem that conceptual? Or well... there's something going on, there. It's... what, that she can get out the material as is, and that when she's processed it, she can what... get out things you can process out of it, and "What it's made from"? She's pretty sure you can't get wood out of cardboard in any normal way, but it makes a certain... internal sense, maybe? At least if she can say, make clay out of pottery and sand out of glass. 

Or well. Is there a sense of 'labels' of what the contents of her 'inventory' 'are'?

Reabsorbing the things she makes is just as easy as absorbing anything else. And yes, she can get sand out of glass. Trying to get clay out of pottery makes her thirsty.

Her inventory of absorbed items is not labeled. Or, at least, not labeled for her — she can keep track of the materials in there approximately as easily as she can keep track of objects in her surroundings, and a bit of focus on a material reminds her of where she got it from and how refined it is. Although it's hard to say whether that's just her normal ability to remember things, or some component of her new magical senses.

Poking at the feeling of one of the refined materials, such as carbon, gives her the same impression of what it is and how much she has that the materials she absorbed directly have.

- Is there an obvious ceiling to how 'refined' things get? If she picks out something really particular - the small touches of vinyl from one of her art experiments, maybe. If she focuses on refining just that, is there a - saturation point it gets to? 

Does she have any particular sense of what being refined... 'means'? Is it a vague sense of proportion or a percentage or something - more finnicky and abstract than that? 

It's not a proportion or a percentage so much as a continual flow from one resorvoir to another. Her 'cardboard' storage drains into her 'cellulose' storage, which drains into her 'carbon' storage, and so on. She can feel out amounts and put percentages on it herself, but again, that's her own mind putting numbers on a thing that she's just ... feeling.

The tiny bit of vinyl refines itself through several stages. Focusing all of her refinement on that small bit of material makes it go faster. First it becomes white polyvinyl chloride powder and a plasticiser, and then with a bit of focus it turns into chlorine and ethylene. Narrowing her intent even further, these pull apart into carbon and chlorine and hydrogen and a handful of other trace elements. And then the hydrogen starts separating into H⁺ and e⁻, and the protons fracture into two up quarks and a down quark and—

Her focus snaps, and she's left with a bit of a headache, from pushing it.

And anyway, it's obvious what refining something means, in the form of a half-remembered echo of her dream. She's turning it into building materials.

Yeah okay, not going that far.

She rubs at her head. 

...Is there anything super actionable she should figure out before - trying anything more? What she has is plenty weaponizeable already, and plenty usable already. Doing too much more would involve buying stuff or selling stuff or doing stuff with other people and... 

...Would you like me to step in? You don't have to, it's not just on you. You know how entwined ours senses can be. 

No, no, it's okay. I... 

I've always wanted to take the first step into the unknown, you know? 

A little jaunty smile graces her lips, followed by a shy little sniffle. 

- Okay. 

She picks up her phone, and dials up emergency services. 

"Emergency Services. What is the nature of your emergency?" the dispatcher asks.

"Um." 

She reflexively looks over her shoulder. 

It's okay. Just take a deep breath. 

"I've got the - subjective experience of gaining superpowers. I woke up this morning with a hammer that lets me de and reconstruct objects and process them for creating things. I just... woke up from a dream and had it there with me. I know this isn't the sort of thing that normally happens, but at least subjectively, I feel lucid and calm and myselves? As far as I know, there's no particular - imminence, but obviously if it's real it's something that should be investigated and explored, so..." 

She swallows, and beats her fingertips against her thigh nervously. 

"Okay, thank you. You did the right thing in calling us. The most likely explanation is that you are hallucinating, so please don't take any actions that would endanger yourself or other people if your powers did not in fact exist. Can you enable your camera and show me an example of something being de- and re-constructed?"

This is already a mildly unusual call, because most people who are having psychiatric problems are, indeed, not that lucid. The dispatcher doesn't even consider that this could be a prank, of course — judging whether everything is a prank would make them worse at their job in the median case, and if it is a prank the justice system can figure out an appropriately punitive fine. That's not their job. Their job is to calmly connect the caller with the appropriate help they need to resolve their emergency.

"Give me a moment..." 

She props up her phone against a wad of tea cozies, then grabs a mug from her cabinet. With a gentle taps of her hammer, it dissolve into light. She taps her hammer against her kitchen table, then it reappears. She repeats the cycle, dissolving it, restructuring it out into a much wider but stouter cup. 

"Um. Hold please."

The dispatcher takes a moment to pull up the full flowchart. Most calls only require the streamlined one that every dispatcher has memorized.

"Okay — first of all, I do observe you to be deconstructing and reconstructing that mug in a way that I previously believed to be impossible. So there is definitely something strange going on. I have no other reason to believe that you are experiencing mental problems. Do you have any reason to believe that this phenomenon represents an urgent danger to life, health, or property?"

She pauses, and taps her tongue. 

"I have no specific reason to believe that there's any such danger? Though I will note that um." 

She's digging herself a bit of a whole here, isn't she. 

"That with minimal extrapolations of I appear to be able to do with the ability, that it probably wouldn't be too hard to violate normal threat modelling assumptions about how difficult it is to create certain risks? I can do some amount of - chemical processing without ordinary logistics, and..." 

She pokes her sense of her power. Can she bin by atomic weight? Like, can she produce something made out of specifically carbon-14, say?