"Looks like I can do one for specifically that spell, even if it looks a little indirect about how it's doing it." 

She picks out the second power the gift offered her, and then glances up at him. 

"Anything you need me to do before I cast it?" 

The spark blooms in her mind, and she can feel the ability to perform a procedure bloom with it in her mind. Unlike the powers he gift grants directly, this doesn't feel like another action that she can just take. Instead, it feels like she knows the steps of a dance, and could do the dance if she wanted to, but the power isn't helping her get a particular outcome from that, it's just letting her have the steps of the dance.

Zatara pulls a bundle of dried sage from his apparently bottomless coat, lights it on fire with a snap of his fingers, and smudges her.

"I don't expect anything to go wrong, but it's never a bad idea to dismiss negative influences in an area before you begin an unfamiliar working," he explains. "Since this is your first ever magic, some quick safety tips: once you start, it is usually better to finish than try to abort a spell half-way through. If you get stuck and can't remember the next step, it's usually okay to stop and reflect and figure out what comes next for the space of seven breaths. For this particular style of spell: if you can't remember in the space of seven breaths, start continuously chanting 'zahza' and come find me. The chant will keep things paused until I can untangle you from the working."

"But like I said, I don't expect anything to go wrong — the light spell is quite simple, and the absolute worst that will happen if it destabilizes is the equivalent of a flashbang."

She nods seriously, and double-checks that her rings should be suitable enough replacement for eye protection. 

And then... she starts the dance, letting the words come to her lips and her arms follow along with the steps. 

The process takes about a minute of careful movements and gestures, timed just right with some carefully chosen Latin words. As she goes through the steps, she gets the feeling that a lot of this can be elided or compressed once she has sufficient familiarity with the magic.

Or perhaps once the magic has enough familiarity with her. There's the faintest sense of something seeing her, and then the magic slips together and it's gone.

A ball of light, about the size of a lightbulb and glowing with a flickery candle light, hovers in the space between Topaz and Zatara.

"Oh, well done! It normally takes a few tries to get something at all, let alone that steady."

He reaches forward with a finger, and seems to feel around in the ball of light before nodding in contentment. The ball of light evaporates in a puff of sparks.

"As far as I can tell, your passenger shouldn't interfere at all with your ability to cast spells normally," he states. "I thought that you might use it as a focus or a channel, but you drew on ambient magic using your own body and soul, just like a normal thaumaturge. Your control wasn't perfect, but that's probably because this was literally your first spell; I have no reason to think that it is interfering with your control or ability to manipulate ambient magic."

She dismisses the spell, then bobbles her head down, a faint smile on her lips. There's something a little special about doing magic qua magic, even if she's already bulldozed ahead in terms of getting used to doing metahuman things. 

"Yeah - it's pretty particular about whether at least base powers are an 'intuition' or something that the gift is doing directly itself. Would you like to see me doing something like that? I've got the crystal generation power, the blue and green light crafting skillset, and if there's something in particular that would be especially useful to see I can just make that power, though I'd need to clear a slot for it? Actually, might be a good idea to have you looking at what that looks like, too...?"

"Sure! I've got plenty of time if you want to do a little more experimentation. If you intend to continue working with and developing your magic, I can also give you the slightly longer version of the safety talk," he offers.

"Let's start with the crystal generation, and then you can try dismissing a power and creating a new one? I'd be interested to see if you could get a power that supplies the, uh, power for a spell, without relying on ambient magic to cast with."

Alright, as for the crystal... Sapphire has been her go to, and she's sure she can make good use out of whatever she makes sometime later, even if it won't be ideal-ideal per se.

She rests her hand on the table, and starts making that, before idly dismissing the light generation power. 

For that... Could she get a power that converts stored emotional energy into magic? Alternatively, one that works more directly could be good to be able to get too. 

When she casts the light power away, Zatara suddenly shoots out a hand that grows misty and insubstantial. When he pulls it back, he is holding a dim red light: a spark, visible in the real world and not just in her internal view of her powers. Here in the real, it looks almost insubstantial — although the inner core of the light leaves the impression of the shadows cast by turning gears, without, apparently, containing any shadows.

"Slippery little thing, aren't you?" he comments, holding it up to examine. "If I hadn't been watching for it, you probably would have gone right into the void."

He pulls out a stick of chalk with his other hand and sketches a quick circle on the conference table, before depositing the spark there.

"That should keep it stable against outside influences until I can take a proper look at it," he explains. "It seems pretty fragile; it probably would have broken up and gotten reabsorbed into the world's background magic."

It could do a power that converts emotional energy into magic, but she doesn't have anywhere to put the magic. Does she want a power that stores enough magic for a single low-level spell and slowly recharges after it is emptied?

"The crystal generation is definitely being done by magic," he adds, glancing down at her work. "But it doesn't look like any school I'm familiar with, and you don't seem to be the caster. It's almost like you're being used like a staff, to draw in energy for the spell. It's very efficient, whatever it's doing."

Miscellaneous noddy nods ensue! 

"It's a few things, as I understand it? There's the materialization, and then there's a sort of secondary process that algommerates spare materials from the enviroment to grow it out...." 

She perks up! 

"Actually... Did I send you the spreadsheet? It's probably not the most useful to you - let me see..." 

Can she make a power to turn the spreadsheet power notation into something like what he showed her with the light spell? 

... no, it doesn't think so. She gets the slightly unsettling impression that she has too few fingers.

She pouts. 

"Unfortunately, it doesn't look like there's a straightforward way to translate the notation that the gift uses into something like yours? If you give me a few minutes, and don't mind me dumping another power or two, I can show you that, though I doubt it'll be too helpful in the near or medium term future. Or..." 

Is there a reasonably canonical ~magicy visualization she could give? In principle there's no real reason that say, she couldn't use the system that the greek gods use or that atlanteans use or that martian priests use, and still get some value out of it, though that being meaningfully easier seems like a giant stretch. Alternatively, could she get an intuition power for describing in general terms what her other powers do, magically speaking? 

The gift thinks about this one.

There are a range of visualizations that she can get, but they are ... for different things? A 1:1 visualization of the magic in a power is maximally accurate, but hard to understand and make use of. The convex-subsets-of-tetrahedrons encodings is uniquely identifying and possible to write down. It can generate lots of powers that are between those things, but it isn't sure which one would be best.

It can do an intuition power for getting accurate impressions of the general principles of operation behind other powers, though! Does she want that?

Hum. Really, it depends on what is useful to the experts? 

"So - there's a few things I could try in that direction? There's the option for some sort of one to one visualization of the magic involved - though that'd probably be impractically large and make me need to figure out some sort of data storage trick to make it at all usable for anything, or the geometric notation I mentioned earlier, which is a more compressed form more useful for identification in power-space than for analysis, I think? Probably most practically I could just get a power that can tell me more about the principles of my other powers." 

She ducks her head.

"Sorry if I'm jumping ahead of myself! I'm not trying to volunteer you for a years long research project, I just - don't like not giving people reasonable options?" 

She shakes out her hands a little at the thought. 

Zatara chuckles.

"I assure you, I'm more than capable of refusing projects on my own recognizance. But I appreciate the thought."

He places his finger to his lips in thought, staring up at the ceiling for a long moment.

"Can you tell what the problem translating between whatever it uses and Collegium Standard Casting Instructions — that's what this is," he adds, waving the paper with the light spell. "— can you tell what the translation problem is? Off the top of my head it probably doesn't cast things like a normal human, so maybe it could describe the end state of the spell structure, without describing how to actually cast the spell? I'm a fairly experienced wizard, and I might be able to back-derive it. Certainly starting with a finished diagram would be a good start to reverse engineering things."

Oh, can she / the gift do that? She wasn't aware there was that level of... separation of the steps of a spell but if there is...

They can do a power for representing the stable, self-perpetuating structure of a power as a multi-layered diagram of colored inks. Is that the kind of thing she wants? Or maybe just the ability to visualize the gross details of the structure of an active power?

- How many colors does she need? 

Every spark is unambiguously representable with less than 23 colors under some visualization scheme. But it could do a power like this that only works on first-level sparks and never uses more than five colors?

- Actually, she's probably being dumb - would it still work if she just say, wrote out a legend of the 23 colors and annotated each ink-object as having one of the 23, or is there some sort of metaphysical reason why that wouldn't work? Oh also, does she get a sense of the - general size of the appropriate diagram, in terms of numbers of layers or amount of geometric precision? She'll have to rethink things a bit if the size is too outrageous... 

The resulting diagram would not be a valid direct casting aid, it's pretty sure? But if she just wants to visualize a power, changing how the colors are represented won't make it not a visualization; it's just a different visualization. Although some of the crossing lines might be harder to see with only one color of ink?

The gift really isn't sure about that one. It's not an expert on having eyes or perceiving things using them.

Does it have a sense of the general order of magnitude of the number of layers in a depiction of a power at or below the fourth rank, or the type of tools that you would need to inscribe the ink in a way that would work properly on ordinary paper? It doesn't seem like it's like, impossible for it to give her a power that would only work with a bajillion years of time and a scanning electron microscope. Honestly, this is still probably workable enough to use, even if the numbers aren't the most favourable... 

"It looks like it's possible? I'm just trying to figure out the details - the gift is sometimes a little insensitive to mortal details about things like this."