"Oh, good thought. Let me see ..."

Cue frantic typing on the matte-orange keyboard.

"Here!"

They show a picture of a mildly irregular crystal lattice as seen through a scanning electron microscope and then overlaid with false color depicting bond affinity. Topaz's crystal-structure-intuition points out that most of these cleavage sites look like the result of natural, gradual formation — so it may or may not affect the thing to grow it as a monocrystal, but if she's trying to mimic Captain Cold as closely as possible she'll need to include those.

"Looks like he's not doing anything too tricky there? I can make it right away if you want, but if they're going to need a bigger sample, the best way to make something like that in bulk for me if I have the constituent materials on hand." 

She rattles off the list of materials her power wants in order to make it as best she can. 

"Might be good to just send someone at STAR labs info about my power and ask them for what they want? But I guess there's no point in wasting the generative capacity I have now." 

She starts making a bit of the crystal just like the image shows - best to follow the expert, even if knowing if that detail is important is something worth finding out eventually.

"Yeah — I think sending a message to S.T.A.R. labs makes sense, but there's also no reason not to try it and see if your power will give you any insight into how to use it to produce a cold field? It's apparently pretty easy to make it generate ice, but Captain Cold has these wide-angle beams that make everything cold and block superspeed without creating any ice, and I would sort of expect that to be the best starting point?"

Robin considers this for a moment.

"Unless you could make, like, a crystal that just stays very cold, and then you could seed them across the ice caps?"

Any thoughts for how to use a crystal like this to produce a 'cold field', gift? An intuition power on the subject is probably the most natural place to start, but she wouldn't nesscarily say no to something more physical, if it has something like that in mind? 

Well it's not really set up to do 'applications', but see how this part of the structure here looks kind of like a sunstone? One of the components of hyperturbid gelignite is the feeling of being cold — see how that feeling twines around these creases in the structure?

It seems like there should be another stable crystal that has the same physical constituents but no feelings about being cold, and it has a structure that is similar in these ways and different in these other ways.

No worries! She was just wondering if you knew of a way to say, bombard it with 'radiation' to make it emit that kind of field, but it sounds like it's not quite as simple as that. 

She furrows her brow. 

"It's... weird? I'm not sure if I'm using the terminology correctly, but I think it's basically imbued with alchemical cold? No wonder they've been having a hard time figuring it out. There's something about that bound... here." 

She waves her hand over the creases in the diagram, after a bit of fussing. 

"It is something about the structure, by the way - let me just..." 

She goes and generates a tiny sample of the other crystal that the gift showed her. 

"This is the same stuff, chemically, but it won't have the same cold effects, which might be helpful for the lab to look at? But really, I wouldn't be surprised if you wouldn't be better off sending it off to Atlantis instead." 

Could she get that kind of intuition power about cold fields, by the way? 

Another spark blooms to life, and raises to her attention a bit of her intuition about emotions impacting the physical. There are forms of radiation that can carry thoughts and feeling along through an area — the carrier for telepathy. And if a directed source of those is used to carry alchemical cold throughout a region, it should produce a 'cold field'. High frequency electricity will loosen the bindings between the alchemical cold and the physical matrix.

As for how to generate telepathy-radiation in the first place ... lots of things produce it naturally, especially living things. And one can focus it using an aluminum prism. Perhaps she could construct some sort of lens, or collector? Or ask a telepath.

So... 

Power source, an aluminum prism into a lense, the crystal, some power and an alternator... 

That not trivial but that should be doable to get a (very loose) prototype up and running... 

Is there a straightforward way to just make a crystal that would work as a power source for this? 

There's a feeling like two abstract bundles of knowledge manifested as metaphorical balls of light conferring.

Her new cold field knowledge indicates that the electrical charge doesn't have to be high current, just high frequency. And her crystal knowledge tells her that many crystals, including quartz, are piezoelectric (meaning that they turn material strain into electric discharge and vice versa).

So if you put a thin layer of gelignite on top of a correctly-sized lump of quartz, clamped it in place and had a living being rest their head near it, and then hit it with a hammer (the crystal, not the head), that would probably produce an ersatz cold field? You'd need the quartz to be shaped right — maybe a sort of tuning-fork shape like this so that you can adjust the frequency by moving a clamp on this bit.

Or you could try producing a piezoelectric composite material directly, maybe, but it would have to be transparent to the telepathic carrier waves the way hyperturbid gelignite is.

So... the telepathic data storage devices can store 'mental force' or whatever you want to call it, right? Making an outlet for it is a little more complicated, though something like the 'index' that she saw earlier might be a good start for that... 

She's pretty sure you can just make electronics that adjust frequency, so she doubts that is a problem? Making it an extra crystal array sort of seems like it's overcomplicating things. Just a mental force power source, the crystal with alchemical cold, and the electronics wiring up to it seems like the best design, at least assuming that the mental force power source can provide the beamforming rather than trying to do something analog with piezoelectricity? 

She shares a quick description on the hammer crystal design she talked about, and then lists off the factors she needs to make it work - the input power, the high frequency electricity, and the cold source, plus or minus some concerns about beamforming and optimizations and the physical structure of it all. 

Robin whistles.

"Damn, that's an impressive amount of insight to have after such a short time studying the crystal. I think we've got all the stuff we need to make a prototype in the Bat-Workshop, though. How would we charge the, uh, telepathic force battery?"

"Get a magician or a telepath or ask me to make a power for it?" 

She blinks and facepalms. 

"Thanks, gift!" 

She shakes her hair out like a wet dog. 

"Okay so... I can make a blue-green thing that self-charges and puts green light into a converter, and plug that in turn into a telepathic device that does the rest? It'll be a little complicated physically and to imbue, but it should work? The - efficiency and clarity of the image of 'cold' will probably be a little weaker and/or fuzzier from all the steps of indirection then if you just got a telepath to plug directly into it, but that's still a trade worth making, imo? At least without a bunch of trade from mars." 

"There are human telepaths. But yeah, that makes sense. To the Bat-Workshop!"

The Bat-Workshop turns out to be a lot like a normal workshop, except the tools are both high-quality and bat themed. Robin shows her to a grounded electronics bench that has, among other things, a variable-frequency current generator.

A few minutes of fiddling produces a cradle with electrodes in the right place to excite a prototype unit.

"Don't forget your safety glasses," Batman intones, suddenly standing up from behind the other side of the bench and handing them both a pair.

"I thought you said I'd found all the secret passages in the workshop!" Robin protests, although they take the proffered glasses.

"You did," Batman agrees. "So I had to have some more added. Topaz — do you think we need any particular precautions before testing the device? Captain Cold's gear isn't particularly dangerous, as these things go, but you clearly have additional insight."

She jumps a bit at the sudden batman, and puts on the glasses. 

"You shouldn't need anything? But you rarely 'should' need your safety precautions in general so..." 

Hum hum hum. 

"I think the worst thing that could theoretically happen in a set up like this would be it exploding or the beam scattering wildly? But it disperses fairly quickly and doesn't penetrate or spread too well, so just activating it from behind a blast shield a few meters away should still take care of that risk, if you want to be extra careful?" 

Batman nods seriously, and soon enough everything is arranged appropriately for the test. Batman hands her a remote control for the frequency generator.

"Since we don't know the optimal frequency, you'll probably have to try a few times," he notes.

She palms it, takes a moment to catch her breath, and tries out a frequency at random.