Hype! 

She'll stop everything, and flounce back with a smile, and wait for her to get a chance to heal herself and dismiss the blindness and all that before speaking. Her offense was kind of incredible, but she doesn't seem to have a... combat routine down, quite yet. Still! She's pretty sure she could have lost that if she was a little more prepared. 

"Nice match! You should probably get some eye protection sorted out - In your place, I think one of the things I'd be the most worried about would be someone with military or 'next gen' technology trying to get around your standard protections. There's only so much you can do to prepare for everything, but flashbangs are something that you should probably expect? Might be worth brainstorming what to worry about and what to do about that, sometime. I wonder if a speech jammer or noise cancelling system or something like that would be an effective way to stop you from spellcasting... Depends on how well you can talk through it and how much physically cancelling out the sound of your voice impacts the thaumaturgical process..." 

She hums consideringly. 

Zatanna sits up and restores her own eyesight when Topaz releases her.

"Yeah! I wasn't expecting the flashbang. I don't know if I can make goggles work with the outfit, though ..."

She contemplates for a moment, and then shakes her head.

"I'll think about it. Maybe I can do a mask or somehing. A noise cancellation system shouldn't do anything to me — the incantations depend on being able to say them, not being able to hear them. One of those weird magic edge cases."

She tries to think of some reciprocal advice to share, but actually Topaz was really bad-ass.

"I know I wasn't able to disarm you, but I didn't see how close it was, because of the—" she gestures at her eyes. "Was that something you were already prepared for?"

(She would be so happy to hear that! But alas, telepathy and even empathy isn't in her current powerset, and she's never been the best at reading people.) 

"Not particularly, on both fronts? I think it was just a magic interaction that you weren't prepared for - the way that rings work is that they create a bond with my soul as part of the interface. I'd expect them to sort of be an extension of the wielder on the magical level, and since there's a physical barrier up there too..."

She shakes her head a touch. 

"I wouldn't be suprised if you would have an easier time trying to cut off my hand to disrupt the connection than brute forcing the ring off a lantern in the middle of a fight, to be honest." 

She tilts her head to the side a little in thought. 

"Which isn't to say it's a terrible approach, if you get them by surprise when they're not focusing on their emotion or you're trying to do something more sophisticated to disrupt it for a moment for a one-two punch, say. Now that I think about it more... if you had a strong enough emotion matching the ring, it'd probably be a lot easier."

"...Actually, I think someone sufficiently spiritually potent and well-disciplined could just will a ring off a green lantern's finger, no magic required, given the way the activation principles of those sort of devices work... Still, I don't think it'd be remotely easy even with a decently stacked deck." 

Zatanna nods thoughtfully.

"That's actually pretty cool. That you can, like, build an extension of your soul like that. I guess cutting your hand off would have been the thing to do in a real fight, but I'm not sure I could do that, you know? Like, emotionally. I do know a basic severing spell that works fine on hands. And I'm not sure I would have gotten a chance to get it off — you really kept me on the back foot."

"It is! It's been a fun hobby to dive into, and it's even pretty practical!" 

She humwiggles.

"Things can get pretty hectic! Though I noticed that a lot of those spells you did were pretty context specific? I think it'd probably help to drill things some - even if you can't say a practiced incantation much faster just by practicing them, I'd imagine that you can still get the extra leeway from a mastered spell to help you out, there? That blindness spell was pretty devastating - if we were in a wider open space and you had a flight spell going or something like that, I think that would have had a pretty good chance of losing me the fight right away. Some form of that is probably a keeper..." 

She blinks slightly. 

"Actually, now that I think about it, getting through a barrier of hope with an effect that you aren't hoping to apply could be extra hard, so that complicates the calculation a little... Honestly, there's probably a billion things like that that means that sparring between the two of us won't be 100% representative of how a 'real fight' between us or another lantern would work. Though we shouldn't let that stop us!" 

"- Do you want to spar or test some more? I think we probably already mostly know how the blindfight goes, but there's other things I could do if you want to test how your barriers do against my fare (or vice versa) or you don't mind being thrown around a bit and maybe leaning on my healing a bit. Not sure how much this drains you? I could probably do another... three or four of these without more recharging, myself, but with my lantern here and the fun I'm having with this, I should be able to keep this up for a good while, but wouldn't mind doing something else if that's what catches your fancy." 

"My autolevitation is a little shakey," she admits. "I'll have to practice it more to be able to keep it during a fight. And yeah — I'm sure fighting you will be pretty different from fighting random people, and I shouldn't optimize my spell repertoire for it! But I'd love to do another round without the blindness and see how that goes. Do you want to try a round with just basic shields and blasts and see how that goes?"

How that goes is: still onesided, but somewhat less so. It's much easier to hope not to be hit by a magic beam than it is to hope to hit your new friend with a magic beam, but the magnitude of the effect is small enough that Zatanna can power through it and hit Topaz with a concussive blast with enough concentration. Her aim is a lot better when she isn't blinded. Ultimately, Topaz still gets the better of her by being able to bend azure bolts around behind her shields.

Goodness it's hard to keep all the complicated hopes when her bones are rattling and her barrier is rippling, teetering close to failure, but it thankfully is a good bit less hard to wordlessly pray that it holds together! And yeah, hoping to actually hit her is a little tricky - she can sort of... hope that she gets a tag and then hope that she can follow through enough to keep things going and meaningfully teach her, but it's honestly a lot easier when the hope is flowing less directly, and indirect is slooow. 

Still, she's green enough that she can pull off wins most of the time, even without cheese, and it's fun to fly about and see what her barriers can and can't take. 

Soon enough, she feels the dimming flicker of her power running out, and she raises the white flag, and wipes a bead of sweat off her brow (though not her little lingering eager smile). 

"Nice fights! Lots to learn for both of us - wasn't expecting quite how finnicky keeping emotional investment in all of those constructs would be - gonna have to work on that. And... since I need to recharge anyways, it might be a good time for you to take a look at my lantern in action?" 

"Oooh! Yes, please! And yeah, I have a bunch of stuff I'm going to have to drill later, and probably some enchanting for my outfit ..."

Zatanna peers down at herself.

"Although, does this place have a shower? I'm not sure what your standards for cleanliness in lantern-related activities are, but I've gotten pretty sweaty."

"It does! Thankfully, my environmental shield mostly takes care of that." 

She points her over to a computer screen that can give her directions. 

No brain, that is not an invitation to do a group shower thing. Even if she knew her a little better, she's probably going to want to get comfortable here as part of superhero working, and doing something the more... industrial way probably wouldn't be too encouraging or helpful for settling in. 

She'll go fetch her things! She's got a bit more work to do on finalizing some of the green crafting stuff, she's got to start the wire network - that shouldn't take much at all to let the energy start to flow a little, and connect them up a bit for charge balancing and helping with the dynamical system a little... 

Hm. 

She drops the blue light fighting power. She could probably get an emotional spectrum affinity testing power, right, gift? Probably it makes more sense to just ask her what she's thinking about picking something like that. And powering the gift... There's a bunch of things in there, but is there any reason in principle she couldn't get a power to help make a nice thaumaturgical process for gathering the type of power the gift wants? She's not sure what the bottleneck there is, though - for all she knows, power could be a totally irrelevant constraint in practice? But worth checking! 

It can do an emotional spectrum affinity testing power, sure!

As for powering the gift — it feeds off of cosmic background energy, but it can also store some. So right now it's focusing as much as it can into the bud, but it doesn't spend most of its time bottlenecked on that? She totally has had it create enough sparks in a row to run out of stored energy before, though.

It ... isn't actually sure that cosmic background energy is the kind of thing that can be gathered or focused like that. But the amount that it can gather does vary over time along with her activities, so maybe there's a way to make it work!

Could she get a power to get a sense for how to optimize that, then? Actually, now she's just confuzzled. What is it doing if it isn't gathering and focusing cosmic energy 'like that'? Unless that you're like, implying that you're doing some some sort of sympathetic connection with the entire multiversal sheathe and false vacuuming stuff up / dynamically mapping yourself onto some sort of existing but immutable gradient or...? 

No, she's not going to speculate up an answer to that one, and if anything, probably it just natively doesn't have its full design spec loaded in all the time? 

It has reflective access to its own design as part of its power generation process (so that it can make powers that will interface correctly), but the details of its power system usually aren't relevant. Let it think for a moment ...

Design spec loading noises.

So cosmic background energy is the measure of how real something is. There is some process out there that generates more of it, and then it flows through sheaves of related universes in a way that is sort of like water if meaningful narrative relationships were rivers. The energy naturally reaches and interacts with the soul, but most of the energy is 'wasted', reflecting away into increasingly insubstantial 'what if' scenarios. The gift uses its tendrils to contain that energy and use it to reify the powers that she requests — turning the speculative 'what if she could fly' scenarios into actual changes here in reality.

The thing that its mechanisms do, and that it is sure can be done by thaumaturgic means, is taking the cosmic background energy passing over and through her at this current moment, and focusing it toward a particular end (or storing it for later). The thing that is isn't sure can be affected by magic is how much cosmic background energy comes flowing down her "channel" at any given moment — although the amount demonstrably changes along with her activities. There's hardly any when she's asleep, and lots more when she talks to people and invents things.

Would she be able to say, make a system that makes use of the... 'narrative background' on something that isn't her, then? If it isn't something that needs to attach to her specifically, she can just like, make an enchantment and store the energy and go over and collect it in a way useful for power generation, right? Or would that only work to empower the thing that it was attached to, or only work to empower her in so much as she's a part of the story of the thing that it is attached to? 

The spark churns for a moment in thought.

If she ... made an object that had enough 'weight' to it to attract its own cosmic background energy, but was still strongly associated with her, such that it was effectively part of her story, that would work!

Actually, that describes the gift! It attracts its own small stream of cosmic background energy that it also funnels into her. It's also pretty sure that it grabbed some cosmic background energy off of her teammates when she was investigating that fire, so people who are associated with her and part of the same story might also work ...

So maybe that gives her an idea of what kinds of things it could siphon cosmic background energy off of?

Aww! 

Though that does still raise the question if she could make something that works specifically and entirely for someone else. Though maybe getting the whole - system booted would be something that requires a certain degree of connection with the caster? 

She doesn't have the best sense of how important it would need to be? But even if it needs to be something pretty out there, she could probably do that. Though... that being said, this is another big metaphysics conversation that she should in fact have with someone who is used to having big metaphysics conversations, before getting too too into, if it's going to be a thing that substantively involves the weird metaphysics of other people's experiences. 

She is looking forward to talking to Wonder Woman about these things...

She taps her thigh a little nervously. 

She'll fuss with making some more ring blanks and her existing light projects (she kind of wants to get the key fob system up and running too soon, and that could be cool to show off...) 'til Zatanna's back. Hopefully should have the system wired up by then...? She wants to show her something... breathing and the difference and - let her feel it all, you know? And just a - contained individual system modelled a little after a focus of the green light isn't nesscarily the best for that so... 

Well, it can definitely create a system for shaping someone else's cosmic background energy into real-world effects; it is working on making a bud right now.

Zatanna doesn't take too long — using magic to clean your suit and dry your hair really cuts down on the amount of time showers take.

"Alright! What all do we have here?"

"So!" 

She claps her hand happily. 

"I've got a blue lantern, complete with some bonus features! I've done another round of upgrades to the violet power core! I've been working on a set-up to help make the defense talismans I've been sharing around, and some basic example tools for a Green Lantern to maybe learn some of my ring forging skills, and a bunch of ring blanks - I've been planning on making rings of every color, but I've only done blue and green rings so far, and only a little more about violet. Not sure if you have a color in mind or are looking to pick up something like that?" 

She hums. 

"Feel free to divine at these! I will say though that... you're not going to see everything like that? You are a thinking feeling person and you should be able to sort of... get a sense of it, just by reaching out your hopes, and that might help you get a better sense of what the planar stabilization systems are doing, what's up with the connection, and the - general direction of the design around the harmony of hope." 

She smiles bashfully. 

"Dad says you can't un-have an insight, so let me try it with normal divination first, and then see whether trying to feel it out makes things make more sense," she decides. "I need the practice with reading unfamiliar artifacts. Let's see ..."

She makes some delicate gestures with her fingers.

"!raeppa ,cigam fo smetsyS"

She blinks at the lantern for a moment.

"Um. So you've got ... a bit like a summoning tether, and then a bright blue bit, and, uh ... No, I've got nothing."

She holds out a hand to the empathic equipment, and tries hoping to understand it, instead. That works a lot better.

"Oh! I think I see. You've got a sort of loop holding open the connection to a realm of hope, here, and then it sort of bleeds over there ..."

Zatanna asks a series of detailed technical questions about the design of the planar stabilization system that someone with a green spark specialized in the design of blue light systems would know, and nods thoughtfully at the answers.

"This is really incredible! The lantern would make a great powersource for wide-area hope-based rituals. I don't know any off the top of my head, but I bet there are some in Shadowcrest's library."

"It would! I was thinking about if the atlanteans would have something to do with it or something like it in a different color... Even without more explicit magic, you can make a sort of sanctified hope space like so!"

She proceeds to explain so!  

She hums. 

"Actually, I'm a little suprised that query worked? My understanding was that lightwork wasn't 'magic' in that sense, but..." 

"... ooooh Dad's going to lecture me about accurately describing things. Maybe that's why the results were so hard to interpret."

She stares at the lantern for a long moment.

"It's kinda weird, actually? Like, magic is such a big field, with so many interconnected disciplines, that it feels weird to see something like lightwork and have it be just ... not completely unrelated, but clearly not magic. And I've been working so hard to be a magic hero, and then you kick my ass sparring using this thing that is almost magic but not quite ..."

"I just feel ... I don't know what I feel, you know?"

She nods. 

"I think... A lot of things aren't quite that simple. I remember looking briefly into metahuman powers, and there's this... mess about them. Some of them are the sort of thing that you could build into an alien robot, if you really tried, some of them are something that interact with these weird energy fields, dimensional or otherwise, with a broad-spectrum of how 'magic' like they are. Heck, M'gann comes from a planet full of people with telepathic powers, and that's apparently something that you can put in a fancy metal habit or a test tube, as the genomorphs show, no magic required. It was... a little unmooring for me to learn all that, honestly." 

She fusses her hands together a little, palming the yellow ring blank and rolling it around in her hand a little. 

"I've been a little scared of just... picking up an internal magic, myself. Magic is this... big and wondrous thing, and I'm happy to lean on that, and I'm happy to - put my head and heart in into these more ephemeral things, but I'm a little scared that I'm just going to... run off into space one day and none of it will matter or transfer. That's why I've focused on rings, since those do work everywhere here, as best I can tell, and thaumaturgy, since that depends less on incidental factors about me and is something that gets to... 'count' more, I suppose? There's plenty of practical reasons, too, but I'd be lying if I said the more... ephemeral things weren't a larger part of it."