"... oh, poo."

The Mad Hatter goes limp in his blue restraints, giving up the struggle.

"I guess it's back to the Duchess's castle to eat my pepper, then, isn't it? I was just trying to make a treat for Alice, you know — I've found her, the real one, only she's too small right now. A bit of cake would set her to rights, but not with pepper in it."

He sighs disconsolately.

:... well, that was an anticlimax. I guess we should fly him back to the Asylum and then keep searching? The 911 dispatcher offered to send an ambulance, but then we'd have to wait around for them.:

She'll bind him and up and facilitate that (and take off his hat, in case it's also supernatural in some way.) 

:Probably. Though we're not nesscarily in a huge rush - could interlace it with other buisness, maybe... There was a jeweler here I was hoping to speak to, regardless of the venom business, so might want to weave that in, sometime?: 

She'll... what, take a good look around, see if there's any news from the team back at base and try to shake off the unsettled feeling? Yeah, that sounds about right. 

That... worked fine, but it's a little hard to feel proud of it, right now, given how overgunned they were, and her instinct brain is still telling her that he wasn't actually a threat, but... there's no guarantee the hat wouldn't have worked on her through her defenses, and if it did, that would be a problem. People are safer, now, and that's because of her. 

She shakes out her head and goes off to do that - she'll try to see if their route gets them to a place near a zeta tube so there's a convenient time to pop over and get her sale gems and do that as a bit of a break, perhaps? 

The route doesn't go directly by the zeta tube, but it's not much of a detour.

When she flashes back to the cave to grab the jewels, Kaldur is just finishing up his scrying ritual — it points to a block of three or four warehouses by the river, about a third of a kilometer down from where they encountered the Mad Hatter.

Robin does some quick querying of the city's property database, and sends her back with a list of potentially relevant company names while they continue to investigate.

Okay! 

She can pocket those... 

Hm. She can probably drop the red light detection power if she has a place to start on...

So - she needs to trace the ultimate source of these - there's a decent chance there's a stoppable local operation, here, but that's not the point of things. 

So what can she try, that isn't just "throw M'gann" at the problem? 

- Can she get some sort of 'magic hacking' power? Though Robin might be able to deal with that already... She could get some sort of personal stealth power, but at 1 spark, it's probably not particularly useful enough for an amateur to be able to get that that good a performance out of it. If she could get a good enough like, wall penetrating scanning or vision power she could maybe get more of a sense of things? Really it just depends a little on their threat model, and what they actually want to do, here.

"So... There's a couple of paths here? We could try to raid the warehouses, we could try to stake them out or just bug them? I'm not entirely sure on the legality and feasibility of that, but it seems like the least drastic option available,, but we would get more information if we can get everyone on the sites actually trafficking venom through a telepathic interrogation and seize everything. But if we make a big enough fight out of it, there's a decent chance that some of them will start going on combat drugs or start using metahuman powers and that could get messy quickly. I don't think it would be too hard for Miss Martian to drop some audio capture devices, between her awareness of minds, her shapeshifting and her telekinesis, or set up a camera somewhere to see if we can get a sense of the people supplying these places? We could try to do a deeper infiltration, but..." 

She shrugs a little. 

"Batman did say safety came first and that there's no particular deadline, so... Something minimal might make sense, at least at first? If we don't get anything out of doing that we can always do more." 

Miss Martian taps her chin thoughtfully.

"I was kind of mentally preparing myself to fight? But you're right that there's no particular reason to when we could avoid spooking them and just bug the place instead. I don't have any Martian bugs, though — unless you can produce some really precise telepathically resonant crystals for me to program?"

She bounces the schematic of a little telepathically receptive disk that loops thoughts that occur near it until interrogated.

She furrows her brow. 

She can do that, right? If so, she'll make it in her palm. Heck, it'd be fine to swap out a power to help out if she'd need it. 

"I was thinking that we'd get Robin to scare something up? But thinking on it more this is probably a better solution - I bet it's easier in most situations to find an electronic bug than something like that. We could try both, or maybe even see if there's anything Kaldur can procure or I can whip up, but that sounds like a bit of overkill to me, to be honest." 

Hey - we're thinking about bugging the places that Kaldur scried out - Miss Martian has a martian trick for it, but was wondering if you wanted to add something there too? Imagine Batman has his own tricks there. 

Yeah, I have a surveillance kit with bugs that can either constantly transmit to a base station, or that can run silent and be picked up later. What's MM's trick? I could take a mix of both and try to get in through the vents — I'm looking up the registered floorplans, but they're likely to be slightly out of date. Should still be HVAC access on the roof, though.

She glances her head off to the side. 

:An impression of Robin's question, and her desire for her to reach out to them to clarify the details: 

I'm happy to defer to your expertise? Hard to know how sophisticated the operation is and don't know how much easier it would be to snif out a transmitting one over one that's just lying around. Shouldn't be that hard to retrieve later if we need to, though obviously it's a source of additional risk. Might be good to do something layered, too - see if we can get a cam on the doors and an audio bug inside, or something like that? 

If I had to give an opinion, I'd say it'd be nice if we can just check up at base later on it and not run over again - we're not exactly that well suited for stealth missions, right now, and we don't want to spook them into changing things up if we don't have to, but obviously making sure the mission goes smoothly is the main priority over our convenience. 

Robin and Miss Martian discuss the details, and eventually settle on a mixture of conventional bugs for the outside, and telepathic bugs for the inside. Cameras will let them track who comes and goes, and Martian bugs have the significant advantage that a trained telepath can check them at range while leaving them in place.

... aaand that was the last bit of energy that it needed for the bud! It's now fully grown and ready to be shared.

Oh hype! 

She'll leave them to it - her current skillset isn't too helpful for that  but she's happy to help if she can! Presumably Miss Martian can just tk up the external bugs and watch for attention to slip them inside? They could do something more elaborate but that might not be too important. 

Okay so - 

Things. She can get rid of that rage detection power, and... 

Could she just use the trick that Giovanni used to store a bud instead of a spark? The thaumaturgical skill for that was something that fit in one power, and that would be convenient! 

It turns the idea over. The bud is a little bit bigger, but it's also designed to remain stable while looking for a new host ...

The gift ejects the rage detection, and replaces it with a spark representing thaumaturgic skill for creating stable, protective spell containers suitable to holding sparks and buds.

The new skill informs her that she will need a flat area of about a square meter and a thamaturgically conductive material such as silver or properly treated chalk, but that actually sketching out the containment array is straightforward.

Hmmmm. 

- Well, that's a reason to go gemselling, then! Should be pretty easy to find some silver chains at a nice jewelery place and that should work for this, and potentially could be helpful for some other projects, too? And besides, she was thinking of getting more of that sort of thing anyways! 

She'll quickly check in with everyone that she's good to go before popping back out and to the store with her generated goods!

Gotham jewelers are constantly on the lookout for stolen goods — but you absolutely don't stay in business in a city with this number of peculiarly talented thieves without becoming good at distinguishing and pricing gems.

The gemcrafter who was recommended to her gives her a fair price, and is more than happy to pay her partially in materials such as silver wire and chain, gem sockets, blank rings, and so on, since it keeps his margin up.

"You can get a reasonable product with just pre-made chain and some pliers, but if you want to make the really professional-looking stuff, you'll also want a bit of silversmith's kit — a soldering iron, blowtorch, flat and rounded hammers. I have spares of all of those available, and I'll throw in a granite work surface, since you're just getting started."

Seed funds get! 

She suppresses a happy dance wiggle. She was really expecting it to be harder - some of these are pretty rare! Honestly, she's half-expecting that someone on the league's end called in in advance to make sure they had the operating cash on hand and weren't maximally sus but she is not in a looking-a-gift-horse-in-the-mouth no siree bob! 

She'll thank him and sure why not! She can afford getting upselled, and if nothing else, some of these might be useful for imbuing since they were designed by professionals with this sort of craft in mind. Her room might get a bit crowded, but that is 1000% a later problem! And besides, she was already thinking about setting up some subspace storage work... 

She'll go on her merry little way back to base, and make a couple little arrays for storing sparks and then the bud one - is perhaps a little wasteful to just discard discard these when there's maybe a chance that they'll be useful as is... 

And then she'll see about making the blue-green light communicator functionality she was thinking about! She's so exciiiited about being able to bug random green lanterns and ask them for their toys talk more to Joan when she's out and about! She already has a decent sense of projecting emotions and the basics of the lights, it's just a bit of a trick to make it extend out and stay coherent, but will is good at staying strong and itself and hope is good at self-reinforcement so she can manage! She's not entirely sure how the 'contacts' system should work, but at minimum she should be able to get something she can use the next time she stops by - there's enough mingled in here about storage and managing the energy she can get a taste of the signature a ring leaves in the honden, she thinks, and that should be usable enough, and there's probably a more formal system in the corps, though if she were designing it, it would probably end up routed through the Green Central Power Battery connection or thereabouts, and she is not poking that bear today! 

A bear she is however actually kind of willing to poke is the grand power reorganization that she had in mind! She was thinking about getting it to do an optimization pass on the whole thing? She'll probably be commiting to that for a while... Though actually, it'd probably be better to do something a little more conservative - just swap out the lantern making complex for something with each of the colors and ~see what happens~. That'll give her enough time to adjust and maybe possibly doing something with it would be a good way to get her powers all synced up to the next level? 

She'll doff all but her largeset spark here, and see if she can pop by shadowcrest - it probably makes sense to do this all in a warded environment, after all.