She nods. 

She takes a deep breath and - 

- A blue flash springs from her ring, she jumps forward with a focused yet playful smile on her face, a green-blue expanding hemisphere construct expanding out from her ring, racing towards them. 

Try to dodge this! 

Okay! That's a pretty solid opening, actually. "Nice!"

Robin throws a punch at the construct to get a feeling of its durability, and dodges to the side. The full hemisphere coverage means that they have to backpeddle a bit to get around the edge before it catches up with them.

It seems solid enough to take a punch, at least, even if it doesn't have the incredible unphysical solidity that they might have seen in the stronger superhumans. 

She tries to just rush it out, expanding and warping it into a wave to try to slam him against the holographic walls, her arm snaking out to follow his path. 

"Yikes!"

Robin drops flat, taking advantage of the small gap between the wave and the floor, and then pops back to their feet and tries to trip Topaz with a leg sweep.

She startles, dropping the wave construct in favour of a thin green outline wrapping around her leg, taking the sweep readily. Then, she flinches a little at the echoed feeling of the blow, decaying into a green fuzz before her focus rallies. She raises her hand, and lets out a spray of three green darts down at them.

Robin pivots to the side, letting the darts pass them, and then rushes Topaz to close the distance and pull her into a throw. She's fighting like a ranged fighter, and the best way to deal with those is to stay right on top of them.

This is both suprisingly fun and suprisingly frustrating! 

She throws out another wall to get a bit of breathing room, and tries to see if she can get him with a lashing rope construct. 

That rapidly puts Robin on the back foot, and the fight devolves into a series of retreats (to avoid walls of blue force) and lunges (to try and distract Topaz, ideally in a way that gets her grappled or thrown).

"That 'omnidirectional shield bash' is really good — any chance you could put one of those in a talisman?"

Soon enough, she raises her hands up in surrender, a little chuckle on her lips. 

"I should be able to! It's pretty power intensive though, and it wasn't as fast as I hoping it would be. I'll have to work on that." 

She shakes her head a little, catching her breath. 

"Sorry for being a bit of a one trick pony! I know I'm over-relying on it, but I'm pretty sure the moment you got properly on top of me you'd have a pretty good chance of messing up my concentration and ending the fight right then and there, so..." 

Robin nods.

"That sounds about right. If you're going to keep a set of powers like this, you should probably put a lot of your practice into keeping people at range. You might also have to worry about multiple opponents ..."

Robin goes on to give some additional combat training advice, while leading Topaz through another set of cooldown stretches.

"... but altogether you did really well! A lot of people freeze up when faced with combat, and you definitely didn't. You pressed your advantages well and kept me on the back foot."

They think of an additional detail. "And we've got showers, towels, and hrobes if you feel the need for a quick shower."

She stretches out loosely - even with the body optimizations she went with, there's a certain level of stress that combat always brings, even when the exertion largely isn't physical. 

She smiles appreciatively. 

"Thank you!"

...Then she blinks. 

"hrobes?" 

Robin grins.

"Well, they're branded. Batman has to get bat-everythings. So for his birthday last year I got him a set of bat-hrobes. They're actually pretty fancy — they have an experimental nanofiber that picks up charge during drying and then actively wicks water away. Bat-terrycloth, you know."

She breaks out laughing, her hands falling down to her knees as she chuckles. 

"Goodness." 

They smile back at her.

"I knew I had to get them as soon as I found out about the fabric, honestly."

Robin gives one final stretch, and then glances over at the table where their equipment is still spread out.

"That actually does give me another idea for equipment you could potentially add — the League uses a few different identity-authentication technologies, but more variety is always better. Do you think you could make a gadget that recognizes someone by their goals or hopes?"

She hums a bit. 

"Hopes, yes. 'Goals' no, but I think I could make something work on the will side? It would probably be more about what they've built themselves to focus on, or something like that? I could probably make something that matched to a reference impression, or something that just produced an image based on what it sees that a computer could verify matched a file? The first is probably a bit more secure but I bet it'd require a bigger item and more work on my end." 

"The computerized version is probably more susceptible to hacking, as well," Robin notes. "That does sort of raise a point, though — how much time are you willing to spend on producing these kinds of things? And how long does it actually take to make something like that medallion? If you have a ton of high-impact ideas, some of them are probably not worth your time to prioritize right out of the gate."

She sits down, and hums quietly. 

"I think it depends on a lot of things? It's kind of metaphysically impossible for me to work hopecrushingly long hours on feeling hope, so there's that limit, for one. There's whatever use I'm making out of other powers - I can't do much more than maybe feed a little bit of power into things if you want me to be actively using a whole other powerset? I'm also not sure how much it's worth my time to use subpar materials, so I'll be kind of bottlenecked by my supply of that, too. "

Okay no you are being a silly girl who are talking about this like you are a machine with uptime concerns not a person with feelings stop ittttt. 

She blinks and shakes her head. 

"Frankly um, it depends a bit on how well I can monetize it and how well I can make use of money or opportunities to do good, have fun or spend money to make myself happier? I wasn't exactly rich in my old world so I don't have a great sense of that part of things. I do also want to - at least try to be a part of the team batman proposed? So time that I'm being a part of missions or other training is time I'm not working on this. I probably want to keep my hours... relatively reasonable, at least in terms of the emotional powers? The willpower ability means that I'm more resistant to those sorts of pressures then I would be, otherwise, but that doesn't mean that I can't be ground down. At a very loose guess, I don't want to be on the clock crafting or working on team stuff more than say... 10 hours a day six a week, and ideally we figure out some sort of formal 'on-call' schedule for emergencies? What makes sense for that depends a good bit on how well the lanterns and magicians can interact with what I'm doing and how important it ends up being, though."

She fidgets a little with her hands.   

"Right now.... The warding pendants take maybe two or three hours to make, and making something as simple as possible is still five to ten minutes of reasonably intense work. Making a ring as good as I can make it is highballing it a bit a day's work, and that's about as big a project as I can do without it more being about experimenting and doing design and procurement work than actual execution? I think I can make most things fast enough that it's not too big a burden on me to create prototypes for a pretty broad set of things, but making any real volume is going to depend a lot on what batman and the league are looking for most, what big projects we can get off the ground, what's the best financially and figuring how much I can 'automate', tool up for or foist off on other people." 

She does the air-quotes thing with her hands at 'automate'. It's going to be tricky, and probably there's no getting around involving a bunch of people in the process, but what's more important is being able to make it not the labor of someone who would otherwise be doing something as or more valuable than making it, rather than making it something clean and mechanically replicable. 

Robin nods thoughtfully.

"I actually wouldn't go as high as 60 hours unless you find the process relaxing. When your work can involve emergency response, it's usually a bad idea to plan to work right to the limit of your capacity, because something will always come up. But it also sounds like anything you make in this way is going to be pretty low-volume. So equipping the league is probably feasible, but mass-produced items aren't. Anything you do make for sale should probably be sold for at least a few thousand dollars, given that they'd be nearly unique."

"... so maybe we should actually be thinking of unique, high-value creations that you could sell for starting capital," they conclude. "Batman seems to think that the gemstones you create are indistinguishable from real gemstones, but it's probably better to sell them as 'lab-grown', even if that lowers the value, so that people don't get mad at you for false advertising. Could you make a gem that does nothing other than glow or sparkle prettily? I bet you could sell something like that for quite a lot to a collector."

She hums. 

"These thing all depend!" 

She rolls her head back and elaborates. 

"Part of the reason why that number is as high as it is is because just sitting there feeling hopeful isn't too hard on me? The hard part is if I'm trying to maximize intensity, force myself to feel it when I'm not quite in the mood, or do something really intricate or some combination of all of those sorts of things? I guess I was maybe also assuming a little that the on-call stuff would be at least for now be something close to only what needed either exactly me or everyone humanly possible, but if you're expecting more than that or that I end up doing a lot of missions, it's probably a good idea to make the amount of time on that you expect without that sort of thing a good bit lower." 

She taps her thigh. 

"I've figured out the pattern for a power that can make me make batches of things a bit faster than just doing them serially? I haven't invested in specialist crafting tools, either, and those could speed things up a good bit, too. One thing I was thinking of was making a big batch of some sort of warding talisman solution for political leaders, and I don't think it's prima facie absurd for me to create a few hundred to maybe even a few thousand of those, medium term? It'd depend a lot on the demand and how willing they'd be to trust that sort of thing, but something kind of mass produced is at least not totally out of the question." 

She frowns a little. 

"Making a sparkling gem would be super simple, but the rate I can make the crystals is a little on the slow side? I'm thinking of improving that but even still it might be a bit hard to have too much left over after my crafting projects. I'd expect I could get much better money out of making something more exotic - I'm pretty sure the current power or a minor variation thereof could make say, kryptonite to order, and that seems likely a lot more valuable than trying to sell a synthetic gemstone? That kind of buyer is probably a lot harder to arrange, though." 

Her lips purse a little as an idea crosses her mind. 

"But it might be more valuable as superhero memorabilia, or something like that? Create some sort of serialized project and sell those off slowly, or..." 

She shakes her head. 

"Honestly, I just don't have the faintest clue how valuable just a big gemstone with a quirk is off the top of my head? I don't think the market is very liquid, either, so maybe it'd be easier to make a power that generates a commodity like gold or oil and not bother trying to monetize that specific power outside of the applications to the lantern imbuement stuff." 

An expression of extreme disquiet crosses Robin's face at the mention of kryptonite.

"I was thinking you'd sell it more as superhero memorabilia, yeah," they agree. "Collectors really care more about the story and the connections than about the actual object in question. There's this one art collector who we found out had actually hired Catwoman to steal his own painting, for the media attention. I suggested the glowing just so that the item would be eye-catching and easily authenticatable."

"As for making more exotic crystals — I think kryptonite should be a last resort? It's ... not really useful for anything except painfully incapacitating one of Earth's greatest heroes. And also it's highly radioactive, which makes it hard to handle safely."

And that's why Batman's stash is stored entirely in thick lead-lined boxes that Robin isn't allowed to open outside of an emergency.

"Oh! But you might be able to make Kryptonian sunstone! That would be useful for all sorts of things. Or hyperturbid gelignium, maybe ... Actually, do you want to just go through the league's exotic material database and see if anything jumps out as especially useful?"

She nods along. 

"Sounds good to me! I just mentioned kryptonite since it was one of the crystals that came up the most when I was researching metahumans, rather than any sort of considered analysis." 

Honestly, she should probably get her powers configured for this a bit more - could she get a power that would speed up the crystal generation process? There's a few options for another power in that general area - maybe some sort of intuition about the make up of exotic energy crystals to help being able to make these? 

The sparks spin in consideration for a moment. They can do a power that gives her intuition about structural stability and makeup of exotic crystals! Does she want that?

- You know, what, let's try it! 

She unmerges and ditches the habit and object attention power, and asks for that power again. 

Does she have a sense of what Robin was talking about with 'sunstones'? Could she make them? 

Her exotic crystal generation power seems to think that "Kryptonian sunstones" is an equally usable specification to "Emerald" or "Zeta crystals". Her newest power feeds her an impression of a sort of twisted lattice made from all sorts of elements, but mostly carbon and aluminum. The arrangement doesn't feel stable on its own, but the crystal has tiny threads of trapped sunlight woven into its structure in a way that lets it act as a kind of sunshine-capacitor.

Does that mean that she can generate it here? She's a little worried with a description like that it would explode if she didn't make it in an environment with lots of sunlight? But maybe it accounts for that. 

Any thoughts on a way to make the crystal generation process faster, by the way? There's got to be some way to do it, even if she's not too clear what kind of metapowers are most 'natural' to the gift.