Essence of thePuppeteer

By consuming the Essence of the Puppeteer, you gain several boons:

• You gain a instinctive knowledge of mechanics, gadgets, and certain arcane arts. You can construct puppets from a variety of materials, from ordinary wood and metal over flesh to materials not normally usable, such as water or fire, and the puppets you build will be far stronger and 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 being 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 into the puppet, even when the 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 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 Any weapon can be withdrawn from the puppet's body so long as the opening it's drawn from is large enough to withdraw the object from, in other words if the puppet pulls a sword out the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 limited, though the process is exhausting for you and the stronger the puppet is the more energy it takes to further upgrade it. 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 you can convert into an array that you can inscribe on a puppet, letting the puppet instantly activate that spell or ability. 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 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, though when empowering it with your energy you're able to 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 change in personality 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, though 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 you choose to, you will instead appear unharmed in a location of your choice that's within 100m of the destroyed puppet. While you are possessing a puppet your real body will be moved into your storage-dimension, it will neither age nor require sustenance of any kind whilst in the storage-dimension.