D.S.S. Reason

—ison Transport, Level 5—

—eport loss to D—

That's unfortunately pretty unhelpful and not very actionable! 

She focuses on the writing for a moment, taking the time to scan her eyes along the surface, moving around a little to get as good as look at it as she can. She tries to record her focus on looking at the script on the surface - it's probably not perfect, but it's better than not trying it - before she flies up through the water, and out into the sky.

Okay so...

There's... a good amount of her equipment back at the base, she's pretty sure? There's the hope and love core, there's the knife, and plausibly there's a good amount of lingering residue of her power still there from all of her work. She tentatively reaches out for that, trying to get a feel for the concentrations of that special kind of formatted densified hope, and get a bearing she can use, taking care not to send any of her inquisitive senses anywhere near the direction of the ship. 

That might be pretty difficult. The Great Barrier Reef is, inconveniently, at nearly the antipodal point from Happy Harbor. Maybe she should just fly sideways for a while so that the ship isn't between her and there?

She... flies up into the air and sideways out a bit to get a bit of a better sensor profile, and maybe take advantage of the lighter air? She's really not too sure how much she's going to have to deal with conventional aerodynamics but it shouldn't hurt to much to try. 

Also, she pokes at the blue rings and hopefully pokes at them - that was all done on intuition but hopefully she can just... pop it back into working normally? She's kind of excited about the possibilities of flow regulation and she's honestly a little eager to sit down at a computer and try to figure things out a little more. It's not really too unexpected that she'd run into things a bit beyond her scope, but that's no excuse for not trying to make the best of it!

After clearing the probable location of the ship, she can feel out her emotional investment in the equipment in Happy Harbor. It is almost directly down from her current location.

Hope is ... springy. Which is to say, yes, her rings are happy to bounce back to their previous configuration, apparently no worse the wear except depleted charge.

Joy and glee abound! 

She blushes a little, before focusing up a little, taking a deep breath. 

She's got her own little mission, now! She's made something real and fun and build-up-on-able, even if it got interrupted a little. She's going to make her own way through the skies, and through the stars, someday, and no is going to stop her from being able to make! her! mark! 

A coruscating current of blue light wraps around her body, lightening her as her mood brightens, as an aurora of green stretches out around her, space warping in time with her every statement of conviction. 

And... off she goes, soaring off as a streak of light in the sky!

She doesn't really have much of a route in mind, but she'll try to stay far away places that look on the busier side. 

Well, of all the ways to circumnavigate the globe from here ... a bit under half of them involve crossing the Pacific ocean.

It's a big ocean.

So the first part of her route can really just be beautiful azure-blue waves, dolphin pods, container ships, more sparkling water, secret island full of ninjas, a school of flying fish, more waves ...

How focused is she on the joy of flight, relative to paying attention to her surroundings?

The joy of flight is one of her main concerns, but there's a certain amount of focus that she needs to have on her surroundings to not crash into things, avoid planes, and big concentrations of people and be willful about it, rather than just sort of floating on the breeze giggling like a little girl. And part of the joy of flight is the feeling of the world around her, the sparkling distant sense of people's hopes around her as she soars, and it's entirely possible that a secret island full of ninjas feels more than a little unusual, to that sense! 

The island is more willful, or fearful, than hopeful — but wherever there are people, there are hopes. Hopes to impress their teacher, to get to go on a solo mission soon, to live their own life, to pass this test ...

Visually, the island looks like little more than another solitary volcanic remnant, covered over in dense jungle.

That's... a little odd? It's not really her place to judge if people want to make some sort of monastic order, here, or otherwise just have a bunch of hierarchy and a concept of 'missions', but it seems... maybe more militarized than that? She slows a little as her focus drifts and her hopes uncenter about getting back to happy harbor, taking it in and getting a bit of a sense of where it is, relative to everything else, the particular flavor of hopes and to a lesser extent wills present, here. 

She idly goes to doublecheck that there's nothing weird here spatially that she needs to worry about, before shaking off the distraction and flying onwards. 

Then there is a ton more ocean to cross (like, so much) and then she hits the coast of Baja California del Sur! Beaches! Tourists! Desert!

North America has a lot more planes and people, so she might have to slow down a bit. But it's also much less far across than the ocean, so she can close in on Happy Harbor in relatively short order.

Okay! 

It's a little tiring, to keep this up, but the thought of having more reports and getting to - sync her feelings up with the love crystal and getting to have opinions about all sorts of things and getting to make stuff helps it a lot! The spatial awareness is heady, too. 

Alright, she scurries inside, and sets herself up at the computer station, grabs the love core - idly spilling out her little gushy feelings into it, and recalls the stored will impression of the text. Did she see anything else she might be able to translate or at least transcribe? 

No — the rest was really to covered up in coral.

Which .... doesn't make sense given that she was able to see partially obscured words, actually. That's not how language works.

A bit of additional pressing, turning things over in her head, yields:

Huh! 

She obligingly transcribes that and sends it to the league chat! 

Got a hope empathy sense of the prisoner when they drained me after I tried to sense what was inside the ship - I only really got a sense of a hope to escape and live, but that doesn't necessarily mean anything more than that that their more complicated drives and plans were more associated with other emotions.

She drops the translation power, and hums a little. Any new messages, yet? She's feeling a little anxious, but there's not much she can do without reconfiguring her power set pretty dramatically, and even then, she doubts it's a good idea to go after someone who has drained something like that from you. 

Speaking of... 

To Zatara: 

Got a bit of my hopes drained from my rings by something in what looked like some alien vessel [link to the notes in the league chat] - I was able to stop the drain before it became much of a problem on it's own merits, but not sure if there's anything I should particularly be worried about, magically speaking? Sorry if I'm being a bit of a nervous nelly, but better safe than sorry? 

She has a bit of an idea for the queen's gift, though, so she starts her crystal generation on making a pair of teardrop sapphire earrings to serve as the physical form. 

It's hard to say without an in-depth examination, but there is a dissociation ritual that you can do to sever lingering magic influences if you're worried about it. If you feel it is urgent, you can go petition my house, Shadowcrest, for aid. But otherwise I can go over it with you tomorrow?

Don't think it should be urgent? I wouldn't be surprised if it wasn't strictly a magic thing, either, given how it went? Would be happy to go over it with you tommorow though - I'm sure I'll have plenty of other questions for you by then too ^^

Zatara doesn't respond right away. For all that the League is probably busy, the mountain is silent.

Okay! 

She settles down, and pokes at her notes. 

She's been implicitly working on a big ass project on the lights for... a while now? Mostly she's just been letting herself be battered around by what seems shiny at the moment, and there's a certain merit to that approach for something so empathic, but that doesn't mean she shouldn't write out what she's trying to make, more broadly. 

She wants a proper suite of things for each of the colors - 'things' here defined to be a power source, a ring, and the at least theoretical capacity to go and make more devices on theme as she desires. Ideally, she should be able to learn to use a large swathe of them, and be able to teach them, share them, the whole shebang. Nothing about what she's doing is completely singularly special, and she's pretty sure from the blue body enhancement intuition that it's not some... physical structural property or anything that you need, just a mind opened up in the right way. It should work in space too just fine, which is a nice little benefit of going for something like this over thaumaturgy. 

It's a little unforunate that she had to make as many design concessions as she did for the violet power system - she's pretty sure there's still the conversion system there just fine, and she even managed to get it to work off her own loves to empower itself. She's... going to nurture it a bit more, if only as a little empathic pet project. She doesn't have the power socketed any more, but she's still pretty sure that that's an approach that's natural, for nurturing love, anyways, so it's not like it'll be a waste, in terms of productivity, persay? Maybe integrate ring functionality into it, throw it together as part of a dedicated crafting system... She's pretty sure the "Star Sapphire" has a basically integrated system like that, so it's not out of the question, for all Zatara dinged her a bit for her previous lack of singular vision. 

The hope she had earlier is that she could make the whole thing 'work' ultimately off of a singular power system, with the ability to go out and mass produce a bunch of hope-based empathic energy gathering systems, and then either use those to directly empower gadgets, or at least be able to use those to fuel a power conversion system that converts from blue into a desired color to recharge, if it's not simple enough to toss the whole mechanism in like it has been for blue to green, at least if she's trying to do anything more complicated with it. 

Her experiments with love seem to suggests that if she wants to scale up violet light equipment, that she'll need to just work with the concessions of a dedicated power generation / power conversion suite for exactly violet. Probably it's feasible enough to make personalized violet empowerment systems on say, individual rings if she empathically connects with someone and bonds their loves and passions to it? Which doesn't feel guaranteed, overall. One benefit is that - even though she's pretty sure that it's not entirely this simple, the violet light system she has right now can just accept arbitrary expressions of the blue light and turn it into usable violet, even she's pretty sure that the result wouldn't be quite as good as if it was part of an organic emotional mix associated with love and/or her feelings. She could still go and do that experiment, though - check to see if gathered hope from places associated with love can make it work better, feel the results out that way...

Making a ring should just be a matter of fundamental mastery, nabbing the appropriate symbology skill to get the basic design. Hell, she should probably go and ask about getting some sort of more canonical auspicious day calendar - the magic of the hellenic gods seems... workable enough, and she'd be suprised if Hera doesn't have a holy day that might be useful, if she's going to think about it as a ritual. Though she's not sure how capturing a holiday specifically works - if she needs to be observant or there needs to be observant people celebrating it or how it counts calendars or what have you. A question for Zatara for later, probably. 

She's not sure how important lanterns are, but if she's going to make one... probably she should make a blue one? If she's thinking about making a proper dedicated power system, she kind of likes the idea of making something a little bit more ramshackle for the other colors, all fed into by a proper, dedicated, regulatable system. She's a little doubtful it's an efficient use of her time to try to make a proper Central Power Battery until she scales way up and probably gets at least another slot from the gift, but it's worth thinking over a little bit and not totally discarding as an option. She's also kind of curious if making some sort of dense interrelatey network of all the different colors will do something, so that's another reason to get the whole thing, beyond just completionism. 

So that leaves... Red rage, yellow fear, orange desire, and indigo compassion to figure out a power system for, given that she's already figured out a reasonably canonical solution for blue, and a reasonably workable one for green and violet. 

In spectra order... 

Red seems like it's going to be complicated - the easiest pathway she can picture off the top of her head from hope to rage is foiled hopes, and that seems like a bit of a nasty tightrope to walk. She's also just not... a very angry person, generally, and it's going to be a bit of an adjustment to make it all make sense in her head, even with the help of the gift. 

Fear seems... possibly decently straightforward? Hope and fear are easy enough to pair - hope you'll succeed, fear that you won't. The motivations certainly entangle further out, and she's certainly far from free from fear, she's still not... exactly the most comfortable working with it. Still, that might be a bit of a bonus, and fear is probably one of the more beneficial of these to be able to manipulate in a light touch way, maybe? 

Desire is - direct and simple, probably? Hope builds up your desires and makes you get closer to them. This is probably one of the more simple ones, unless she's missing something> She might be very well missing something - there's a feeling she's not... grasping everything, here, and she's not totally sure on what the difference between the two is supposed to be, anyways. 

Compassion, on the other hand, seems like it's a natural pair for hope in a promotional way, and in a way that mostly doesn't blend together in her head too much? She's pretty sure that she's a decently compassionate soul, too, for all that she finds it a little easier to be driven by more hopeful things, a lot of the time.  

Which implies a rough ordering of... compassion, desire, fear, rage? That sounds about right, though honestly she should probably integrate more colors into her walking around powerset if she's going to be working on these regularly. 

Oh and yes! She got away with skimping on violet base - that probably explains a decent chunk of why it took more out of her, given that she didn't have quite the same quality of gift supported foundations on the subject, especially given that she wasn't really in love, at the time? The experience gives her a bit more of an appreciation of having taken that for green and blue before doing too much with them, but she definitely doesn't need it, at least for working on the basics, though... 

Honestly, violet is probably her next ring color? She's pretty sure she's a passably natural fit for it, and the way that her life is turning feels like it'll be... good for her, to be thinking about love a little more. It's also just a classic magical girl power source for a reason, and while she hasn't explored the utilities around it in detail she's sure there's plenty to find. She's not... too sure how she wants to prioritize power generation vs. ring making vs. all of the gimmicky things? Probably it's just sort of going to naturally fall out of her desire to explore and how her powersets get frozen by the gift running out of flex, but that'll be what it is. Though that being said, she's pretty sure that ring making is more complicated to do truly right than storage, so that implies she should work that out first, more or less? Though exploring into harder territories is always a good thing. 

For now... 

She should really work on improving her blue kit, make the lantern, make sure the gift is up to snuff, make some more of the protection amulets, that kind of thing. She'll reroute her powers later, probably - maybe she can swing a visit to Hera's temple or something when she's there and see if they have anything on love-related magic? She doubts Themiscrya has much of a health care bureaucracy, either, so making a proper healing device to demonstrate there sounds like a fun idea. 

What does the gift think about making a power for making blue lanterns? Oh, and she feels silly for not thinking of this earlier, but what about for making specifically rings (or the same class of generalized light manipulators that rings are a part of, anyways) of a given color? 

Hmmmmmm.

Making blue lanterns from scratch is too big. It could do intuition for how to correctly bind a fragment of elemental Hope into a crystal, once she has one?

- Does it need to do things from scratch? She already has a bunch of hope skills, right? She can already feel out a little how lightening makes the barrier between this world and the honden of hope a little thinner, and she has a bunch of different things on the application of making things and making things happen with the blue light - she's still got the symbology power in there, and the crystal power being merged in should help...? Could it do a power that builds on her existing powers in that general direction, or something like that? 

Actually, she's confused a little, here? She's been binding hope to crystals for the past few days and she's decently sure that she's been doing it 'correctly', right? Is it talking about some sort of extra distinction between hope and elemental Hope, here? Or is it making some sort of distinction between 'infusing' and 'binding'? 

The sparks churn. There's the feeling of trying to break a complex thing down into pieces that fit together. Luckily, she does have a lot of loaded intuition for working with the blue light, which helps process the vague impressions from the gift into something meaningful.

Her hopes are hers. And since she is finite, they are finite. She can bind them into things and structure them in different ways. She can bolster them with ambient hopes. She can re-enflame them from her soul. She can move them, and manipulate them, and use them, but they are still her hopes, and can be used up, or suppressed, or stolen.

A lantern is a wellspring of hope without limits (well, except throughput). It provides infinite hopes, hopes unbound by context, unflagging in the face of use. A proper blue lantern can be used, but never used up. So to make one, she needs a Hope that will never die.

Does that help?

Kind of! 

Hm. 

She pokes her big ol' intuition blobs, then the gift again. Does she have the prerequisites for it, aside from that? Can she get a power that does specifically that, then - some sort of skill for binding or translating finite hopes to infinite hopes, or something like that? She's also pretty sure that she can figure out immortality with a bit of elbow grease and time, but that's... probably neither here nor there? The league has some people who are probably at least biologically immortal, and it wouldn't be too weird if Wonder Woman was theologically immortal, either, though she hasn't like, checked. Could she just sort of.... work from their hopes to do it, if that's the bottleneck? 

The sparks spin and flutter.

If she got a suitably infinite hope to work with, her existing powers should suffice to work it into a lantern. But the gift isn't big enough to produce infinite hopes either. If she has a friendly Goddess to work with, She probably can produce infinite hopes?

Her thaumaturgy intuition is niggling at her, though — elemental hope .... she might be able to summon a ... manifestation of Hope itself?

Oo? 

Can she get a power for knowing how to do that? Not that that's probably a good idea to embark on right away, but.