"May I present pasta and mushrooms in a white sauce, and some lemon cheesecake to accompany it."

"Ah ... Thank you, Shadowcrest."

He clears away the diagrams, pushing them to the far end of the table.

"This next course is pasta and mushrooms in a white sauce, and cheesecake for dessert," he relays. "I, for one, am deeply sorry to have let myself be distracted from the excellent food in my enthusiasm. Once we've finished up, perhaps we could retire to the sitting room to continue the discussion."

"Oh, cheesecake! Food is good too ..."

"Actually, I bet you could do thaumically-active cake decorations with the right frosting—"

Thunder booms again.

"—which I will, of course, speculate about after finishing dinner!" Zatanna squeaks.

She grabs a floating plate of pasta and settles it in front of herself.

...She really hopes those lightning strikes aren't Zeus warning her for her hubris. They totally could be Zeus warning her for her hubris, couldn't they be. 

No, no, this seems normal enough for them, and probably he could tell? 

She obliges on the schematic stuff briefly but yes! 

Food! 

She's not much of a pasta person, but she is a cheesecake person, and honestly existential concerns are enough that she isn't like that hungry, all things told? The ice cream helped, too. 

She lets Zatanna speculate about thaumically active food preparation! 

When the magic and lightwork conversation drifts to only a dull murmur and the eating is done, she rallies herself a little and... 

"Thank you for the meal, Shadowcrest, and thank you both for being lovely hosts." 

She bows her head towards each of them, maybe a bit more stiffly than usual, though it's a little hard to tell? 

She clears her throat a little. Just say it, Topaz! 

"Mr. Zatara, would you mind stepping out for a private discussion?" 

Zatara folds his napkin.

"No, not at all. We can talk in my office."

He leads her down a hallway and into a spacious office paneled in dark oak. It's surprisingly ordinary, for a magician's office — although there is a pack of tarot cards laid out across what looks like a tax return, on his desk. Perhaps he mostly does magic elsewhere.

"What did you want to talk about?"

She looks... nervous? She's still - relatively composed, but there's a certain - twitchiness to her. 

"It's... not something that I'm sure I can just start talking about without it being unkind of me?" 

She breathes out softly. 

"So please be patient with me if I stumble, a little." 

Zatara frowns, his brows drawing together.

"Of course, Topaz."

She starts nervously fidgetting with her hands, a little. 

"Um."

"I'm not actually going to ask you this, because I feel like it would be asking too much of the trust we have, and because I don't like to think of myself as the person who lets their ideal lawful solution to things get in the way of actually being kind and reasonable to the people in front of me. But if I were going to ask you something, it would be something like 'Please don't make any final decisions or take any particular rash action about the stuff I am going to talk about, until you do at least one of talking it over with a league member (probably batman?), a priest, or sleeping on it.'"

She's not like, incapable of or even that disinclined towards thinking like an Orderly person but she already feels all wiggly about even in an example having enough escape clauses - how do e.g. fey manage when so many things can happen...? 

"Even if I were asking that, I wouldn't be asking for any particular additional confidentiality, because sharing the burden of it is probably important enough that you shouldn't have to think more than you are already going to about the weight of this. Okay?" 

Her words are a little slow, not in a rehearsed way, but in a way where it feels like she dearly wishes it had been something that she could rehearse, or that it was something that she could have a real script for. 

She blinks. Oh right. 

"- Also you don't have any special e.g. magical vows or particular theological or philosophical beliefs that you need to maintain for your magic to work well that I need to keep in mind as operational constraints, right?" 

She would feel so silly if she did this and then his magic poofed.