...a place.

It's a small place, and a dark place. The things will not have light here unless they brought their own.

There is stone here, and dirt, and water. The chunk of savanna wedges itself across a gap between two flat slabs of rock; the rest of the things scatter into a low untidy heap across one of its new neighbours. About ten feet in, a ragged wall of dirt halts the advance of the smallest and most adventurous items.

One that is more adventurous than the local average, but not particularly small, wakes up.

She is very confused about several things, such as where she is, who she is — well, that's concerning and distracting from her apparently inert environment for a while.

Eventually she notices that she is wearing things and clothing may contains useful objects and a practiced routine tells her to open this familiar pouch and pull out a flashlight.

The flashlight illuminates:

stone above;

stone below;

stone ahead;

rough dirt walls of unnerving regularity to the left;

a somewhat battered chunk of displaced grassland to the right;

miscellaneous interdimensional junk all over everything.

Past the savanna-bridge, the beam of the flashlight finds no wall, nor any other vertical thing. The floor goes on for a bit and then stops, with only blackness beyond.

Behind her, the dirt walls close in to form a sort of broad corridor, which bends sharply to what for lack of a better scheme we will call the west.

Okay. Nothing is happening. None of this junk — is hers? — well, looks obviously relevant.

She checks around the bend, first without the flashlight in case it would be noticed.

Without the flashlight: silence, darkness.

With the flashlight: silence, a winding passage with a stone floor and dirt walls.

She goes back to examine the landing site. (Ow.) She has no backup and no plan (?) so she should see what resources are available before stirring up trouble. Any of this junk have an identifiable use?

The junk includes (but is not limited to):

several sparkly rocks;

a single cinnamon heart candy, or something that strongly resembles one, sitting pristine on the bare rock floor;

several non-sparkly rocks;

an improbably intact rose, with pale blue petals and a snow-white stem;

a crystal vial of some liquid which could at least plausibly be water;

a scrap of old dried bark, worn and crumbling;

a bag of dice, half spilled across the floor, made of heavy black stone and engraved with unfamiliar symbols;

a tangled skein of pink acrylic yarn;

a bright brass coin with a stylized sunburst on one side and unfamiliar writing around the rim;

a bandolier of obsidian throwing knives;

a leatherbound book with no title on the cover;

an untidy pile of once-neatly-folded clothes;

a scattering of coal lumps;

a piece of furniture that might perhaps a chair for a nonhuman body plan;

and many items less identifiable.

Some of this is probably useless, some of this is Do Not Touch The Artifact. She pockets the coin and the dice as possibly identifiable. What's the book?

The left-hand page is a very short Table of Contents. The right-hand page is titled Introduction to the Exocontinual Manual.

In a language she's never read before.

She — does not drop the book in surprise, because flailing in the presence of weird stuff is a bad idea. (Why is it a bad idea? She cannot remember examples, only find these habits, protocols, procedures drilled until they are automatic.)

She puts it down and thinks for a minute, then picks it up again. Information is valuable.

The Exocontinual Manual is an information storage, gathering, and analysis device designed to adapt and become applicable to the circumstances it finds itself in. Those who find copies of it should consider it available for their use.

The introduction goes on to briefly explain its history (flung randomly across the multiverse by entities often known in their home world as “the Powers that Be”, among many other names; this particular instance seems to have encountered some kind of — glitch — but here is as good as anywhere), and describe its general and projected-for-this-instance capabilities.

The next section contains concisely-listed facts about the local environment, such as a catalog of the contents thereof. It has guesses about what's in her pockets. It's good at guessing. It also has some guesses about the junk, but with much less certainty since none of it is related to any of the rest of it. It tentatively labels some of the rocks, the heart, the rose, the vial, the throwing knives, and the chair as Magic.

A footnote directs her to the glossary, which defines magic as, in its terminology, any of several sorts of fundamental principles of universes which tend to form a recognizable cluster; most notably, they often seem to cause there to be significance to categories that are natural to local personlike minds (loosely speaking, non-reductionism), resulting in effects such as enabling resurrection from not even a corpse, making certain words or mental actions have dramatic physical effects, or many other possibilities.

…ooookay, allegedly friendly book. You seem useful. You can come along while she checks out the corridor further.

The corridor twists oddly. Some sections are built at too-sharp right angles, as though excavated with a guillotine; others curve in a more natural way, with their walls a little rougher and more worn down, although still very straight; and then there's a section that seems to be built on a hex grid, with the walls of its straight segments zigzagging accordion-fashion to follow the invisible lines, each cell of the grid being about three meters on a side.

That section bends around a single hexspace of dirt to turn back the way it came, and then segues into another rough curve, which finally opens out into a sharp-cut square chamber.

In the middle of the chamber there is... a thing.

It's low and mostly flat, set into the stone floor. It glints a metallic yellow in the beam of her flashlight. It looks like... a foundation, perhaps, or an armature, four broad ribbonlike arms splayed outward from a central well. If you considered the room as conforming to a square grid system, the thing would take up precisely the nine central squares of a 5x5 grid, with the round depression in the center taking up slightly more than one square and the arms reaching from there toward the corners.

It's also not in great shape. Its arms appear to be twisted and sheared as though mangled by some great force. An explosion could have done it, but an explosion would have left traces on the surrounding walls, and there aren't any. The entire rest of the room is pristine.

That sure looks like the sort of thing one does not go stand in the middle of for no reason.

Hey, book?

The book now has a map! It's on Page 2.1. Presumably if you're a contents-changing book, integer page numbers are awkward.

The map says that this thing is Quiescent Unknown Complex Magic.

Yep, definitely the sort of thing one does not go stand in the middle of for no reason.

She examines the walls for secret passages or something and then goes back to the room of junk to examine its weirder perimeter.

Standing on the side of the crevice where she first arrived, the far wall across the savanna-bridge looks like simple perfect darkness. The floor and ceiling and intersecting walls all go up to it and... stop. Stone and dirt gives way sharply to a black absence.

It's time for the time-honored experimental technique of chucking a rock lump of coal at it.

The lump of coal passes through that dark surface as though it isn't there, and then the lump of coal isn't there either.

The map helpfully acquires unknown-but-probably-extreme-hazard markings. It also notes that the chunk of savanna probably has magic.

It does not indicate the presence of any other possible exits.

Welp, time to poke some less-promising unknowns. How about those artifacts?

The book has a handy list with improved guesses, and drawings for identification.

1. Rock, with embedded unknown magic.
   
2. Rock, with embedded unknown machine.
   
3. Heart candy. Magic. Moderate confidence: produces a beneficial effect when consumed. Safe to handle.
   
4. Blue rose. Complex biological magic. Recommend avoiding skin contact.
   
5. Unknown machine, hidden under rubble.
   
6. Vial of liquid. Unknown magic. Safe to handle.
   
7. Obsidian throwing knives. Unknown magic. Recommend avoiding contact with blades.
   
8. Furniture. Unknown simple magic.
   

Unburying the fifth thing seems like a nice safe option.

The unknown machine hidden under rubble turns out to be... a sort of ray-gun-looking thing, fairly sleek but with discernible seams. That's probably ammunition or a power pack slotted into the grip, and the dial on the side might plausibly be for controlling effect strength in some way. There are little indicator lights, some green, some blue; one has the label SAFETY imprinted in the adjacent plastic in plain English.

Encountering an English word here seems — incongruous. Suspicious. This gun isn't like any human make she's … ever seen? She has seen a lot, she thinks, but can't connect that to where.

Right, anyway. It doesn't conveniently come with instructions other than the one word which doesn't say which way is safe. (The Manual thinks it's currently safe and isn't a booby trap either. Reasonable.) Wrap it up and stash it in a sample pouch so it's not going to go off but isn't lying around for someone else to pick up.

She pokes the other items with the end of a tool (this one, besides other functions, is insulated against electricity and, as much as possible, other known contact-transmissible phenomena), and when this neither does anything nor gives any clues, packs up everything interesting except for the inconveniently large and heavy rocks. Time for another look at the large ominous device.

The large ominous device is just as she last saw it, in size, ominosity, and all other characteristics.

— she pokes the arm. According to procedures, with the standard artifact-poking stick, not a finger.

It makes the sort of quiet tinking sound appropriate to a piece of metal being poked with such a stick. Nothing interesting happens.

Got any more ideas, book?

This installation is the primary physical component of a multi-functional system, which is also permanently linked to all nearby space that has been observed. It must be directed by a controlling mind to perform any non-maintenance actions. It is currently inactive because it does not have a link to such a mind. Forming such a link requires standing within the installation with intent to do so and may require other conditions.

Well.

This is definitely the sort of thing that you don't do just because it seemed like a good idea at the time.

Another hour of poking around doesn't yield anything promising. Her comms gear doesn't get her in touch with anyone or think there's anything nearby (it's dead silent in radio as well as acoustically), digging into the walls doesn't suggest it's worthwhile to dig further, and none of the artifacts are either definitely helpful or likely to be a better idea to get to know further. That one rock when cracked open had a blue-glowing magic substance and the other one had some kind of scientific probe that once drilled into it but has no interesting capabilities.

So she goes back to the thing in the floor. And this feels like the right thing for her to do for some reason. Probably still a bad idea.

She steps into the center.

The central well, a round depression about two feet deep and six feet wide, hums softly as soon as she steps down into it. The hum deepens as she approaches the center.

When she's standing in the very middle, at the bottom of a barely-perceptible incline in the floor of the well, the smooth stone under her feet begins to glow with a faint light, of some pale colour or other that looks greenish in one second and pinkish the next.

There is a sense of... a question, or an offer; a thing she could reach for and take, or pull back from and leave alone. This reaching is not to be accomplished with her body, but directly, with her will and her self.

Does it care to make any statement about its character, first?

Well, not directly, because it is not the kind of thing that has a character or makes statements.

But it definitely does give off some sort of sense of being something that, if she takes it, will be hers; hers not the way vassal belongs to master but the way body belongs to brain, or tool to wielder. A thing which has no will of its own and answers only to hers.

Then it shall be hers.

Something happens.

It's hard to get more specific than that, because it's happening very abruptly and extremely much.

It doesn't hurt exactly, but it definitely feels like something, a whole lot of it, whatever it is, and it goes on kind of uncomfortably long, and then—

First, she feels the new things. She (is? has?) this space: five cells by five, with a three-cell-wide installation in the center.

The installation is in much better shape than it was when last she saw it, and also looks very different: the arms are gone, and where the central well once sat, a geodesic dome of iron and glass surrounds a mysterious radiance which casts beams of light out through a random selection of its facets to illuminate the white plaster which now covers the ceiling and walls. It's not quite tall enough to brush the ceiling, nor quite wide enough to completely fill its three-cell square; but it stands on a raised circular platform ringed by concentric steps, and the edges of the lowest step stop just shy of that invisible-but-perceptible border. Platform, steps, and floor are all made of dark wood.

Also, her body is lying on the floor at the base of the steps, perfectly healthy, still wearing and carrying all the same things as when she last saw it, and it has its eyes closed. It's still just as much hers as it was before, but it is now a much smaller proportion of her direct sensory input.

(Well, all the same things with one exception—her book, instead of being in her pocket, is lying on the floor next to her hand.)

Her sense of the tunnels is much dimmer; they don't (yet?) belong to her in the way that this room does. She can see into them from her current large square vantage, but she'd have to go look at them herself if she wanted to see them directly. Or she could send a—

There isn't a word for the thing, but this is a potential she has: to create a slightly-autonomous creature at her dome, which can be directed to perform tasks. Sort of a cross between a magical servant and an extension of herself.

She doesn't have any other such potentials looming large in her thoughts, but there's a sense that she'd have more options were she not so constrained on space.

That was more things than she wanted to happen!

Hey, self, wake up.

Opening her eyes and sitting up and so forth all turn out to work in the usual way when attempted, although the extra senses are a little disorienting and it's hard to find the trick of focusing primarily on what she sees through her eyes instead of observing herself in third-person view with her territory-sight.

This is seeming less like “tools to escape” and more “getting extra stuck”. Also like “example for the training manuals about why you don't poke artifacts”. (Does she have a vague memory of reading some of those unfortunate stories rather than just knowing them? Has her new sort of existence unstuck whatever's wrong with her memory? Unclear.)

She will just have to make what she can of it. And this isn't bad. It's just — unintended, unknown, uncertain. (That's arguably bad, isn't it.) Anyway. She picks up the Manual from where it fell —

— and finds that she doesn't need to open it. It is hers and she can see anything that is hers.

In one way it is very simple; just as it described itself, it is an information storage, gathering, and analysis device designed to adapt and become applicable to the circumstances it finds itself in. But the means by which it is this is an enormously complex foreign magic; and the data which it has gathered and the analysis it has performed are an enormously detailed and iterated body of knowledge.

It's quite enough to get lost in.

But part of analysis is determining what is worth attending to, and it directs her attention — not like it says something, as it is resolutely not an independent agent, but as a matter of indexing and navigation cues — to a recording of what happened from its perspective while she was distracted.

The recording depicts the well flaring into a column of bright light, from which the book is tossed aside with surprising gentleness and she herself vanishes completely along with all her clothing and items, converted from a straightforward physical form into a kind of ghost or spirit as the first step in the linking process. Next, the light cycles through a few colours before finally settling on a familiar sunny radiance; it squashes itself down, its edges rippling, to fit into the shape of the dome, and the iron and glass sprout from the floor and grow around it, enclosing it and slightly obscuring its fierce glow. Wooden floorboards well up out of the floor in an unsettlingly liquid fashion, buoying the book up a few inches and then building on themselves to lift the dome up onto that central platform; plaster races up the walls like a shallow wave advancing on a beach. These stylistic manifestations settle into place, marking this room as belonging to its new master.

Finally, a hazy shadow slips out of the dome, a thin misty substance coloured a slightly blue-greyish shade of black like an inversion of the dome's not-quite-sunlight: the immaterial form of her temporarily discorporated body. It darts over to the book, pours itself into its usual shape, and rematerializes.

More information about what she's stuck with, but not something she can do anything with right now.

She walks through the small, twisty space anew.

As soon as she steps off her wooden floor and onto the bare rock, a new possibility lights up in her mind: claiming territory. If she stands here and concentrates for a minute or two, she can bring this part of the tunnel under her control.

This seems like an eminently reasonable thing to do, in context. She will do a bunch of that.

Wood and plaster expand outward from the initial room, covering the walls and floors and ceilings of the tunnel as she claims them.

The more her territory grows, the more options she has for what to do with it.

There are... patterns, stored in the complex magical something-or-other which she now has and/or is; if she had the right resources, she could construct rooms according to those patterns. Right now, she has none of the appropriate resource at all, so all she can do is overlay the patterns on her claimed sections of tunnel and see where they would fit, with her magic depicting them in a ghostly white overlay visible only to her territory-sight; the majority of them are designed to tile across the square cells, a handful are designed to work with the hexagonal ones, and there are only two that work straightforwardly with arbitrary shapes: a reinforcement structure that fills in pillars to strengthen a tunnel section, and a corridor pattern that seems meant to cover sloped sections of floor with something resembling a wheelchair ramp.

The patterns don't just tile straightforwardly; they're adaptable, changing configuration automatically when she stretches them over longer sections of tunnel. It's a very tidy system.

Among the few patterns that have both a hexagonal and a square version is one whose preview shows desks and bookshelves and stuffed leather armchairs: a library, or maybe a study.

Well, if she's going to be stuck here at least it can be personalized.

Now how about that savannah, junk, and void?

Claiming the part of the tunnel under the junk offers her the option to pick items up off the floor and move them around, although the telekinesis seems to be bound to her territory-sight and can't work very precisely on a scale much smaller than a single cell.

Claiming the savannah... confuses her new magic for a few seconds, and then it tentatively labels the grassy ground with its scattered trees as a type of room, which at her command could be analyzed to add to her pattern-library.

As soon as she claims the floor adjoining the void, the magic recognizes that instantly: it is the edge. On this side there is space and matter, and on that side there isn't. It is very dangerous and she shouldn't touch it.

Perhaps it should be walled off then. Exactly what does she not have that she needs to do that?

Her magic thinks some of this junk could help! It's particularly ?excited? about the sparkly rocks. It does not actually have emotional states as such, but it has the ability to recognize and categorize things, and those rocks are categorized as the-type-of-stuff-you-convert-into-the-thing. She could convert them, and then she would have some of the construction resource. (She could also convert any of the other junk, or for that matter the entire chunk of savannah, but she might not like to get rid of the savannah until the magic is done scanning it into a pattern, and her somewhat imprecise sense of the yield of these various items values most of the things at way less than sparkly rock levels.)

Okay, if that's how it works. She will convert sparkly rocks into construction resources and construction resources into — iron fences blocking off all of the edge? Does the edge count as square enough?

Well, if she wants to put up iron fences she's going to have to invent a pattern for a fenced-off room, because she doesn't have one available currently and her construction abilities are decidedly non-freeform.

Also, 'construction resources' turns out to mean 'piles of gold coins stamped with a shallow relief of her dome, appearing out of thin air to rain down around the perimeter of the dome room'.

If she tries, though, she can invent a fence pattern fairly easily, and it turns out to be the cheapest thing on the list by a fair margin. A single coin, out of the few hundred now piled in her headquarters, will convert the whole edge-adjacent floor into a room with a sturdy iron fence that follows the curve of the edge and blocks it off.

Gratuitous quantities of gold. Well, that's an aesthetic that — she still can't get names — some of her enemies would appreciate.

She finishes the fence and commands the examination of the savannah, and — looks for more things she can do.

One of the subtler options turns out, when she investigates it, to mean fill in a tunnel section with dirt. She can only do it to blank sections, with no patterns constructed in them; but she can convert such construction back to gold (at a slight loss) anytime she likes, so building things in places won't permanently stop her from blocking them off later.

...the savannah room-pattern, when its analysis completes after a few minutes, turns out to be shockingly expensive. Per unit of area it costs more than any other pattern in her library. The value of the existing piece is revised upward accordingly.

Okay but why is it expensive? If the magic won't tell her then maybe the Manual can, if there's enough information to work with.

The magic seems to consider it an inherently magical space, of which there aren't actually any other examples in her pattern-library at all. Presumably this is an expensive characteristic.

As for what sort of inherent magic it is or does...

Not enough information to analyze underlying magic. Low confidence: observation of slight effect on your body suggests an ambient healing effect.

That could be interesting.

Now. If she can fill in holes, can she dig them out? Because she would really like to not be in this tiny random corridor-and-two-rooms forever.

Well, she doesn't seem to have any ability to dig them out directly by magic, but presumably the dirt could be moved by other means—and she can de-plaster select sections of wall at will, exposing the underlying dirt surface, in a way that suggests it's customary to want to interact with it.

Can she construct a digging machine?

There is no such thing as a Construction Machinery Room. (There's a few rooms that seem like they might be for building things in—forges, workshops of assorted kinds—but they're alarmingly low on safety gear and a lot of the equipment seems designed for taller people with bigger hands who can lift a lot more than she can.)

She can make a Construction Machinery Room if she can envision very clearly and precisely exactly what parts her desired construction equipment should be made out of in what arrangement, not necessarily all at once but in a way where all of the parts end up fitting together correctly with all the rest, and slot it into the templating system as a movable fixture of a new room type. The room-templating system is clearly not designed for this purpose, but it does have a sort of autosave feature for non-finalized templates, so if she goes this route she will at least be able to work on it piecemeal without having to keep the whole thing in her head unaided.

She plays with the possibilities a while but she is not an expert on digging machinery and would also have to — no she would not have to put the dug-out material somewhere because she can throw it into the edge, if nothing else.

She saw another option about autonomous constructs. Can she get helpful previews of those?

There is a vague impression of their size and shape—smallish humanoids, four feet tall or thereabouts, with very large round heads and large round eyes and large, extremely pointed ears—and, if she digs a little deeper into that impression, she can get a glimpse of their starting equipment too: a set of durable-looking overalls, a tool belt with a large prominent pickaxe, and a sturdy backpack with a metal frame. Pretty promising for her purposes, all in all.

One of those, please.

It materializes out of her dome similarly to how she did, except that it's in motion when it emerges, and tumbles to the ground with a squeak.

It gets up, dusts itself off, and for lack of other orders starts neatening up the piles of gold.

Does it come with a catalogue of possible orders, or is it more of a direct interface than that?

Somewhere in between. She can get a sense of what tasks she might direct it to and a sense of how she might do that, and one of those tasks is most certainly digging: specifically, she can use a magic connected to her territory-sight to designate a wall to dig into, an amount and shape to be dug, and which if any of the two grid systems to align the excavation with. (In this fashion she finds out that the grid systems are absolute: she can't make an offset grid-square or grid-hex, only hexes and squares aligned with the grid or freeform shapes judged by eye.)

This system defaults to allocating minion-task correspondences automatically, but she can also direct the minion toward this tunneling task in particular if she likes.

All right, she has tools and resources enough to do something.

She plans out a new layout that isn't a random passage snake. She doesn't know what there is to dig toward, or if there are other tunnels like this, or how far under the surface she might be. (She doesn't, strictly speaking, know that there is a surface.) But it seems reasonable to assume — until proven otherwise — that there is more edge over in the direction she will arbitrarily call “east”. So, that's both a limitation on travel or building, and a potentially useful defense.

There's no reason for there to be that stretch of hexes next to the dome room; it can be replaced with a square tunnel. And let's have some defensive cover and other features in that tunnel, built out of thick iron plates with no need for a shop to fabricate them — she doesn't know what local threats and vulnerabilities are, but it's plausible that she needs to defend that dome with her life because it is her life. (Though, is there any reason that there has to _be_ a tunnel? Do the piles of gold need to be accessed physically? She can dirt-fill the entrance and see if there are any consequences.)

(It bothers her a little to be building in iron on top of the wood theme. But for now, caution. She can figure out how to use these architectural elements the way they're meant to be later.)

Selected sections of the rest of the tunnel can get similar neatening and fortifications, and the room with the edge and the savannah — hm. She doesn't want to touch that part. She plans out another defensible tunnel arranged so that one of its walls is the fenced-off edge (assuming the edge cooperates and continues “north” in a straightish fashion), and continues that way for perhaps ten tiles. Then extend to the west, a plain room seven squares square, some little side rooms off that for whatever purposes might suddenly be important, and a staircase heading up and to the west, to seek whatever might be found. The staircase and all the other room exits can get sturdy iron doors.

She orders the most domeward construction begun, and then checks the cost of all this planned work and how fast it'd be accomplished given the example of the one minion.

Sealing off her dome room prevents her minion from getting back in on its own, and would presumably prevent future ones from escaping unaided, although her telekinesis has a teleportation option that works just as well on the minion as anything else.

The minion's pickaxe appears to be magical: it clears more dirt in a swing than it should physically be capable of, and the dirt vanishes rather than falling on the floor. (If she is very observant, she might notice a tiny tiny pile of gold dust accumulating in the dome room as the minion works. It's much less obvious than the handful of coins that vanish to purchase her fortifications.)

Most everything else works just fine as planned, except—the edge turns out to be drifting inward as the minion tunnels north. Her planned room will need to be shifted much closer to the dome room in order to fit inside that curve. It might be prudent to dig along the edge enough to map it out, or at least a nearby section of it, before she plans any more grand projects.

Also, it is unreasonably difficult to include doors in a room plan. It's possible, but none of the preexisting templates have any and the reason for that appears to be that it's just a huge pain to get the system to put them there without accidentally distributing them to the wrong locations within the room. It's a little easier, if she thinks of it, to invent a room template that has doors tiling its entire wall-or-doorway area and then put one-square-wide instances of that room just outside each aperture she wants doored.

Entranceways-with-doors seems like a reasonable option.

She revises her plan so that instead of the hub room for further exploration being located near the edge, it will be placed halfway between the edge and the dome. Then straight exploratory tunnels can radiate from that and find out where the edges are. Still starting up-and-west.

She creates some more minions to get this done in a reasonable time.

Creating more minions works just like the first, up until she has five, at which point she gets a sense that creating a sixth would tie up a portion of some sort of resource that she has. It's not a very big portion—she could make five more minions easily with the available amount—but it's not very clear what the resource is exactly, what else it's good for, or where she might be able to get more.

The edge turns out to be... a circle, perfectly centered on the dome room.

That is

very

concerning.

She plans tunnels heading straight up and down (with ladders and occasional landings, if that works, otherwise spiral-ish staircases), because those are plausible places for there to be irregularities.

And frets and considers possibilities and makes plans and discards plans while she waits for the tunnels to meet something.

And the tunnels meet...

...the edges of a sphere.

No—

— she will not be —

—isolated—
—disconnected—

She soundlessly screams at the substrate that has trapped and transformed-translated her: show me the ways out, to greater spaces, to connections, not-alone!

And there is—

—something.

Something faint and far away and effortful and dangerous, but something.

Something she can reach for and pour effort and resources into, and sustain that effort for an amount of time measured in days, without breaks—but if she does that (and she can do that!) then she will have a connection to Somewhere Else.

Something? Something?

Something.

She slumps on the floor, exhausted for the moment.

The something, now that she has identified it, remains within her mental reach.

Can it be prodded into specifying what resources are necessary?

The thing she'd have to set aside some of to make more minions. All of it.

That sounds risky because what if she needs it she won't because she is alone and nothing else can enter into the situation when the connection is open to handle whatever she connects to.

Is it a sort of thing she can build in or as a room, or is it less spatial or less explained than that?

The resource expenditure is sustained over time from a renewable source rather than being a permanent loss; whatever the resource is, it'll be freed up as soon as she's done.

To the extent that the thing has a location, the location is not here. Extremely far from being here. Just about as not here as it's possible to get.

More, careful, study of this possibility seems valuable. She suggests as much to the Manual, so it can do what it's good at. Together, they poke at things.

Speaking of things, are there any other resources she has or lacks, besides gold and the mystery stuff?