The crystal generation power can generate crystals. Which includes generating all the components of those crystals, even when the components are something like "sunlight". But ...

Her crystal-structure intuition power presents the feeling of an energy well with a region of stability — the crystal generation power would have to produce much less binding energy in order to move the crystal into this part of the phase space here if there were a natural sunlight flooding the area to be drawn into the lattice.

And the gift overall thinks that it could do a "increase the speed of generation powers" power, but that wouldn't be optimal, somehow. Does she want intuition about how metapowers interact with powers?

She idly tells robin that she'd need sunlight for best results, but she could just go and make it now, if she wanted. 

She hums.  Could she make a power that 'grows' a crystal from a seed instead? If it works like sunlight and sunstones, she could probably speed up the generation even more by just surrounding it with as much of the constituent elements of the crystal as she could get her hands on. Honestly, that's likely not even a 'real' metapower - but there's probably some way to use her generation ability to nucleate things in a more intertwined way? Or maybe it would be better to just have a power that generates that 'binding energy' to feed into the crystal generation power, though that might be what it was talking about already. 

Yes, it can do a power that feeds binding energy into generation powers!

There's the impression that that is ... sort of another angle on "increase the speed of generation powers", but it isn't quite the same thing. Like viewing an object from two different angles that show off different subsets of some more cohesive idea.

A power that grows a crystal from a seed given feedstock containing the appropriate elements would definitely be faster than her current power for generating them ex nihlo, though!

Her intuition for crystal structure likewise agrees that providing correctly-arranged nucleation sites would speed things up further, as a catalyst. There's a niggling worry about crystal micrograin misalignment, though — her current generation power creates crystals that are all one grain, but joining together multiple independently-growing crystals wouldn't do that. Whether that's important depends on what she actually wants from the microstructural properties of the crystal in question, though.

That doesn't seem like a huge problem, honestly? At least assuming being able to generate from feedstock and being able to grow from nucleation sites would be the same power - she could just pick and choose as needed, and who knows! She might have a few uses for multi-grained crystals for symbological reasons, even if that's below the level of abstraction of most of her intuitions right now. 

If so, she's happy to nab the crystal growing power, and hopefully merge it up with the new intuition power. 

The two aren't a perfect fit, but they do click together with a little prodding. The result is a power for rearranging nearby elements into stable crystals, which seems like a very good fit for her existing crystal generation power.

... she can't use it for much right now, though, since she doesn't have the feedstock that she would need for most exotic crystals. She could produce a handful of nitrogen and carbon-based crystals from the air, though. 2-methyl-1,3,5-trinitrobenzene, for example.

Hopefully merging it with crystal generation power will help that out a bit - needing everything present isn't ideal, though it's still workable.

The powers fall together, brightening once again.

... and yes, now she can make all of the crystals that she could have before. But the ones for which she has components available — mainly those that incorporate oxygen or nitrogen — feel like they'd come out much faster. Maybe ten to twenty times faster, if she had all the components. Which still isn't blazing speed, since she's starting from a low baseline, but it will certainly make it easier to create larger crystals.

This is great but also bad!

She really thought they'd synergize, since a big part of the foundation was specifically for creating the emotional energy resonant crystals, and they're both 'crafting powers', and there's a bit of overlap and similarity in the intuition powers. Does the gift have any suggestions for what the problem is and/or what she could change to make them work? Probably the laziest marginal change is subbing out the zeta-like crystal power for another power designed around making a crystal appropriate for the lights, but that just... doesn't sound like it would do it, on its own. 

The two sparks circle each other warily for a long moment as the gift figures out how to render this information in comprehensible form.

...

It sends her the impression that one power is manipulating things on a metaphysical, emotional level. The other power is — with the incorporation of her most recent power — manipulating things on the level of physics and atoms. And those aren't different things (since emotions are just part of physics), but they are far enough apart that the powers can't quite bridge the gap. Like two puzzle pieces that don't quite fit. If there were something that was about connecting the two things, or about understanding how emotions actually interact with crystals, or if the generation power weren't optimized-in-the-direction-of-chemistry, it might work.

It also tries to share an impression of what merging in a ... sharp? ... power like her crystal-growing one does, but this comes across mostly as an incomprehensible blur of impressions about cones in fractal spaces.

Hm. 

Okay so - she has a spot for another two powers to merge into these to make the material generation power more... esosteric, somehow? 

That's tricky! The gift doesn't seem to like powers that have too many steps of indirection so... 

Something relatively straightforward, something that relates as directly as possible between crystals and emotions, and something that's useful in it's own right. 

The first thing that comes to mind is something to make crystals more attuned to willpower magic? But that's maybe not quite right, since magic is something she doesn't want to poke too much and she'd be deliberately picking something out that didn't quite work with what she already has. 

Oh yeah! Miss martian had those... telepathic crystal data storage things. Could she get some sort of intuition-y knowledge-y power about those? 

Yes! It can do that, for sure.

Another spark blooms to life, and with it the knowledge of how Martian telepathic data storage works. There's a difference between a thing, and a memory of the thing. Like the difference between sounds and language, or between nerve activations and feelings. But they aren't wholly separate either — the physical gives rise to the immaterial, and the immaterial gives meaning to the physical. What Martian data crystals do is use incredibly simple, densely packed 'brains' to tether metaphysical constructs such as thoughts and memories to a physical object.

Miss Martian's diary is technically kind of alive. Less alive than the smallest insect, maybe, but more alive than a psychically inert stone. That's why emotionally meaningful objects would hold will or hope more efficiently — the associations, the history, are actually part of the object itself. The stones Topaz grows with her generation power are physically flawless, but they don't have any meaning to them except the broadest strokes of color-based symbology and the meaning she imparts herself.

With this additional context, her crystal generation power supplies that it can make inert telepathic data crystals — but they'd have to be 'woken up' by a telepath to start functioning properly.

Oo... 

These are pretty neat! She figured it was something like that - the metaphysics here are on the verbose side, but they're not... too seperated from things, so there's naturally a lot of comingling. 

The other part of it is a bit harder to define - if she had to put it into words without reference to the role in the power node grid, she'd say... An intuition about the relationship between telepathic and empathic imbuement, maybe? Or some sort of intersectional intuition in that general area, at any rate. There's no way storing thoughts and memories is unrelated to storing hope and will, and it might be useful for the security project robin mentioned, even without thinking about other implications. 

The gift takes a moment to figure out how to fit that into a power, but it eventually agrees that it can do a power for understanding how thoughts, memories, and emotions match and differ in their attachment to physical objects. Is that the kind of thing she had in mind?

Mhm! 

She merges that with her other base power and - moment of truth number 1! - unpacks the material generation power to see what the synergies look like. 

Her newly minted "telepathic and empathic crystal attachment intuition" power waffles for a moment before settling into an arrhythmic orbit with the constituents of her crystal generation power. It's more dubious about the raw generation power than the structure-intuition power, but they do form a mergeable triumvirate.

Okay! 

Merge them up for moment of truth number 2! 

The newly re-constructed crystal generation power swings into a slow orbit around her existing emotional-energy manipulation power. The two are, indeed, compatible.

Eee! 

She merges them, and then eagerly pokes the end result. 

The merged power burns with the same strangely deep blue as her first top-tier power. It grants her the ability to generate, reconstruct, and imbue crystalline materials that interact with esoteric energies, particularly emotional and psychic energy, in a way that can result in crystals with a much deeper alignment to emotional energy than normally possible. That is a crude description of the underlying thing, however, since it also includes knowledge on how that process works, and, at its core, the enhanced hope and willpower necessary to make use of it all.

Robin finishes adding a note about potential distraction and/or weakness while focusing on her powers to Topaz's file in the batcomputer, before alt-tabbing back to the League's materials database.

She shakes her head out of her reverie. 

"Okay, got the power optimized a bit more! Think I might be able to make something even better than what I showed batman earlier for the emotional imbuement stuff, by the way, but for now..." 

She cranes her head to peek over their shoulder. 

"What are you thinking of trying out, beside the sunstone?" 

"So you have to understand that a lot of these were recovered from supervillains who didn't exactly leave safety datasheets," Robin prefaces. "And there is probably more to it, but the first thing that came to mind was hyperturbid gelignite."

They put up a photo of a grey-blue crystal sitting innocently at the bottom of a long streak of jagged ice that stretches across a lab and up one wall.

"It's the active component in Captain Cold's tech. Or, at least, it was. The League managed to recover a few crystals early in his career, but recently he's switched to something that melts near-instantaneously when someone opens one of his devices. We only have two crystals left, because the rest were destroyed in testing. S.T.A.R. labs doesn't really know how it works, but if you want to re-glaciate the arctic, getting enough samples of this to do proper testing on is probably a good start."

She nods, and scratches the back of her neck.

"But nothing obvious, right? No conventional radiation, no noxious offgassing, nothing like that?" 

She generates a tiny fragment of sapphire, then uses the oxygen in the air to start to form a small circle for her testing. 

"If there's anything you can think of that I should ward against for these, feel free to tell? But it sounds like it's safe enough as long you're not prodding it too much," 

Robin skims the lab notes.

"There was no detectable conventional radiation or offgassing, no. It doesn't seem to be combustible in air, or anything like that. It does have a relatively low melting point, as minerals go: 41°C. So store in a cool, dry place. On the other hand, people who handled it reported chills and persistent feelings that their hands were cold, even when they only manipulated it through thick gloves. Reports stopped a few days post-exposure."

She imbues just a bit of hope - the joy of an experiment and brightness of possibilities - into the circle for later, in case she has any ideas for things to add later, letting it gather a bit of power while they ponder. 

"Do you have - what did batman call it - a crystallographic scan of it? I think I could make the material but there's no probably not much point in doing so if it the technology only works with a specific alignment that I don't duplicate."