The Business Penguin is underpowered, while the Box Knight, Our Friend (progress card) aka other ally is overpowered. I propose rebalancing these two denizens of the dream world as follows.
The Business Penguin
The What:
1. Change the cost for the business penguin to 6 Contact (the summoning cost of the other ally and matching the cost of a penguin action and the Dreammonger action) instead of 6 Contact per player/1 Ether.
2. Change the Business Penguin to not count as a dreamer (like the other ally.)
3. Reword the distress clause to retain the effect that if it is within range of an action or effect that causes distress to dreamers, remove it from the dreamscape.
The Why:
1. The benefits offered by the business penguin are situational, random, and the current costs are generally not worth the potential rewards.
2. This raises the cost for any gradual actions, making the business penguin's benefits effectively cost even more. Also, there are at least two dreams with disconnected/walled off tiles and very few sources of pain (All shades of filth and A Long Way To School) that require all dreamers be on the same tile to complete the dream. With no way to move, relocate, unsummon, or reliably cause pain to the business penguin, unwittingly summoning the penguin could render the dream incompletable, resulting in failure.
3. Thematically it does not make sense for the business penguin to hang around in a hostile environment, and having some limits/required management helps to limit the power of the benefits.
The Other Ally
The What:
1. Change the action cost to 1 Ether (like one of the current optional costs for summoning the Business Penguin.) I would say 6 Contact per player or 1 Ether, but given the space for action costs, it seems best to simplify.
The Why:
1. For an ally that only "dies" when it's tile is discarded (or when Awakening), the current cost of 6 contact is very cheap. It self-prevents its normal mode of deactivation (Morphing token that disables Progress Cards.) Perpetually poisoning an entity - even Balshazar and other climactic battles! - removes tension and difficulty to such a degree, with virtually no risk to the dreamers, that some higher cost or penalties or drawbacks seem necessary to balance this power. If the cost is one Ether, this is now a more limited resource and its benefits will now compete for Ether along with other benefits. It will have an impactful cost if heavily relied upon.The existence of this card mostly obsoletes other morphing cards like Smartie.