Aww. 

"I would, on another day? But I think I've done enough heavy thinking and emotion building on what was supposed to be a rest day already - don't wanna push it or anything, you know? I'd be happy to talk to her more another day, though." 

She smiles a little sheepishly. 

"I haven't actually gotten a phone yet, but I guess I could set up an email and coordinate through the league systems 'til I've gotten it figured out? I've just been so busy and I'm sure batman has been, too, for all that he's been an excellent host."

Zatara nods.

"If she's going to be training with you and getting involved in superheroics, I should probably get her in the league's system as well. And perhaps introduce her to the other young heroes. I'll see if she's free for that tomorrow ..."

He opens the study door and heads down the hall to the living room, where Zatanna is sprawled upside-down on a couch, a Terry Pratchett book floating in comfortable reading position above her.

"Topaz had some stressful things to discuss with me, and she's feeling a bit worn out," he tells her. "And she hasn't gotten a phone set up yet. But since you've gotten the name spell down I was thinking that we could go meet some of the other young heroes affiliated with the League tomorrow afternoon, and you could exchange contact info then—"

Zatanna rapidly rights herself, her hair flying.

"Yes! That would be great."

She turns to Topaz.

"Topaz, it was great to meet you! I can't wait to work together, and you have to come over for dinner again soon, yeah?"

"Yeah! Been great to meet you, too." 

:3

She pulls her up into a hug, kisses each of her cheeks in turn a little overexcitedly, and then pulls away with a twirl. 

"But yes. See you later!" 

She wanders off with a bit of a skip in her step and a blush on her cheeks, making sure all of her things are back in her pockets and no worse for the wear. 

... is Topaz French? Did this not come up, somehow? Maybe she's French Canadian. They still kiss each other on the cheek in, uh, French Canada. Right?

By the time Zatanna's recovered enough to verbalize questions, Topaz has already disappeared through the teleporter.

The training area is quiet. A faint brush of awareness makes it clear that Miss Martian is in residence and noticed her return, but if anyone else is about they're being quiet about it.

"Recognized. A-01: Topaz. You have   3   new messages."

She'll grab herself a glass of water, give herself a few minutes of discretionary staring at a wall time - she's kinda tiiiiiiiired and doing the heavy conversation after thinking with her will brains a bunch doesn't help, either - and then goes and checks those out. 

I've gotten your onboarding paperwork processed. Most relevantly, you've been assigned a postal box in the Hall of Justice — #104. It needs a code and a biometric scan to open. I've set your initial code to 4482093 and used your teleporter scans for the biometrics.

When you have a moment, you should reset the code and pick up the league communicator and paperwork that should be waiting for you by that point.

The next message is from the League's internal package-tracking system:

You have packages available for pickup in your box.

Team —

I've gotten King Orin's preliminary approval for that trip to Poseidonis, and now we just need to work out times. Please fill in this calendar entry with times that work for you.

Oo the phone, one hopes? It's going to be so terrible but also so useful - there's probably only so much being vaguely attached to a superhero team can fix things up on that front. 

As for the appointment in atlantis... 

She's good to take care of the appointment... not tommorow, because that's probably when they're going to do stuff about venom, but pretty much any day after that? Actually, she probably wants a day free of other commitments to just hang out and make sure she has her financial stuff worked out, honestly? And that should probably be before, if only to calibrate what amount of money is reasonably worth her time. So... somewhere from 3 days from now to when she goes to Themiscrya, if that works out, ideally, she supposes? 

She'll do a bit of winding down - she'll do a final look over the lantern - looking good, honestly? Then she'll make a memory stone for general utility and/or more green light work later, and then make the blank for the little key and anchor for the lantern's subspace system, and then another, for another subspace storage project. She'll throw in a start for the budding process, too - it should be if anything more stable than the individual sparks, so even if he doesn't want to go that route and there's no special mechanism for 'saving' them, she can probably just do that. 

She'll scare up something to read - she's sure by now there's some oldie but goodie asimov stuff on the web by now, and that sounds fun enough? She'll do that for a little while and then....

Alright, fiiiiine, before it gets late enough for it to be awkward she'll run over and set up the whole PO box affair. She'll have to fuss about the biometrics later if she wants to do more bioupgrades, but she'll cross that bridge when she comes to it. It's a little unforunate that there doesn't seem like there's much of a league bioguy, but she can scare that up later. Honestly, the most practical thing she could do would maybe be to copy something like red tornadoes body, but she's not quite that personally excited with transhumanism that she wants to be the first person to go through that sort of uploading process, and there's probably a billion things to figure out with all the technological changes that has happened over the years, not to mention magic and everything. And biological bodies are fun. 

(She might as well ask the gift what generating a power for that would look like - could she get something for that elemental... tech?? that red inferno and red tornado uses out of the box? Making humanoid droids is definitely a path of all time to walk down.) 

She blushes a little. She... was a little overenthusiastic there, wasn't she? She's kissed cheeks hello and goodbye before, but it's not exactly... normal for her to do it like that either, really. 

Anyways! 

Off she goes! Hopefully it has the phone and the rest of the stuff batman was setting up for her...? 

It starts working on the bud.

Yes, it can do skill for working with elemental robotics! Although, not much skill in a single spark unless she wants to break the concept down into simpler pieces.

Her P.O. box does indeed have a phone in it. Also a thick set of legal documents, various plastic cards of the types a modern person is generally expected to have, a skin-colored self-adhesive throat mike, and an instruction booklet for the same.

Hm. For now, she's just kind of curious about what's possible with element robot technology? She's seen fire, water and wind ones, but for all she knows it's using the chinese system and red tornado is actually a 'wood' element robot, so a power biased towards broad overviews would be fine - technical skill in particular areas can come later when she's actually sitting down trying to build one.  Though being able to build a basic demo unit for say, a water manipulator to show to the Atlanteans would be nice.  

Shiny! 

She pockets those - she'll have to grab a purse or some more elaborate carrying situation later - there's no reason why she couldn't make a subspace storage system for walking around, really, and that'd be a useful proof of concept for batman, probably? 

She'll change the code to an appropriate randomly generated one, memorize it as best she can in a few minutes, write it down on a tiny slip of some easy-to-generate crystal on her person, and then go back to the mountain. 

Can she get a general overview of what they do, what elements they can use, how abstract they are about manipulating the elements, and if she could make them into cybernetics or if they require a bigger more integrated system or...?

The brain systems that they use might be interesting, too, but she has no idea if that's the kind of thing that comes bundled up with this, here. That could totally  be a separate super robotics skillset. 

An overview of elemental robotic technology reveals:

The underlying methodology can actually be based on any system of elements, but the efficiency of the stoichionic generator is affected by the choice of system, and the number of robots one produces dedicated to each element must be 'balanced'. The whole robot is usually built around a certain generator, which uses a 'productive loop' of 'elemental nodes' to produce elemental energies. These can be used to power more typical mechanisms, or routed through specially designed channels to expel structured elemental energies to produce effects. The most basic possible effects are <element>-kinesis and <element>-genesis, but <element>-catanesis is theoretically possible as well.

Generating any effects more complicated than extremely basic <element>-genesis requires difficult on-the-fly calculations, requiring dedicated logic processors. Plus the stoichionic generators have a minimum viable size — the smallest generator possible without some other form of miniturization is a sphere with a diameter about the same length as her hand. But if she can come up with a cybernetic system that has room for the generator and processors, the technology itself is totally compatible with cybernetic integration.

She can see how to power a robotic brain off of a stoichionic generator, but actually building one based purely on elemental robotic principles would only suffice to script very basic "if then" responses. A being like Red Tornado definitely has something else going on.

Since she just asked for an overview of the subject, the details of how to actually do any of this are a bit fuzzy, but she definitely has a better understanding of the basic principles now.

Ooh that is interesting. 

She'll note down the approximate materials she'd need for that water demo unit as she thinks a bit more - she'll have to see about buying those or generating those later.

Would the lights work? Or sunlight? She's still not entirely sure how much the principle in cold guns is 'cold' versus 'ice' - it seems at least heavily cold biased in the stored crystal form but she's not sure how much the release frequency reflavours it into something else adjacent or just calls on different aspects of the same base element or what, the power she got there for analysis on the subject was pretty basic - but could something in that space work? She's a little curious how it works in elemental systems that might not really have a complete 'cycle', so to speak, over just having a giant number of different things out there to find. 

The size requirement seems a little harsh, but that doesn't seem totally unworkable, especially since this seems like a pretty early generation version of this. 

The lights ... aren't quite a compatible elemental system, because they are not quite "substance-y" enough. She could ... maybe see how to adapt this to create mental light-active constructs out of the lights?

"Sunlight" on its own isn't a complete system, but there are systems that include sunlight as an element, sure! "Cold" and "ice" likewise.

If an elemental system doesn't have a cycle in it, then one can't build self-sustaining stoichionic generators with it. That said, the cycles can be pretty abstract — the modern chemical system with 118 elements has a few different cycles based on radioactive decay and stellar fusion, for example.

The size requirement comes from avoiding interference between the 'elemental nodes'. There is no reason in principle that the internal components of the generator couldn't be folded into subspace? You'd need to figure out how to 'twist' a compatible elemental channel through the subpocket's spatial attachment point, but her current knowledge powers aren't generating any reasons that that wouldn't work.

Ooh! She's pretty sure she could manage some energy overflow concerns with the right empathic barrier approach, too. Doing something with subspace with the elements would be... complicated, and probably require a bit of power restructuring, but that's fine for a later project. She'll have to see if Red tornado is interested in sharing his technical information or what have you. Or making some sort of elemental diode, if she could find the right material for that... 

Oh that's interesting. Could potentially make some sort of interesting anti-kryptonian or the like weapon, but probably the most useful thing she'd get out of it would be some more conventional hologram system or having something interesting to share with Helios and/or Apollo. Or maybe Amaterasu or something - the only real reason she has right now to go for the hellenic gods is that they're known players in the superhero community and she has a bit of an 'in', but she's happy to look into other offers. 

She'll discard this power after a bit of finishing up some quickly jotted notes on some ideas for that. 

Speaking of elemental cycling systems... 

Can the gift do white (and black, I guess, but she doesn't really want to go there) light powers, if that's even a thing? Her intuition powers keep niggling at her that there's something more going on than just the seven, but she remembers the first time she poked just getting the ROYGBIV list and nothing else, so... Do you know what's up, there, Gift? 

The gift is too small to safely channel Light. It isn't the right kind of thing for it. And it will not create any powers that impinge on the Darkness for her, for a slightly different set of safety reasons.

If she were located in an area where other colors of light existed, it could give her powers associated with those. Does that help?

Aww. That makes sense. But can you still get information on it? A crafting power is probably too direct, but could she get say, a white symbology power, or something like that? Or build a complete cycle of the seven lights into a single power through merging and go from there? 

The sparks churn for a moment.

Hmmmm ... Yes, it can do intuition for the symbology associated with Life, although that won't actually be enough to channel any white light on its own. And building a composite power with a complete cycle of lights in it would definitely do something! What it would do depends on the details of the powers and how she merges them, though, so it can't quite predict whether she'd get what she wants at the end of the process.

She nods along. A project for another day a while later (for all that he said she should make a full recovery by tommorow, she really doesn't want to push her luck, there), and also probably another project that would be best undertaken with a spotter. 

Hm. 

Thinking about other things that she could maybe theoretically do that would be nice to be able to report to batman. 

Can she get base powers that interact with... 

Karma? Dharma? Yin? Yang? The Tao? Fate? 

...No brain, doing something to directly call on the power of the domains of the endless without their consent is probably in fact not a good idea, though she could probably get away with a power that say, gives her a base extra lil connection to the dream or something like that? Though that, she's sure, has its own host of problems. 

Oh is time travel a thing, and if so is that something the gift can do? 

It can do powers that interact with Karma, Dharma, Yin, Yang, and Fate! "Interact with" is a pretty low bar, though; if she wants to accomplish something specific using those, it could give a better answer. The Tao is also too big for it to touch directly. It can also do powers that make her dream harder, though.

It can do time-travel within the confines of her own soul, limited by extremely steep energy requirements. But it could, for example, move small pieces of information from the future of her soul to the past. Going the other way around is a lot easier — it can move lots of information from her soul's past into its present. Moving physical objects through time outside of her soul is too much.

... does she want a power that gives intuitions about what sources of energy and universal fields exist in her current location?

...

No, no, she's supposed to be resting and not doing magic things, not poking at what magic things are the hardest and furthest away and scheming about them, or brainstorming more ideas about how to ressurect people - 

You could totally do something using yin and yang to recontruct someone's existence, couldn't you? Or use someone's path through samsara as another imprint for reconstruction, and add all of those up together to compensate for other problems, couldn't you?