She blinks away the sudden sunlight, and shakes off the popping of her ears. It looks she's not in Kansas anymore, so...

She steps back from the street a little, and takes a good long look at the cars, and glances over to the source of the laughter. 

Down the block, a man in an unseasonable parka points a blue gun at a boy in a yellow skin-tight leotard. The boy's feet appear to be frozen to the ground. In the background, an armored truck has been overturned.

A gentle, hesitant feeling pokes at her mind. Does she want the ability to intuit things about people who are laughing, maybe?

The question comes with the sense that this is truly an option — she doesn't have to accept. And the feeling that if she pushes away the source of the question, it will leave her alone.

Oh hello telepathic nudging thing! 

That probably wouldn't be that helpful? Probably better then not having it - goddess knows that she's bad enough at taking advantage of social cues to make good use of it but. 

But that did sound kind of like a first offering, based on what she was thinking, or something like that? A power to help out here would probably be a decent place to get started - something medical, maybe, or something to help deal with that ice on that kid's feet would be good, assuming you're not a demon or something? That outfit really does scream 'supervillain' to her...

It's not a demon, it's a gift! It can do all kinds of things.

Does she want the ability to make ice melt quickly? Or maybe an intuitive knowledge of the best way to treat cold-related injuries?

Okay, as long as it's not irreversible... Let's.

Melting ice off is probably more useful, especially if it's reasonably precise or decently ranged - this looks modern enough that there's no reason to think they couldn't do better than her once this whole mess is over, she thinks? 

There's a sense of deeply considering her response, and then a dim spark flares to life somewhere inside of her, and it becomes obvious that she can shoot a weak beam that will cause ice to melt faster. It's not anything foreign, or even unfamiliar, it's just something that she can do now.

The spark orbits gently inside of her, and she can tell that she can push it away when she's done with it, in the same way that she could push away the whole gift, if she chose.

"... and when he comes for you, my gelion trap will activate ..."

The man with the gun seems to be monologuing, now.

She takes a deep breath, swallows down her fear, and feels out the familiar confines of the power. That's a supervillain monologue if she's ever heard one, and there's no time for hesistation or inaccuracy, and no need to have more of a profile then she needs to have. 

She gets down to the ground, and extends out her hand in the direction of the kid in the yellow and red supersuit, and shoots the pale blue beam at his feet.

The kid is momentarily taken aback, but ultimately reacts faster than the man with the gun, ducking under another shot from it.

And then several things happen very quickly.

The man in the parka releases a button held in his other hand —

The kid hits him in the solar plexus and then starts to slow —

An older man in a predominantly red body stocking appears from nowhere, throwing a rock —

And parka guy manages to tag him with a blast from his gun, creating a cone of ice around the man's head.

"Don't!—"

She flinches slightly at the flurry of action, wincing at the sight of the ice covering that man's head - that seems like the sort of thing that in real life ought to be horrifically lethal but she has to try. Her first beam disperses in a barely visible fuzz as her hand tilts up and fires out a second beam at his head, unfocusing the stream of whatever-it-is just a little to make as much of his head as possible is saturated in the effect, even with how much he's moving.

Her beam reacts strangely with something the man does, and the ice goes flying away from his head just as the stone knocks against a device on the ground —

And then it's all over. The man with the parka is down on his front with his hands handcuffed behind him, and the man in red is blurring around in and out of the car.

The boy in the bodysuit — who, on closer look appears to be about 15 or so — appears over her just as suddenly.

"Hey! Thanks for the assist! Are you all right?"

Does she want faster reaction times?

She startles and blushes self-consciously. Why did she have to get introduced to the heroes looking like this... The plain blue t-shirt and the loose pants are reasonably comfortable but give her a certain 'scruffy 20-something boy' look that she's never really managed to shake. Being able to do something about that really would be good.

She gathers herself up, and nods a little shakily. 

"Sort of? I'm not injured or anything, but I just... appeared here suddenly, so I'm more than a little disoriented." 

A little sheepish laugh spills out of her lips. 

There's a sense of sorting through different options. Does she want a tailoring ability? A slow regeneration ability? The ability to summon decorative aesthetic sparkles?

"Just appeared here, huh?"

Well, it wouldn't be the weirdest thing he's seen since becoming The Flash's partner.

"In that case, you're pretty on top of things!"

"I suppose!" 

She smiles bashfully. Her thoughts whir a little bit in the background, her eyes darting up into the air to help her think. 

Some sort of shapeshifting power, maybe? Really it depends on what's easy - some sort of super (femininization) hormone production ability or even a zero range illusion power could make sense for this, amongst other options? Not that she's sure that they would treat her alright if she suddenly started girlifying... 

"Really, I just felt like I couldn't just stand there when people were getting hurt and I had the option to do something about it." 

Oh! It can do feminizing hormone production! But the actual uptake by her body tissues would be slow, without a regeneration power. A zero-range self-targeted illusion is totally possible too.

Does she want the ability to appear to others as she would if she had been born with androgen insensitivity?

A regeneration power isn't a bad thing to have, by any means? It depends a bit on how many powers she gets and how good the powers would be, and of course how safe it would be to actually go through with it. And honestly she's not even that sure that she'd look great directly distaffed? Not that that'd be a bad place to start, necessarily, if she's going to be working up to her ideal body slowly. 

Probably the most important thing is knowing if and when it'd be okay to try to start down the path...? 

She gets the sense that there's no limit on the number of powers she can get — only a limit on how many she can hold onto at once. And she's not very full right now.

Does she want the ability to intuitively guess whether someone would be upset if her appearance started to change?

The kid grins at her.

"I know how you feel. I'm Kid Flash, by the way, since you're not from around here."

He sticks out a hand.

"Have you got a nom héroïque?"

She nabs that power and reflexively reaches out her hand to shake his.

...Would it be okay? 

"Not yet! I just got this power, but if you're looking for something to call me... 'Topaz' is a name I've always been fond of the thought of bearing." 

It's a little endearing how enthusiatic he is, even if he's a bit much. 

A second spark blooms to life inside her, and with it comes the impression that she's half-full. The two sparks don't seem to like each other much, and settle in a wide orbit around each other.

... and yes, she's suddenly pretty sure that Kid Flash wouldn't have a negative reaction if her appearance started to change.

"Topaz ... Oh, like the color of your beams?" Kid Flash — who, despite his excellent chemistry grades, has somehow come to the conclusion that topazes are all blue, through no fault of the American educational system — asks.

She chuckles faintly. 

"You would think! But no, I've... always aspired to be a magical girl." 

She grins soft and shy, and plops in the 'born with androgen insensitivity illusion' power. She'll get something better figured out later - she's got so many ideas for how she's supposed to look - all leggy, tall and elegant, with cerulean blue hair and bombshell curves, or a body that's a little more modest and genki girly and a few embarrassing flickering little thoughts about what she'd want to do with her genitals, but... this should get the message across. Could she get a power that makes her body shift towards the body the illusion is showing, or something else she has in mind? 

When this spark blooms, it ends up orbiting closely with the previous power, and she gets the feeling that she could push them and make them snap together.

And yes! She can get a slow regeneration power that shapes her body toward a particular mental image. It would have to be pretty slow to avoid being too 'big', though.

"Oh!"

Kid Flash's eyes widen, and then he gets a look of understanding.

"Shapeshifter — gotcha! That's why you don't have a ..."

He makes a vague gesture at his own mask.

"Well, I guess you're just all around pretty, then, not just pretty on top of things, yeah?"

A little chortle spills out from her lips at that, her hand slipping up to cover her lips. He's so clumsy but it's kind of adorable and it just makes her ears glow pink with pride at being flirted clumsily as a girl. As a girl! 

Her lips curl up into a faintly giddy smile. 

"I don't think I'll need one, no. But I think you misunderstood - I just... randomly appeared here, got some pick your poison superpowers, and bam! There you were, fighting the" presumably "good fight!" 

"Wait, really? Justaminute—"

He blurs away and then reappears a few seconds later with The Flash in tow.

He holds out a hand, apparently not self-conscious in the least about greeting people while wearing a skin-tight red suit with weird little lightning-helmet-antenna things.

"Hi, Topaz. It's good to meet you. Kid Flash was telling me you just appeared here — do you remember where you were before this?"

Oh and she nabs the idealized mental image regeneration power, slotting in the less ambitious genki bluenette look to work on the background. Can't forget that! 

She reaches out her hand to shake his. He's presumably the guy in charge of Kid Flash and the metahuman response, here, so no reason not to be polite and accomodating.

"It's good to meet you too!"

"I remember where I was - I was in my bedroom at home, in a whole other universe where I'm pretty sure none of this" she glances around a bit timidly, gazing pointedly at the two of them. "could normally have happened. So unfortunately, that's probably not too helpful for you?" 

This power likes the most recent two, and they end up twirling in a tight dance, the ice-melting power forming a distant counterweight. She also gets a feeling something like fullness, and something like her mysterious partner relaxing into the background.

The Flash slumps a little.

"Ah, shoot. Those ones are always tricky."

He glances over at Captain Cold to check that he's still bound.

"We have to wait for the police for a few minutes, but after that I can take you to a friend of mine with good scanning equipment, and he can see whether there's any hints as to how you got here, if you'd like."

She hums, and pokes at the sense of the power discarding function. Is there anything she needs to worry about, there? 

"That's probably a good idea, at least for thoroughness sake."  

She glances down a little. 

"Do you have any advice for how I can stay on top of things, if there isn't an obvious resolution to all this after the scans? I've got a powerset that'll probably take a good bit of explaining that I'm sure can be put to plenty of use, but it's not like I have immigration papers, given how I ended up here." 

There is a nuance to it, but it's not one that affects her right now. She can push any of these four powers away if she wants to.

"The government technically has a special visa for superpowered individuals, but, uh, it's probably better to establish a separate civilian identity," Flash advises. "Batman can help with that, too."

The man in the parka manages to get a hand free, somehow.

"Ah, shoot. Kid Flash, can you fill her in on stuff while I—"

And then he's gone again, bearing parka-man back to the ground.

Kid Flash thinks for a moment.

"So, like, are you a Junior? Senior? Batman will probably want you to finish High School in your cover identity or test for a GED, since he's all serious like that."

Okay, let's get rid of the anti-ice power and... sure might as well keep the transformation information one, since it's networked in, somehow?  She's really got to sit down and figure out what this power does, sometime.

"Oh - I've been through high school already? I was about to go into university, back home."

She shakes her head lightly, then hums lightly. 

"I guess things probably aren't too different, given that we're speaking the same language, somehow? But I have to imagine superpowers have changed things a good deal. That alone will be plenty for me to study, really." 

The spark pops free, drifting away and out of her awareness.

He rubs the back of his head.

"Whaw. I guess they'll probably want you to do a GED, then — even if you've already graduated, it's easier to slip in a test record than it is to slip in an issued diploma, Robin says. Something about how diplomas are cross-referenced by the State department ..."

"Oh! Robin is Batman's partner, like I'm the Flash's partner. He's like a hackery-acrobaty sort of fighter."

She nods along. They sound like they're sort of... extraterroritorial paramilitary people, but also sort of half government-entwined people? It sounds like it's going to be a headachey to figure out, at any rate. 

"Interesting! Is there some sort of superhero guild that you're doing your apprenticeships under, or is it some other arrangement?" 

Kid Flash looks thoughtful.

"I hadn't really thought of it like that, but I guess the Justice League is sort of like a guild. Although I tend to just work with Flash, and sometimes Robin and Batman. I think I've met Superman, like, once. During this big tornado thing. It's all pretty informal, honestly."

She blinks a little, before nodding along. 

"So it's just that there's more senior people in the league who happen to be your personal mentors, then? I suppose powers means that things are a lot less universal there than they'd be otherwise." 

"Yeah, that's pretty much it. Powers can be pretty unique — Flash and I have powers that come from the same place, so he's taught me a lot of tricks about how to use it better. Even if I'm not as fast."

He visibly has an idea.

"You mentioned your powers being pretty hard to explain — are you willing to share what you can while we wait for the police? Maybe we could figure out a League member who'd be willing to show you the ropes!"

She nods lightly. Poor guy. 

"I think it might be best to wait 'til I can do a full debriefing? I don't want to have to explain everything twice over if I can avoid it, and I imagine they'll want to record it for later when the time comes." 

"Oh! Cool, yeah, that makes sense," Kid Flash agrees, just as the police pull around the corner.

"I've got to go give a statement — just hang tight, we'll be right back."

And so they leave Topaz standing around on a streetcorner for a few minutes while Captain Cold gets bundled into a cruiser and a tow-truck arrives to help right the overturned armored car.

She lets out a loose little breath, exhaling gently. For all she knows she's in super fascist evil land and everyone is just being polite to her as a psi-op, but this... looks relatively normally western and liberal and everything? She's sure that even if shifters were a thing in her world that plenty of people who freak out seeing someone sex swapping in front of them. They seem kind, and reasonable, and there's really not that much to complain about, given how eager they are to jump to accomodate her and make things work reasonably and right. She's probably not going to start a superplague from different immunity profiles, given the way that they were chill with world travellers? Still, it's... rattling, that either of those things could be the case. 

These powers are good, the sort of thing that could make a career or a fortune, even just a single one alone would be enough for that. It's a little thrilling just... thinking about the idea of doing more with what she has already. Her body feels good, too, even with just the slight change to the texture of her skin and the feeling of her hair on her scalp. 

Would it make sense to get a power to say, know more about the power? The assistant seems happy to talk about possibilities as they occur, but that doesn't really mean that she can give a real answer of what's possible. She should probably figure out a way to get around some sort of model village - some sort of research power or way to confirm things against the common sense or the outside web? 

She's not sure, and she lets the thoughts linger in her mind, idly half-meditating on her powers and her ability to keep herself safe, if the worst comes to past. 

Oh! Does she want an intuitive understanding of what powers she can have? Or maybe a sense for whether people are manipulating her?

...You know what, let's try the first. 

As the fourth spark blooms, it suddenly becomes clear what each spark represents: a power or ability just on the far end of what is possible for an unempowered human. That could mean peak human strength, speed, agility, memory, insight, and so on. Or it could mean supernatural powers that are slow, situational, limited in some way, or that only reinforce something that she can already do.

Her current powers show this pattern: her intuition about her powers is as good an intuition as she could have; her ability to tell whether someone would be upset by her appearance changing likewise. Her illusory appearance is definitely supernatural — but it's passive, limited only to one appearance and to her own body. Her regeneration is the same: faster than an unempowered human, and guiding her body in a direction it wouldn't go without assistance ... but not very much faster than an unempowered human, and mostly focused on reinforcing her body's built-in ability to change itself.

She's already seen that she can discard sparks and get new ones, but her latest spark draws her attention to an almost unnoticeable feeling of fatigue or strain: she has a volume limit (four), but she also has a throughput limit, although she's nowhere near it yet. Subject to those limits, and within the constraints of what can 'fit' in a single spark, she can do all kinds of things.

Along with this burst of understanding comes a strong impression that powers that synergize with each other are important, and that she could go farther by merging her three appearing-female-related powers.

Is there a reason why she shouldn't just throw these out and get in new ones to merge? They were kind of hastily thrown together as situational answers to problems rather than anything else, so they aren't exactly ones that were perfectly picked out to work well together.

There doesn't seem to be any intuitive reason not to, other than the fact that if she pushes all of these sparks away with nothing to replace them then she'll go back to looking like a boy.

Okay so... 

Let's get rid of the appearance change acceptability power, and get something that'll merge well.

The most obvious thing to do would be something that just boosts her body (or perhaps anyone in touch range? It probably doesn't have to be very impressive to merge up well) to speed up the process, or something that makes some sort of more... qualitative improvement. People in this world can have weird powers like the superspeed that Kid Flash has - maybe there's something that she can do with that? It might make more sense to get some sort of analysis of it done first before trying to implement any part of it, but maybe it's easier then she thinks? 

Does she get a sense of how those ideas would work? 

The intuition from her most recent spark seems to suggest that her newfound powers may be able to replicate native weird powers, but they don't work the same way. That said — sparks are more efficient when they're more ... focused. If she can break a power down into small, focused pieces, she'll be able to stretch things farther.

The sparks she has (and the source of her powers) don't seem to have more detailed ideas about how to do that in her case, though. Super-intuition about what powers she can obtain doesn't stretch to any special insight about what powers she actually wants — although it does help a bit with brainstorming.

Okay hm. 

Let's try... a zero range regeneration booster power - probably want to keep it relatively narrow, given how much the assistant emphasizes that - if you can do that, and then merge it with the ideal form healing power, if you can? 

The sparks spin for a moment, a fourth one blooming in her chest. It latches strongly onto the regeneration spark, and then sort of shyly swings around the illusory power, before all three click together under her nudging, like magnets prodded a bit too close.

And then there are just two sparks within her: a dim one, providing her insight into the kinds of powers she can get, and a brighter one that gives her noticeable regeneration toward a mental image she sets, fast enough that she can feel her facial structure changing.

Ooo okay, that is a weird feeling! Having her jaw sort of click and the bones sort of wriggle and melt into her face is odd, though thankfully not painful. The mental image is the fairly conservative one, but it still is good to just feel her chest filling out a little and the fat flowing into the different places, little shivers spilling down to her toes as she breathes out a satisfied little sigh-smile. It feels like her, with the blue eyes and hair all packaged up in a fit everygirl package. 

Hm. If she can do information powers, including information powers about the power itself, can she get a bit more of an explanation of how the power works, if not by the rules of this universe? Might as well nab a power for that...

Another spark blooms to life, and it suddenly becomes obvious that the sparks are the seed-pods of an alien entity that has gently draped itself around her very being, wrapping her in its fronds — but not maliciously; it's here to help!

It wants to help her, and it does its best to make that happen, but it doesn't really know how. It acts on the level of instinct, feeding on the background energy of the cosmos and growing sparks according to her desires and requests. The sparks are not truly aware in themselves, but they do have synergy or dissynergy with each other. Cliques of sparks of the same level that are all mutually synergistic can be combined into a stronger spark that subsumes their functions. Anticliques of sparks (a group with mutual dissynergy) sort of push on the boundaries of her soul in proportion to their magnitude — not in a dangerous way, but rather like a long stretch at the end of the day, or like a shoe stretched on a block.

When she pushes a spark away, it drifts off to somewhere else to take root. Combined sparks are too 'big' to pass through the boundary of her internal space, but she can pry them apart into their component sparks and cast them off individually. That does mean that she can end up in a situation where she doesn't have enough room to get rid of all but one of her powers, but she can never get 'stuck' and be unable to reconfigure things with enough time.

There is no limit to how bright the sparks can grow, with time and cleverness and attention ... except that they're practically limited by the space she has to create and merge them in.

Oh that is kind of cute! She's picturing each of the nodes having it's own little smiley face and it's kind of adorable? Or maybe some sort of lightning elemental with googly eyes that are also the nodes. Either way, that is cool! If maybe a bit intimidating.

Synergy seems pretty intuitive so far, but is there any sort of definition of dissynergy here? Is it just being sort of unrelated or is it more of an 'opposing elements' thing? Oh, and is there anything she can do to directly optimize at these? Like... can she just ask for a power that's as dissynergistic (or synergistic, if there's ever a reason to do that) as possible to minmax the soulspace expanding thing, or certain things she should look out for to get it the best environment and food to grow? 

Does she have a sense for how the regeneration power would work on someone else? Hopefully it doesn't require her to heal them into the same template that she is using... 

The idea of 'synergy' and 'dissynergy' is really a binary discretization of a continuous attribute. But the attraction and repulsion between sparks isn't actually linear in the underlying space of synergy — she gets a kind of wordless visual impression of something a bit like the arctangent function, when she prods at the 'mechanics' spark — so functionally it makes sense to treat synergies as being either 'present' or 'absent'.

Does she want a power that is maximally dissynergistic with her current set of powers? Because that's actually pretty easy for it to produce, compared to trying to interpret her alien thoughts into a stable spark-seed.

The template for her regeneration power is pulled from the person being regenerated, so applying it to another person (using its extremely limited range), will regenerate them toward the shape that they think of as being healthy/correct. She can't use it to forcibly shape other people — although a different combination of powers could do that. There's also the background impression that applying her regeneration power to someone else will be weaker than the effect on herself, because of something complicated about the way ranges interact when sparks merge.

Oh that's not a problem at all! She was hoping it'd work that way, honestly - managing the mental images from her side sounds like it would be a big headache. 

...It said 'soul', didn't it? That's something to unpack. Presumably that means that it's a magic thing and that magic things are a thing? Maybe they have people with skills in that area here that could do something with this... Or really, it's probably worth poking if it can do anything with 'magical potential' or something like that? Getting powers that help out when she hasn't gotten them slotted is probably a wise investment, even if it probably won't be the most helpful in the here and now, the ability to do that seems like it'd be really helpful for keeping the versatility in live in practice. 

You know what, sure! At least assuming that she can just have the dissynergy power and not use it if she doesn't want to and it's like, safe to have and all that. And while she's messing around a little recklessly, she might as well merge the two power intuition powers, too. 

The power-intuition-powers click together, brightening to the same level as the other combined sparks.

The newly bloomed dissynergistic power is ... strange. It doesn't feel dangerous to her, but it does feel like it could be dangerous to her surroundings. On the other hand, trying to feel out what it does is an exercise in futility. The concept of it is too complex, too situational to fit into a small sequence of thoughts. It is the singular thing which is least like regenerating or understanding powers, which is a very strange thing indeed.

As to granting her 'magical potential' — that is too big, and too vague for the gift to parse. Does she want a power that makes her better able to sense cosmic background energy?

Ookay then. Odd, and probably not a good idea to try out, then. 

She was thinking... maybe some sort of elemental affinity - for water, maybe - or something like that, or maybe some sort of intuition about the steps required for 'initiation' into being a magic person, or some sort of magical heritage, like from a dragon? Dragons are cool. Really, without knowing more about what's going on with magic trying to specify something more particular might not be the most effective thing in the world. That sensory power might be worth poking at later? 

She'll leave it like that for now. Keeping her head in the clouds is only going to make this a bit more awkward, honestly, and a true healing power is probably enough already to prove that she has something genuinely really useful to offer. 

She does a few quick little grounding breaths, and fidgets her hands quietly. 

She can set the mental image of her regeneration power to involve parts of a dragon? But 'magical heritage' is still underspecified. It can do a power that makes dragons think she's a hatchling?

On the other hand, it can definitely do a power for manipulating water! Or one for sensing it, or one that boosts the effect of other powers on water. Does she want one of those?

As it is trying to puzzle out that latest set of thoughts, the superheros finish up with the police and head back in her direction.

"Hey, Topaz! Sorry for the wait," The Flash says. "I called my friend, and he's prepping his scanner, but it's a bit of a trip. Do you mind if I carry you?"

Her eyes flick up appraisingly, not quite parsing it for a moment. 

"Um. Sure?" 

He sweeps her up in a bridal carry.

"This is going to seem quite fast, but I actually keep it slow when I have a passenger, so know that everything is under control."

With that reassuring statement, he starts to move, and the world extends into a tunnel of wind and light.

Kid Flash — for all his whispered comments ­— doesn't appear to have trouble keeping up, and a moment later the three of them arrive at a high-tech-looking door, incongruously located in what appears to be a natural cave. Kid Flash steps forward and presses a reinforced doorbell.

The Flash gently lets Topaz down, holding her until she finds her feet again.

"You might want to fix your hair," he advises, gesturing at it. "I can never seem to smooth things out enough for people's hair."

She nods appreciatively, then shakes out her hair, a hand swishing through the frazzled mess. Maybe the regeneration power can help her out a little here, fudging things? But regardless...

Goodness that was a bit of a rush! The contextlessness was a little disorienting but honestly she kind of wants to take that ride again? But yeah, that's a later thought, not a thought for entering the superhero doombase. 

A moment later, the door opens to reveal a man in a bat-themed cowl. The majority of his outfit, however, is a dark grey — the kind of dark grey which, if it were not for the bright yellow symbol right over his center of mass, would make him extremely stealthy in the shadows. Black, true black, isn't grungy enough to blend into the night, and this costume was clearly designed by someone who knew that.

And then decided to add a big yellow logo anyway.

"Welcome," the man intones, in a voice striving for a hard-won compromise between 'gruff' and 'comforting'. "You must be Topaz. This way, please. If you're hungry, I can have some sandwiches sent down."

Immediately, her attention snaps up to take him in. It's the sort of solid sensible armor that she'd expect, and he's clearly buff enough beneath that he just... looks like he's the guy in charge. The emblem looks like a... concession to the style of that the Flashes are using? Probably there's some sort of colorshifting or rotating system to get past that. 

She takes a moment to meet his eyes - eye contact is always hard but getting a sense that he's watching not staring really helps. She relaxes infinitisimally, and nods, trying not to think of it too much as a pure dominance thing, head tilted forty-five degrees down for a solid moment before she picks herself back up and follows. 

"I suppose that makes you Batman, then? I'm not hungry quite yet, but I'd certainly appreciate a glass of water."  

"Indeed," he agrees. "I'll call for one."

He leads their party past a series of displays that look flashy, but which, upon close inspection, are probably not actually particularly valuable. A moment later, they come to a large room containing a dizzying variety of analytical equipment.

In the corner, a dumbwaiter chimes and opens to reveal a glass of water.

"So first I'd like to try and measure your quantum flavor ..."

After a thorough scanning by all manner of devices, Batman runs out of things to try.

"I'm afraid that there is no trace of your origins," he tells her. "Which will make it ... quite difficult to figure out how to send you back."

On the other hand, he has gotten some excellent scans of her shapeshifting power in action — even though it seemed to settle down and start focusing mostly on her organs after a certain point. He'll be updating the cave's monitoring systems with a matching detector this evening, just in case.

"Have you given any thought to what you might like to happen next? I have some experience relocating young metahumans who can't return to their homes, for whatever reason."

...Okay, probably now is the time to get a general research power slotted in. Maybe something that would let her search the internet or 'common knowledge' somehow? Getting a sense of relevant taboos here and the general political enviroment would probably be a good idea. Or maybea social intuition power about general trustworthiness, failing that? Her intuitions about what really matters in this sort of - social combat have never been the strongest. She looks around for a spot to sit, and settles down if she can. 

"It's really hard to say? I've been here for less than an hour, so I don't have a great sense of how... any of this works. You've been nothing but reasonable and respectful, but I don't know really much of anything at all about what this world is really like politically or for a..." 

She bobs her head down and hums lightly. 

"Metahuman, you said?" 

She looks up into the air, eyes unfocusing a little. 

"In an ideal world, this is when I get a general sense that I don't have anything to fear, right now, and I tell you in detail about my powers and tell you about how I feel like I might be able to help - as a 'superhero' or otherwise. I'm just not sure how to get there." 

"Though... it might be a good idea to - explain a bit about where I'm from, first?" 

She cocks her head to the side a little, bouncing the idea around in her head. 

It can do any of those, actually! But not all three at the same time unless she makes space first. Which one(s) does she want?

There's also a verging sense of tiredness — she hasn't hit the limit of how many sparks the gift can make, yet, but it's starting to deplete its reserves of cosmic energy.

Let's do... common knowledge. What does that say about the Justice League and the local government? 

A spark providing common knowledge blooms. Being full of dissynergistic sparks gives her a slight stretching feeling, barely noticeable.

The local government is ... surprisingly similar to the America of her native world, given that metahumans are apparently a thing. In the way of properly functioning democracies, it's not great but it's not terrible, either. It has a bill of rights that is mostly upheld, except for probably-unconstitutional exceptions in the name of border security. The majority of people have representation in government, but Puerto Rico and felons both muddle along without it.

Common knowledge about the Justice League is considerably more interesting. Formed as an alliance of convenience to fight an alien invasion, and headquartered in the Hall of Justice in D.C., it is a team of loosely-aligned top-tier superheros who coordinate to fight global disasters while mostly focusing on their own home areas. While nominally international — and given legitimacy through a U.N. charter — a supermajority of the members are (probably) American.

Some of the members have known identities and origins: Aquaman (who is King of Atlantis), Wonder Woman (who comes from Paradise Island in Greece), Plastic Man (who can't really hide his powers), and Superman (who is an alien). Other members of the league include The Flash, Batman, Black Canary, and Captain Atom.

The League is generally considered trustworthy, although there is perpetual grumbling about their inability to head disasters off before they occur. And the more conspiracy-minded individuals who insist that they're secretly in control of the world, given the group's power and lack of accountability.

"If you feel comfortable with that, I think we would all be interested to hear a bit about your home," Batman agrees.

Okay, yeah, that's about as good a scenario as she could have expected, honestly. 

She drums her fingers against her seat. 

"I come from the Canada of another Earth. It looks a lot like this world, but I'm pretty sure there aren't any metahumans or magic users - there's a few people who have developed a handful of weird party tricks really really far, but not anything even remotely as... 'ungrounded' or impressive as what the Flash can do, and the only evidence we have of alien life existing is a some pictures rovers took of mars that suggest that there was maybe possibly microbial life there, at some point? I don't think the timeline quite lines up, either - it was 2025 when I left, and I think it's a little earlier than that from you, judging from what the cars looked like? Though the technology that they had back in my world is way less advanced then whatever you're using here, so I don't expect anyone from that side will be poking their heads in here." 

She hums a little, her tone getting a little meandering as she slips into storyteller mode. 

"I think my home world is a good bit less - liberal and internationalist then this world? I can't imagine the great powers tolerating something like the Justice League, and there's been a bit of an uptick in right wing populism and nativism that's been a little scary. Still, things... mostly have been chugging along pretty well, and it's pretty prosperous, all things considered. Bililons of people have internet access and smartphones, and absolute poverty is going down all the time, and a lot of the diseases that have been killing people throughout history are finally getting dealt with, at least in richer countries. There's a lot of hate against trans and gay people, if you look in the right places, but it's broadly legal and tentatively accepted, so it's not so bad there, either."

 She smiles a bit wanly. 

He leans back in his (custom, bat-themed) chair. What an interesting set of comparisons for her to draw.

"I think it's sometimes easier to see the bad side of our own situations," he comments after a moment. "One might say that our world is more international because it must be, to counter extraterrestrial threats. But I am always glad to hear about a world where people are overcoming poverty and disease."

Kid Flash, who has been alternating between examining the various scanning machines and losing at ping-pong during the whole scanning process, leans over to whisper to The Flash.

"Is Batman okay? That's, like, a lot more optimistic than I would expect from Mr. 'I am the night'."

The Flash just makes a shushing gesture at him, and then there's a half second of tussling followed by another half second of ping-pong.

She bobs her head from side to side. 

"Maybe? We did still have nuclear weapons, which have caused a lot of problems around just how threatening those can be the world over, and those still ended up in the hands of some pariah states and that's caused a good deal of problems. I suppose a big obvious external threat can be a lot more convincing than just the game theory, though, and aliens would probably be at least a little bit bigger of a problem." 

She taps her lips together with thought. 

"I've always had a bit of a problem of giving overly critical feedback - to me, the things that are wrong just... jump off the page at me as jarring and incomplete, and the things that are working right as natural, right, and beneath notice because when things are working correctly you shouldn't have to think about how things are working? Still, there's a lot of things that do just... work, and problems that you can just solve with a bit of time and money, or things that you can get that are just uncomplicatedly good, and... that can really mean the world, to me." 

"When you see those negative things — how do you handle them?" he asks, his voice tinged with genuine interest.

"My first instinct is usually to just sort of... write them all out in a big unstructured list, and then go down the list and see how addressable they are? There's a - charitable movement in my world called 'Effective Altruism' that have clarified my thoughts a lot on how to think about this - the way they try to think about bigger scope problems is in terms of how important, neglected and tractable they are. How big of a difference would it make to solve the problem, how much are people already putting in (the right kind of) work to solve the problem and how much can the current state of the art on the problem be improved? Thinking through that, implicitly or explicitly can really help clarify what's going on in a problem." 

She furrows her brow and leans back a little. 

"Though a lot of the time, I feel like that sort of - assumes a certain ownership over the area? A lotta the time in more ordinary situations people just want to see if they missed anything particularly meaningful or how much the problems they know about are obvious to other people, so working like that can be a pretty different project." 

To Batman — a man who decided to single-handedly clean up a corrupt and dangerous city while dressed like a small furry animal — that seems like a perfectly reasonable response.

"And your new-found powers give you a good deal more traction, or at least leverage, than you once had," he concludes. "I understand you haven't had much time to consider, but in our world people such as yourself often end up in costume, on one side or another. The League has been working on something that could help ..."

He glances over to The Flash.

The Flash lays a hand on Kid Flash's shoulder.

"These two did help me actually capture Captain Cold just a little while ago," he points out.

Batman thinks for a moment, and then nods decisively.

"Topaz — would you be interested in joining a team of young heroes, where you could learn from those with more experience—"

He nods to Kid Flash, who stands a bit straighter.

"—and use an existing support network to help keep you on your feet while you reorient yourself to a new world?"

"Oh um!"

She startles, and laughs lightly. That was a shorter interview then she expected, especially given that they're taking her up as a bit of a mystery box! But honestly, her power sense seems pretty sure that they're reasonably legitimate, and worst comes to worst she'll more or less be back where she started so...

"I'd be interested in trying it out, at least! I don't think that - all of my work would one hundred percent make sense through that lense? But it does sounds like you do a lot of important work and I'd love to get to be a part of that." 

He nods.

"Of course. I wouldn't ask you to commit sight unseen — but if you're okay with the idea in principle, that means that I can offer you housing at one of the League facilities while you—"

"Weeeeoooooeeeeeeooooooeeeeeeooooooo"

"—while I deal with that. Flash, that's the silent alarm at the Stewart Gallery. Could you—"

"On it!"

The Flash and Kid Flash both disappear in blurs of red and yellow.

"—show Topaz to ..."

Batman sighs.

"Or, I suppose I will show you to the League facility in question, and then come figure out how many toes Flash managed to step on. This way, please."

That's an - interesting way to do it? Maybe it's some sort of coded message for superhearing, though, so she really shouldn't judge - at least beyond the little reflex scrunching up of her face at the loudness.

She nods and follows along. 

The batcave is designed with many contingencies in mind — including the need to guide people through it without actually showing them anything. So the route to the teleporter is a little winding.

"I have some questions that I'll need answered as part of setting up a legal identity for you — but that's not urgent at the moment. I imagine you must have questions for me?" he asks.

A careful observer might note that he subtly grabs one edge of his cloak to make it swoop dramatically whenever the route goes around a corner.

She hums softly, and tucks a strand of hair behind her ear. 

"I have a lot of questions! I'm not quite sure if you're the right person to ask, though, but the first one on my mind is..." 

"Is there anything special legally I need to know about being a metahuman, here?" 

Hopefully, they're not too protectionist? It'll probably be a headache either way working on most big things but... 

He nods approvingly.

"If you don't put on a costume and go fight crime, no," he replies. "There is no mandatory registration, or anything like that. Of course, there is also no special treatment for metahumans in law — with the sole exception that if your powers give you dietary or more esoteric requirements, those must be accommodated under the Americans with Disabilities Act."

"On the other hand, if you choose to help with League activities such as disaster response, there are some things you need to know. Good samaritan laws, under what circumstances you can perform a citizen's arrest, and so on. There's a training module for that in the computer system, so you can review it at your leisure."

He pauses at a computer terminal beside the teleporter (a large tube-shaped contraption with a worryingly futuristic design) to link her biometrics from the scanners to a league identity file.

Her eyes drift up in thought, before she nods along at the comment about the tutorial. 

"I wasn't too too worried about that? I think before you go into the field looking for a fight or to butt heads with people, there's plenty you should figure out how you want to go even if there isn't any particularized law saying that it has to go one way or the other. Honestly, I was most worried that there would be some sort of sweeping rule against commercialization of superpowers - there's a lot of really dumb law and contracts on the books about automation back in my world, and having someone with superpowers doing things seems like it might cause the same kind of institutional problems." 

She watches him work quietly for a moment, then perks up a little. 

"...What would you say the Justice League is missing, as a team?" 

He pauses for a moment, to give the question due consideration.

"That's a very interesting question."

And he is not about to list the league's actual weaknesses, so he needs to find an answer that is probable, helpful, and doesn't give those away.

"I think one of our biggest problems is mobility," he finally answers. "Outside of a few members like the Flash or Green Lantern, who can quickly make their way to anywhere on Earth, we rely on a UN-funded system of teleporters, like this one here, in order to respond to emergencies. Unfortunately, the teleporters, while very safe and reliable, are expensive to construct and maintain. Only major population centers can justify installing them, which leaves the League unable to respond as quickly as I would like."

He turns to her.

"I think an ideal mobility solution would allow any League member to show up anywhere on Earth instantaneously — but all the systems that I've considered for accomplishing that would be prohibitively expensive, unreliable, or both. What do you think?"

She hums thoughtfully. 

"I think... Realistically, a lot of the high value targets are naturally pretty concentrated there anyways? I'm not sure how much superpowered situations present themselves outside of those kinds of areas - I wouldn't expect it to be that that common? And I don't really know exactly how fast the Flashes and Green Lanterns are, but it seems like it might be reasonable to try to set something up for making it easier for them to carry people to where they need to be, with shifts so you always have someone on standby for that purpose. Even if they're not quite as fast as I'm picturing, you could probably get pretty decent coverage out of that and the teleporter network. Failing that... some sort of network of planes or helicopters on standby to use by the teleporters instead? But there's never really 'fast enough' when you're the first and last real line of superpowered defense, I suppose." 

And now that she thinks about it, that's not really an answer to the question she asked? It's a closely related one, and one that she'd probably want to ask anyways but... She's not exactly skeptical, but the more she runs through it in her head the more it seems  more like a recently lagging KPI than a truly foundational issue. 

Can she get a sense of what's possible with higher level mergers? The 'seed power' of teleportation is probably a bit hard to squeeze into a slot, but she already has a few ideas for how she could build a decent long range teleportation power - maybe some sort of low mass limit low range teleportation power and a way to reduce effective mass, or maybe some sort of distance compression or sympathetic connection trick to make things closer then they'd otherwise be... It doesn't seem obviously unbuildable, at any rate. 

Wait...

She startles, and blinks back dramatically. 

"You have teleporters?! Honestly, I'm suprised it's that much of a problem to have enough of them if they're that reliable - rich people in my world spend tens or hundreds of millions on private jets, and a teleporter network seems like the sort of huge improvement over that that they'd be happy to set oodles of money on fire to make that scale as best it possibly can, even if they'd have to let you jump the queue once in a blue moon." 

It isn't very good at speculation; it would need to see her actual concepts to see if they fit together. But that seems like the kind of thing that is possible in principle.

"Regulatory capture and fearmongering," he replies. "The underlying technology of zeta beams is strong enough to teleport people between planets — and that is actually how the League's Martian Manhunter arrived on Earth — but using it with an unanchored endpoint is considerably riskier. The League's zeta beams are strictly point-to-point because the receiving end can act as a focusing crystal to prevent molecular decomposition in transit."

All of this is public, although little-known, information. The downside of UN funding.

"The problem is that some transport and oil executives got a copy of preliminary experiments with unfocused zeta rays, and used that to lobby to effectively ban the technology as unsafe. It's only because the League teleporters are for private use that I was able to get a waiver from the FAA&T."

"As for the locations that regularly need a League response: you're not wrong that the majority of our deployments are near population centers. But we also handle stopping natural disasters and alien invasions, both of which are not so correlated with population density."

She winces sympathetically. 

"I can see why that'd be a problem! Imagine that means that even if you had a different method that didn't have those sorts of problems it'd be hard to invest the time and money into it when there's a good chance much the same people would end up playing whack-a-mole, there." 

Probably there's also magic problems that happen in awkward places too - though it's hard to get a good sense of the base rates on those.

...This is honestly more awkward then she expected, but brave heart, Topaz! There'll be a chance to explain everything soon, she's sure of it, even if it's not now-now. 

"Are there any other technologies that come to mind with stories like that?" 

"Many," he agrees. "There is a particular kind of brilliant inventor who will create something revolutionary, without stopping to consider basic safety measures. And then their creations go rogue, or they can't find anybody willing to adapt the designs and put them into production, so they start to believe the whole world is against them, and sooner or later it becomes our problem. The League funnels a lot of the technology we recover from criminal operations to STAR labs—" and Waynetech "— to see if it can be adapted for safe civilian use, but with that kind of initial impression, many of the most useful technologies don't get adoption. We have successfully released better clotting-inducing bandages, and a few kinds of industrial equipment, but it's slow going."

"You're set up with temporary guest access to the teleporters," he declares, hitting a final key at the console. "So if you would just step through there ..."

She frownily nods along. 

"I'm glad that someone is working on it, at least." 

She steps through obligingly. 

"A-01: Topaz; 02: Batman"

The room on the far side is a wide open space, with colored sections of floor indicating that it might be a multi-purpose room. A pool of water sits in the corner, smelling faintly of the sea. In the distance, the sound of construction faintly echos.

"Welcome to Mount Justice. Formerly one of the League's fallback shelters, we've been refitting it for use by the proposed young hero team," he explains. "There is still some work being done on the backup systems, but the living quarters are fully ready. They're just through there, and you should feel free to claim whichever room you'd like, since you're the first person to stay here since the refit. The kitchen is down that corridor, as are the locker-rooms. Both should be stocked with essentials."

"There is a small town about a mile away, but for security reasons I'd ask that you not go there until you've taken the League's covert entry and exit courses. The teleporter will let you go to the Hall of Justice in D.C. and return the same way if you need to head out. I'll arrange for someone to come help with less urgent things like replacing your wardrobe tomorrow."

His tone becomes slightly gentler and less business like.

"I know losing your home like this can be difficult. Life often is. But I believe you have already shown the intelligence and strength of character to overcome it. Is there anything else you need from me before I go catch up with the Flash?"

She stares up at the room - it's pretty nice, for a fallback shelter, and pretty roomy too, nodding along distantly. 

"Is there a computer I can use to look things up and write things down here? Also, I'm not sure what exactly you have in mind, but having someone to contact to help keep figuring things out would be helpful? Don't think it's the best idea to do before I get settled, but I'd like to talk someone through my powers and maybe have a point of contact for odd problems that might crop up here or there." 

He nods.

"Sensible. For the computer, if you press here ..."

He taps a button on the wall, and a surprisingly orange holographic computer interface springs to life in the center of the room.

"For a point of contact, you can use the computer to message me. Or, in the case of an emergency, to send a general League alert. We'll get something more permanent sorted out in a little while — the plan is for the team here to have a rotating League member in residence to do training in different subjects — but you arrived before we had everything perfectly ready. Your first prospective teammate should be moving in tomorrow, though. My schedule is, unfortunately, seldom predictable, but I should have time at 17:00 tomorrow for a less rushed conversation, about your powers, the League, or anything else on your mind."

She pauses a bit, then bobs her head down firmly. 

"I'm happy enough to lock that in, then."

"...I think that should be all, for now?" 

There is a quiet movement of air, and if she turns to look, Batman will be gone.

The teleporter doesn't seem to have announced his departure, either.

..She titters lightly. It makes sense that the stealth guy would have stealth options, but... 

She grins a little. 

Okay! She claps her hands together excitedly, and subs out the anti-synergy power to be anti-synergistic with her current loadout instead of her previous one, pulling up a clock widget to get a sense of how fast the change is. 

Research time, research time! 

Do they have global warming here? She should probably double check the intel on what's up and who is in the justice league, too, and if it is all on the up and up... 

Are there any credible online resources about learning magic or psychic defense? That's honestly something that she should have patched earlier, now that she thinks about it - nothing would have stopped martian manhunter from just reading her mind from out of view and that could have gone in some nasty directions if they were worse people. 

Figuring out how to monetize her powers is... probably something that she should wait a little on? Ideally they have some sort of lawyer to talk to about it or maybe a business consultant? Really, the most obvious idea is just pumping her healing power and seeing what arrangements they can make to make use of that, but doing something with idk, chemical synthesis or a courier service. Getting a few million honestly sounds like it's probably not that that hard, if she gets some sort of pipeline set-up for it. Hopefully they have a person for that, but even if they don't, it's not like they look like they're angling that much to keep her contained-contained. 

She hems and haws about it for a bit, before sending batman a message: 

Looked things up a bit and saw that magic is a thing here! I'm not sure if it would be a good use of his time, but I'd appreciate it if e.g. Mr. Zatara would give me a look over, magically speaking? I'm a little worried that being from another universe might mean that I'll have some problems interacting with the magic of this world. 

Oh and yeah! What's up with aliens? There's a few aliens in the league, and there's a whole planet full of martians. Is there any sort of special rules around copying alien technology or media, for that matter? That's probably another angle worth considering. 

Also geopolitics is a good thing to get a bit of a better sense of - she tries to find a big ol' list of countries and pokes through them briefly to see if there's anything too glaringly different from what she remembers, and then looks for the bird's eye view of american history, letting the common knowledge power fill in the gaps and guide her a little. It's a little overwhelming, honestly, despite how natural it is, so she's glad that she's not pushing it too too much by just stacking a kajillion other powers to get more of a sense of things. 

And metahuman businesses! Any canonical examples of non-combaty non-superhero-y things where a metahuman just provides the service of their power? Might be worth seeing if she can track them down a bit later. 

At some point, her stomach starts rumbling and she has to go and check out the kitchen and nab a sandwich or something. This can be pretty hungry work! 

Globe: Warming, but slightly less than her Earth, if she can remember exact WMO predictions.

Current League roster, per justiceleague.org: Aquaman (King Orin), Captain Atom, Batman, Captain Marvel, Zatara (No relation to famous stage magician Giovanni Zatara — they've been seen in the same place at the same time), The Flash, Green Arrow, Green Lantern A, Green Lantern 1, Hawkman, Hawkwoman, Icon, Martian Manhunter, Plastic Man (Patrick O'Brian), Red Tornado, Superman, and Wonder Woman (Princess Diana of Themyscira).

Justiceleague.org looks very official, and has links to their UN charter. There are news stories about the various members doing various good things. There are also stories about how Superman is working to take over the world, and also pregnant with Batman's hybrid alien baby, but they're from tabloid-y places, not credible news sources.

Magic and psychic powers are definitely real and acknowledged, but weirdly under-discussed. There are no findable, reputable websites that will teach her about defending against either, although there are places willing to send her a correspondence course if she just provides a credit card.

Her message gets a read notification instantly, and a reply about 30 minutes later.

My scans detected no large enchantments, but it's still a good idea for Zatara to give you a more thorough checkup. If you go here you can see the League scheduling software and find a time when he's free. You should also remember to arrange a time to get all your normal vaccinations, although that will have to wait on your legal identity.

Aliens: there are a lot, apparently! Known kinds include Kryptonians, Martians, Appelexians, Dhorians, Guardians, and Rannians.

Rannians are Earth's closest neighbors, about 4.5 light years away. The government is working on constructing a long-range, low-frequency radio transmitter to talk to them, but the project won't be completed until 2014.

Superman has put up a site about Kryptonian art and culture, although it's not very popular. Mostly because Kryptonian ideas of beauty seem to have revolved around the very precise arrangement of otherwise quite plain crystals.

There don't seem to be any actual rules against sharing alien technology, but it is still in extremely limited circulation. Kryptonian technology apparently relies on an industrial base that Earth can't yet support, Martian technology is almost all alive (and only usable if you're psychic, because they haven't developed the concept of a 'user interface'), and Appelexian technology explodes on contact with non-Appelexians (and you should report possible sightings to the League here for responsible disposal).

Zeta-beam teleporters are reproduced alien technology, actually: scientists caught the backscatter of an interstellar zeta-beam transfer and rederived the corresponding principles. Those aren't in wide use for the reasons Batman discussed. Ditto a thing called a "Cosmic Energy Generator", which was recovered from a crashed spaceship and might offer unlimited free energy, but nobody is quite sure how it works and whether it has any side effects, so its use is banned other than in research.

There are persistent rumors that China and Russia are both working to weaponize captured alien technology, but there's no actual evidence of that, especially not in the form of actually available alien technology.

American history is weirdly similar, given that superheros have been a thing for decades. World War II was largely the same, even, although Encarta Populi (The Free Encyclopedia that Anyone Can Edit™) attributes the lack of superhero intervention in the war to a mass-scale mind-control artifact called the Spear of Destiny that made it too dangerous for allied superheros to deploy to Germany.

Metahuman businesses seem scarce on the ground, although there are a large number of hypnotists available for hire. There is one guy in Spain who will assist with lead and asbestos removal, apparently by eating it.

The kitchen contains, among other things: bread, cheese, a toaster, mustard, baby spinach leaves, lettuce, peanut butter, normal butter, dried seaweed chips, pickles, pepperoni, mayonnaise, a tomato, two bananas, and an entire cupboard of vacuum-sealed Wayne Enterprises-brand nutritionally complete rectangular food prisms, in a variety of flavors.

What kind of sandwich she wishes to make from these things is entirely up to her.

A peanut butter banana sandwich will do! 

Global warming is probably not the biggest problem and is one that's a little awkward to work on, but is from afar something squeaky clean to do, maybe? She puts a pin on that - that technology? captain cold was using didn't seem like it's the sort of thing that works remotely normally, so there's a possibility that doing something with that could help a lot. Probably worth asking about, though who is a little unclear. 

...Okay they've got to be trolling her. They look exactly the same! There's no way that they actually believe that it's not just some magical trick with illusions or some such? He's even publicly the magic guy, so they don't have the excuse of magic not normally being on the list of options for why things are happening! If anything, in a world with alien technology and metahumans, you'd want to see them in very different places at the same time. 

Oh, and yes! 'Atlantis' and 'Themiscrya' are both things, and both things with magic. That's probably a better direction to look than just trying to poke around online if there's as little public magic knowledge as it looks like there is. She also pokes a bit to see if she can find what happened to Doctor Fate after the war - he seemed Important.  

She sees if she can find some kryptonian music as ambience - maybe that translates better? Though Superman apparently has superhearing, so who knows if it'd make any sense to human ears. 

Having aliens out and about with no readily available FTL is pretty awkward - green lanterns aside. Is there anything public on the rules and regs of their corps? That seems like something worth checking out if she wants to deal with alien things more, and that does seem kind of shiny. A communication system with a 4.5 year ping seems not worth it to her, but what does she know? 

Okay, the power generator seems to like it a bit more when there's free powers so... get rid of the anti-synergy power and the common knowledge power and heck while she's at it get rid of the power intuition power - it seems like the main use of those is to get the basic information imparted rather than being the sort of things that give that much feedback as she goes, so it doesn't seem like it's a huge loss to ditch... 

She tries to feel out the space of communication powers - could she say, make a base power that pairs two objects for basic sound or text transmission without a range limit, or get a power that would let her have a 'call' with a specific person decided at power creation, even if they're far away or she doesn't know where they are? There's probably a lot of uses for something like that, and it's not obvious to her that it would have to be expensive to make. 

Does it have the same problem with vagueness with psychic powers as it does with magic? Probably it does, but there's no harm in seeing if she can at least download non-psychic mindreading resistance 101 into her head, and maybe see if she can get an internal only psychic mental defense constructing power, ideally one that wouldn't rely on her continuing to have 100% psychicness uptime to get some benefit out of the things she'd be able to make? 

She pokes the scheduler, and sees about getting a time a bit after the appointment with Batman to do the check-up with Zatara - probably it's best to have the context of that disseminated before she talks to the magic guy about magic things. 

The justice league seems... solid in some ways? But she gets the impression they're... a little low on a few things - though high on brawlers and fliers, and only a smattering of people who have the ability to do things truly detailed with the more esoteric parts of this world. She'll leave that as something to ponder idly, since there's just a lot going on, there, and probably a lot of it is just who's available - there really don't seem to be that many metahumans out there, given how diverse they are. 

She pokes at the training course thing that batman left her when her brain gets a little mushy and tired - receptively reading things laid out for her always helps a bit when she's a bit tired. 

Kryptonian music sounds a little bit like someone tried to compose an epic rock opera on a techno-harmonium. It sounds pretty strange to someone used to the western music canon, but basic concepts of euphony and rhythm are apparently universal, so it's not bad. If there are any parts that rely on super-hearing, she can't hear them.

Doctor Fate continued operating as a superhero for about a decade after the war, and then vanished in mysterious circumstances.

The full Green Lantern Operating Code is available on request at the nearest regional office, just over 5,000 lightyears spinward along the galactic arm. The substantially summarized statement on the Justice League website reads:

The Green Lantern Corps is an independent, interstellar police force. Members of the corps are required to comply with local law and work with local law enforcement, except when the local government is engaged in crimes against sentience. The Green Lantern Rings that serve as their badge of office allow all members of the corps to speak any spoken, written, or signed language, to fly faster than light, and to create energy shields. Green Lanterns are directed to hold the protection of innocent lives as their highest priority as they discharge their duties. Most Green Lanterns spend their time on anti-piracy enforcement, disaster relief, and facilitating diplomatic ties between neighboring polities. Earth's space sector is currently home to four active-duty Lanterns, three of whom reside on Earth.

Permanently adding magic properties to objects is not impossible, but it doesn't fit into a lowest-level spark; she'll need to break it down. Making a telepathic connection to a single, designated person does work, though, as long as she can touch them to establish the link and they don't resist. Does she want to be able to do that?

Establishing a connection to a specified person over a distance is harder, and feels like the concept is missing something.

Asking for general 'psychic powers' is too vague, but 'peak human skill at avoiding mind reading' and 'power that makes telepathy targeting her fail' both go through. The former seems like a skill she should be able to learn via practicing with the power active, and then keep going afterward. A bit of prodding eventually produces 'power that helps instill reflexive responses to psychic connections', which seems promising.

Does she want anything like that?

 She'll let the music run, and see about remembering the name of the artist for later to get more of that. Probably if there's any superhearing based element, it wouldn't work on these speakers anyways, but... this alone is nice. 

She clicks the link over 'crimes against sentience'. 

Oh looks like... not quite the same degree of problem? She takes the avoiding mind reading skill power - seems helpful to have, and potentially even more helpful to be able to disseminate. It doesn't sound like getting a proper telepathic power is impossible, but that's probably another thing that would be kind of impractical to do without talking it through with an expert. 

What else would work for that sort of communication power then, besides touch? A name and a face or some sort of sympathetic bond? Some sort of magical or psychic signature? She floats the thought on generating that kind of power to the assistant, then thinks about the - shape of those powers when asking about it for the remote communication connection power. 

Probably the simplest thing to do would be something like... creating the minimum viable magic walkie-talkie and some sort of duration increasing / effect stabilization power specialized as tightly as possible towards the artifacts the first power creates, and then merging the power? It's a bit moot point if she can't get them delivered, though, which would take a conversation with the green lanterns and/or an extensive read of their rules and regs to figure out what they're allowed to do for that sort of thing. Maybe they even already have a solution for this that they're not talking about? It's pretty hard to know if she's barking up the wrong tree, here. 

Oh while she's at it... There's no way rings that give you willpower-based energy manipulation powers aren't magical, right? Even if they aren't magical magical, there's got to be something interesting going on there - does the power creator have any thoughts about infusing magic willpower energy into things or ways to create force fields like they use? That seems like a fairly tangible specific thing that it might have a bit of an easier time with. 

- Objectively, she's probably procrastinating about trying to make bigger merged powers, but she's not... too too sure how to feel about that? It's not like she can't just get rid of it, but some part of her feels like it ought to be a show, you know? Or something that she works up to and busts out at the perfect moment to the lamentations of a big bad supervillain. But really, it's something that she can do at any time, and it seems like the power is pretty convinced that any strain from using the power is if anything good for her, and it's going to be hard to explain what she can do if she doesn't know what she can do herself. 

- She'll figure it out after these experiments. 

Avoiding mind reading: check. With the power in place, she can do it reflexively while working on other things. But it's a purely mundane bundle of mental habits that should be learnable on their own.

Projective telepathy is definitely possible, it's just not what she asked for earlier.

She can make the communication power work with a sympathetic bond, and work with limited range with a name and a face. The range is a bit hard to get an idea of, but it still seems pretty large. A magical signature also works, although she doesn't yet have a way to get someone's magical signature.

Giving the gift that context and then poking it for a communication power results in it offering an infinite-range, multi-target (although not at the same time) rate-limited mental communication power that works with any consenting recipient that she has a magical bond with. It seems almost as though a lot of the energy of the initial 'make contact with someone and then talk to them' power was tied up in connecting to them, not in actually communicating.

Making forcefields: definitely possible, although it's a tradeoff between range and stopping power.

Infusing willpower energy into things is more interesting; the gift thinks about it for much longer than it typically has to, and then offers a power that just boosts her willpower, with the implication that this would be sufficient to infuse magic willpower energy into things.

Oo. 

How would she go about making a magical bond with someone, though? It's hard to get a great sense of options there - but maybe some sort of contract or exchange ritual or? She's not sure what the options are, there. 

Really, she's spoiled for options, here - at least assuming that she can get a decent power for getting someone's magical signature from being near them? 

She plops in the willpower power, watching the clock on the computer as she goes. How long does it take to create and slot in? 

There are lots of ways of making magical bonds; does she want skill with bonding rituals? Or a power to do it directly, maybe? She can also definitely get a power to read someone's magical signature through prolonged proximity, if she wants.

It takes the gift exactly 36 seconds to grow the new spark, counting from when she confirms that she wants it to when it comes online.

Huh! A bit slower then she was expecting, honestly, but still enough to be super useful even in a decent frantic situation. 

No no, just knowing that she has the option for a foundational magic power is enough to make her grin! For now, though... 

Let's see what she can really do. 

She was thinking... Some sort of aura of vitality? Not healing or regeneration, persay, but vigor and endurance and maybe a bit of durability to fortify the body. 

And alongside that... Some sort of biological restoration power? Something that helps with aging on its own is arguably justifiable just on its own, but if she can squeeze some sort of general healing and/or patching up ability in too that would be good.

It could do an aura of vitality! To cover vigor and endurance and durability, it would be fairly weak and have a range of six feet.

The idea of biological restoration makes it ponder for a moment. She already has a regeneration power slotted. Does she want a kind of sensory power that lets her get detailed mental images of healthier versions of organisms she touches? Or maybe of what they looked like prior to obtaining an injury?

She hums a bit. 

Let's just keep the first power to vitality, then, and then make a complementary aura of endurance, let's say? If it helps, match the range and general design with the other one? 

Oh and what does the willpower thing feel like? Is there an obvious way to do magic willpower energy things? 

She'll have to get rid of a power or merge her willpower boost with her anti-mind-reading skill to make room for two aura-powers. She only has one slot left.

Having boosted willpower feels sort of like the opposite of choice paralysis. It is easier for her to decide to do something and then do it, easier to tune out distractions, and so on.

There's no feedback or sensation to suggest one approach or another — but it seems plausible that she should try willing it to happen, really hard?

...Okay, let's! 

Merge the willpower and mental defense one, and put in the auras. 

Done!

The little boost to vitality and endurance is definitely noticeable.

If she focuses with single-minded intensity on imbuing an object with will, she can get a small flurry of green sparks to surround it, one or two of which will sink into the object and apparently remain there.

For that, she just played around with a knife lying around in the kitchen. Just... focusing totally on it, concentrating on the weight and shape and undeniable physicality of it and bonding it with the firmness of her will until it feels certain that they are on and the same... It's both intense, hard work, and almost... relaxing? 

Interesting! She'll play around with it more later. 

She merges up the auras, then the auras in with her body changing power (if she can), watching the clock as she goes. 

Merging the two 1st-level powers takes 6 seconds. The resulting merged power takes a moment before it slips into an orbit with the regeneration power and becomes mergeable. Once it does, merging them takes 18 seconds.

She tries to feel out the power - what does it do, exactly? 

It provides an aura, extending ten feet, within which people slowly change toward a healthy, non-tired version of their current self-image. The changes prioritize tiredness, followed by contagious sickness, followed by features that affect a person's gender presentation, followed by non-contagious sickness, followed by surface-level features, followed by organs and bones. The regeneration is slow enough that it wouldn't do much (on its own) for battlefield trauma, but fast enough to keep up with the tiredness and muscle strain from moderate exercise.

Oo that is solid. 

Is the geometry and prioritization list fixed? Tiredness as a primary priority is a little awkward, but she can definitely work with that. 

Really, the biggest thing that would probably help is something to help the speed and size of the aura. 

Ideally, she'd have... what, the ability to enhance magical healing auras within an aura range depending on the determination to live and prosper, to make the whole thing merge up as she goes? Working backwards a bit... An anti-mental fatigue aura is probably a pretty natural thing to include? Really the question is what meta-aura things she can do - just a raw range and/or power increase could be good, or some sort of lingering effect or ability to 'store' the effects of the aura for a while in an object - ideally she can get a bunch of uptime out of something like this without having to dedicate her time to sitting around durdling in a hospital 24/7.

She pokes towards doing the anti-mental fatigue one, trying to lean it towards being kind of willpowery, as she contemplates the rest of her options and tries to feel out how practical they'd be. 

Does she want a compatible aura power that lets people gradually reduce mental exhaustion through force of will?

The geometry and prioritization of her current aura power is fixed — but that feels like a fact about this specific power, not about aura powers in general. Maybe if she took it apart and rebuilt it she could get something more flexible?

...Sure! Hopefully it gets a bit easier to use as it merges up. 

Oh, another idea... can she make a power that makes her able to manipulate the fine details of these kinds of magical auras instead, make tradeoffs and add some wiggle room to the details of the mechanics and the like? 

Yes! Does she want a power that will let her trade off between range and efficacy of any auras she generates, with the changes taking about a minute?

If so, what does she want to merge or get rid of to make room?

(The gift is starting to feel tired — it feels like it can grow maybe three or four more sparks before it has to rest.)

Sure! 

Merge the two mergeable 1 pters, and then make that power.

Done!

Merge 'em up! 

That leaves her with a level-1 power that lets her manipulate the range and efficacy of aura powers, and two level-3 powers. One is her slow perfective regeneration aura, and the other one is an aura that grants additional willpower, skill at avoiding mindreading, and ability to suppress mental tiredness.

The green lightning is oddly satisfying to watch. She takes a deep breath, and merges the two three pointers. Here's for hoping for something good! 

(And watches how long it takes, of course.) 

54 seconds exactly.

There's something qualitatively different about the merged 4th-level spark. It burns a dark blue that somehow feels deeper and brighter than it looks.

The combined power takes the form of a passive 10-foot aura that allows the people within its influence to use augmented willpower to reshape their own minds and bodies toward a healthier, less-tired, more-private state.

'more private'? 

She turns it on tentatively, feeling the ebb and flow of it as it expands and contracts, the power fading and strengthening at her whim. 

The concepts the gift uses don't always translate into language perfectly. It comes from the blending of 'skill at preventing mind reading' with the 'having a target image' part of the regeneration power; when the powers merge and everything blends together, being skilled at preventing mind reading means being able to subconsciously picture a 'healthy' state that is resistant to psionic information gathering.

Also, there isn't really a hard line between reading minds and reading emotions, or between reading emotions and reading blood sugar. With enough willpower and focus, someone could remodel their pancreas in a way that would interfere with some forms of psionic information gathering.

Oh that is shiny and pretty useful, even! A lot of people's ideals probably have enough embarrassing microdetails that that's helpful in that direction, too. 

She tries to get a sense of the full range and full strength - how much stronger is it when it's just applying to her versus the default state, and how large is the aura effect when she's stretching it out as far as she can while making it still have a noticeable effect? 

She writes out the times she's figured out in a simple lil text editor. 

Merging: 

1st: 6 seconds

2nd: 18 seconds

3rd: 54 seconds 

generating:  

36 seconds

So that means... a fourth level is 8 base powers generated. Those eight powers require four level 1 mergers, two level 2, and one level 3. 

8*36 + 4*6 + 2*18 + 1*54 = 402 s = 6 m, 42 s

That's... pretty fast. Not blazingly fast, the sort of thing that you can rely on being able to do in an emergency, but basically any situation where she has real control of when things start happening, the only real limit here is going to be how 'tired' the assistant is and how much of a good idea of what she's trying for she has. Probably she only has that once a day or so, from the recharge, but in principle if she ever has say, ten minutes, she can probably totally respec by just dumping everything. 

can she... 'save' power configurations? If she figures out something that works it'd be good to be able to replicate it precisely again, and ideally 'buffer her inputs' so that she doesn't have to think too hard about it and doesn't lose any time, in case that bit of time is ever important. 

She might as well use all but the last little bit of the power generation capacity - She should probably make a dedicated focus for the green lantern stuff - maybe some sort of... stainless steel generation power, if she can get that? The material probably isn't that important but having something that she can control the shape of and that'll last well is probably a good idea. If that works, she might as well just fill in the last slot with an anti-synergy power, since she's going to have this configuration set for a while, short of some emergency that means that she has to use the last power generation. 

A power to slowly generate stainless steel works, although it is pretty slow. This anti-synergy power is different: it doesn't feel dangerous to use. In fact, it feels sort of like the opposite of an aura.

With these last two sparks generated, the gift starts to feel genuinely lethargic. Its presence retreats from her mind — still there, but dormant, sleeping.

Experimenting with the aura range/power manipulation power shows that it takes about a minute to change between settings. The minimum range is exactly half her height and there is no obvious maximum range. Getting an idea of the strength of the effects is a little difficult to measure precisely, but limiting it to just herself and measuring by how many green sparks she can produce suggests that setting is about three times stronger. Extending the aura out to twenty feet makes it about four times weaker.

So presumably that means that it's proportional to square of the radius, at least expanding it out - which is at least a bit better then the cubic scaling you'd get if it was scaling by volume. 

Seeing no reason not to get two birds with one stone, she nabs another knife alongside the first one that she infused sparks in, and infuses sparks in it for maybe twenty seconds at distances a few feet apart, focusing absolutely and letting it slide slowly into the steel. Does it fit the square of the multiplication of the distance line when she increases it? She plays around a little with decreasing the range too, even losing maybe a foot off her height to see if it makes a noticeable difference in the maximum intensity. It's going to be really awkward if the best way to do this is to shrink into a bobblehead, but this is why you test things! 

She takes the newly infused knife and the previously infused knife up in each palm, and meditates a little, reaching out to feel the emerald sparks of will caught within each one. Do they feel different in character? Intensity being different is a given, but she's not sure if adding all of the extra concepts means that they ended up being comingled, here. There's only so much that just meditating can get her, though - she experiments with cutting up some of the banana peels with both knifes - is it sharper? Can she sort of... extend the blade or animate it, like the green lanterns seem to be able to do? How much of that is coming from the knife versus her directly? 

She looks up a picture of the rings that the green lanterns use - probably there's some sort of subtle structure involved that means that this wouldn't get the full benefit even if this worked, but she faithfully replicates the emblem and shape on one ring, then makes a smooth topped ring with otherwise the same dimensions. She tries infusing them both in turn on a minute's  timer, focusing on her resolve to be strong and make the world safe, and to get the tools she needs to make that happen. The most useful thing would likely be the personal forcefield that the lanterns seem to always have wrapped around her body, so she pictures that, making her steady and in control and ready to help whatever is around her. 

She feels out their power - can she make anything (like that) happen? Do they feel any different from each other? 

She puts aside all of the green light infused things well clear, then feels out the anti-synergy power for a short while, before flaring it on for a brief moment for science. 

Shrinking her height does not noticeably impact the power of her aura either way. Presumably for deep, consistent, mathematical reasons that this margin is too narrow to contain.

The knives both do a better job at cutting than un-enhanced knives. A careful inspection of their blades shows that they glow very slightly green while cutting. Whether that's the beginning of them starting to develop a projected edge or not is unclear — but it clearly depends on her willpower too. Using the knives while not paying attention leaves them roughly on the level of normal knives. Applying her will as she cuts is needed for them to produce the enhanced cutting effect. Exerting her will while cutting with a control knife doesn't exhibit the same properties, though, so both the imbuement and the focused use seem to be necessary.

Weirdly, a stainless-steel ring bearing the Green Lantern's sigil is noticeably easier to imbue willpower into than an otherwise equivalent flat-topped ring. The flat-topped ring doesn't do much when worn, but the sigilized ring produces what might be a faint shimmer of green across the skin of her hand. If she wants to test its defensive properties, the computer does have a "holographic training mode" shortcut on the desktop.

Turning on her anti-synergy power immediately makes the effects of her aura power cut out ... as well as making the computer's holographic interface look fuzzy, and introducing a strong flavor of cinnamon to her mouth.

She reflexively switches the power off the moment the taste hits her tongue - that's not usually a good sign! 

It doesn't seem like it's an actual problem problem, and it could... theoretically be useful, if she ever runs into someone with aura or light powers that she wants to disrupt? It's doesn't seem like the sort of power that plays nice, though, and she'd probably need more of a target to get that much out of it. 

She lets out a small sigh of relief at the aura power not getting stronger when she shrinks, before immediately starting to think about how it works if she grows - an extra foot of height honestly still seems pretty natural? 

Really though, the real gold mine is the ring! The design appears to help, and in principle at least something like this should work as something that she can do without an active investment, at least eventually. Hopefully Zatara will have some ideas about how to optimize it further? 

...Probably not the best idea to fight fight quite yet, but... 

She pokes around to see if there's a 'training dummy' or 'pressure plate' mode, or something like that? It doesn't look like it's consistent enough yet to be that that useful as a defense qua defense, but in principle it should be possible to see if she can say, enhance a punch with it. 

Oh and... do the knives deplete when she uses them to cut or no? 

She's not exactly working with precision equipment, here. If the knives are depleting, it's slowly enough to not be obvious.

The computer does have a 'punching bag' mode, actually. Along with a number of other pieces of holographic workout equipment including various weights, a climbing wall, and a trampoline.

She tries out the weights without the ring's assistance, feeling out the way her new body strains and shifts with the dumbells, slowly adjusting the weights 'til she can barely get through a ten set, then letting her aura restore her, and working her way up to near the point of failure with the barbells. It feels good, honestly, the warmth and flow of her muscles steady exertion, the relief and rush of strain and rippling strength, the little moment of ease as she settles into full extension. Without really thinking about it, she lets a good half-hour go by, idly pushing the focus of the zone into her ring for later. 

Oh! Yes, she was going to... 

She tries out one dumbell in her ring hand and focuses on calling on its power to help her lift. 

It's a little hard to disentangle 'focusing her willpower lets her push a bit farther' versus direct effects from the ring, but it seems like she can lift about ten more pounds with it than without it.

Okay! 

That's a start, honestly. She spends a good while longer infusing her ring and idly researching little miscellaneous superhero things, looking up some supervillains and superhero footage to get a bit of a better sense of what it looks like, before she notices just how late it is. 

...Right! 

Probably the aura helps a bunch with going without sleep, but she really shouldn't push that too much first day. 

She takes a long, luxurious shower, before scoping out a room to nab - they look all much the same, but she'll grab one of them by the water, and tucks herself in for the night. 

Nothing disturbs her rest — other than the inevitable strangeness of sleeping in a new location, in a strange new world, in a superhero-secret-mountain base with an in-progress plumbing system.

Gloop.

Thankfully, girlifying and having a power that erases mental fatigue when she focuses on it and heals away cramps and little discomforts almost as fast as she can cause it does wonders for her sleep quality! 

She bounces out of bed with only a bit of bleariness in her eyes, and goes makes herself some toast. 

She pokes around a bit more on what she can find on the green lantern policy stuff, then checks out the green lantern's schedule - she's probably figured out enough that it makes sense to poke them a bit about the policies and ways to use the green light - probably there's some big database the Guardians have with stuff about that that they might be able to share? She looks to see what their availability looks like, and sees about maybe booking one after the two appointments she has? Honestly though, it's probably best to leave that in their court - pressing too much seems a little unwise. 

One of the Green Lanterns on the League has a very carefully arranged and blocked out schedule — with a free spot for consultation today from 15:00 to 15:30, or tomorrow between 16:00 and 17:45. The other Green Lantern either doesn't use the League's scheduling program at all, or is free literally 24/7 for the rest of the year.

Poking around for more information doesn't reveal much more about the Green Lantern Corps' operating rules. The definition of crimes against sentience reeks of being the absolute bare minimum that a government has to avoid in order to not earn the corps' ire: genocide, torture purely to inflict pain and for no other purpose, mass deportation, slavery (very specifically and narrowly defined to work around some implied bizarre alien biology), systematic rape, and enforcing heritable punishments against species that do not have a genetic memory.

Other information about Green Lantern rings is mostly dispersed throughout various short interviews. She does find a comment from the organized Green Lantern that their rings are unforgeable proof of authenticity, akin to an Earthly police officer's badge. Her reading is interrupted when—

And a light brush of something passes over her. Topaz probably wouldn't feel it, were she not currently skilled at throwing off mind reading. It's not an intrusive probe; more just a passive ping to reveal people's presences.

Two silent, stoic green figures in blue cloaks and red double sashes float out of the teleporter, their body language vaguely uncanny.

It doesn't look like he's too tightly scheduled, so she'll leave it be.

She stiffens a little as the feeling rolls off her. So that's what it's like, huh? Might be worth trying to see if she can evade that sort of thing in the future - probably worth rebuilding a more narrowly specialized build, since this one is kind of a mess, honestly? 

She pauses her video and pops out of her seat, walking over to them with a light smile.

"Oh hello!" 

She toggles off her aura once they'd be in range - that's another point of awkwardness she should fix at some point, honestly - and lifts out a hand for Miss Martian to shake. 

"Good to meet you! I'm Topaz. Imagine you're moving in today?" 

:Aaahh! Uh, I mean—:

"Aaahh!"

The smaller figure (with a white undershirt) jumps in surprise, her features coming alive with an expression of chagrin.

"Hi!"

She reaches out to shake the hand.

"Sorry, I wasn't expecting anyone to be right by the teleporter. I'm Miss Martian!"

:Uncle, why on Marzz does the teleporter lead right into the middle of the base?: she asks at the same time, the thought clearly not directed at Topaz.

:Space constraints on the layout due to the bulky nature of the zeta crystals,: the larger figure answers. Unlike Miss Martian, Martian Manhunter doesn't suddenly start emoting. Whether that's because he knew she was there, or he's just like that is hard to say.

"Martian Manhunter," he introduces himself, giving Topaz a nod. "It's good to meet you."

Aww poor telepathic disaster girl! She shakes her hand firmly. 

Doing this with the aura down is kind of awkward, but she focuses a bit on making sure her thoughts stay private, the intricate little procedures of her fingers flitting against each other to fidget playing again and again in her surface thoughts. 

She smiles winsomely. 

"No worries! it's good to meet you as well! Been pretty impressed by the league so far, honestly - you've all been very hospitable and accomodating."

She bobs her head to the side a little and steps politely back, letting her aura flicker on for a moment to make sure she's doing it right and for the burst of reassuring strength. 

"I think part of it is just that the center is where you want the exit to be! I heard from batman earlier that this was originally meant to be a bit of a bugout base, so being able to get in and out quickly from anywhere inside seems like a good idea to me, even if it makes the transition into the space a little more awkward." 

Miss Martian cocks her head.

"I guess that makes sense — it's just weird, because Martian dwellings have this —"

:How do you say z'errat?:

:Antechamber:

"—antechamber between the privacy shielding and the main living area, so you can feel people when they come to visit," she explains. "I'm not sure I've ever seen a building without them, actually, but I guess it makes sense if this wasn't intended as a living area."

She nods along. 

"I think that's part of the point of the separation of the teleportation module and the announcement system? But I can see why it'd be disorienting, definitely, and even as a human, this place does feel a little... compressed, I suppose?" 

...Okay honestly now she's feeling like she doing something wrong not doing anything with her powers. She ditches all of the one pointers, and sees if she can get another copy of that willpower one pointer, and something to make the infusion process more efficient and less conspicuous, and then merge those together? 

The duplicate willpower spark fails to form; she gets a kind of confused impression from the gift, because she already has one of those?

"Miss Topaz, my niece is quite new to Earth," Martian Manhunter interjects. "That's one of the reasons that I suggested she move in here, to get experience with humans. But when Batman mentioned that you had moved in as well, I realized it was a chance to kill two birds with one stone."

:Not literal birds, it's an expression; 'carve a bidirectional tunnel':

"I'm told that you will require a replacement wardrobe and similar items; Miss Martian would benefit from having a human to show her around and help her learn to fit in. I am still not entirely sure how young woman's Earth fashion works, myself. After we get her settled into her room, would you mind taking her with you on any outings you may have planned?"

She smiles a little awkwardly. 

"I'd be happy to! I'm new to this world myself - though the differences I imagine are a good deal smaller than those between mars and this earth - so I might not be the best guide, but it'd be good to learn together with her." 

In that case... she still wants a power that makes an object a better vessel for willpower energy, and a way to make the process more subtle and perhaps a bit more precise - can she add in something that dampens the apparentness of willpower magic things (or something more specific to the infusion process, perhaps?) she does, then? That should get her too much the same place, at least as long as she can keep the aura up. 

"Do you have arrangements in mind for paying for the clothes and all? Batman wasn't entirely clear on how that would work." 

That's a lot of things! It can't quite see how to do them all as one power; does she want a power that makes will more subtle and easier to control in an area? That fits in a single spark.

Martian Manhunter somehow manages to convey the impression of a sigh without moving or otherwise appearing to do anything at all.

"Batman sometimes forgets that other people have limited amounts of money," he confesses. "I can give you some starting cash that you can consider either a welcome gift and a thank you for looking after my niece, or a debt, if you prefer not to accept charity."

He reaches a hand behind his back and comes out with a bundle of bills. He counts off two groups of $343, and hands one to each girl.

Miss Martian takes the bills and tucks them into a hole that opens on her chest and then closes without a trace.

:Humans tend to find adding or removing things from a vacuole distressing,: Martian Manhunter comments. :I recommend pretending that you have pockets.:

He telepaths a close-up schematic diagram of a pants pocket.

Oh, she was thinking of two seperate powers to merge together - one for subtlety (and a bit of precision as a bonus if she can fit it), and one to improve vessels? She doesn't really need it to have a big range - just large enough to cover the ring is enough, honestly, and it's fine if it requires some level of touch, too, if that helps narrow things down. 

"Oh, thank you!" 

She pockets the money gratefully. 

"I'll do my best to pay it back, financially or otherwise." 

She turns to Miss Martian. 

"Would you like to go take a look around the base with me, then?" 

Oh, that's much more possible!

The gift generates a spark that does something to space in an area that dampens the glow from willpower and makes it slightly less prone to fizzle from small lapses in concentration as a side effect, and another one that makes a small, held object 'deeper' in a relevant way. The two sparks like each other a lot — they orbit nearly touching.

Miss Martian perks up.

"Yes, please! Maybe we should start with finding my room so that I can drop off my luggage?"

(Said luggage is a mottled grey-brown sphereoid that has been sitting at the Martians' feet, conveniently undescribed, this entire time.)

Once they slot in, she merges them and gets to work! 

"Sure! Outside of my room, they're unassigned - do you have any preferences for what room you'd like to take?" 

She gestures her over to the holocomputer and pulls up a map of the place, then points to a room a good bit away from the zeta tube and a decent bit away from the exits. 

"Maybe this one, if you want to be able to have a bit longer to see people coming in?" 

"Oh, goodness! That's a lot of empty rooms. Let me think ..."

After a moment of deliberation, she does go with the one Topaz pointed out.

"I'll leave you to it," Martian Manhunter says, beginning to float back toward the teleporter.

There's a brief, tightly focused thrum of telepathy between the two martians. The edges of it don't resolve themselves into words like the other psychic spillover that Topaz has been feeling: instead, it's a complex burst of familial love and well wishes.

Aww cute! 

I think the next power is... something for that personal force field that the green lanterns have around them, even when they're not actively using a big defensive construct? Having some sort of dedicated superpowered defense is probably a good idea. She's not totally sure if it make more sense to make it just a power she has and then make it something that she imbues in later when it merges up into a 3 pointer, or try to make a power explicitly for generating green light ward charms? Does the assistant have any thoughts on that? She's leaning a bit towards the former since it seems like that's the more fundamental thing to do be doing and that seems like that might be more helpful in a merger, but the point of this is to create something that she can use when she's not using a super dedicated build, so maybe being a bit hacky is fine? 

"Alright! Off we go, then." 

She turns off the screen and sets off to her new room. 

The sparks spin for a moment in consideration.

It can make a power that gives her a weak personal forcefield, but it wouldn't be very strong and would shatter after a hit. It can also give her super-intuition for structuring will in defensive ways. A power that directly generates will-based defenses is ... not too big, like some of her other power ideas, but carries the sensation of a category error. Like asking for a number that is also a doughnut.

Does she want one of those two?

Miss Martian telekinetically picks up her luggage, and starts floating toward the appropriate corridor.

"So where are you from?" she asks, spinning to face Topaz while floating backward.

A light brush of mind-reading tries to tap into Topaz's spatial awareness, and is rebuffed.

Her eyes can't help but jump to watch her baggage float - it's amazing to see, really. 

Let's do the super intuition one - that sounds a lot more native, even if the other one would probably end up a bit green after merging everything up.

Can she sort of get some sort of power to encode patterns like those she gets a sense of into the will infusion? Or something in that general direction - something to help it / the user specifically produce that kind of effect. That... probably dodges the category error, since it sounds like the problem there is that the ability to manipulate the green light is sort of fundamentally general? That also sounds like it disqualifies the other thing she was thinking of, which was some sort of dedicated flight / mobility power - though the same intuition power approach would probably work...

"The greater toronto area (in canada) in another universe! Ended up moving around a bit for university, but I was there for my whole life, pretty much, 'til I got beamed up to another universe with some flashy new superpowers! It's a bit of an adjustment, to say the least." 

Intuition for applying will defensively, and skill at shaping will into patterns both bloom to life within her.

It's now obvious that she has been doing the equivalent of shaping sand into rough castles for her ring: the will within has taken on the shape she was pushing for, but only in the roughest strokes. With more precise visualization and focus, she should be able to shape it into something more detailed and solid.

"I can imagine!" Miss Martian agrees. "What was university like? M'arzz is too far to pick up most broadcasts from Earth, but we used to get TV shows before everyone changed encoding formats, and there were a lot of shows set in high schools, but not really any set in universities."

When they reach her chosen room, she spends a moment scanning the available space before setting the luggage in an available corner and giving it a kind of telepathic poke. The luggage unfolds into a vaguely skeletal-looking bookcase containing a set of crystal disks, a remarkably normal wooden box, and a bundle of something like leather.

She'll merge them when they're done, please and thank you! 

"It's a little hard to describe! I think the biggest differences I noticed is that there's a lot less structure, in some ways? There's even less of a 'class' as a social unit then in elementary or high school, so there's a lot more social spaces you just have to sort of figure your way into. And there's a lot more open time - the classes are a lot longer but a lot sparser. It makes it sort of feel like you're just living your life and have this interruption of the class and the homework, rather than being quite as much the center your whole life orbits around five-in-seven days of the week, if that makes sense? Sometimes that makes it a lot less stressful, but since the work keeps getting harder as you go, it can still really take a toll on you." 

She strolls over to the spot where her luggage is, crouching down to take a (hopefully polite) closer look at it. 

The sparks snap together readily enough; the overall combined power gives her the intuition and precision to layer defensive will into an object.

The luggage is strange. It is, on the one hand, clearly alive. A close look reveals that it isn't just bone-like: it's primarily composed of actual bone-analogue.

On the other hand, it's just a shelf. It's not putting down roots or anything. It seems perfectly content to just hold Miss Martian's stuff.

The stuff itself is equally interesting: the leather is also clearly alive, although it doesn't seem to have a skeleton of its own. The disks aren't alive, but looking at them brings a set of not-quite-memories she's never had before to mind — at least until Miss Martian does something, and the disks stop reminding her of journaling and start reminding her of reading the blurb off the back of an autobiography.

"Oh! I guess that makes sense — the shows weren't really clear about how much time people normally spend in high school? Because sometimes characters would be there like, all the time, and sometimes they would just meet up there and then go do other things? There were a lot of opinions in the, uh ..."

She stares into space, visibly trying to work something out.

"... fan-anthropology group-thinking project? I guess? I don't really know the English word for it. Anyway, there were a lot of different theories about what a high school schedule actually looked like."

Oh goodness!

Telepathic data storage! And not just telepathic data storage, something that at least sort of works for non-telepaths! The living technology is also kind of interesting. She smiles slightly at the sight. They seem pretty small and readily available too, which is a promising sign. 

"It varies a little, but I think about 7 hours a day is pretty typical - mine was 8:30 to 3:30, if I recall correctly. As for how to say that... 'fan club' is probably the most idiomatic way to describe a group of people who meet up to talk about a media property, though I guess that depends a bit on how much the telepathic component makes it structurally different? You make it sound like it's maybe something closer to a mind-to-mind forum discussion or some sort of academic project, perhaps?"  

Oh, that's a slightly larger defense bias then she was expecting! Probably worth recomping at some point, but for now... Probably the lowest fruit to pick is unmerging the four pointer and getting it reunited with the original willpower power? If she can, she'd like to keep the aura compression adjustment, but she doesn't know if that's the sort of thing that persists through mergers and all. 

Okay, yeah, no, she needs to do something about this, even if only for other people's sake.

She hums and pops back up to her feet. 

"- Have you talked to Martian Manhunter about etiquette around telepathy here, by the way? It's been a really interesting experience feeling all these new sensations but it's been a lot, too, and I don't want you to get the wrong idea about how you should expect people to treat it." 

Miss Martian's bodylanguge freezes for a moment in what is, counterintuitively, obviously embarrassment. Then her thoughts catch up, and she puts a nervous expression on her face and rubs the back of her head.

"I know humans aren't telepathic, and he did warn me about not reading unshielded surface thoughts — And I haven't been doing that!"

She waves her hands, starting to get agitated, as though to ward away the thought.

"I've been leaving your thoughts alone, I promise! But I'm ... not really sure how much you can feel me? Like, for a long time we thought humans were just intensely isolationist, because you guys never responded to our messages. And then you started putting out radio broadcasts, and we realized that you weren't telepathic, and that's crazy. Only it seems like maybe you can do receptive but not projective telepathy, and you were hearing our messages the whole time but couldn't respond? But I don't want to just treat you like, like, a table ..."

She takes a deep breath.

"Sorry, I'm babbling. Do you want me to ... shield more? Can you hear the furniture or my outfits? Because I can't really make those any quieter than they already are."

...She kind of wants to hug her, poor thing. 

She tries to let that slip outside of her mental defenses as best she can, if that's a thing? She might try to sneak a peek and even if she doesn't, the power is kind of overly comprehensive enough that she's not totally sure if it would actively make it harder for a telepath looking at her to get a sense of her emotional state, so... 

"Just speaking for myself... It's basically okay to poke me, as long as you don't try to probe my private thoughts? My power shapeshifts me a bit in a way that makes me more able to control where my thoughts go and some of the details of what comes out, so I don't think it'll be a problem long term? It might take a little bit of adjustment for me, though. I can't hear your thoughts passively, or that of your furniture or outfits, though I could feel when you tired to access my sense of direction, earlier." 

She gives her a small open smile, then pauses in thought, the intuition guiding her a little. 

"but I think I might be able to if you focused really hard, for idiosyncratic metahuman power reasons?" 

Her lips purse as she tries to remember a bit of her research - it wasn't really a focus of hers but... 

"Humans can be telepathic - and telekinetic, for that matter - in a way that looks from the outside like what martians do? I remember hearing about Adam Blake who had an unusual mutation that made him a pretty powerful one - he was a superhero active in the 60s, I think? I think there's a few other people like that out there, though they're probably a lot less impressive than what you are used to. A good amount of humans have learned magic, too, and I think that there's probably a bunch of ways to do mind to mind communication through that, too? I think an average human has never even heard of the concept of telepathy, though, much less developed a faculty for it - I'd be surprised if having some way to communicate mind to mind or do parapsychic tricks is more common than one in a million or so, so even if it's theoretically possible for any given human to hear that sort of thing, they wouldn't have any sort of sensitivity training or much context for what to look for. And part of that means that there's no - set up social expectations about what kinds of telepathic access are okay or unobtrusive, just the knowledge that telepaths can do lots of scary things to you if they want to and they're powerful enough, and a vague sense that they're probably not all bad if Martian Manhunter is on the league." 

She pauses, and steps a little closer to her tentatively. 

"I hope that makes some sense to you?" 

The body language and deliberately putting her hug-feelings outside her defenses is enough for M'gann. She wraps Topaz up in a hug, getting a little bit shorter to fit under her chin.

"I'm sorry — I didn't even notice looking at your spatial awareness earlier," she tells Topaz's collarbone. "It's a reflex, because nobody likes midair collisions. I ... guess that means you probably don't have much idea of what's even possible with telepathy?"

:[A mental image of traffic through the main cavern outside her neighborhood, the many streams of hovering martians seamlessly splitting and weaving, twisting around one another in a flowing braid that somehow never seems to result in a crash or even a traffic jam; the low hum of a hundred minds reaching out to touch each other, building a gestalt impression of the shape of the cavern that glows against the walls, making the place itself seem almost alive.]:

The bright spark takes a bit of prying to come apart — but it does come apart, into two lower-level sparks: one for her regenerative aura, and one for boosted willpower and avoiding mindreading.

The orbit of the remaining sparks is a bit chaotic; the two that were merged still like each other, but the willpower boost also likes her green-light-imbuement suite. But the green-light-imbuement and the regeneration don't like each other, which keeps all three sparks from orbiting in synchronicity. Instead, they form a chaotic double pendulum sort of arrangement.

She hugs softly, and leans into her, a little untensing sigh slipping out her chest. 

"It's okay. It's just something you should be mindful of going forward, you know?" 

She lets her reaction to the thought slip out of her defenses, just basking in the moment of simple closeness, tamping down her nerves as best she can.

That's pretty to watch - it reminds her a bit of that animation she saw of an animation of a pathing algorithm of hundreds of people just seamlessly swarming and stepping past each other. This seems a bit more improvisational, but it's no less beautiful for that. It seems kind of... intimate, too, in the way that sitting together on a long train chatting each other up is, for all that it's a fairly transient connection. A highway really doesn't compare.  

"I really don't know too too much - my power gives me a bit of an instinct for mental defense, but that doesn't translate particularly well for understanding what's going on with telepathy. And I don't have much of a sense of what it's like to be telekine, either." 

She merges together the willpower imbuement suite and the willpower et. al boost once they settle into place. 

They go together without too much trouble, the combined power deepening her control.

Miss Martian radiates the sense that she doesn't want Topaz to be nervous.

"Yeah, you're right," she agrees, determination filling her voice.

She pulls back from the hug a little way and smiles up at Topaz.

"I wanted to come to Earth to explore, and that means there will definitely be new things I need to learn and remember," she decides.

She releases the hug and floats over to her shelf, flipping through the storage disks.

"I don't know if I can really describe what telepathy is like either, though," she muses. "But for the opposite reason: I'm not really sure what it would be like to not have it. But I know you can share some of the sensations ... aha!"

She pulls out a disk that doesn't look any different from the others, although looking at it is reminiscent of the track list of a CD.

"My cousin is part of a dreaming quartet — sort of a sensory jazz ensemble — and I have one of their albums. This one has pretty good impressions of group telepathy, I think. We could sleep on it tonight?" she suggests, voice becoming a little hesitant. "Like a sleepover! And I could paint your nails?"

She laughs brightly. 

"...You know what, sure! I've got an appointment with batman for 17:00, but I'm sure I'll be able to fit in some time for some R&R." 

She nods along a little. 

"Maybe you'd want to start with what you like the most about it? Being able to ground it in particulars helps a lot with explaining it, I think. Beyond that... I think the most important thing is that people don't expect to feel someone else in their head? I don't think it's a big problem if for now you end up feeling where people are and getting a few other stray details for now, as long as you don't end up unsettling people and you keep following the sort of rules that you would on mars? Some of the heroes here might also have some training there, too, so you might want to be extra careful about doing it with people with powers and costumes, too." 

The new power makes it - not quite easy, exerting your will to bend the shape of the universe is not something that natively comes in 'easy' - but approachable to weave in a little more detail of the defenses, to the imprint the structured static and firmly supported seals of thought into the ring, making it nestle in with the environmental shield she's been building and the formless fuzz of potential, to ward her mind and nestle in a net of will-wire to keep her private thoughts safe and sound. It's slow work, still, especially when chatting like this, but she can feel it helping a little already. 

She puts one hand on her hip and the other to her chin in an obvious thinking pose.

"I guess the thing I like most about it is just how it lets me get to know people?" she muses after a moment's silence. "I like learning about people, and body language is a really cool way to do that, but it's not really the same, you know?"

"Yeah..." 

She hums, and plops herself down on the bed, posed across from her. 

"There's a certain - instinctual immediacy of being around people, of being able to see or even touch people that's hard to replace, for humans. I have to imagine the difference is even more dramatic for a telepath." 

She taps her thigh lightly in thought.

"I think... that's part of why I like reading people's thoughts in text so much? It's just divorced enough from the sensory experience of someone's personhood that it doesn't compare too directly to physical closeness, but it can really give you a lot of insight into where people are coming from that you can't usually get anywhere else." 

She blinks, processing this.

"Oh my goodness! You must have so many autobiography recommendations," she deduces, bouncing excitedly. "Do you ... think that I could find someone who would be willing to share their ability to read?"

"If it's not too involved, you can share mine? I'm sure there's plenty of people who'd be willing to consent to that sort of thing for a superhero, honestly." 

She hums thoughtfully. 

"As for autobiographies... I'm not totally sure if these exist in this world, but I'd recommend "Surely, you're joking, Mr. Feyman", Stephen King's "On writing", and maybe Anne Frank's diary, if you're okay with something heavier? Unfortunately, a lot of them I only really know from reputation or excerpts I've stumbled across - I'm a lot more of a blog or fiction reader, really."

And putting a pin on the fact that telepathic skill sharing is possible - that's so cool and she has so many ideas already for making use of that. 

A telepathic probe tries to settle on her, touching parts of her language center and muscle memory.

"It's not involved! It just requires some prolonged contact to pick up a skill in a permanent way," Miss Martian explains. "And it's a bit easier if the person donating the skill actively uses it, but that's not a requirement. What kinds of blogs and fiction do you usually read?"

She lets it settle, relaxing back her barriers and refocusing her spare attention on making more physical shielding.

"I'm a bit of a sucker for xianxias and crunchy litrpgs? But I'm happy with any fantasy or sci-fi you can name as long as it has enough soul in it. As for blogs... I think a lot of them are too recent to be around here, but I followed a few with a bit of a focus on psychology, statistics and politics - there's something viscerally satisfying about following people along on the journey to fix things and figure things out, for me." 

The conversation quickly turns into an interrogation on different kinds of Earth media, during which it becomes apparent that Miss Martian is, in some respects, a terraboo. That impression is borne out by the shopping trip, which somehow ends up with a wardrobe mostly suited for a 1980s sitcom protagonist, although she does get some more modern clothing on Topaz's advice.

She's pretty sure she'd be so insanely outed if she was even a little bit less ignorant of human culture and how clothes work when they aren't on a screen or some sort of shapeshifting telepathic organism but she is so! 

She buys a nice swishy blue dress, a set of fairly modest undergarments, and a small handful of shirts and tank tops, some yoga pants and a few hairties, just to try them out. She nabs a thumb drive while she's out and about - there's a lot of things that she wants to try in that direction when she has the time. 

When she gets back, she shows her around the computer system and shows her a few more things to watch and read as she settles in. 

With that dealt with, she goes off to her room and starts poking at all the things she's been so excited to look at! 

Her instincts are a little a mess here - there's so many new sparkly things to deal with! But in terms of prioritization... 

Magic things, big downside risks from supervillains, figuring out something for immortality, and helping the green lantern corps out are all reasonable places to start, and seem at least kind of tractable? Magic research probably is something that she'll need to get a bunch of consultations around before she can really get much of a sense of what's reasonable to do without being directly babied by her power or just going into the research cave and plopping in a bunch of powers around various subfields and writing herself primers on what's what. Call that plan B. 

She pokes around online a little - back home, there's the FBI and Interpol most wanted lists for the most notable criminals still at large - is there something like that here? The league does seem kind of criminally undersupplied with trackers, in her opinion, and she should be able to change that with a bit of work. 

Oh and... speaking of supervillains... Sinestro has a ring like the green lanterns, but with a different color that looks to work a little differently? If there's two, there's probably more. Can she get a power that tells her something about the different colors and what they do? Honestly, a power for that isn't likely strictly necessary, at least for identifying the colors, since she can just poke the Gift with a big list of colors and/or emotion words to try to figure what colors have what emotion and then try to get it to pitch powers unique to each color? Yeah, that sounds like a reasonable idea, let's! 

Themiscyra is weird! An island of immortal women patroned by the Hellenic gods is not exactly within her experience. There's got to be something that she can do with that - it's not like there are no people who are already faithful off paradise island, and a lot of people convert. Really, it depends a lot on the leadership situation and what the magic there actually requires. She goes and tries to book a time with wonder woman - if nothing else, she does want to talk to someone about her options for weapons and combat training, and hopefully she'll be able to enlighten her a little about the situation, there? Being polite and taking it at least a little slow is probably better than trying to rush it as dramatically as she really wants to. 

As for her powers... 

She does really kind of want to break down and reoptimize the green light stuff - the aura half of the 4 pter is pretty tangentially related. The basic core of the imbuement skill power, the willpower power, and the deepening power is good, and adding an associated skill is probably a good way to make use of a 3 pter slot. As for what she can do with the rest of the points, if she's doing a dedicated build... 

Something around 'lanterns', whatever those are? More skills - she really does want to pick up some sort of mobility option soon... She's not touching magical bond powers until she can get some oversight there. Probably the guardians have figured out most of what there is to figure out about the purely green light side, but she wouldn't be surprised if she could upgrade them meaningfully in a different direction. Does the will-shroud effect linger on the items she imbues? If it does, that's an angle all on it's own to try to upgrade the entire corps. It's probably not a huge edge, but if it's an indefinite buff to control and makes it easier to use inconspicuously at important moments... That could be huge, even before considering other things she could add. 

Decisions, decisions. 

Most wanted criminals: various unofficial lists, but the authoritative source seems to be a set of documents sourced from the FBI's Uniform Crime Reporting database.

Wonder Woman: bookable via the same League-internal appointment calendar, although she doesn't actually have a free spot until late next week due to something that is only marked down as "The Thanatastic Games".

It can definitely do a power that provides intuition about the different colors and their emotional associations! Does she want that?

Alas! Still, she books the next available slot. 

It's a little unfortunate that the concealment shroud doesn't linger, but that's fine - the principle of the thing still applies, and there's no reason to think it wouldn't be possible to do something likethat, and it's not like that sort of thing is useless, even. 

She hums. She doesn't want to use up too too much of her power generation capacity before the meeting, so... 

Jumpy thing. She gets out one of those feelings words for kids and skims her eyes along it. Could she get a power structured like the willpower one for hope? Awe? Anger? She goes on like that for a while to see where she where she gets a hit. 

Can she get any power with a color like that that will help with charging stuff like her ring more easily? Can she feel out which ones are better for armor or offense and mobility? 

After a bit of prodding, she gets obvious 'yes' responses for anger, fear, hope, sympathy, and love. Other emotions get responses more like 'you're missing necessary prerequisites' or 'very weakly' instead of a clear 'no'.

For a power that will make it easier to charge her ring, she gets offered a spark for supporting her ability to feel hopeful.

As for which color is better for which use: asking for a color that is well-aligned with something like 'armor' produces uncertain feeling responses that have a lot in common with the answers she got for non-obviously-yes emotions. After a few of these questions, it generates the strong feeling that she is asking the wrong kind of thing, but not quite to the level of being a category error. Like asking what kind of dog is best for going on vinyard tours with — not an impossible question, but also not really the usual way of categorizing dogs.

She purses her lips a bit. 

Oh before she does anything with that! She was thinking... could she get a power for - writing down some sort of specification for the powers that she chose, preferably digitally? That would make her a bit more comfortable switching them out willynilly and might be interesting for Zatara to look through, perhaps after a translation effort or two. 

The gift puzzles on that one for a bit, before producing a spark that lets her focus on any single other spark and produce a unique identifier for it in the form of a list of pairs of convex subsets of a tetrahedron and rotations. The description for that spark itself is twenty two items long, the description of the second-level spark is eighty three items long, and the description of the fourth level spark is two hundred and five items long.

Oh shiny! 

There's a spreadsheet program here somewhere... 

That's honestly not even the worst data entry task that she's had to do. She writes a little note up top explaining what it is the best she can - probably she'll have to figure out something to make it a more meaningful representation, but that is super duper later work. 

Okay after that... 

Let's ditch everything but the 4 pter! The power was kind of slapped together in a rush and it's blending too many things in too many different directions. 

So... 

What she wants, in terms of changes to the existing power, is to get rid of the chaff around the lingering aura specialization, and respec it down to a 3 pter of related green powers - something close to what she was doing already. 

The base green power and connection. 

The skill at imbuement. 

The 'deepening' power. 

And the skill of choice - she'll leave it as defense, for now. 

She doesn't need the shroud power - it was fine for purpose, but not lingering is enough of a dealbreaker to make her happy to discard it, and get herself down to just those. 

Do all of these powers merge into each other? Her first thought is (imbuement, deepening), (base green, defense skill) - matching the crafting edges with themselves and the skill with the power it is being expressed through, but she supposes there's no reason not to try every pair exhaustively to see how they differ, beyond a bit of time that she does in fact have. 

She's not too sure what to do with the blue side of things - there's something poetic about mirroring it, but that seems wasteful, somehow. 

It takes a bit of Hanoi-like shuffling, but the sparks are perfectly content to be rearranged in her proposed manner. Except ... all four of the sparks she chose (intuition for how to imbue will into things, intuition for using will defensively, making an object 'deeper', and boosted willpower) synergize with each other. So she can merge all four together. The result is a second-level power that tightly coheres into a set of skills for manipulating will and embedding it into things, including her mind.

Oh okay, that's how that works ^^

Eeee! She's going to get to have so many awesome powers!! 

She wonders if gets better results for the green light power - the power of focus - being tightly focused. Probably not, but a girl can dream! 

Oh... Could she do it to someone else's mind? There's a lot of potential there, once you get past the obvious concerns. 

Okay, so, for the blue side... 

She wants to see if she can get some sort of... batch process going, some way to sympathetically copy the imbuement out or mirror it or just spread it out amongst several objects efficiently? In an ideal world, she can produce enough to say, give a mental shielding pendant or cuff link or bracer or ring or whatever the best most socially acceptable form factor is to whole groups of people in government, and have that work. Probably it'd need some sort of silent alarm system to be that useful, given that it probably won't be that hard to brute force past, and probably it won't stop a really sophisticated magical effort, but it's the first step to taking things seriously she can think of. 

She sketches it out in her head. Something like... 

(batch-crafting-power?, blue-imbue-skill), (blue-base, blue deepen, a blue skill (probably movement?)), maybe? 

Just a matter of figuring out what she wants in that first slot for now. That would be... either one of the batch crafting powers, some sort of bonus infusion quality power, or just a skill. Honestly... until she figures out her material sourcing, batching probably isn't that good an idea. Which... actually suggest a pretty clean resolution, actually - can she get an intuition for what would make a good vessel for blue light imbuement? 

The concept of a 'batch crafting power' makes the gift churn for a bit. It could give her skill with doing the same mental motions over multiple objects at once, maybe? Or a power to make objects more similar to one another?

It can definitely do a power for figuring out what vessels will hold hope effectively, though! Does she want that?

Hm. 

That's... not not promising? It's seems a bit fiddly to make it work, though, and really if she wants to do something in that direction she'd probably want to do something with a bonafide ring if she can? Can she make a similarity power like that one-sided, so that one object becomes more like the other object without influencing it in the other direction? Either way that's probably something to ask a real wizard about. 

Thinking about the exact powers more... 

(blue-base, blue-mobility-skill), (blue-infusion-skill, blue-vessel-skill, blue-deepen) 

Is what she kind of wants in her heart of hearts, but she's at least like a little wary adding another skill not directly related to crafting. She's not too sure what options are left, there... 

Oh! 

Could she get some sort of like... hope magic enchantment / runelore intuition skill, or something like that? 

She nabs the proffered power while she thinks a bit more about what exactly she wants. 

She can get a power that tells her what symbols or patterns work well with hope. Or generic skill at making complex structures out of hope, although that's a little broad. Is that the kind of thing she was looking for?

The former sounds about right! 

So... 

She locks in doing (blue-base, blue-deepen), (blue-patterns-skill, blue-infusion-skill, blue-vessel-skill). That makes two two pointers. Hopefully they're able to merge up with the green power? Fingers crossed!

The logistics are such that she first needs to create the group of three — one of which informs her that  is a good symbol — and those happily merge up to a second-level power. It settles into a happy orbit around her existing power. The group of two also clicks together, and ...

Yes, the green and blue powers seem content to merge, leaving her with a dense power that provides intuitions for materials, symbology, and structures of will and hope to imbue into deepened objects with her improved willpower and hopefulness. The combined power does feel a little lopsided, in that it's easier to feel out what materials will work well on the hope side of things, but things seem to fit well together overall.

Her new material intuition is telling her that the steel of her ring is a middlingly poor choice for storing hope, by the way. It's not terrible, but she could do better.

Oh yes! 

She figured, really - it was just a placeholder that seemed not obviously totally contrary to what she was looking for. What would serve well, then? 

The improved hopefulness feels refreshing, like she just walked out of a nice spring rain into the warmth of a homey hearth. 

Crystals would be better than metal, and silver would be better than iron. But more important than the physical material are the emotional associations — a dense object freely given in the hope that it would make things better would be the best choice. Failing that, an object refined and forged by hand with the hope that it would be a good receptacle would be nearly as good.

And for will, or will and hope, if that's a thing you can do? 

She furrows her brow in thought. Doing something interpersonal is out for the moment, so by that logic... a crystal that she can grow by hand would be best (at least for a purely blue item)? Could she get a dedicated power for making an appropriate type of crystal?

The best vessel for imbuing will would be an object specifically made with that purpose in mind, with a clean, symmetrical design. Her power-created iron ring is actually pretty good for will, although aluminium would be better, and crystals would work well too. Will seems less ... picky, for lack of a better word, about materials. Imbuing will and hope into the same object doesn't feel particularly impossible; perhaps she should try it?

And yes, she can get a power to slowly generate fragments of sapphire! Would she like that? It wouldn't be particularly high-volume, though — making a ring might take a full day of work.

Good to know. 

She pops over to the kitchen to check if the silverware is real silver. 

She'll take that power, sure! 

...That very much doesn't sound like the power saying that's it's a good idea. 

Still, it's worth checking out. She makes sure that she has her best defensive aura thrumming to life from her green ring, and gently spools twinned threads of green - the steadiness of her concentration, the determination to find a way to excel - and blue - her hope that this isn't a terrible idea and her earnest curiosity about what color the aura will be, once she's made this work - into a spoon, slowly soaking in past the surface before goddess willing she goes to thread in the patterns of a simple physical reinforcement effect of both colors. 

Whoever stocked the kitchen may be rich — *cough* Batman *cough* — but they weren't profligate. And also some of the people who have to eat here might bend softer metals without noticing. The silverware is stainless steel.

The hope and will definitely have a reaction to one another. There's a kind of repulsion, and then a kind of heterodyning interference that feels like if interference patterns had emotional instability, and then she gets the balance just right and they fall down some rabbit hole in the energy landscape and end up settling into a combined lattice. The resulting pattern in the spoon is neither solid blue nor solid green nor some shade in between, but a gently shifting chimera of both, blue and green blowing across its structure like slow motion flame in response to her emotions.

Oooo...~

She watches it irridesce, for a while, before remembering to turn on the sapphire generation power in order to form the basic ring blank for the prospective blue-green ring. 

She tries the same experiment with the knife she infused with green light earlier - does that work fine, too? 

It does — although it is a tiny bit harder to get the hope in, compared to the spoon. 

Good-o! 

She's tempted to do something more to her existing ring, but she kind of wants to keep it entirely green, because then it'll be easier to do the sympathetic tricks with and more directly analogizable to their experiences? Going forward she should probably figure out something there, but for now... 

She goes and books an appointment with the green lantern for tommorow, if she can find a spot - should be able to have everything set up by then. 

Can she get some sort of... material molding power for her rings? Ideally one that's related to her colors somehow or that'd help with sympathy with the material, or what have you, and one that she can merge in with the sapphire creation power? 

- She really got sidetracked, didn't she. It looks like the willpower boost doesn't make her any less audhd ^^

She picks up where she left off on the crime stuff - hopefully she can get a sense of some of the supervillains at large and see if there's anything she can (propose to) do about that. 

A power to slowly reshape iron is definitely possible. One that's related to her colors is a bit harder; it can do a power that lets her very slowly reshape metals through her willpower alone. Does she want that?

Or maybe intuitive skill with jewlers' tools and gemstone socketing?

There are a slightly worrying number of supervillains at large.

Examples include everything from "monster of the week" type cryptids, through muggers with a gimmick, up to skilled professionals who chose to put on a brightly colored costume instead of writing grant applications. There's an "interdimensional imp" who occasionally fights Superman. There's something called the "League of Shadows" which allegedly offers assassination services. There are not one, not two, but three different swamp-related super-zombies that come up in her search. There are some kind of mantis creatures that keep showing up in Nevada.

The regent of Vlatava is, quite possibly, a vampire. He's known to hypnotize people and get away with it due to diplomatic immunity, at least. Jane Goodall discovered a city of intelligent apes in Africa and then went missing, and since then there has been suspiciously gorilla-like violence done to anyone who proposes sending an expedition to that area of the jungle. There's a man who dresses up as a penguin and runs organized crime. There's a shocking number of villainous robots. There are at least two separate people called "Doctor Sivana", relationship unknown, who occasionally pop out of the woodwork to terrorize the American midwest.

If there's some common thread that links all of these, it is not obvious from her research.

Her eyebrows creep progressively higher up her face as she looks at the ridiculousness. 

Really? Really?! 

Could she make say, some sort of long range tracking power based on having someone's dna, say? Actually, do they take biometrics from criminals in this world? It seems like a good few of these people have escaped prisons before, and having some way to make that harder to get away with would probably be good, and would be relatively bright-liney. 

Beyond that... some of these people have weird exotic energies, and that's another angle to go and track things, perhaps? Heck, she can already kind of sense the green (and presumably blue) lights right now, so she's pretty sure she could get a power that would be able to track an active yellow lantern if one popped up again, and it's not like that's the only one. 

Mind controlling political leaders are really really not okay!! 

Honestly that seems kind of stop halt and catch fire-y!

So! 

Can she get something to make her power generate more of that sapphire to merge with it? She's not too picky what that looks like, though of course color synergy or other utility would be nice - maybe a particular crystal that's more willpower aligned that she can generate more quickly that she can merge with it for improved volume, or something like that?  And then maybe... the multiple object attention power that it mentioned earlier would be good, too, though she's not too sure what would merge well with that. And gosh darn it, she might as well nab that object similarity enhancement power while she's at it. 

She pinches her hand a bit, feeling the pumping of her heart and the heaving of her chest. 

No, no. 

She should be sensible about this. The material generation power is fine, but the rest... 

She takes a deep long steadying breath, and goes fetches herself a glass of water. 

She can get a power for tracking people based on having a connection to them at long range, but tracking people based on DNA is a bit more dubious. Tracking particular kinds of energy is definitely possible, depending on the energy in question, though.

She can have a power to generate emeralds! That seems to synergize with the sapphire-generation power pretty well.

Okay, okay. 

If she's going to go for a crystal generating power for the moment... Can she make 'zeta crystals', whatever those are? They sound like they're potentially pretty valuable and even if batman was being a bit evasive, it's not like that's something that wouldn't be valuable. If so, that's probably worth making. 

She does in fact still not want to get into complicated magic things, but the ability to make more of these is in fact, good. 

She was thinking... that power the gift mentioned earlier about doing the same mental motions across objects, and then something else in that space. A fully general multitasking boost would technically work, but what she's more thinking is something that helps her sort of... 'automate' the task of enchantment in her head, a little? Having something that makes it steadier and easier to avoid her thoughts wandering, or just helping it take up less of her thoughts so she can focus more on the feelings she has to put behind them. 

The iron power was faster than the crystal powers for a good reason that doesn't come across well in her mental link to the gift. Something about spark geometry. Zeta crystals would be one step further in that 'direction' in spark-space, and therefore out of reach for a single spark. Can she break the concept down or find something just a little simpler to ask for?

It could do a power that prevents her emotions from distracting her from her thoughts, or maybe one to increase her focus, or to let her learn mental habits more quickly. Are any of those the thing that she wants?

She tilts her head to the side in thought. 

That's awkward... But ideally merging three different crystal generation powers would generate some sort of relatively generic crystal generation power? It might just make a list or only generalize a little, though, so... can it just give her the nearest neighbor crystal generation power that is valid? If not, she might as well try just say, a quartz generation power and see if that works for what she's thinking of. 

The mental habit power sounds good! 

Well, which one does she want first? The mental habit power or the unnamed energetic zeta-like crystal power? She only has space for one, right now.

(The gift isn't the kind of thing that can prioritize to reach the obvious answer, here.)

Aww! 

Yeah, she should be more mindful there. 

The unnamed energetic zeta-like crystal blooms to life inside her. It doesn't orbit quite as closely to the sapphire and emerald as they do each other, but all three still clearly resonate with one another.

Merge them all, please! 

And then the mental habit forming power and the multiple object attention power. 

The crystal generation powers click together into a 'slowly generate crystals that interact with esoteric energies' power. The two mental powers also seem to like one another.

The gift is pretty tired — it can maybe do one more if she really needs it, but it wants to rest now.

Aww that's totally fair! 

She merges the two mergeables, and then sets off to work. 

She makes a half-dozen disks, each the size of a quarter, green emerald forming the green lantern logo on one side, with the interior detailing made of a green sapphire, with the reverse side made of blue sapphire, with pale blue emerald forming the base, with little streams of runic script etched by lantern's light. She grows a slight stem from the top of each - fit for threading in a small wire to turn them into pendants, if so desired. She spends a good half hour on each of three pairs - a mental ward, a physical ward, and a mix of the two. 

For them, the hope is to impress batman, to see him approving, to have something tangible and brilliant and colorful, to make something by her own will unique in all the world that makes people light up with glee, and to give people a steadiness and surety that they never really had, in a world with so many bizzare things that can make invalidate their choices and their strength. No more, she hopes. No more, she wills. 

She makes a replacement ring of emerald, for simple will, in much the same design as her old one, doing her best to channel out the steady strength she imbued into the replacement. She keeps the function as general as she can, but takes her time to refine the shield it projects away from the blurry fuzz into a sliver-thin barrier, trying to make sure it can protect her from more ills then simple physical force - the green lanterns seem to be able to survive in environments that no ordinary human would, so she tries her best to include that. The focus is on her will to live, her will to conquer and steady the world, to be the shore and a sailor both, and the strength of her resolution and her old talents in meditation. 

She forges a ring of blue, a solid sapphire polished to a silvery sheen, laced with little impurities that form sigils inside the shining blue gem. Her hopes are wider, looser, and her meditations reflect that - the hope to see the stars, to bring hope to others, to get to dance and fly and sing, to see the grateful look on people's faces as she forges something new and precious, the rush of relief and the satisfaction of a task completed that caps off the pursuit of a forlorn dream. In so much as she focuses on anything, she focuses on keeping her hopes safe and free inside her soul. 

She forges a combined ring, too, the materials intermingling like the disks, the two sigils pressed together like two sides of an infinity. She presses her hope that she can be a hero and the resolve she needs to be one nestled softly together to form an incredible strength inside the iridescent ring. She lets her wordless hopes and wordless will pour into it, too, feeling them more beneath her fingers as she forges it, accumulating the layers one at a time, blue and green streaming and splashing against each other before they twine into place and steady. She doesn't have a full suite of skills, so there's so much left to feel, so much left to put inside, but for now, she puts in the patterns for the weaving of barriers and constructs - the safety and salvation of others, the gift she can give, with her own self a little more assured, now. 

She makes untouched samples of each material - the zeta quartz, the green emerald, and the blue sapphire she used for his examination, later, before remembering the kryptonian fascination with crystals, and looks for a while to see if there's anything of interest she can make there, as of yet. 

It's... oddly intimate and exposing, to work through feeling so much, so she won't poke M'gann quite yet. Still, she has to eat, and she has to take care of herself - she takes a shower just to unwind from the reverie of it all. She plans a little, too, letting her half-verbal thoughts wander as she thinks of exactly what she wants to say to Batman. 

She finds herself a room to have the meeting in - it would be good to have a whiteboard or something, but anywhere with chairs is ultimately okay - and sets herself up there fifteen minutes before in a nice blue dress, her charms laid out before her on the table. 

The zeta quartz noticeably tarnishes in air, beginning to crumble into a mustard-colored powder after only a few minutes. Other than that, her crafting goes well, even if working the crystal and the emotion are time-consuming. Her multiple-attention power means that the identical disks are actually a good deal further along than the rings, even if the rings seem like they might be able to contain more emotional energy overall. The rings will definitely need a few more hours of work before they're completely full, but they are already having little effects — the blue ring makes her feel lighter, her steps having a peculiar kind of bounce to them, as though she's in arrears on her gravity bill.

Batman is not late, nor is he early. Instead, he is somehow directly behind her at the appointed time.

"Topaz," he states, swooping dramatically around the table and seating himself in a chair opposite her. He manages to make the greeting sound like a pronouncement.

"How are you settling in?"

She startles a little, before settling back down. 

"I like to think I'm doing reasonably well? There's just... so much on my mind, just because of how big a difference superpowers makes to the world and me." 

Batman nods.

"That's perfectly understandable. I've been working in this area for years, and I still spend a lot of my time coming up with contingencies," he agrees. "But it's good to hear that you're well. I have a few things I wanted to cover—"

He produces a manila folder full of documents from under his cape and sets it between them.

"— but it looks like you have something to show me first?"

He peers inquiringly at the crystals laid out on the table.

She nods firmly. 

"I do." 

She pauses, and looks into his eyes a little more. It's - hard, to get a sense of him - she's sure that he could run circles around her in intrigue, but... 

"But first..." 

"You're something between 'first among equals' and the 'ops and intel guy' for the Justice League, yes? The public picture of the league's operational structure is... muddy at best, and what I've seen so far hasn't been too clarifying, but Martian Manhunter and the Flash do seem to defer to you." 

Batman leans back in his chair and steeples his fingers.

"Superheros have the same natural tendency toward organization that tornadoes do," he remarks. "First among equals is an ... interesting way to put it. I am not the leader of the League, because we have no leader. The Leauge is a voluntary association of like-minded individuals. The only real formal rules we have are the processes for membership laid out in our UN charter. But the other members do tend to listen to my plans and recommendations, because I have a track record of, as you put it, having the right intel and sensible judgement. I can't run faster than light, or even faster than a bullet. I can't lift a falling bridge, or fly. So I work to combat crime in other ways — primarily overseeing the League's routine operations, contingency planning, information gathering, and so on. Combined with my status as one of the founders of the League, I have a certain amount of soft power, it's true. But if I ever suggested to the Flash or to Martian Manhunter that they do something stupid, they would doubtlessly refuse."

"Does that answer your question?"

She suppresses a chuckle at his opening remark, a small bright smile dawning on her face. 

"It does, yes." 

She hums lightly. 

"There's really a lot to get into, but probably the first, most foundational thing to say is just what my powers are." 

It doesn't feel quite real saying that yet, but it is hers, isn't it? 

"As best I can tell from interacting with it, it's some sort of... well-concealed higher dimensional magical thing - some odd hybrid of a spell, an expert system, and symbiote. It gives me four 'slots' for sub-powers. They can be pretty much anything, so long as they're not too too complex for it to implement, though it has a harsher restriction on the amount of raw power involved. When I tried, I wasn't able to copy Kid Flash's power, but I was able to do... this." 

She waves her hands over the crystals indicatively. 

"I was able to - using a system of 'merging' of sub-powers that I can get into later - make a power that could make these from thin air. The rings are... very roughly ersatz replicas of what Green Lantern uses - though the blue one and the blue-green one use the blue light of hope, which I was able to discover after poking around with the power creation system - and the pendants are warding charms using the sample principle. Two mental, two physical, and two mental and physical." 

She points them out in turn. 

"As part of trying to make the first draft of these as good as I can, I got a power that can make these esoteric materials - and I think other crystals that interact with exotic energies too, though that will take some figuring out. The emerald is resonant with the green light, the sapphire with the blue light, and I can make zeta quartz, too - though I'd need to make a vacuum ward first to be able to demonstrate that properly. Feel free to put them and the warding charms through whatever battery of tests you want - they're just demonstration pieces, for now." 

Batman leans forward to examine one of the pendants, and then carefully picks it up and turns it over in his fingers.

"What tests have you run on them so far?" he inquires. "You said they were modeled after Green Lantern rings, but their rings are recharged by a larger portable power source — what powers these?"

"I haven't run too many tests, honestly?" 

She frowns, then shakes her head. 

"No, I've run plenty of tests, but they were generally about the feasibility of design elements and power selection, rather than about performance of the items I've made. As for the rings... I can give them charge personally through my power. I haven't tested it, but in theory, I'd expect it'd be possible for a lantern of an appropriate color or a magician with the right skillset to recharge it as well. The items with a blue component can recharge off of ambient hope, too. Potentially worth noting is that even without an additional power, I'm pretty sure I could create a 'converter' that would be able to charge a 'pure' green charm or ring - and possibly the other colors too." 

"Part of the power gives me an intuition for how powerful items like these are and what they do, but it doesn't convert cleanly into a numerical performance metric.  They are intrinsically empathic, so they'll work best when the person using them is feeling the emotion(s) that I used to make it - though it should in principle always work."  

He nods.

"Magic is always a bit tricky to quantify," he agrees.

He sweeps the crystals into a small, bat-themed black bag which he then secrets somewhere about his person.

"I'll take them to the Batcave for a crystallographic scan, and then ask Zatara and the Green Lanterns to examine them, and see about field testing. You mentioned having control over individual design elements — would you say that you understand how these work? It's not the power just 'making' them, there's an actual design? And if so, what do you think you would need in order to prepare a better design?"

If they work at all, they'll be useful for discrete protection in people's civilian lives; very few pieces of personal protective equipment have such a small profile. But he privately suspects that something turned out in less than 24 hours, by someone apparently completely new to not only their powers but also the entire design of protective talismans, is going to be near the lower limits of what's possible with the technique.

"It's.. weird? I'm making them myself, according to articulable principles, but that doesn't mean that if I turned off the power I could give you a sufficiently extensive description of how to do it to do it completely synthetically, or anything even close to that. I could tell you that there's a certain series of thoughts and geometric images that represent how a construct extends, or how you can shift a formless reserve of will into one aligned with defense, but the - tacticit knowledge of what steps to do and how is mainly located in the power, not in me. It's... Imagine you were playing a really complicated video game, with a walkthrough and a wiki open on another monitor, and an expansive in-game 'hint' system, and maybe even savestates on top of that. There's a lot that you could do in that scenario that you don't necessarily really understand, even if you could give someone an accurate idea of what was going on and you have everything there in front of you you would need to learn how to do it normally. It's still an intuition though, not a mathematically perfect solver, and it's pretty lazy about suggesting additional ideas for what I could do 'better'."

She snorts a little at the second part. 

"These aren't even fully 'charged', and I haven't gotten the opportunity between playing around with everything to even max out the power that makes it, so there's a lot of performance to gain there. They're just proofs of concept I made in two hours. Beyond that... I would love to have a sample or at least a scan or specification of whatever the Guardians use to make Green Lantern rings, since I'm really doubt they use this. I'm sure there's someone out there with magical skills that I don't have that could apply to this - another big part of why I haven't done more here is that I haven't talked to a professional here about the "Dos and don'ts" of magical experimentation and practice so I've been skipping out on doing magic qua magic directly myself for now - really magic in general has a lot of unknown unknowns. I could probably get something out of seeing how the green lanterns do their thing, too, since the expertise I get out of my power isn't anything like perfectly comprehensive. I'm pretty sure just finding a deeper understanding or greater source of hope and will would make my creations better, too. In theory, there's probably more synergies with more colors that could make it better, so if you have any sort of emotional light artifacts around somewhere, I might be able to do something with those after some looking around? And that's just off the top of my head - I'm sure if I thought more about it or I knew more about what metahuman powers existed I would be able to list another half-dozen things that could plausibly help."  

He frowns in thought.

"Those all make sense. I doubt the Guardians will be willing to share — it's a big Universe and they tend to leave things up to their Lanterns — but you could ask the Lanterns to relay a message."

A short, blue man with stark white hair appears through a tear in space.

"No need. It's been nearly four millennia since someone else successfully struck a ring from the Green Glow," he remarks. "So of course we take an interest. But Green Lantern rings are a badge of office, you understand, so ..."

He reaches out a hand and boops Topaz on the soul.

Batman starts, pulls out the bag of crystals, and pours them back out onto the table. The green ring is suddenly Obviously Not A Green Lantern Ring. This fact about it seems just as apparent as its color or its size — it is a small emerald ring that is Not A Green Lantern Ring.

"bwha?" 

She shakes her head firmly.

That was a very odd experience! 

That's on you for choosing the universal symbol of willpower and an obvious form factor as a badge of office

She bows her head slightly, and in lieu of anything coherent and polite to say just says - 

"Thank you?" 

The guardian smiles benevolently.

"You're most welcome. Do come find me on Oa in a hundred years or so when you've gotten a good grasp on the basics."

And then he's gone, as suddenly as he came.

"Alert! Unidentified intruder in the living area. Alert! Unidentified —"

Batman sighs, and moves to a wall terminal to silence the alarm.

"For a group of nearly omnipotent aliens theoretically responsible for the whole universe, they sure do pay a lot of attention to Earth," he mutters under his breath, almost too soft to hear.

She nods sympathetically. 

"Even in a world where... all this is possible, it feels a little absurd just how much goes on, here." 

"There is always something," Batman agrees. "That's actually one of the things that I wanted to bring up."

He returns to the table and flips open the manila folder, pulling out a printed list of reference numbers and brief descriptions.

"This is a list of the training modules that I believe you would benefit from, sorted by urgency. You should have access to them in the computer. The League is, as I mentioned, a voluntary association: so I have no particular standing to require you to go through all of them, but I do think it would be a good idea. As you have just seen things can ... happen."

He hands her the list.

"The ones I've highlighted in red are the ones that are mandatory for safety reasons if you want to continue staying in the mountain and having access to the League's computer infrastructure."

These are 'Mount Justice Evacuation Routes', 'Teleporter Safety', and 'Phishing Awareness'.

"The ones highlighted in yellow are things that you should really know before trying to fight crime. They're also generally useful for the inevitable strange situations that come up in life."

This is a larger list, including items like 'Vigilante laws and you' and 'Rendering Firearms Safe'.

"The remainder are things that I personally recommend, but that are not matters of safety per se, and so are up to you to judge the worth of."

This includes items such as 'Maintaining a Secret Identity' and 'Who You Gonna Call: A List of Affiliated Heroes by Specialty Area'.

She nod-nods along. 

"I'll certainly take a look!"

"I've also got your first set of official documentation here," he continues. "Justice League affiliate ID card — which is valid proof of identity in many places, but does not indicate that you are a member of the League — a UN passport, a debit card linked to a Wayne Financials savings account and a checkbook for the same, and the registration information for a P.O. box in D.C. which you can pick things up from using the teleporter or set up forwarding if you so choose."

"None of these things are a 'civilian' ID, they're just the basic things that you need in order to have a chance at navigating bureaucracy. If you want a separate civilian ID, which I do recommend for privacy purposes, I'll need some additional information such as your birthday, preferred last name, and so on. There's a set of forms at the bottom of the folder. Any questions so far?"

She takes a look through it, and hums faintly. A dedicated civilian ID seems like a bit of a pain, but if he's able to set things up like this so quickly for the 'hero' ID...

That could be worthwhile.

"A few! But most of them are downstream of further details of my powers, so it might be good to discuss that first?" 

"Sensible."

He leans back in his chair again.

"You aren't the first person I've met with a power-granting symbiote, but the others have all eventually run into ... problems. I hope that won't be a concern in your case, but it's probably best to check. Do you think you could expand a bit on the nature of your powers and how you came to learn that information about them?"

She nods. 

"So I mentioned that it works kind of like an expert system for creating powers? I've gotten the information I have on it from a few places - there's a 'display' that shows the state of mergers, there's a thought-based interface for requesting powers and giving the 'introduction', and the powers themselves. If I inquire potential power, I can ask it if it would work, and get back a response, and sometimes a countersuggestion for an alternative power that it could provide. I can also just ask for powers that give me information about itself, so I ended up asking it for a power that tells me what the power does and what it is." 

She steps up from her chair, and grabs a marker, and starts scribbling on a whiteboard. 

"In terms of what it does, I see something like this, when I use it." 

She draws four rough empty circles in a square. 

"Each of these are power 'slots' that I can fill by asking for a power, or by merging two or more synergistic powers together to get a power that encapsulates them all. It tends to generalize and enhance them, too, though the results seem to vary depending on how well they 'fit' together." 

She fills in each of the circles, then draws a squiggly line from each node to each other node. 

"Powers that are synergistic with each other are shown in the interface like this. Synergistic powers of the same 'order' can be merged together, like so." 

She moves a little to the side, and draws four dots closely nestled together wrapped up in a circle with a small '2' above it, and then three other dots forming the rest of the square. She draws the jagged squiggles between each of the base level nodes, then draws out the same diagram again, this time with one cluster of four, and one of three, with the wiggly line between the two. 

"And I can keep repeating the process as long as I have room to get bigger powers. Apparently, eventually I'll be able to get more slots based on some sort of soul strain and anti-synergy metric, but right now the most I can hold is 22 base powers like so."

4 ((((1 2 3 4) ((5 6 7)) ((8 9))) (((10 11 12)) ((13 14)))) 3 (((15 16 17)) ((18 19))) 

2 ((20 21)) 1 (22)

"'Synergy' seems to be based on an intuitive sense of 'relatedness', and anti-synergy appears to be based on 'oppositeness'. I've also made a power previously that can give me a specification for powers that I make based on some sort of geometric definition? I can send you what I have of that later, in case you can make any sense of it." 

She purses her lips. 

"I can discard base level powers, and 'unmerge' merged powers, so what powers I have can change in time. I have a chart about the amount of time it takes for a few things that I've mathed out - most of them are predictable but it looks like unmerging is a little less so? It's 36 seconds to make a base power, 6 seconds to merge base powers, 18 to merge second order powers, and 54 to merge third order powers. Discarding powers doesn't seem to be a problem - if anything, it seems to think that doing it is a little beneficial?" 

"Beyond that... Everything else that comes to mind is the particulars of individual powers I could create, but there's so many of those that it's probably best to let you ask questions about specific ideas that come to your mind than to have me try to rattle all the possibilities off." 

"Hmm."

He pauses for a moment in bat-consideration.

This kind of completely open-ended power really seems as though it should come with a drawback, to his suspicious mind. But he does regularly work with a man who can cause hurricanes by breathing, so ...

"It's a very flexible powerset. When you discard a power, do the things that you did with it remain done? For example, the protective pendants you made aren't going to disappear if you discard the powers that went into making them?"

She nods. 

"I could make a power that makes temporary constructs or gives temporary enhancements, but that's not a problem I have to worry about. Everything I've shown you is real and permanent." 

"Good, good. That does give me some ideas of powers you might like to try. But before that: do you know what the power source for your powers themselves is? Are they also powered by ambient emotional energy?"

I.e. is she some kind of emotion-vampire. It wouldn't be the first time.

She pokes the gift to double-check. Intuitively, it seems like it's just powered by magic in the normal way any spell would be, but she hasn't actually asked-asked?

She doesn't have the spark that originally gave her insight into the nature of the gift right now, so the reply is a little vague, but she gets the impression of multiple things, for redundancy, all of them with an autotroph-like flavor. It definitely is magic, it can just also collect power from other things too.

She furrows her brow a little. 

"It's a magical construct that's powered largely off of ambient magic, I think? There's a few other things in the mix, too, but it doesn't look like it feeds on people or anything." 

That's better than the alternative, at least. He can ask Zatara to check how much it's impacting the local background magic.

"Alright. If you do start experiencing cravings for human flesh, hearing whispered words when nobody is around you, or find yourself becoming increasingly violent in response to mundane scenarios, please do let me know right away."

He takes out a notepad from one of his many pockets, and starts jotting ideas.

"As for how you can actually use your powers — it sounds like producing equipment is a good fit, since you can keep using the equipment even after swapping out your power loadout. You might also be a good sparring partner, if you can adapt to challenge people where they're weakest. Have you considered trying to improve your body, mind, or other traits? Can your power be used to learn mundane skills more quickly? That would likely be useful no matter what you plan to do with your powers in the long term, but I have some more specific ideas that depend on your plans."

"I've looked into a few things in that direction - you've seen the rings and warding charms. I've also got a power that helps me build mental habits easier available right now that I've been using to help make the crafting process a little easier. This - body configuration is new? I haven't looked into biological improvements in any detail but I did give myself an 'ideal form' regeneration power for a good while, so I should be about as good as you can normally get. I haven't figured out quite what I'm looking for in terms of mental changes - obviously there's a lot of reasons to avoid being too hasty there, but the powerset I have should also work for 'enchanting' my mind as well? Haven't looked into that too too deeply. As for the sparring idea... I think it works alright, as long as you don't rely too too much on specific power interactions, since I can't 100% faithfully replicate the mechanism of at least some metahuman powers? The power creation throughput isn't unlimited, too, so that might make that a little hard to arrange without disrupting crafting too too much." 

She sits back down on her chair and leans back in thought. 

"Honestly, the biggest thing that's stopped me from doing too too much more is choice paralysis - there's a lot of things that I could do, but there's no obvious canonical choice, and a lot of the the best ideas I have for making a lot of money or making a big positive impact on the world are a bit..." 

She shakes her head slightly and snorts faintly. 

"Supervillain plot-y, at least from the outside?" 

And that right there is why Batman is able to write off "providing new metahumans with the resources and guidance to apply their powers productively" as a line item in the League's disaster-prevention budget.

He keeps his tone non-judgemental (although there is a certain amount of gruffness that never goes away).

"Maybe you could walk me through one of the ideas you've thought of, and we could brainstorm how to make it work without scaring or harming people," he suggests.

She nods. 

"There's a few things that come to mind? I'm not 100% sure of the details of the ward around Themiscyra, but if it's just an area of effect blessing, perhaps with a few extra parameters specifying the people it works on, I could probably make some sort of giant underwater city or just excavate a ton of earth from the seafloor and make more artificial islands within the boundaries of the effect, and immigrate people there to make them ageless? Or maybe I could make a giant array of something like captain cold's cold guns (or a magical alternative, perhaps?) and reglaciate the artic and/or solve global warming, since I doubt that what he's doing follows anything like normal thermodynamic conservation laws."  

"Diana — Wonder Woman — would know more, but I believe the island's blessing only applies to female worshipers of the Greek gods. The Amazons have hosted people in need of refuge before, so it's certainly a possibility. The non-supervillain approach there is probably to speak to Wonder Woman in her capacity as Themiscyra's ambassador and ask her to have the queen consider a project proposal. Hearing back may take some time, since the people of Themiscyra are generally fairly conservative," he councils.

"As far as reglaciating the arctic: I would suggest speaking to the World Meteorological Association about the likely impacts of such a course of action, and how much heat would actually need to be removed. Generally, when you have a big idea like these that might scare people, I recommend finding the people or organizations that are already working in that area and consulting with them. People are a lot more likely to accept large changes if they're done in consultation with other people, instead of unilaterally. Announcing your plans ahead of time and having a public comment period — even if none of the public comments are particularly helpful — also help."

"In the moment, doing that kind of working with people can sometimes feel like a pointless delay, especially when people's lives and well-being are on the line. The thing to remember is that you're not working with the existing authorities in order to fix whatever the problem you're tackling is: you're working with the existing authorities in order to keep people calm and promote confidence that you're a responsible, trustworthy person. Once you've built a reputation for behaving in a particular way, you can start relying on it to take quick action in emergencies without getting as much pushback," Batman, the world-class actor who decided to single-handedly decimate Gotham's criminal underworld through the power of psyops, advises.

She nods. 

"Yeah. Honestly, that's - a large part of why I want to also work on being a... 'conventional' superhero? Because that seems like the kind of thing that would really help getting people on board. There's also just more conventional things I can do - I know I could make a mass healing powerset, for example, even if that creates it's own problems? Even if in some ways I'm more moved by things like that or say, the thought of popping over to mars to study non-sapient telepathic life a bit and then working on to create a worldwide telepathic teaching network or giant shapeshifting telekinetic excavator or what have you, it still makes sense to put a good amount of focus on the fundamentals people expect from metahumans and to watch the world's downside." 

she's not pent-up about all of these ideas, you're pent-up about these ideas

"Yes. ... Please do not put together a global telepathic network — or, in fact, a telepathic network of any kind — without putting in some serious security precautions and having Martian Manhunter give it a green light," he requests. "I think healing is likely to be a bit safer, although you're going to run into problems with the healthcare system sooner or later. It might be better to start any healing work in another country with a more sensible insurance regime."

He thinks for a moment, and then comes to a decision.

"Okay — I think there's someone who you should meet. My ward, Robin. I can see why you would be suffering from choice paralysis, and one of their specialties is research, so they may be able to help you refine some of your ideas and form a priority list. I'm generally interested in hearing your proposals, but it sounds like right now you have a lot of ideas that need some fleshing out before they become actionable. Robin is also going to be part of the team of younger heroes that we're assembling. Perhaps the two of you, Miss Martian, and Kid Flash could spend some time tomorrow getting to know each other's capabilities and planning how to tackle some of these things together?"

He was originally imagining that Topaz, as an older teen, even if she's still new to her powers, might be something of a stabilizing influence on the team. He is no longer imagining this.

"If you come through to the Batcave, I can introduce you to Robin now," he offers.

She nods. 

"I think doing something like that would probably be a good idea, yes! And yeah, right now my thought is mostly to try to get settled and ready for the normal hero work, and figure things out in more detail later? Mostly I just want to - give you a complete picture of what I could do, and some plausible candidate directs down the road? I don't want to just - not think about the possibility of doing this, even if it's going to be very hard and complicated, and I don't..." 

She trails off. It's never a good thing to argue from 'behind', and it's a bit too easy to picture herself as a whiny kid here but - 

"I don't want you to think that I'm hiding something from you, or that I'm playing games by not being - serious about this? Right now, the thing that makes the most sense to me is trying to figure out the - tactical advantages that you'd like to have, and then maybe after that we can look into giving or selling something like the warding pendants to governments, and then going from there. There's a reason why I didn't - jump to actually starting on one of those plans, but put some time into a downside risk aversion project, you know?" 

Batman half-turns from his stride toward the teleporter.

"Topaz — I tremendously appreciate the restraint, wisdom, and transparency you have shown since your arrival here," he says, somehow managing to convey the feeling of eye contact, even through the mask. "My normal routine involves dealing with the fallout from two ill-advised schemes every three days on average. The reason I could not have this meeting with you earlier is because I was dealing with tracking down the source of a very nasty new mutagenic narcotic that came out of nowhere last week."

"Your willingness to work with an established organization like the League, your willingness to seek out and listen to advice, your genuine desire to help on a grand scale, and your measured approach in doing so are all a breath of fresh air, compared to my normal routine. If your protective amulets work as advertised — and I have to assume they will, given that a guardian bothered to show up in order to prevent your prototype green ring from being confused with a real Green Lantern ring — they will almost certainly become part of the League's standard protective equipment. I have no doubt that you will, in time, make a huge difference to this world."

"Do you know how many criminals I successfully stopped in my first month as Batman?"

She smiles a bit bashfully and blushily, her eyes darting away. 

She looks up in the air in thought. 

"Five, maybe?" 

It's easy for it not to be a lot - it's hard not to get injured and be forced to stop, and easy for things to just sort of... fall through. It could be a lot more, if he found something organizationally or hit the ground running, but that probably takes more than a month stem to stern, and catch and release can be a big problem, sometimes? Vigilantism seems like it might be a reputation game, too, so starting out might be rocky, to say the least.

He smiles.

"That's a properly pessimistic answer; Robin guessed thirty when I asked them the same question. No, I only managed to stop two."

"It's actually really difficult to get started, when you first try to make a difference. Now, I have some of the best equipment and training in the world. I have some amazing allies who I am proud to call my friends. I have a skilled support team who help with day-to-day operations. But I will never forget when it was just me, in a barely-armored hand-sewn costume, going out for hours every night, and fumbling even the most basic investigations."

"If, in the course of the next month, with the support of the League and your new teammates, you can come up with a solid, detailed project proposal for even a single one of your ideas? I think you'll have made more of an impact, faster, than I did when I was getting started."

With a dramatic flare of cloth, he disappears through the teleporter, the security system announcing his departure.

She smiles lightly, and steps through herself. 

The Batcave is largely unchanged since the last time she was here, but this time Batman leads her down a different corridor, and into a room with a huge computer monitor. A short, androgynous figure is punching a speed bag against the back wall while listening to an audiobook about Eel biology at 2x speed.

"Topaz, I'd like to introduce my partner, Robin," Batman remarks.

He takes the pouch of crystal samples and sets them in a tray on the desk.

Robin pauses the audiobook and wipes their forehead with one bandage-wrapped hand.

"Hey," they say, straightening up. "It's good to meet you."

She does a little finger wave. 

"Hello! Pleasure to meet you too." 

"Bats mentioned that you are living out of Mount Justice for now — how are you settling in?" they ask.

They grab some water to rehydrate while she answers. Batman does something mysterious to the computer (You'd think they'd label the keys ...) in the background.

Hey, she happens to be inclined towards touch typist solidarity

"Alright! It being a superhero mountain base is a little weird, but at the end of the day, it's mostly just a weirdly big house on the inside. The computer is pretty helpful at finding things if I need to fall back on it, too." 

She joins in on the watering as well - talking this long is thirsty work.

Robin hands her a cup.

"There."

Batman whips a document from a boxy black printer that looks like it could laminate someone if it tried.

"These are some of the contact points for the organizations that I mentioned," he explains, handing the list to Topaz. "Robin, Topaz has a number of interesting ideas for raising League effectiveness and establishing some large-scale humanitarian initiatives with the support of her powers. I was hoping that you could help her with brainstorming and fleshing them out. I've already told her about your research specialty."

She takes the list, and takes a quick look at the contents. 

It contains the names and contact information of a handful of relevant people, including the director of climatology at the WMO, the UN climate secretary, the internal lines of the Themiscyran and Atlantean consolates, and the new projects director of the Thomas and Martha Wayne Foundation.

"Well, I'm definitely happy to help," they agree. "What kinds of things were you thinking of?"

"Oh, I should give you the quick rundown of what my power is, overall."

She proceeds to do so, in a way eminently similar to how she explained it to batman, but which this margin's patience is too small to contain. 

"Right now, my powerset is the ability to make exotic energy interacting crystals, the ability and skillset to make knockoff green lantern rings that can work on hope on as well as will, as well as items with less flexibility that can duplicate specific constructs or interactions, and a minor internal mental power that helps with enchanting and forming mental habits. Let me write out the constituent powers..."

 ((will-imbuement-intuition, will-deepening, willpower, defense imbuement intuition), (increased-hope, hope-deepening), (blue-symbology, blue-infusion, blue-vessels));
 (generate-sapphire, generate-emerald, generate-exotic); (multiple-object-attention, mental-habit-formation); ( )

"Right now, I'm trying to figure out - in rough order of priority - what would be useful to the league to have available, what would be useful to make available more widely, and to a lesser extent what would be valuable for me to make to potentially sell on the market. I have a lot of ideas already - I've already made a demonstration model for warding talismans, but there's a lot of other things that I could do, even with just what I have now, or minor expansions thereof." 

Robin looks thoughtful for a moment, before pulling off their utility belt and laying it out on the table.

"So I think there are probably a ton of things you could make that I haven't really thought of, but maybe a good starting point would be looking at what Batman and I already carry, and seeing if you can make improved versions or if any obvious gaps jump out at us? One big problem is that a lot of our gear is pretty specific, which is fine if we know what we're going to run into, but if we run into something unexpected we might not have appropriate equipment on hand. If you could find a way to combine different pieces of equipment, or make storage pouches bigger and lighter, that would be a big help, I think."

She strokes her chin a little. 

"I know that green lanterns can fly, so the first thing that comes to mind there is giving you an option for that - and if I can do that, it should be pretty easy to create some sort of powered support for some sort of bag or the like? Those two together might be able to mitigate problems with bulk you'd otherwise have, too. Beyond that... I'd love to hear what you carry and I'll see if there's anything that comes to mind to help with doing those jobs."

"Right, sounds good," they agree.

Robin starts pulling out a large number of little gadgets. Some of them are just straightforward common sense (bandages impregnated with improved clotting agent), some of them are high-tech but generally useful (wide-spectrum battery-powered distress beacon), and some of them are weirdly specialized at the best of times.

"Let's see ... Oh, this is a connector cable for Otis elevator control panels — let's me hijack or stop a car, for example. This one is an experimental anti-allergen nasal spray that should bond to and neutralize various pollens. That's an adjustable-radius cylinder for solving Jefferson wheel ciphers. ..."

Notably absent: a way to defend against, interfere with, or track magic. A lot of the gadgets are also clearly compromising durability in favor of weight and multiple utility. Other than that, the utility belt covers a lot of possible areas, although still with a few minor gaps.

She hums lightly. 

"A lot of this is going to be tricky to do without looking into complicated magical solutions?  It should be pretty doable for me to just empower a lot of these with a basic reinforcement effect without that taking too much time or charge and maybe even without a visible glow, which should help out a good few of these. Beyond that... I think I could probably make a usable gas mask or pressure vessel replacement charm, and it's not necessarily... too hard to just create an object with certain mechanical properties with the green and/or blue lights? I know I can at least create simple geometric shapes with the rings I've got already, and I'm sure with a bit of work I could do something to make producing more complicated objects easier, but it's a little hard to get a sense of how practical it would be to make it usable for someone who doesn't have my powers or the kind of extreme outlier performance that green lanterns do." 

She frowns a little. 

"I'm not sure how common it is to run into a psychic or a magic user, but it doesn't look like there's anything here for that? I've already showed batman the mental shielding talismans - I imagine something like that would be good to be able to give out in a crisis, as long as you have a good way of keeping track of them. I don't have a comprehensive answer for dealing with a hostile magic user, but in theory if you really needed a way to resist a necromancer's life draining effect, I could make something that does that? There's a few other things like that out there, though they're probably pretty niche."

"Oh! I could make an emotional... 'battery', if you will, that stores up a bunch of focus and/or hope and that can infuse it into someone? You could probably use that as a sort of ersatz stimulant that shouldn't have too much of a biological effect, and it could probably help with some kinds of spiritual and/or telepathic injuries, though obviously you want to be careful to not use not-exactly-magic mind control juice willy-nilly." 

She ducks a little bashfully. 

Robin looks down at the equipment arranged on the table, brows furrowed.

"The truth is, magic equipment is just harder to source," they explain. "There aren't a lot of magicians for hire, and there's no standardization, which means your gear all has to all stand alone. Plus, I'm not as knowledgeable about magic as I am about, say, chemistry, so it's a lot harder for me to evaluate how useful something like that emotional battery would be."

"Having a stimulant that people can't be biologically allergic to could be pretty useful, though — would it be very costly to make a prototype and see how well it works?"

She nods firmly. 

"I get that. Still, there's a lot of things that are going to be hard to deal with without really specific tools, so I think it's worth thinking about, at least for someone on the league? It might make sense to only have a few people rated to deal with complicated magic problems or say, someone with abilities like captain atom or atom has. " 

She hums herself. 

"I don't really have a good sense of what's a common problematic power for your kit, say? I gravitated to thoughts about magic since it's something relatively clearcut and there's so many opportunities that probably really do require specialist advantages to take full advantage of, but if you just say, have a problem dealing with people who are 'just' really physically tough or fast and that comes up more often, that's maybe a better thing to focus on? As for the battery..." 

"It would be pretty easy to make a quick prototype, especially if you're not asking for it to be qualitatively the same as the final product, just quantitatively. It'd probably take... call it an hour for a basic but reasonably complete and reusable demo model and something more like three or four for the best I can do without changing my powers or training my skills up? Make it a few days if you want me to see if I can figure out how to preserve the structure of the hopes and focus that goes in a useful way, since that seems pretty tricky." 

"Batman and I definitely take a different loadout if we know that we're going to be facing something specific. But in Gotham we tend to get fewer super-strong brawlers than other cities, for some reason. We're a lot more apt to have to deal with various kinds of mind control or esoteric poisons," Robin explains, their tone distracted as they think through the question.

"Actually! Do you think that your emotional batteries would help against fear toxin? We've got respirators, but civilians caught in an attack that uses it often don't, and something that could get them moving and out of the conflict zone would be really helpful. Ditto for something that calms down someone hopped up on Smilex."

She hums. 

"It... depends a lot on the exact mechanism and if he's put in any countermeasures? I could make something that increases the mental resilience and decreases susceptibility to mind control of the person I applied it to, or infused them with hope or will, but how much that would help against that specific threat I'm not too sure? I could also make a powerset that works off of elemental fear, and I'm pretty sure it would be possible to create some sort of... 'fear siphon' with that, and that would almost certainly work against an effect that tries to inflict fear directly. I was thinking about if that would work well as some sort of non-lethal weapon when applied to will, actually, but I would want to talk to someone with a better understanding of how souls work before trying that out."  

"That's ... probably a good idea," Robin agrees.

"Okay — so: a mental shielding talisman, generic reinforcement, hope and will batteries, maybe some emotion-based nonlethal weaponry if we can show that it's safe ... Oh! You mentioned maybe being able to do a gas-mask or similar as well, and it's always good to have backups there in case of failures. The shielding talisman looked pretty small; how big do you think an emotion-powered gas-mask would be? Or the batteries, for that matter?"