Let's see...
What if wee Initially Cancel Cancel Then,
>>971171
Jam the door and begin Siphoning Mass this way To create a basilisk Organ and use
>>971133
Interface to lock the two Xotl Down long enough for us to siphon over enough mass to to kill those two dead.

Once that's done Alice could move her entire body to this room, physically steal all the idols, temporarily swap quicksilver for bottom feeder, destroy all evidence of her being here, swap back to quicksilver, re-enable the door mechanism, and move on to the next objective.

>>971034
We should absolutely not switch anything out until we have more slots, as moving around like this requires quicksilver and it's our bigger asset. We should get the login info, see if the subject is helpless enough to nom and get something out of it, before we try and refit our abilities while we're in the middle of using them!
Focus on the Xotol in the specimen room, get what you can, and focus on improving yourself and your abilities enough to help your crew.

>>971033
[X]Cancel
[X]Cancel
Current abilities are too immediately useful.

1/4 Alice Dietrich 2020/07/26(Sun)07:15 No. 973200 ID: 3b7932
File 159577291386.png - (17.76KB , 800x500 , alice_muppet.png )

>I think Husbandry would actually make you more dangerous to nearby life by allowing you to stitch still-living (and possibly screaming) organic bodies to yourself.
What.

>Fine Detail will let you destructively analyse a xotl and then remember the experience forever.
Why?

>That third idol looks very useful for when you rejoin with the crew. Bottom Feeder allows consumption of non-meat-based foods which will let you (re)gain biomass without combat or entering a meat-feeding frenzy, Husbandry will allow you to carry around your allies to protect them, and Gardener sounds like it will enable healing of their wounds, which is the biggest problem with engaging in combat while they are nearby.
>We neeeeeed it. We also need an extra slot to use it (since quicksilver can't be disabled at the moment), so we need to eat another experiment very soon.
All useful. Time to acquire materiel then!

>As a temporary solution, see if you can use Interface to lock them in.
Alice thinks there was a junction near her point of entry. She locates it and messes with the ability to use the door's keypad by cycling the power to it every few seconds. That should buy her some time as she retracts her other exploratory tendrils and shuffles more of her body into this room.

>With Clever Hands (and possibly Fine Detail) do you think you could manufacture a reasonable looking approximation of an idol in a fairly short time frame to pull off a switch?
Out of what exactly? She's a bit low on blue crystal thingies.

>Well, a bit of a longshot, but could you drill a tiny hole underneath their feet? And then shoot a tendril up into it?
Going through arbitrary pieces of floor is very slow.

2/4 Alice Dietrich 2020/07/26(Sun)07:17 No. 973201 ID: 3b7932
File 159577303761.png - (23.86KB , 500x800 , when_muppets_attack.png )

>Begin siphoning mass this way to create a basilisk organ
As part of her mass redistribution, Alice starts trying to form one here.

The xotl check the boxes but apparently one of the items they needed isn't there. One complains about the casteless xotl not doing their jobs. He tries the door twice, then grumbles again and goes towards an intercom.

Oops, Alice has to strike now! She's more present now, it'll be fine.

The other xotl's distracted by the first one so she drops down on top of him and garrottes his neck with her feeding tendrils. The reinforced fabric resists for a second or so then she cuts through as he vainly tries to pry her tendrils away.

3/4 Alice Dietrich 2020/07/26(Sun)07:18 No. 973202 ID: 3b7932
File 159577312372.png - (32.52KB , 800x500 , shes_got_a_gun.png )

Alice tries to reproduce her disabling scream. It's more of a frantic hiss than the howl her basilisk organ produced before. It seems to work, the xotl staggers, fumbling to get his gun off his back.

>Shoot the far xotl with the near xotl's gun.
Alice lifts her xotl and scoops the shotgun off his back. She aims and shoots at the neck. and the xotl staggers. She's not sure if that's enough to finish him off - their armour is pretty tough against the explosive rounds they favour - and shoots twice more. She drops her original xotl and scuttles over to stab the second one in the neck with her feeding tendrils a few times to be sure he's down for the count.

Alice pauses for a moment. No-one has come running at the sound of gunfire. Hopefully the rooms muffle the sound.

>Ideal outcome would be for them, their gear, the idols, and the cart to all completely disappear, no sign of struggle, as if they'd left on schedule but never arrived at the intended destination.
The xotl, easy. The idols, maybe if she widens the holes she's made. Their gear, trickier unless she walks out of here. The cart? That's a bit of a tall order unless she just tries to stash it somewhere.

>I'm tempted to start disappearing xotl. Make innocuous holes, eat one, cut what you don't need into tiny pieces and hide it underground. I also really like the idea of being able to multi-task, even if I wouldn't sacrifice things we can do now for it.
Alice'd need more low-risk biomass to get bigger to spread herself wider to get that rolling.

Speaking of which... Alice yanks the two dead xotl together and stashes them in a corner. She webs them in a mass of her feeding tendrils to be sure she vacuums the leftover slime into storage sacs as well and lets them digest.

80 biomass consumed. 53 mass gained, mass total is 184
Conversion continues to stabilise, efficiency is now 70%

Blind One's pipers! They're much more nutritious than the meat smoothies. Her protoplasmic flesh prefers fresh food? A little worrying but that's fine there's lots of xotl.

4/4 Alice Dietrich 2020/07/26(Sun)07:19 No. 973203 ID: 3b7932
File 159577318894.png - (27.46KB , 800x500 , this_guy_still_hates_his_job.png )

As she regrows her exploratory tendrils to the mainframe, possible crew room and secure area, Alice checks back in at the first room she found. The xotl's gotten the decayed experiment out of its tube and onto a trolley. He seems to be finishing up some work on the computer. His friend's missing again.

Should she wait for him to come back to nab them both? And how should she try to absorb the experiment? Just eat it or try that mental battle the basilisk used on her?

>>973203
Mental battle. You need their marrow. Remember to deploy your shell first this time, don't let your jellyfish battle naked!

You seem to be able to ambush one at a time pretty effectively, but not knowing where the other one is puts a dampener on doing that right now.

It would be really, really nice if you could interact with the ships systems to camera view, but your quicksilver mass spreading might do the trick anyway, you can send small eye-tendrils to watch any entrances so you can ambush xotl number 2. See if that's feasible and eat this one if it is. If there's no way to get a visual, then repeat messing with the room lock the way you did before to keep the other one out while you eat the first AND the disgusting misshappen animal thing. If it gives you the ability to add another artifact, then we are in range of being able to use some horrible inhuman plant monster powers to basically take of the station.

I'm going to say if this all works out, slot the multitasking ability, and use your spread out mass to start reshaping the undercarriage of the station to your advantage. With multitasking things like pulling apart xotl gear and hiding it underground shouldn't be too hard. You can also build protected conduits for you to quicksilver through, make a safe zone to hide your allies in, and maybe take a larger degree of control of the entire station by interfacing with it's electronics. All at the same time you slowly predate your way through the xotl populace.

This also offers us a unique opportunity in that we can maybe use our clever hands and multitasking to build an ambush for the dragon slayer. They are too competent for a "pop out behind and kill him before he reacts" kind of easy victory, but if he chased after where he thought you were, the floor gave out beneath him because you'd recently carved everything beneath it away, and dropped him into a mess of exposed electrical conduits that might take him out without any serious direct contact.

Imagine all the deaths trap you could make to get revenge on that bastard.

>>973200
>What.
Just look at the wording.
>Refinement to animating principle for additional modes of nondestructive interference with lower organisms.
So you can touch things and not digest them, fine. But...
>Amalgamation, doping and preservation of useful substructures.
Amalgamation and preservation. Sounds like it only stops complete digestion so that you can fuse organs and limbs to yourself without having to reconstitute them.

Check the other rooms too if you've reached them. Wouldn't want to trip the alarm if his friend walks back in, but time is finite... How about a quick snack on that xotl's head, stash him out of sight, then try and eat the experiment's marrow once the second xotl is accounted for. Lay a shotgun trap for when he comes back?

>>973202
>Their gear, trickier unless she walks out of here. The cart? That's a bit of a tall order unless she just tries to stash it somewhere.
Can't you walk out inside their armors? you could make some sort of umbilical cord to connect both if you don't fit in just one (let's hope you can add some armor and/or covering to it). That'd let you roll out the cart as if everything's going according to plan, until you either find somewhere quiet to dismantle it and dispose of the pieces or find a place with some other carts where it wouldn't seem out of place.

>>973218
That is one interpretation, but
>nondestructive
is the important part.

>>973203
Wait a bit. If he starts moving the trolley on his own, strike to take him out then block the door until you're done in here.

>>973202
Lets not sweat the upgrade right now until we can fit it in. Get that tasty marrow!

I forget, is that psychic shit wi-fi or do you have to connect to it?

I don't see him doing anything tedious that requires a report. I'd say eat the stupid lizard and pig and start unlocking that slot for your new upgrade.

Or for fun and chaos, throw his body onto the pig mass, let it eat and get loose and just watch. If the onslaught that follows isn't technically your fault, they may think the pig is the one killing them all in this general area. Good frame job. Also fun.

You know...
We could go all 80's slasher flick here.

Depopulate the base of xotle one by one until they are reduced to an manageable number.

>>973247
sadly we don't know how close reinforcements might be, if we take too long we could have a whole new shipment of Xotl to deal with, or if we become "unmanageable" they might just destroy the entire base.

Wait for that guy to come back, and nab him, then mental battle that blob thing; it really doesn't seem like much of a thinker so hopefully it'll be a cake-walk.

>>973203
If we get into a mental battle, wouldn’t we automatically get disconnected when the xotl moves the experiment and we haven’t won yet?

And would we need to worry about falling from the ceiling when we begin the battle? Because if our body goes limp when we enter the mental battle, we’ll fall to the floor where the other xotl will find us and catch us while we’re not moving! It would really suck if that’s how we end up getting caught again!

>>973283
True...
What if we manage to cut power and coms?

1/3 Alice Dietrich 2020/07/28(Tue)02:57 No. 973409 ID: 9a5ec1
File 159593023911.png - (33.54KB , 800x500 , here_she_goes_killing_again.png )

>I don't see him doing anything tedious that requires a report. I'd say eat the stupid lizard and pig and start unlocking that slot for your new upgrade.
Having partially layered some meat back on her bones, Alice stands up and shoots him.

>Or for fun and chaos, throw his body onto the pig mass, let it eat and get loose and just watch. If the onslaught that follows isn't technically your fault, they may think the pig is the one killing them all in this general area. Good frame job. Also fun.
No, Alice is going to eat that xotl! That sounds like the most fun for everyone.

>Husbandry's wording is amalgamation and preservation. Sounds like it only stops complete digestion so that you can fuse organs and limbs to yourself without having to reconstitute them.
Alice is growing increasingly concerned about what exactly the Precursors were trying to do with some of these mods.

>Can't you walk out inside the consumed xotl's armors? you could make some sort of umbilical cord to connect both if you don't fit in just one. That'd let you roll out the cart as if everything's going according to plan, until you either find somewhere quiet to dismantle it and dispose of the pieces or find a place with some other carts where it wouldn't seem out of place.
Alice would have to trail a bright red fleshy noodle behind a faux-xotl. Bits that are cut off her usually decay fast! Also doors might close on her noodle and she assumes that would hurt.

>We could go all 80's slasher flick here.
>Depopulate the base of xotl one by one until they are reduced to an manageable number.
While Alice does enjoy the occasional vintage film, she has to assume the xotl do actually check in on each other and will notice the disappearances quickly.

Also they seem to have the base broken up into quadrants. She assumes there's some beefy isolation between the lab quadrant she's in and the living quarters she needs to go through to access the launch pad.

>Block the door until you're done in here.
Alice walks over to the access pad and interfaces to scramble the settings. That should do the trick! She turns back to the trolley.

2/3 Alice Dietrich 2020/07/28(Tue)02:58 No. 973410 ID: 9a5ec1
File 159593031044.png - (25.53KB , 800x600 , the_unupgraded_experience.png )

>And would we need to worry about falling from the ceiling when we begin the battle? Because if our body goes limp when we enter the mental battle, we’ll fall to the floor where the other xotl will find us and catch us while we’re not moving!
The mental battle seemed to be accelerated compared to what was going on outside but Alice makes sure all of her distributed body is secured somewhere safe.

>Mental battle that blob thing; it really doesn't seem like much of a thinker so hopefully it'll be a cake-walk.
Alice grabs on to the sad, rotten thing's face and feels her senses go blank.

>Remember to deploy your shell first this time, don't let your jellyfish battle naked!
Alice doesn't experiment too much, just recreating the scenario she experienced when she fought the basilisk.

Her representation's mass shell is substantially bigger than last time and has the basilisk's protective field. She guesses the protective layer is an interpolation of Interface after all.

This feels a little unfair.

She fires a harpoon at the weakly moving experiment's little jellyfish core.

3/3 Alice Dietrich 2020/07/28(Tue)03:00 No. 973411 ID: 9a5ec1
File 159593043704.png - (37.24KB , 800x600 , pog_champ.png )

That was too easy.

Alice wins!

Currently fused to inert worker-body. Estimate 30 servitor mass. Absorb and convert?

[X] Absorb
[ ] Cancel

Foreign worker-body reformatted, 27 mass gained. Mass total is 211. Alice needs more mass, she's still too vulnerable! She'll eat the dead xotl once she's done messing around with the idols. She's still hungry...

>Get that tasty marrow!
Alice feels herself swallow something essential from the destroyed core. It's like the basilisk's Marrow. But there's not an ability as well this time, the experiment had no idol exposure?

Marrow constituting deceased animating principle of foreign worker-body has been absorbed. Now able to integrate an instruction subset from a filled node. Select option:

[ ] Quicksilver
[ ] Interface
[ ] Cancel

Permanent Quicksilver would let Alice slot in Bottom Feeder, Husbandry or Gardener. Integrating Interface would let her fit Multi-task or Fine Detail. Alice could alternatively try to be tricksy and replace Interface with Multi-task or Fine Detail and then slot Interface back into the freed slot.

Which should she make permanent and should she slot in a new ability?

Interface is essential - why is it that computer science is a critical component of so many adventures? Integrate that and you'll be able to combine Fine Detail and Clever Hands. I want to destructively analyze some gadgets... perhaps the experiment's eye spike?
Remember to clean up your mess - take the experiment and the xotl belowdecks!

Gaaaah. Bottom feeder is so goood... But
>>973412
Has a point.
Clever hands, Fine detail, and Interface all synergize way too well to not use all three at once.
Make Interface permanent.

>>973411
ok, so. Quicksilver has been the absolute best ability we got, judging by how quickly and how often it's come in handy since we got it, to the point where getting rid of it feels kind of like shooting yourself in the foot. That said, though, the next abilities in line for Interface sound more useful than the others, for now. So I guess that while I'd agree to make Quicksilver permanent in a literal sense, I'd vote for Interface to be made permanent in the mechanics sense, if that makes sense.

>>973411
Make interface permanent so we can pick up fine detail, yeah. In other news you need an intervention, missy. You're getting a bit focused on accumulating biomass. That's the problem when you have an addiction but it's currently a necessity... You have to remember it's for necessity, not to feed your addiction. Operation War Piggy was a good plan and you rejected it out of hand.

I am reluctant to make interface permanent. For all that it is useful, it is also situational, which means that so long as you have an idol for it, you can use it for technological matters and reserve the option to replace it when you need to do something extreme.

I am tempted to suggest fine detail, as it is a general awareness and mental upgrade, which is always useful, but do you want to have an enhanced sense of smell that you can't turn off for the inevitable sewer level? Or flashbang spam?

>This feels a little unfair.

Fair fights are for suckers.

Quicksilver so we can slot in Bottom Feeder.

Okay hold on here.
The permanent choice will be always on, so we kindof want it to be something that will be useful both in and out of combat. Optimally the now empty slot would be used to switch between multiple things and not be required for effective combat since we won't always have the prep time to switch.

Considering that... Interface is useful in combat since it is required for the Basilisk organ, and is useful out of combat for messing with computers.
Quicksilver has... some use in combat, but is primarily useful out of combat for sneaking around. I'd kindof like to have quicksilver always on so that we can have the combat mode on at the same time by default to give us both the option to fight and flee (and maybe some synergy?), but instead maybe you should consider having combat mode on when you're not actively using quicksilver.

Let's go with Interface.

>>973425
While I'll agree that Fine Detail is a better passive, doing the tricksy thing will cost us a significant amount of mass.
Instead of just a small amount of mass to enmarrow, we'll also be taking 2 load in penalties, and there's a chance we'll lose our basilisk organ again, as we don't know if it'll go dormant or just straight up die when that ability is unloaded.

I think it would be worth it and would be willing to change my vote to from Interface to Fine Detail if others are interested, but even with mass to spare the cost of the operation is worth considering.

>>973411
Quicksilver, Bottom Feeder will basically allow us to consume WALLS!
Consume WALLS! Consume armor! CONSUME THE DRAGONSLAYER WHOLE!

Interface perm fo sho.

Yeah, there might be short term benefits to always having quicksilver but interface is basically going to save us in the long term. The ability to both control xotl electronics and our only means of fighting these precursor creatures should we run across more of them is too valuable, less so right now but for any actual escape plan essential.

I want to slot multi-tasking as the replacement for that slot. There's a truly insane number of things we can start working on with our massive amount of mass and clever hands. Lets get multitask and then later fine detail too, and then just start rebuilding this base to fit our whims. We'll make hidden tubes for us to quicksilver along or escape down, we can cut holes into other sections of the base while hunting xotl here, we can make traps to help us ambush tougher enemies, and if we are really clever maybe some new weaponry (I can only imagine what our hydraulic bio-gun could do if we were able to use it to fire shrapnel at people instead of bits of goo).

>>973456
I agree with all of this. Let's make Interface permanent!

interface, hacking has never led us astray

>>973411
I feel like Quicksilver/Interface/Bottom Feeder is a more useful combo for stealthing than QS/I/Multi-Task, as Bottom Feeder would allow us to dispose of evidence (like the cart in the other room). Also, I think it's important we be able to use crew support options [read: make contact with crew without risking them] without sacrificing our QS stealth.
(As for Fine Detail, I've yet to be convinced that it's particularly useful at all.)

So I vote we lock in Quicksilver. Interface is almost certainly our next lock, though.

>>973581
You know what? You're right. I change my vote.

>>973411
Nom. Given the ease at which Xotl weaponry can hurt you, more mass just means more of a buffer against damage. There's probably some consequences, but you can keep them in check, or they'll balance out eventually with mass loss.

>>973581
Also agreed, interface is highly useful, but so is the ability to eat everything, and eating evidence makes sense.

>>973680
That ability to eat everything requires an external source, seems like a furnace. We might not be equipped to do that just anywhere.

>>973421
>You're getting a bit focused on accumulating biomass.
I'll echo that.
Beware your greed. Biomass helps, but always, ALWAYS, remember what you fight for. If you lose that, you lose what's left of yourself.

1/2 Alice Dietrich 2020/08/04(Tue)05:33 No. 973799 ID: 746503
File 159654442188.png - (34.39KB , 800x500 , aww_yeah_stare_at_the_thingy.png )

>I want to destructively analyze some gadgets... perhaps the experiment's eye spike?
>Clever hands, Fine detail, and Interface all synergize way too well to not use all three at once.
>Make interface permanent so we can pick up fine detail.
>Interface is useful in combat since it is required for the Basilisk organ, and is useful out of combat for messing with computers.
...

>Quicksilver so we can slot in Bottom Feeder.
Quicksilver's permanence through use of the Marrow doesn't feel like much of anything, but then Alice extrudes an eyeball to stare at the Precursor idol in the other room and feels her distributed body tingle and then pleasurably burn as the transcription occurs and her body twists a little further.

21 mass lost, 190 mass remaining.

Alice's senses go numb for a for a moment and then she steadies herself. Perhaps this ability is particularly complex, or maybe having her body spread between rooms is disorientating because of the time it took for the alterations to travel through it. Photosynthesis... lithotrophy... She frantically constructs additional sacs to store the slime from her body melting a little.

Now Alice thinks about it, this means she was more of a fungus than a plant previously. She isn't sure she likes any of these thoughts.

>Quicksilver has been the absolute best ability we got, judging by how quickly and how often it's come in handy since we got it, to the point where getting rid of it feels kind of like shooting yourself in the foot.
Between it and Clever Hands, Alice is getting better at infiltrating her body through the underfloor. She's starting to spread peripheral connections so if she's discovered one cut won't chop off a significant part of her mass. She needs to eat more, maybe find more liquid to spend less mass on mobility systems.

2/2 Alice Dietrich 2020/08/04(Tue)05:35 No. 973800 ID: 746503
File 159654454524.png - (47.66KB , 800x600 , armed_to_eat.png )

Alice reels the harpooned xotl in to eat, clamping her split forearm over the head and infiltrating feeding tendrils through its body.

40 biomass consumed, new mass total is 219.
Maximum conversion efficiency has been reached. Efficiency is 75%.

The soft parts of xotl's armour are easily dissolved by Alice's feeding tendrils, some kind of aramid? The composites making up the carapace aren't entirely digestible, Alice keeps worrying away at them like sucking on a gobstopper.

Compatible matter absorbed, new total is 221.

It's like the xotl meat-smoothies. Slow and inefficient compared to eating xotl, but less likely to fight back.

>You need an intervention, missy. You're getting a bit focused on accumulating biomass. That's the problem when you have an addiction but it's currently a necessity... You have to remember it's for necessity, not to feed your addiction.
No Alice isn't! She almost died fighting the dragonslayer and if she makes more mistakes, people are going to die. She can't survive here. The xotl are going to kill her given the chance.

>Bottom Feeder would allow us to dispose of evidence (like the cart in the other room). Also, I think it's important we be able to use crew support options [read: make contact with crew without risking them] without sacrificing our QS stealth.
Alice has to stay secret and stay safe for now. Fine Detail has a lot of possibilities but she couldn't think of anything she currently has available to her that would be useful to analyse and duplicate with it. She does have Interface for any tech she finds after all.

>Biomass helps, but always, ALWAYS, remember what you fight for. If you lose that, you lose what's left of yourself.
There's so little of her left. She has to be strong. Propagate, ramify, overcome. Otherwise she'll fail the mission! The mission to, to get everyone to the... the Penguin and everyone is happy again!

Alice hears the door to the experiment room bloop and refuse entry, then hears a knock. It's followed by whining about whether this a prank, open the door now, and that the other xotl better not have left without him.

Looks like the other xotl of the pair's come back how should Alice get rid of him?

That's definitely too slow to make the cart disappear. Good for squeezing every last drop of biomass out of the place, though.
Stuff the armor under the sheet, get out of line of sight and open the door. There's no gore visible that'd scare him, right? Regardless, once he's in, muffle that xotl as quickly as you can and shut the door behind him. Hope he didn't bring friends.

>>973800
I want to take over this whole ship/station like a parasitic organism. Like a mold!
Being a fungus is a beautiful, powerful thing. Nothing hardier, nothing better!

Let's see if Quicksilver and Bottom Feeder can combine into spreading creep/mold that can live on and spread past yourself. Put some of that shit in the vents and watch you spread! SPREAD THROUGH THE WHOLE FACILITY!

They'll be forced to spend so much time burning and cleaning you up! You might even be able to spend enough biomass in a certain area to respawn yourself! A checkpoint!

>>973800
Hide yourself and the xotl you're chewing on, unlock the door, wait for him to come in, lock the door behind him, ambush him.
Hmm, maybe you should interrogate him. Ask why the xotl are moving things around. Also, ask where the rest of your crew is. We haven't gotten that information from infiltrating their systems, so it would be good to know.

>more of a plant now than a fungus
Well, I think that's a plus. Plants are more well known for living alongside humans. Plants are also more... familiar, aren't they?
Your stomach efficiency maxed out, which means in theory you should have less of a feeding urge. Nothing else to spend fresh food on but biomass, right? That would mean less of a priority on it, aside from base survival. I also wonder if Bottom Feeder lessens the meat craving since you should in theory have other more readily available food. Like someone adjusting to a post-famine situation.

>>973800
Try to remember. You are Alice Dietrich, your grandmother's name was Marie. You are a crew member of the Survey Corps ship TFS Penguin. Your ship was attacked by the Xotl despite being ight years out of their territory. In the chaos, the crew hadn't been able to do a clean wipe on the ship's data core and the Xotl managed to recover the crew roster. They'd taken the ranking officers for questioning and set the others aside for experimentation. You served in the military and received a commendation for your initiative during the Kota Rebellion. You received a Tier II engineering rating.

Never forget who you are.

>>973828
Also, you're getting fat.

>>973829
That was a self-deprecating joke. Humans do those.

>>973832
You do know that self-deprecating jokes are made by the person being deprecated, right? It's only a self-deprecating joke if she makes it herself.

>>973843
What we say, miss Dietrich tends to think. Or argue with ‘herself’ about.

If she’s really been listening to a bunch of voices out of nowhere like it was a good idea, I dare say she’s got bigger problems than being called out for her eating mania.

After all, the point of coming here was to gain a better grip and understanding of her capacities, not to lose herself in a feeding and self-propagatory frenzy.

As we learned earlier, she needs a break from eatin’ to come down from that mode. In that sense Bottom Feeder is a trap, lowering her capacity for higher thought while she’s gnawing on svant materials like a dog worrying on an old bone.

Huh... so permanent slotting is a mind-whammy. Quicksilver too, by appearances.

We need to STOP, we need to ignore that guy and devote all our mental faculties to finding our friends, we are VERY close to the point of no return people!

Into the walls, seal up the holes, leave them guessing.

>>973847
Eh. I wouldn't say so. Alice has only been half there the whole time, and with people are making weird assumptions and saying stuff about missions that don't exist, her response was... Normal.

>>973849
Ok wow. Look. Alice is currently on task. The only thing that's changed is that we've eschewed covert action for overt action. We are currently running quiet, but it is only a matter of time before things get loud now. We need to obtain more mass and marrow before that happens so we're ready for it.

Alice's existential crisis can wait until after were safe and reunited with the crew.
On that note, we should probably hunt for more marrow and make husbandry permanent so we can coexist with the crew safely.
While we should be less ravenous in theory now that feeding efficiency is maxed, another layer of let's not kill everyone would be nice.

As for this guy, kill lights, open door, close door behind him, harpoon to face. Let him continue thinking it's a prank until the end.

>>973871
There's only two benefits and an immense number of cons to being bigger at this point.

pros: we could start actively destroying the base bit by bit at this size and we could theoretically dismantle/hurl a fafnir mech if we could get close enough

cons: We'll be an immensely easier target to spot and hit, we'll move around slower and that's not counting the sanity penalty for being megahuge and monstrous.

it's time to stop eating and controlling alice's gargantuan and worrying appetite...

Well, after we kill and consume this last guy for stealth purposes.

>>973884
Quicksilver negates that first con and any mobility issues, and there's no "sanity penalty" for being big. As for being monstrous, well, the comparisons are inevitable. Alice just needs to put some effort into maintaining her appearance when she isn't under immediate time pressure.

In the long term, Bottom Feeder and Husbandry should eliminate any self-control issues Alice has. She can wean herself off of meat and go full vegetarian with Bottom Feeder, and Husbandry should allow her to have some manner of contact with people without having to worry about hurting them accidentally. Come to think of it, maybe the previously mentioned worrisome interpretation of Husbandry is backwards. Could it possibly be used to enhance people? Modify their structure to make them more resilient? Instead of grafting parts of enemies onto Alice, graft parts of Alice onto allies.

That icon's abilities are really very important if Alice is ever going to rejoin society, I think. Gardener would be optional in the long term, but could be a useful service.

>>973907
I imagine we would need Husbandry to interact biologically.
Multitask because surgery is complicated.
Fine Detail because surgery is sensitive.
Gardner To regenerate the surrounding tissues.
Interface (Well mastered Interface at that) To anesthetize, and maybe even draw medical data from a database or doctor.
Hell With quicksilver we could form healing pods and cocoon and heal dyeing friendos, or heal or modify through straight-up amalgamation.

In anycase, I doubt Husbandry can do much besides small simple mods on its own. none of the abilities seem particularly useful on their own. They all build on each-other. Tis why abilities like Multitask and Fine Detail are so good despite not having any immediate uses: They just make everything else better.

>>973912
No, I meant that the description of the ability makes it sound like it could be used *by itself* to enhance other people.

>>973932
Aye. Enhance lesser life forms. Presumably with precursor biology. Keyword lesser. The precursors likely didn't give a shit about the lives of other life forms outside of their utility.

Are the mods removable?
Disfiguring?
Destructive to the host over time?
Painful?
Does the module suggest it can keep a host alive while doing something major?

Husbandry might let us horrifically alter some xotl victim, but no human is going to consent unless we can for certain assure them that they are in good hands.

>>973963
I feel like the name of the ability is significant here; "husbandry" suggest that "lesser life forms" refers to cattle, crops and domestic animals, not experimental subjects, and since you don't want to damage cattle before it's time for slaughter, it suggests that it should be a relatively safe procedure. So it's a "maybe" for the first two questions, "probably not" for the last three, and while horrific alteration may be a possibility, it's probably not what the ability is intended for and not something that should be expected for any procedure for sure.

1/4 Alice Dietrich 2020/08/18(Tue)23:35 No. 974712 ID: b488b1
File 159781890679.png - (30.07KB , 800x600 , very_much_sneaking_of_alice.png )

>We need to STOP, we need to ignore that guy and devote all our mental faculties to finding our friends, we are VERY close to the point of no return people!
Not yet...

>Hide yourself and the xotl you're chewing on, unlock the door, wait for him to come in, lock the door behind him, ambush him.
Just a little slime on the trolley that the specimen had been oozing. Alice has been trying to scoop any slime her meals and idol usage produce into her slime sacs.

>Regardless, once he's in, muffle that xotl as quickly as you can and shut the door behind him. Hope he didn't bring friends.
The xotl calls out, looking side to side in the abandoned lab, still demanding to know if this is a prank and whining that it's sorry for not grabbing a drink for its co-worker.

Door's sliding shut, time to move!

2/4 Alice Dietrich 2020/08/18(Tue)23:36 No. 974713 ID: b488b1
File 159781896095.png - (39.76KB , 800x600 , kill_alice_kill.png )

Alice rushes out from behind the specimen tube, trailing the connective tissue that joins her to the rest of her dispersed body. She efficiently muffles the xotl by stabbing him in the face with a dozen feeding tendrils. The xotl doesn't even have time to scream.

>Hmm, maybe you should interrogate him. Ask why the xotl are moving things around. Also, ask where the rest of your crew is. We haven't gotten that information from infiltrating their systems, so it would be good to know.
Alice's feeding tendrils interface as they worm through the twitching xotl's skull, flashes of information and irrelevant images. The xotl's worried it has to report back with the specimen in twenty minutes. She's supposed to be back with the other xotl she's partnered with by then. There's rumours the evacuation is due to an accident with a Precursor warhead in the physics lab. It doesn't like the experiment in this room, it creeps him out. If the Thousand Day Empire couldn't tame Precursor servitors, what hope do they ha ve? Shee's irrationally wo rrie d she's dro pp e d h er d r i... n... k...

She's gone.

40 biomass consumed, new mass total is 249.

Alice's tendrils scrape the interior of the armour clean. She feels different, that last xotl tipped her over some new threshold.

Interlink: A system of cells within cells within cells. Distributed and interconnected. Spinning up additional redundant information storage within worker-body. Basal nodes interlinked. New node made distinct. Fire dread reduced.

A conversation with Blake about back-up thinky parts and any damage Alice takes potentially being brain damage uncomfortably comes to mind. More mass means more redundancy, right?

>Huh... so permanent slotting is a mind-whammy. Quicksilver too, by appearances.
Alice has bits of her brain scattered across several rooms. If she has anything like a normal nervous system, it's going to take some time for information to get from one side of her to the other.

>In any case, I doubt Husbandry can do much besides small simple mods on its own. none of the abilities seem particularly useful on their own. They all build on each-other.
Everything seems to slot together but Alice doesn't think she's really explored the limits of what any one thing can do yet. There hasn't been time.

>Come to think of it, maybe the previously mentioned worrisome interpretation of Husbandry is backwards. Could it possibly be used to enhance people? Modify their structure to make them more resilient? Instead of grafting parts of enemies onto Alice, graft parts of Alice onto allies.
She won't know until she tries.

>Your stomach efficiency maxed out, which means in theory you should have less of a feeding urge.
Alice just ate. But she's still hungry.

3/4 Alice Dietrich 2020/08/18(Tue)23:36 No. 974714 ID: b488b1
File 159781900118.png - (35.61KB , 800x500 , next_eat_the_trolley.png )

>It's time to stop eating and controlling Alice's gargantuan and worrying appetite...
Alice isn't gargantuan yet so her appetite can't be gargantuan yet and there's no point in worrying about it.

>I want to take over this whole ship/station like a parasitic organism. Like a mold!
>Being a fungus is a beautiful, powerful thing. Nothing hardier, nothing better!
Alice can think of lots of things that'd be better to be than a fungi. But she needs to keep spreading, that's right.

>Let's see if Quicksilver and Bottom Feeder can combine into spreading creep/mold that can live on and spread past yourself.
Anything detached from Alice dies.

>They'll be forced to spend so much time burning and cleaning you up!
Alice doesn't want to burn!

>>more of a plant now than a fungus
>Well, I think that's a plus. Plants are more well known for living alongside humans. Plants are also more... familiar, aren't they?
Alice seems to have the choice of looking like a sickly plant when she has her skin on, or a pile of viscera.

>That's definitely too slow to make the cart disappear. Good for squeezing every last drop of biomass out of the place, though.
Alice will cut it up, digest what she can and stash whatever's left over in the underfloor. Make the signs of her presence just disappear.

She flops on the trolley with all the grace of some kind of stranded octopus, torso opening slightly to slide out feeding tendrils to saw into the trolley. She still has xotl armour stuck on both arms so she starts working away at dissolving that too. One tendril mops up the last xotl's dropped meat smoothie too.

Alice starts redistributing her mass again - all that's needed in the specimen room is feeding tendrils, slime sacs and digestive apparatus. She needs to go after the crewmate she found and the mainframe next, now she has the security token. She hasn't poked an eyeball back into the room with a possible crewmate - the chance of being spotted seemed too high with three alert xotl. She drools at the thought. She can hear a lot of movement though, she tries to stockpile mass underneath to take action.

4/4 Alice Dietrich 2020/08/18(Tue)23:38 No. 974715 ID: b488b1
File 159781909353.png - (43.44KB , 600x750 , this_is_the_idol_room_just_to_be_clear.png )

Over in the room with the idols, Alice has started digesting material too. The trolley, the idol case, the two xotl armours and some of the plastic crates are all dragged together into one mass, webbed together by her biomass. Let the xotl wonder where their missing stuff and personnel is, once they find out.

>Alice just needs to put some effort into maintaining her appearance when she isn't under immediate time pressure.
She's always going to be under immediate time pressure.

>Try to remember. You are Alice Dietrich, your grandmother's name was Marie. You are a crew member of the Survey Corps ship TFS Penguin. Your ship was attacked by the Xotl despite being light years out of their territory. In the chaos, the crew hadn't been able to do a clean wipe on the ship's data core and the Xotl managed to recover the crew roster. They'd taken the ranking officers for questioning and set the others aside for experimentation. You served in the military and received a commendation for your initiative during the Kota Rebellion. You received a Tier II engineering rating.
>Never forget who you are.
Hazy. Too many faces and names and images that don't link up. Her home world, and tours of other worlds, how does it fit together? Why was she so excited to see what's out there? The Sleeper only knows why it's this way. It's all graveyards out in the stars and children who don't know where the bones are buried.

She has to survive. She has to find her crew. She has to help them. She wants to go home.

Compatible matter absorbed, new total is 259.

>Also, you're getting fat.
Not fat enough.

>That was a self-deprecating joke. Humans do those.
...

>As we learned earlier, she needs a break from eatin’ to come down from that mode. In that sense Bottom Feeder is a trap, lowering her capacity for higher thought while she’s gnawing on scant materials like a dog worrying on an old bone.
Why is it? Is incorporating new mass mentally intensive? It's fine then! There's very little viable material in these materials! She needs to eat more just to break even with the cost of learning Bottom Feeder!

Thinking it over, she apparently does have a new node thanks to raising her mass? Maybe she needs to stare at idols again.

Alice tries poking at the first idol she found and winces as she feels an error. She's unable to load Megastructure; her body's unable to simultaneously support three configurations from the same idol and she already has made Clever Hands and Quicksilver permanent.

That leaves:

[ ] Multi-task - Division and recombination of animating principle process streams. Division of labour. Control of worker-body portions can be ceded to parallel processes. Literally for multitasking.

[ ] Fine Detail - Improves tactile, visual, olfactory, auditory and kinaesthetic sensory functions of worker body. Interpretation and fusion of sensory cues and options for eidetic storage of sensory input and fine scale destructive analysis of structures. Senses, coordination and she might be able to replicate some pieces of technology if there's anything that'd be useful to do that.

[ ] Husbandry - Refinement to animating principle for additional modes of nondestructive interference with lower organisms. Amalgamation, doping and preservation of useful substructures. Reduces unintentional corrosion of biological matter by subsumption architecture. Alice still reads this as some sort of cross-compatibility of regular biological creatures and Precursor fleshbeast biology.

[ ] Gardener - Additional biosphere utility via worker-body byproducts. A portion of degenerated biomass is reformatted to assist biological proliferation. Exposure to enriched biomatter promotes cellular activity and division in lower organisms. Maybe accelerates healing?

[ ] Cancel - Alice does need to spread herself around so maybe melting ten percent of her body is a bad idea right now?

Once she's taken care of this, she really needs to find out what's going on with this other crew mate. She'd prefer Blake, but anyone will do!

>>974715
Fine detail!

This new threshold was a positive one. Improved capacity, less danger of mind loss because there's more mind. Promising!
Things have really sped up, huh? The longer you wait to integrate the bigger that 10% cost gets, so integrate Fine Detail now. Sharpen your senses, improve your focus, and think of all the juicy tech you could utilize if you were able to manufacture your own replacements for ammo. That gloop gun? You could perhaps figure out how to use that, instead of hoarding all this slime for no present purpose. Can't hold it in forever.
Avoid Multi-tasking, and you'll avoid uncomfortable questions like how much of you is you. If you still think like a human, it's easier to act like a human. Humans can be finely honed killing machines, but they can also identify friend and foe.
Well, we've certainly looked out for number one, crew rescue is a go. Do the xotl's memories mention where they're due in twenty minutes?

>>974715
Are you making A Thing? Is that mess of flesh and metal organized in some way?

You have two very simple harvesting processes that are forcing your mind to distribute over a large area and thus slowing-down/confusing your mind because it takes so long for thoughts to travel to one another. Get multitasking right away and focus on concentrating your mental processes to the crew chamber, while the simple cleaning-up processes can be deliberately too simple to matter.

Remember to keep a "primary" mental process that is more complex than the others so that you don't risk multiple processes simultaneously coming up with separate overall objectives and the resulting civil-war.

Go for Husbandry, it will let you steal the enemy's bioaugmentations and integrated organic weaponry. You can also 'pilot' mummified precursor warbeasts, which is kick-ass.

As we are currently spread out, slotting multitask seems like the obvious choice for now.

>Alice just ate. But she's still hungry.
>her appetite can't be gargantuan yet
...Uh, if you fail to see how those are opposites...
>But she needs to keep spreading, that's right.
>Not fat enough.
...UH... Alice? BAD. BAD ALICE.

>Hazy. Too many faces and names and images that don't link up. Her home world, and tours of other worlds, how does it fit together? Why was she so excited to see what's out there? The Sleeper only knows why it's this way.
Sleeper? What's the Sleeper?
Alice? You there? Earth to Alice?
Do you remember your crewmembers besides Blake? What work you did with them?

>The xotl's worried it has to report back with the specimen in twenty minutes. She's supposed to be back with the other xotl she's partnered with by then. There's rumours the evacuation is due to
EVACUATE? If the xotl seek to leave, they might take the rest of the crew with them! Forget the biomass, that's of greater import!

>>974771
+1 for Hus, BTW.

We're about due for Fine Details.

>>974715
fine detail.

>>974715
>her body's unable to simultaneously support three configurations from the same idol
Oh. That's a problem... It means you won't be able to use all three of the configurations from the idol that looks like it might be useful for fitting in after you get home. Thankfully so long as you don't make either of the other two permanent, you can switch between them.
Do you think you might be able to recover some of your lost memories if you found that piece of yourself you used as a distraction?

Go with Husbandry, since you're about to rejoin your crew, and it should make you able to better yank memories out of Xotls. That is a very good way of getting information, including things like passwords. You'll also be able to find out if you could use it to, say, give a certain crewmember new legs.

Can you use some of this inorganic material you're eating to reinforce your body? Form metal plates like a kind of bastardized version of Megastructure? Small metal plates attached to your body would be flexible enough to work with Quicksilver. You could also try something fancy like a coat of quills or hanging metal plates/scales. Quills would work well to reload that planned autocrossbow, too.

>>974771
The Sleeper is the prime mover who dreamt the universe out of blind chaos. This was touched on in the very first thread when someone asked about the Messenger, which is the soul and emissary of the Sleeper.

Basically it is a religious thing. In this context, when she says "The Sleeper only knows..." it is basically the equivalent to us saying "God only knows...." I never really took Alice for a religious type, but this does show that there is some cultural figures of speech returning to Alice's speech. While Alice definitely needs to take a hard look at her hunger issue, she may still be Alice on the inside. It may just be trapped due to an inefficient neural network. That being said, human brains are clearly more efficient as far as volume vs performance goes, so we may want to try to create something akin to a brain to try and streamline the processing/biomass ratio.

>>974835
>Sleeper
>dreamt the universe out of blind chaos
>Messenger
>soul and emissary
oh. OH.
...shit.
Azathoth and Nyarlathotep.

Alice needs to remember to use the metal guns and weapons her enemys have. To remain good at using them.

[X] Multi-task

Hell yes multitask.

Hey, I wonder if we could fire a whole lot of guns at the same time using multitask.

I also wonder how hard it is to swap these in and out. Switching them in and out to try different combinations has merit.

1/3 Alice Dietrich 2020/09/25(Fri)22:07 No. 977237 ID: 8ebab2
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>Alice? You there? Earth to Alice?
>Do you remember your crewmembers besides Blake? What work you did with them?
Surveying new and undocumented planetary systems. Crew of eight: Alice, Blake. There's Mason too. Science and hyperdrive tech. And Derby. Science and probably dead seeing she has his tags. The other security guy, uh, Upton? Alice didn't get along with him too well. He kept sneaking off to bother the scientists. And her partner, who, no, she's getting confused, she didn't have one. Exot crew member, uh she's not getting much. There was the captain. He... had a beard? The XO... was... new?

Never mind, Alice is wasting time.

>Are you making A Thing? Is that mess of flesh and metal organized in some way?
It's a lump of half eaten material embedded in Alice!

>>The xotl's worried it has to report back with the specimen in twenty minutes. She's supposed to be back with the other xotl she's partnered with by then. There's rumours the evacuation is due to-
>EVACUATE? If the xotl seek to leave, they might take the rest of the crew with them! Forget the biomass, that's of greater import!
The xotl were already packing up everything. Now Alice has confirmation that sh- that the xotl she ate had to check in with some of the supplies soon. She's about to take back one of her crew (probably), but Alice is kind of a fleshy web spread between several rooms at the moment, she needs to pull herself back together before she'll have much mobility.

Or Alice could find more to eat and 'move' that way by spreading out? Trial attacking their infrastructure before she tries it in anger?

>Do the xotl's memories mention where they're due in twenty minutes?
Checkpoint in front of the exit. They're pulling out of this section of the base.

>Alice just ate. But she's still hungry.
>her appetite can't be gargantuan yet
...Uh, if you fail to see how those are opposites...
Obviously she didn't eat enough, she just needs to eat until she's satisfied her weird mutant instincts and then everything's going to be OK!

>...UH... Alice? BAD. BAD ALICE.
No, good Alice! She's been practically torn to shreds once already. She has to survive, she needs to give herself an advantage over the xotl and then she needs to think about how to get the others out safely.

>As we are currently spread out, slotting multitask seems like the obvious choice for now.
Right, spreading out like this is messing with her reactions too much. This should let her manage herself better.

26 mass lost. 233 mass remaining.

2/3 Alice Dietrich 2020/09/25(Fri)22:07 No. 977238 ID: 8ebab2
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Alice feels dizzy and then blacks out.

She wakes up again, disorientated. She thinks that was just a few seconds. She doesn't feel any different. Everything seems to be accounted for, aside from the consumed mass which her body is diligently redirecting to her slime sacs for use as hydraulic fluid or just slime.

>Do you think you might be able to recover some of your lost memories if you found that piece of yourself you used as a distraction?
It seemed to be decaying slower than normal, maybe because Alice used her Interface to order it into the ducts, but surely it would have decayed by now. It'd be nice. She had about two thirds of her body destroyed, she doesn't know what she might have lost.

>Alice needs to remember to use the metal guns and weapons her enemies have. To remain good at using them.
They don't do a good job of fitting through the small holes and tight confines Alice has been using to get around. She's having to widen openings to smuggle the idols back through the underfloor.

>I also wonder how hard it is to swap these in and out. Switching them in and out to try different combinations has merit.
It depends on how much Alice feels like partially disintegrating herself.

Now then, how to multitask?!

3/3 Alice Dietrich 2020/09/25(Fri)22:08 No. 977239 ID: 8ebab2
File 160109693810.png - (43.54KB , 800x600 , alices_not_to_be_taken_literally.png )

>You have two very simple harvesting processes that are forcing your mind to distribute over a large area and thus slowing-down/confusing your mind because it takes so long for thoughts to travel to one another. Get multitasking right away and focus on concentrating your mental processes to the crew chamber, while the simple cleaning-up processes can be deliberately too simple to matter.
Alice tries to make it simple, deliberately allocating a small part of her mass in the idol room for the exclusive use of, er, herself and telling it to look around. She tries to make whatever she has to allocate to it as pared back as possible. This feels weird, like that part of her's gone to sleep. She doesn't have a clear sense of what she's doing. She can see that chunk of mass sprouting an eye, which she didn't explicitly tell it to do. She looks at it and it looks back. It blinks or maybe winks. Alice mentally gives that piece of her a prod and it responds with an impression of the ceiling.

Alice tells it to stop. She remembers being Alice and also being herself but really, really dumb.

... It was a blink.

She tries a different tactic, trying a purely mental split to just 'count to 10' and immediately finds her body trying to sprout eyes and feelers. It ends after a few seconds. She remembers her other self counting to 10 and getting no sensory input, then returning to her at '10'. It seems she can control what exactly she gives to her multitask splits, but she also doesn't know much about what's going on until it merges back on completing a task or she deliberately checks in on it.

>Can you use some of this inorganic material you're eating to reinforce your body? Form metal plates like a kind of bastardized version of Megastructure? Small metal plates attached to your body would be flexible enough to work with Quicksilver. You could also try something fancy like a coat of quills or hanging metal plates/scales. Quills would work well to reload that planned autocrossbow, too.
She could, does she want to split her attention to work on that? Portability may be a concern though, as she's relying on the liquidity of her body to navigate the underfloor.

>Hey, I wonder if we could fire a whole lot of guns at the same time using multitask.
Well duh.

>Remember to keep a "primary" mental process that is more complex than the others so that you don't risk multiple processes simultaneously coming up with separate overall objectives and the resulting civil-war.
Right, primary: rescue crew.

Time is tight so how should Alice multitask? She's trying to erase the signs of her presence in two rooms. There's still the mainframe to investigate now she has a xotl security token. Her body is spread over a mildly alarming area, maybe she should explore more. She could try to manufacture something or conduct other experiments to explore what her altered biology can actually do. She's still hungry.

What tasks are worth multitasking and what resources does she want to dedicate to them?

>>977239
Great. Now you're *more* dangerous to the crew you're trying to rescue. These split-off Alices are single minded and dumb, so if you don't explicitly tell each one not to eat your friends they're probably going to try to. Oh well I guess you can just never have one active near crew.

Abandon erasing your presence. The Xotl are evacuating this area, why does it matter if you've left evidence behind for them to find? They won't find it, since they won't BE here.

Anyway, here are some tasks:

1, send an Alice to investigate the mainframe. Use the token to get in, extract all data, read it all, then relay the memories back. This Alice will need a decent amount of processing power.
2, try making that spine/spike launcher I was talking about. Make sure it's small enough to move around through the tunnels your body is spreading through, or can disassemble into smaller pieces. Shouldn't require too much processing power.
3, Craft ammo for the launcher. Needs very little, the ammo is just a spike.
4, Craft armor plating that you can easily disassemble when you need to quicksilver around and reassemble when needed. This might be complicated enough to need a decent chunk of your brain.
5, Station a sentry watching the room where you know some of your crew is being held captive. It should relay its memories back once the door opens so that you can intercept the xotl and evac with the crew. This is a very simple job and won't need much brainpower.
6, pop up some Alices near the edges of your spread-out body and have them explore more, maybe try sabotaging some stuff. This is open ended and might not be suited for multitasking, actually. Maybe your main Alice should do it?

I think you're a clone now, everywhere you go there's always two of you. Seriously though, you're having enough memory issues as it is, multiple memories of being you could be the last straw. Do not go overboard with instances. You should be able to count them on one unmodified hand at any given instance of splitting up. I don't want to have to say I told you so.
Part of your brain isn't going to be as efficient as your whole brain at creative thinking, you'll just be banging your head against two walls. Possibly literally. Forget that and the mainframe for now.
Priority 2: Clean up and consolidate, rendezvous below this room before moving to the crew's location. Priority 3: Chew the scenery. All processes should send an alert if spotted by security or xotl.

How far away is that checkpoint? Are they planning to pull everything irreplaceable out of this sector and then open it to vacuum, or replace the breathable air with nerve gas or cleansing fire or something?

Set a fork of yourself to the task of tapping and decoding whatever comm lines are available, ordered to report back when it hears anything important. Make sure it's got access to as much as you know about xotl linguistics.

If the enemy is evacuating the area, it means they plan to seal it off and nuke it from orbit. You must get the crew and yourself out of there before they do so.

lets try something ambitious. Send out dozens of orders to get your spread out mass to drill micro holes in the super structure up into the actual rooms every 2 or 3 meters, then grow and send as small an eye tentacle as you can manage to scan the room and then retract. Try and map out the area you encompass. See if you can manage a lot of orders like that, and also if you can make sense of what I'm very sure will be an overwhelming amount of input.

Oh, and they are right, we have to breach out of here within 20 minutes, so either rescue our crew and leave, or breach straight out and actively fight the Xotl to prevent them from sealing the place, and likely destroying it.

with 20 minutes, both seem completely impossible. But, if we were to use multitasking and quicksilver together to spread across the entire facility, consuming every creature with quick and violent simultaneous ambushes, with mass growth and our ability to weaponize growth waste we could overtake the entire facility pretty much as fast as we can send tendirls outward.

And seeing as how our tactical situation is about to go tits up when they fully pull out and we are suddenly trapped here, I can see no other options but to start doing exactly that.

After the experiment, if it's feasible to control many parts of you simultaneously without it overwhelming your ability to make decisions, start boring outwards from your center and spread as far along all conduits as possible. Also use existing parts of you to more slowly consume the unnecessary parts of the super structure, keeping in mind breaching in the wrong direction might space us. Plan to overtake the entire base, and it's whole crew, only stopping if we find blake or other crew members, or reach and need to prepare to breach their exit point.

Pull yourself back to one solid mass. We have a time limit to get past that checkpoint and our allies are unaccounted for, which is going to take an unknown amount of time to sort out with our enhanced senses.

>>977237
Ayyyyup, I was afraid of this. It's bad, especially if you compare her to how she was at >>/questarch/604305
If Alice loses some mass, it'd probably be for the best.
>>977277
>spread across the entire facility, consuming every creature with quick and violent simultaneous ambushes
BAD IDEA. With the way Alice is, that order would have them kill the crew, too.

>>977326
>If Alice loses some mass, it'd probably be for the best.
On the contrary, this implies that every time she loses some mass she basically suffers brain damage. Every time she takes damage she loses a part of herself.

>>977278
Do this!

>>977326
I agree, that's a terrible idea!

>>977326

>>spread across the entire facility, consuming every creature with quick and violent simultaneous ambushes
>BAD IDEA. With the way Alice is, that order would have them kill the crew, too.

It was specified explicitly to stop when our crew is found. Unless her fragments have trouble understanding what she's asking, it should work.

As well, pulling back is essentially giving up, in context. There's no more experimentation time left...

If the Xotl are pulling out, they may well be intending to write off the whole sector as a loss. Detach it entirely, open it to vacuum, bate it in hard rad, flush it with fire, there aren't really any good options there.
Leave in less than 20 minutes with any crewmembers you can gather.

>>977357
If we can do this quickly enough its a great odea, otherwise its time to gather the survivng friendly meat and move to get past that checkpoint. We'll have to improvise from there.

Alice absolutely needs to get herself back together, if she doesn't have a functioning central command center she isn't able to efficiently strategize to rescue her crew.

Probably one of the best things we can do is just a bit of cleanup, then see if we can lock the doors and prevent knowledge of yourself here from spreading while the evacuation is underway.

I think I understand what Alice is suppose to be. She’s likely suppose to be something like a Shoggoth, a biological machine engineered by a superior species meant to be a servitor of sorts.

It's time to get excited! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ThGfAV2Z-aQ&list=RDMMN8RA9KVxo_E&index=27

>>977239
honestly just retract all mass armor up with as much as you can possibly forming like a carapace and just FIND THE crew and figure out how to make oxygen

I second that.