Essence of the Puppeteer
By consuming the Essence of the Puppeteer, you gain several boons:
- You gain an instinctive knowledge of mechanics, gadgets, and certain arcane arts. You can construct puppets from a variety of materials, ranging from ordinary wood and metal to unconventional materials like flesh or those not ordinarily usable, such as water or fire. The puppets you build will be far stronger and more resilient than their base materials would suggest.
- Puppets can be created near-instantly from malleable substances like water, fire or clay. Though such instant-puppets are comparably simple, their only special ability, aside from maintaining the traits of their base material, is that they can use their malleable nature to change their forms.
- When manually crafting a puppet, you can construct and install numerous devices and weapons within the puppet, even when these devices would normally be too large or bulky to fit into the puppet's frame. Any installed device will not hinder the puppet's mobility in any way and will be effectively weightless inside the puppet. Any weapon can be withdrawn from the puppet's body so long as the opening it's drawn from is large enough to withdraw the object from; in other words, if the puppet pulls a sword out, the opening must be large enough that the handguard can freely pass through.
- When touching a puppet, you can, by channeling your own energy into it, upgrade its capabilities, making it stronger, faster, and more resilient. This process can be repeated without limit, though the process is exhausting for you and the stronger the puppet is, the more energy it takes to upgrade it further. Channeling energy into a damaged puppet can also repair it as long as it hasn't been completely destroyed, though, depending on the puppet, additional materials may be needed. This process can also be used on instant, corpse, and living puppets; the latter two can be repaired without additional materials in return for a greater cost in energy.
- Any spells or special abilities you have can be converted into an array that you can inscribe on a puppet, allowing the puppet to activate that spell or ability instantly. Note that this will still drain you as if you had performed the ability yourself. However, you can store energy inside the puppet, letting it activate its arrays by drawing from the stored energy rather than yours. As these arrays need to be inscribed manually, instant puppets cannot use arrays unless you personally modify the puppet.
- You can control puppets remotely and telepathically. Movement of fingers to guide it is unnecessary, though it can improve fine-control. A puppet not actively controlled will shift into an inert state, though you can program it to act automatically in specific circumstances, like dodging an attack, though it will react mechanically and only exactly as programmed if pre-set conditions are met, hence you need to be very specific in your programming if you want any level of successful autonomous action. No matter how many inputs are given, you cannot turn a puppet sentient, though a puppet with decades worth of programming may seem so to an outside observer.
- You can turn a fresh or well-preserved corpse into a puppet you can control. A corpse-puppet retains all special abilities the person or creature had in life, in addition to any device or array you install into it. You can also activate a form of auto-pilot in the corpse-puppet that makes it move and fight with the same level of skill. However, the auto-pilot will not be able to operate any devices or arrays added to the puppet that the body didn't have in life. You can activate them by command, and the puppet's autopilot will compensate as best it can; however, most activations will reduce the effectiveness of the autopilot's combat performance.
- With careful preparation, you can turn a living creature into a living puppet. You can add weapons, devices and even extremities to this puppet to turn the puppet into a Frankenstein-esque creature or a complete abomination, though as the puppet is still a living creature, care must be taken that the vital functions are not compromised during modification. Alternatively, you can choose to leave the body unchanged; however, when empowering it with your energy, you can cause slow cosmetic changes to the puppet.
- Transforming a living being into a living puppet destroys their conscience, though you can choose to preserve the mental faculties and memories of the subject, creating a puppet that can act independently and even re-integrate into their past life, though a personality change will be noticed by others as the puppet no longer has a true sense of self and will only strive to fulfill your orders, a biological robot rather than a follower or subordinate.
- You have a pocket dimension in which you can instantly store any of your puppets and summon them at will. You can also keep materials, devices and tools in this dimension, though no living objects. Objects stored in your pocket-dimension do not degrade, and you can channel your energy into any stored puppets to upgrade or repair them as if you were touching them.
- You can at will possess any of your puppets, controlling them as if they were your own body and activating any mechanisms or arrays installed by instinct. Puppet bodies do not possess a sense of pain, although you will have a sense of touch and be able to tell when the puppet has sustained damage. If the puppet you're possessing is destroyed, you can possess any other puppet outside of your pocket dimension. Should there be no puppets outside of your pocket dimension, or if you choose to, you will instead appear unharmed in a location of your choice that is within 100 meters of the destroyed puppet. While you possess a puppet, your real body will be moved into your storage dimension; it will neither age nor require sustenance of any kind while in the storage dimension.