Miss Martian pulls back.

"I'm sorry, was that too much? I don't mean to make you speedrun things. Oh! I was just listening to your feelings about castes and then the thought was just there, I wasn't trying to pry. But maybe you weren't dropping your shields deliberately, maybe hugs just do that."

(:Vulcans have touch telepathy, and humans must have gotten the idea from somewhere:)

"Oh, it's alright! I just wanted to think things through a little before saying too much, 's all." 

"Yeah, that makes sense. Sorry."

She pulls her knees up to her chest.

"... I super don't know what to say next. Um. I sort of dumped a lot on you and now you're thinking in private, which is totally reasonable, but that means I don't know how awkward to feel. I guess we could watch—"

Then she suddenly perks up, like a switch got flipped.

"Oh! Is that what the movies are for, in a sleepover? So you can, like, have mental space from someone and something else to talk about without, like, ending the activity? Because you don't have to be thinking together since the TV is doing the work to display the pictures! That's actually really clever!"

She laughs faintly. 

"It's okay! And - in so much as it's hard and complicated, it isn't really much more so than the rest of this? New world, new people, it's just a lot in general, really." 

She relaxes her shields a little bit, and scratches the back of her neck timidly. 

"I think a lot of it is even more basic? People just get more comfortable with each other when they're in the same room for a while, or they think of themselves as - having been a part of something together? There doesn't have to be much shared context or a plan for more talking later for it to help. But that's a part of it too, definitely."

It's oddly calming to talk about the general idea of having experiences than actually leaning into it too much? Probably that's because she's a bit frayed and it's getting a little late, but it is nice.   

"Getting used to people you spend time with makes total sense," Miss Martian agrees.

This leads into a brief series of questions about other sleepover and party activities, before she picks up on Topaz's tiredness.

"If you're ready for bed, I think you wanted to sleep on my cousin's dream jazz? But maybe you've had enough new experiences today, and that would be too much?"

As she asks this, she pulls down the decorative drapes and instructs them to become a pair of sleeping bags.

She smiles lightly. 

"Might as well! Worst comes to worst, I can always just retune my rings to shield against it, so..." 

"Okay!"

She fetches down one of the psychic information storage disks, and arranges pillows and sleeping bags so that they can both rest their heads near it. Once they are thus arranged, she pokes the disk in a way that makes it start giving off the strong impression of the hush before an orchestra begins the overture.

"Alright," Miss Martian whispers. "I've set it up to catch us once we start dreaming. You should just have to relax, and you can stop it by waking up or moving your head far enough away. Or just think at me and I can stop it."

"Alright!" 

She snugnestles deep into the sleeping bag, and pulls a spare pillow up against her chest to hug, before slowly drifting off to sleep. 

Her dreams are, not to put to fine a point on it, alien.

She dreams of flying through endless caverns carved through red rock, merging and weaving with a swarm of other people in an intricate dance. Sometimes the people are flowers, or abstract geometric shapes, or completely invisible and present only through their mind-impressions. Sometimes the people are angry, or joyful. Discordant or unified. The emotions of the swarm that she dances in shift and roll in time with their movements through the endless caverns.

The colors are strange, as well ­— she can tell that the rock is red, but 'red' feels like warmth, and like home, and like the taste of iron on her tongue. The forms of her swarmmates favor bright, eye-popping colors, sometimes forming bands or gradients that morph and change as the swarm flows around corners, like water. The colors taste of thoughts, and the thoughts sound like a chorus, echoing from the red stone walls and bringing back an impression of the shape, now smooth and twisting, now rough and dusty. The swarm knows where it is and how it is moving, and so she knows where she is and how she is moving, even as she is pulled through the dream-dance.

The whole thing, for all its strangeness, follows the familiar structure of an album: there is an overture, of sorts, a hint at what is to come; then comes the main tracks, different variations on the core experience that follow each other with brief stretches of unadorned cavern to separate them; then the thing builds to a crescendo. Tunnels merge, and more and more minds flow to join the swarm, until she is surrounded by an ocean of emotion, repeating and echoing and remembering the themes that led to this moment.

Together, they surge through a cavern that opens wider and wider, until they crest like a wave over the yellow dunes and white frosts of the surface, sun streaming past their bodies and painting intricate, shifting patterns of shadow and light on the ground far below.

And then there's an outro, as the swarm settles to the ground, people returning to their normal forms. Topaz is surrounded by a sea of green and white that slowly separates out into a Tao-shape. Around her, the dream-minds think back to their flight through the tunnel, reprising different parts, even as they slowly blink and blur and fade until she is alone again in her head.

... and she has to pee.

Awwwww...~

It's oddly relaxing? Definitely not an always thing, but worth keeping in mind as an option! 

She pops out of the lil roll off bedding as quiet as she can, and scurries over to the bathroom to take care of that, popping over to one of those seemingly randomly placed consoles to check the time. 

The time is 8:43 Eastern Daylight Time. (13:43 GMT)

Alright, that's not too early! 

She goes and brushes her teeth, then checks her mail. Anything yet? 

Robin has forwarded her tracking numbers for some of their test materials.

Zatara and the organized Green Lantern have both gotten back to her about scheduling! Zatara is free all day (excepting emergencies), but suggests 2:30 PM for a magic checkup. He isn't available after 9:30 PM, and the fact that famous stage magician Giovanni Zatara's Las Vegas magic show begins around that time is nothing but the purest coincidence.

Green Lantern has confirmed the appointment she requested for 4:00 PM.

Miss Martian goes by in the direction of the kitchen, her eyes closed and her feet dragging on the carpet. She seems to be chanting "Grumble grumble early morning grumble grumble" under her breath.

Good, good. 

She sends back a suggestion to Zatara for a time a little earlier, to avoid the risk of it running over into the time with Green Lantern, and confirms the 4 pm appointment with him. 

Alright so... 

Things! 

There were a few things she was thinking of demo-ing - she really should have kept a proper list, honestly. The distress beacon, the charger, some sort of flight solution, the emotional battery, the whole converter assembly, the security scanner thing... 

Oh, they probably have some aluminum foil around here? Shouldn't be a big problem for her to cannibalize that for sapphire making, and oxygen should be going reasonably spare too, so that should go decently quickly. 

Beyond that... 

Probably don't want to schedule too much more? But still...

She reaches out to martian manhunter. 

Hey! Talked to Miss Martian a bit, and she mentioned castes? She sounded pretty rattled about it, honestly? Hugged her through it and she seemed pretty okay after, though. Wondering a little if there's anything I should know about all of that? I don't want to pry or anything, but if it means that her powers are different or there's some specific things I should avoid that might make her especially uncomfortable, that'd definitely be helpful to know? 

She drafts up a line about the telepathic repeater idea, and then deletes it. He sounded wearied enough as it is, and she probably won't be able to do much until the next alignment anyways. 

Speaking of... 

She asks the gift for a blue light mobility intuition power. 

It can do that! A new spark blooms, and it becomes clear to her how to structure the light of hope in a way that results in movement or translocation. The gist of it is a particular way to hook her hopes for the purpose of the travel into the structure.

Thanks for bringing that to my attention; I'll make sure to talk with her about it. I suspect she's just a bit overwhelmed by the change in context.

Martian castes are mostly nonsense. They're heritable, and have slight biological differences, but the fact that a society of shapeshifters insists on trying to color code ourselves is completely daft. There's a reason I haven't really emphasized castes in my presentation of my species to the peoples of Earth.

Thank you! And yeah, that makes total sense.  

She wanders off and gets to work on some crystal formation. 

How feasible is space flight, with what she has? She's pretty darn sure that proper FTL is possible and the bread and butter of green lanterns, but that doesn't mean that it's feasible for her quite yet. 

Space-flight as in "flying in space" is totally do-able. Assuming that she can solve the whole air problem. It seems like it should be possible to make her current impact-shield into something that would help with breathing, though ...

Traveling faster than light is ... maybe possible? Her movement intuition power is feeding her some designs for using hope to change locations without passing through the intervening space, but it's not clear whether that would be light-speed or not, at least not with the insights she currently has available. And doing that is a lot more complicated than just flying.

She hums lightly. 

Oh, might as well. 

She nabs a green version of the same general idea and merges it up, and pokes it again. 

This time her desire for FTL was clearer in her mind, and the resulting power was slightly biased in that direction.

Will and hope seem to have different natural approaches to anything beyond simple flight. Her will-based movement intuition is suggesting that it should be possible to bend space and make an Alcubierre drive through pure willpower. Her hope-based movement intuition is suggesting that she could use hope to reduce her mass — if she had a negative mass, she would go faster than light, but even if she just reduced it that would reduce the size of the needed warp envelope.

Oh that is kind of shiny! 

She'll have to figure out how it scales with volume and mass, but it's less hacky and reliant on metaphysical things than she was worried it might be, so adding non-lantern things to the trip shouldn't require something too too qualitatively different, at least. 

Does she have anything more on the air generation thing? 

Not really? Her biggest spark includes intuition for how to structure emotional energies defensively, and that includes the feeling that she could make her current physical shield also protect her from chemical attacks. And not being able to breathe is sort of a chemical attack, when you think about it.

But it's too much of a stretch to really provide details beyond the feeling that it's possible. Perhaps she could do some experimentation?

She flicks on the barrier of her green ring, and takes in a deep long breath.

It probably doesn't really help, but it brings the thoughts and feelings of it to mind, and when you're working with something empathic... 

She focuses on tuning the barrier against chemical attacks, against the perils of pressure and the void, picturing herself as a solitary star of emerald light against the dark, gently threading her light in through the structure of the ring to add and reinforce it just a little further. 

Then she settles a little more, and fusses with the - solidity of it, feeling the way that it's not just a physical barrier like steel, but something more pliant, flexible and ephemeral. She tries to see if she can shift states, from the psuedo-physical barrier to a solid construct around her, and back again, feeling out the transition where it starts blocking out the air. 

Actually... She forms a bit of emerald in the membrane, meditating on the feeling of will inside it, and the way that her power makes and binds alike air and other things to forge the crystal, the way it mingles and maybe even draws in the power from her shield, how it flows and glows. 

There are levels and levels to the world. The material gives rise to the immaterial, and the immaterial gives meaning to the material.

As she moves the light of her barrier, back and forth between the states, it becomes easier to see that there is a core part of it that stands unchanged. Whether it forms itself into a rigid barrier, or flows like the aurora, it is not becoming different things — it is one thing: a shield.

The barrier, woven of her own emerald focus, stands between her and harm. Willpower is the color of plants, reaching for the sun in defiance of the harshness of nature. Willpower is the imposition of the immaterial on the material, not as meaning, but as change.

Her shield stands strong against physical blows, and it commands the force: not here; stop. Her shield stands strong against air pressure, because what is air pressure if not force? Her shield stands strong against chemical warfare and harsh environments, because it is the same underlying concept, twining together and uniting: the pain, the harm, the damage — she rejects it, banishes it with the force of her

Will

There's a flash of green light, and when it fades, she finds that her barrier moves and shifts more easily than before: fluid and solid at the same time, going where she wills it and staying there like iron.