Zatara leans back in his chair and strokes his chin thoughtfully.

"There is a fire dedication ritual that I've used to help restore natural weather patterns where the beginning of the ritual is about building up an ... 'eye of the storm', I suppose. But I'm not sure ..."

"The first course is ready for Master, Little Mistress, and their guests."

Three bowls of soup (light, chicken-based) and three bowls of salad (artfully arranged, including little flowers made from shaved carrots) come floating through a door and land on the table. They're shortly followed by a pitcher of ice water, three glasses, and a small selection of salad dressings.

"Ah, thank you, Shadowcrest."

He unfolds his napkin and bows his head over the soup for a moment.

"Bless us, O Lord! And these, thy gifts that we are about to receive from thy bounty, through Christ. Amen."

"Amen," Zatanna echos, while sending Topaz a 'Fathers, what can you do?' sort of look.

"Plenty of things to try, there." 

She shrugs a little loosely at her, a faint wry smile on her lips. She could work with thissss! 

She doesn't... think she needs to be christian for it to be legit to say it? Shouldn't hurt to be polite, anyways. 

"Amen!" 

She's not much of a soup or salad person, but she'll pick at some of the lettuce and grab herself some water, sure. 

If she doesn't touch the soup, it will float back to the kitchen after a few moments.

"The next course will be grilled salmon drizzled with a sweet lemon sauce on a bed of rice; will that be more to your guest's liking, Master?"

"Do you care for salmon?" Zatara asks Topaz, setting down his soup spoon. "That's apparently to be our next course; I'm afraid the house doesn't like anyone in the kitchen, so it's sometimes a matter of just accepting the courses as they come."

"Don't tend to order it on my own, since it's so easy to dry out too much, in my experience? But I'm happy enough to have it." 

She hums lightly. 

"I'm curious what your lessons look like, and maybe what you have in mind for superheroing, Zatanna? Are you looking to be a general magic expert and frontline magic-dealer with? Or a backline buffer and problem solver or...? Really there's plenty of things to get up to with your blessings." 

"Oh, good question! I've sort of been following in mom and dad's footsteps — which means being a general magic expert and magic-dealer-with. It's always seemed to be the thing to do, you know? Especially when dad runs into so many magical incidents and there aren't really any other magicians he can bring in to help. So I've been getting a good foundational education, but I've been practicing to be able to do nonlethal takedowns, identify and disrupt unfamiliar magic, and that sort of thing."

Zatara meticulously attends to his soup.

She nod nods. It's... kind of cute how much it looks like she idolizes her parents, honestly? 

She gets her salmon soon enough, and experimentally chows down on it before speaking. 

"I can see it! Was one of the options I considered out of the gate, but couldn't help but feel a little drawn to getting to make use out of my feelings and my own... natural talents, you know? Remember Zatara saying I came here as a bit of a blank slate, magically speaking, so it felt like it would maybe be a little weird building up everything without much of a plan to follow, which lanterning gave me, a little. I think... with more contact with atlantis, there's probably going to be a bit less of a need for people who can fight magic users, but people who can fight well and deal with weird unfamiliar magic and improvise a wide array of effects on the spot and advise people on arcane concerns is probably never going to go out of style." 

- you know what, since this has gotten thoroughly lost in the weeds of magic things already, she might as well.

She reaches down into her pockets, and pulls out the full slate of the work she's brought - her rings, the violet power supply, the little soap bar poison-focused protection system thing, and the earrings she made. 

"Here's some of the things I've been working on - I didn't want to trust the lantern to the zeta tube because of how finnickily dimensional it is, but these are probably some of my more impressive work. Feel free to take a look!" 

Oh and while they're looking that over and to distract herself a bit from her nerves...

Can she get a power for insight into the afterlife system, here? She'll need that for background context about what she's working on. And beyond that... There's no point in going too heavily into her wacky ideas if there's adequate solutions already abound that she can go and pirate, actually? Though there's certainly the possibility that there's nothing as good and reliable as what she's been thinking of. She would like to get another power that tells her about existing solutions for cheating death - resurrection methods, primarily, though she's also curious about brain uploads, reincarnation tricks or the like. She doesn't particularly need from this power any information about how to actually perform the processes, just enough information to have the option of following up on it later and perhaps a bit of information on the limitations of the process. She... doesn't exactly expect that she'll be able to get out of a conversation about this without talking about the Sindella case, specifically, so she'll need to have at least the start of answers, there, for all that her idea might bypass the normal problems...

Hmm ... It can give her knowledge of what is generally believed about afterlives, easily. Direct understanding of the afterlife system as it currently exists is harder ...

It could do a power that shows where a person's soul will end up if they die without any other interference?

For the latter part ... It could do intuition for whether a particular way to cheat death would work? Or it could do a divination power that shows people and things she runs into that have successfully cheated death, perhaps?

Those are kind of underwhelming options, honestly...

Could she get instead something more like "What the magic community believes about the afterlife system"? She doesn't want to let it be too garbage in, garbage out. She doesn't even particularly need it to be that comprehensive - right now, the biggest thing she's not too sure about is what - kinds of afterlife are actually out there, and perhaps details about specifically the Christian system, since that's presumably what's going on with Sindella? 

An intuition about if ways to cheat death would work would help? She's just a little worried that it would run into the same problem that she had when she was previously asking about the idea with the lights and cloning and all that. Is this the sort of situation where getting that power would help it explore against the limits it already has or would it just be redundant with the analysis it already gave? 

She should probably figure out her afterlife arrangements, honestly, but that's not a today thing, she thinks. 

Sure, it can do "what the magic community believes about the afterlife system"!

Two new sparks bloom into being.

Afterlives are definitely a thing — there are a bunch of them, and which one one goes to upon death depends on which mythos one associated with in life. Pacts and contracts take precedent over worship, which takes precedent over mere interaction, which takes precedent over family history and culture. Hell exists and is very bad. Heaven exists in the form of the Silver City, but the angels that guard it do not permit contact with the souls that dwell within. Various other pagan afterlives exist, and are generally easier for necromancers to call spirits out of. Some of them, like the Summerlands, aren't controlled by any central authority. Others, like Hades, are controlled by a central authority like Hades.

Also, it's now clear that her plan to take emotional imprints from the different lights of the spectrum and reconstitute a person from them would "work" for most people, in that a version of them would be alive again and recognizably the same individual, but depending on the attachment of their soul to their afterlife, it might result in a fork instead of a person no longer being present in the associated afterlife. And that might piss off the relevant gods of death. And there are people for whom it wouldn't work, because they've mutilated their connection to the emotional spectrum.

(Her previous speculations were backed by plenty of understanding of the emotional lights, but not by enough background knowledge on how they interact with afterlives; now that the second spark is providing that, the answer is a lot clearer.)

On the other hand, calling a soul from an afterlife into a copy of their body and then infusing it with the impression of their vital energies left in the lights would definitely work, for that subset of people who have intact souls present in a reachable afterlife and a healthy connection to the emotional spectrum. It's definitely not the only way that would work, though; it feels like there are a lot of possible approaches with different properties and tradeoffs.

She can honestly work with that! Banyan lifestyle foreverrrrr!

She'll merge them up and let all of her queued idle ideas spill into her powerset! 

If anything, if she can do it right enough, that's a feature, right? Because not everyone is going to have a super benevolent custodian of their eternal soul. Or from an alternative perspective, that means that you get the best of both worlds - they get to enjoy their eternal reward, and also you get to be pals with them in the mortal realm! Gods who can't see that are big stinkyheads, in her opinion. 

...At least assuming that wouldn't mess too much with it being like, an exact exact copy? She wants to let herself be particular about that even if it's not like, super tactical relevant or even necessarily relevant to how well they could relationship, at least in figuring things out in principle. 

Would a process like that retain the magical power of a magic user? It would be annoying if it didn't. 

...Actually, it would be kind of annoying for the sindella case if the eternal reward mangled her connection to say, the red light. Hopefully that's not the case? You could probably do something with earlier backups but that's not like, ideal. 

- Now she's wondering if there's something you could do to resurrect someone through the planes of order and chaos, if they have that same kind of record. Maybe you could even double ressurect someone :3

You could probably revitalize e.g. a shade from hades using a similar process too, right? Unbind them from hades and replace that with a connection to a living cycle of the colors or their emotional record or what have you, plop them in a body, and debug that as you go 'til they're a reasonably whole person again? 

Reincarnations are a thing! So that's another angle - if you're in an afterlife where you can request that, you could just you know, go and request that, and then as long as you're willing to wait a bit for a body to open up you could conceivably do the same kind of trick with imprinting the colors to restore memories and feelings and patch up the records and everything? That way you wouldn't even have to go out of your way to make a body or defy the system, you'd just be doing a bit of patch-up work to the soul, maybe? Though that's complicated a bunch by whatever the range is for possible reincarnations, oin terms of species and timespan and physical space. 

Ooh do brain uploads and brain transplants, like, work, spiritually? She's not super sure how death and soul transmigration is adjudicated, though the answer is probably to some extent "Whatever Death of the Endless decides in the moment". And yeah, obviously all of this is off if she doesn't want this to work, but still! Here's hoping. 

She's sure there's a bunch more hackier and specific more direct ways to do it but when all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail! She'll have to poke batman and/or the database later to see if there's anything else the league knows about that she doesn't, but this is plenty to go to them about already. Maybe he'll have ideas once he's over the shock? Anyways, she probably shouldn't over linger in her own head, here.

A process that involves calling a soul back into a body will probably retain a magic users' powers, depending on the details. Resurrecting someone from order and chaos will result in an entity that retains relevant memories and sense of identity, but in a way that does not seem to qualify as "working", according to her merged spark. On the other hand, revitalizing a shade from Hades using the process she has in mind would work.

Restoring past-life memories to a reincarnated soul is definitely possible!

Brain uploads and transplants can both work, although there are a bunch of fiddly details that have to be done correctly.

"... the energy flow through here, see?"

Zatanna gestures over the anti-poison amulet, salmon momentarily forgotten.

"!raeppa ,swolf ygrenE"

A breeze blows through the house.

"This is why there's normally no magic at the table ... Master, I will keep the pasta course warm and the dessert cold until you're ready. Please let me know."

"Oh, yes, of course. Thank you, Shadowcrest. I'm sure we'll be ready in a few minutes," Zatara absent-mindedly replies.

"Topaz — how do you think this would react to mental or psychic poisons? Because I think the resilience that you're inducing here might apply, but it's a marginal case. Did you design it with those in mind?"

"...Kind of? I was thinking about making it comprehensive where I could to some extent, and I based at least the barrier on the fundamental green - and to a lesser extent, blue - principles of protection, but if you look at the actual implementation details of the whole system, I ended up focusing more on a layered defense about protecting the body from being exposed to poisons, or failing that expelling poisons, or failing that being able to continue to fight and recover through the bodies natural defenses as it takes its toll and failing even that embodying the principle of being big and primordial and having things wash away in time, and only the first and last layer really focused on comprehensiveness, structurally speaking. I figured since it's for Wonder Woman and she's already a magically resistant fighter that it would be good to focus on a more - layered, resilient protection that takes advantages of her strengths somewhat, rather than trying to bar as much as I possibly can from the start. If I had to guess, I would say that it would probably help a little at each phase, slowly increasing in effectiveness as it has to dig deeper into the more esoteric realms and make more concessions? Though the actual curve depends a lot on where the most hope is felt and what the poison does, of course, so it's hard to say?" 

She hums and tilts her head. 

"You would probably have to try it to find out the details, especially since I don't know how her inherent magics or the magic of her armor is going to adapt to her wearing it. But I'd bet it'd help a good bit pretty much no matter how esoteric you get, at least." 

Interesting!

Zatara floats some paper over from his office, and gets her to sketch out the relationship between these parts, walking Zatanna through a more complicated thaumaturgic diagnostic spell. He can really spend an arbitrary amount of time speculating about how the design would react to various things. It's clear that he got into magic because he finds it deeply fascinating.

"AHEM!"

Thunder booms in the distance, rattling the shutters and sending a gust of cold air through the house.

"I will be serving the pasta course now, Master. And desert at the same time, since that way if the cheesecake warms it will not reflect poorly on me."

Zatara looks up, blinking guiltily.