"Oh, it absolutely is," Mr. Nelson agrees. "But I've learned over the course of these past many decades that if you give Fate an inch, he'll take the inch right at the end of that mile over there. This way, to recruit people in a reasonable amount of time, he not only has to abide by these terms, but also leave me in a state where I still feel like being helpful and making another agreement four hours from now. Plus, recruiting people will almost certainly include giving them time to think about it, which is time that I can spend in my own damn body."

"It would be more convenient to recruit people if I could give them a guaranteed time that I could check back in with them—"

"Absolutely not. The right time to think about maintaining a convenient working relationship was when my wife died alone because you were busy tracking that fraudulent frog. Do you accept the unaltered deal, or not?"

"... I accept."

Mr. Nelson steps forward and lifts the helmet, staring at it with a complicated expression. Then he turns it, and slowly places it over his head, his greying hair vanishing underneath the burnished gold.

A flare of golden light envelops the pair of them, and then the body standing there is different, in some undefinable way. Standing perfectly straight.

Dr. Fate turns, adjusting his shirtcuffs so that they align exactly.

"Thank you. For your counsel, and your warning of the witch boy's whereabouts. Now, I believe I have a team of acceptable apprentices to find."

"It was, I believe, the right thing to do.  I hope your search is fruitful.  ...And one more thing.  Don't make Mr. Nelson regret this, Nabu, or I will figure out a way to make you regret making him regret it.  You may be a force for Order, and Order the foundation of civil society, but know that I will not make the mistake of conflating Order with Good."

His borrowed lips narrow, and he gives her a tight nod before striding out through the door, golden ankh in hand.

"Oh, that man who sleepwalked into the Hall of Justice because a nightmare creature was trying to torture him!" Wonder Woman exclaims. "I knew I knew that name from somewhere. He got Batman possessed by ... Brand, I think it was, who told us about this nightmare creature that was trying to unite the realms of Life and Death. And he needed Doctor Dee's stone to do it. Or were there two stones ... I was trapped in a nightmare realm for a while; makes it a bit hard to remember which parts actually happened."

She shakes her head, refocusing on Wildcard.

"Sorry, what was important about the Nightmare stone? These things tend to all blend together ..."

"...Well.  I would say exactly who I think that stone might rightfully belong to, but I have adopted the policy of not saying names when their owners might be able to hear me.  One of the Endless, I think I can say."

Wonder Woman nods agreeably.

"Alright ­— is getting it returned urgent on the scale of minutes or hours, or should I add an action item to the list?"

"Add it to the list; if it's kept this long it can keep a little longer."

"...That said, it's probably a good idea to have it ready to go by the time the Burgess investigation goes off."

She needs her notes.

Ah, Gift, is there anything that could help her with that?  Something that would - stick with her more directly than a notebook, or her old diptych -

She shakes herself out of the exomemory.

...Say.  If there was more stuff like [Sylvia using Aura-reinforcement principles to charge the shield], could you help - reify it properly?

For the memory — it could do eidetic memory, or maybe a power that lets them deliberately sharpen individual memories?

For reifying exomemories — it depends. It's definitely useful to have a 'guide' to try to pattern a power after, but there are still limits to what it can do, and if they have an exomemory of something that runs counter to those limits it probably can't meaningfully reify them. Does that help?

It does!  Thank you very much.

No, the trick is that it needs to not rely on her brain to pull off recall.  Her brain is awful at that sort of thing except in very specific circumstances, the compression's really lossy - and considering that she's not even necessarily getting 100% of her own brainpower for meta reasons, it's best to have something semi-external.  But relying upon a physical item would be...  Well.  You don't want to write these things down.  And she's rather out of the habit of having any such object, anyway, short of relying upon the Fatebinder's instincts.

Ah, okay! It can do a sort of indelible mental notepad that keeps its data storage on the gift's side of things, instead of in their physical brain. Does that work?

That would be great, please do.

...Will what she's written still be there if she drops the power?

Hmm. Not if it does it the naive way, but it can put this little twist on the connection ...

She would need a compatible power in order to read or write the notes, but they would still be there even if the power went away. Is that an acceptable tradeoff or should it explore other powers in this area?

That works!  Probably.  Would be great if it was only the writing that took active power use, but she's at least content with this.

It can't do reading without active power use unless the data is connected to her brain or soul in some way, and it can't do unstructured soul-editing powers for safety reasons. And it sounded like she wanted a power that was more durable than things stored in her brain, so ... that's the design dilemma it's working with.

Since this is deemed acceptable, it goes ahead and creates the scratchpad spark. They now have an additional space in their shared head, something like memory, but not entirely, into which they can put ideas and words and visualizations to safely store them for later.

Yay!

Alright, notetaking time.

Oh, hey, if it's in your metaphorical side of the room could it be something you could read off of?

Oh, uh, also, Wildcard to Earth, anything happening down there?

Notes:

- Lightsabers: Lightwork?  Ophelia/Diana variants.

- TODO: Raid villain stuff for ideas.  Cold guns.

- Lantern.

- Multiverse comms power - should be message-in-a-bottle type; breadcrumbs?  live comms probably a bit annoying metawise.

Could it? Um ...

The sparks swirl as the gift ponders that one. On the one hand, it has senses that it can use to observe local physics for the purpose of constructing powers. On the other hand, it isn't sure how to write notes on local physics. Maybe it would be easier to store the information in its preference memory? And then it just has to figure out how to encode a note as a learned preference about its user ...

Oh, actually they asked to be reminded about a thing earlier! It could probably store notes in the same way that it encoded that. The storage space would be limited, but that would be readable without a power, it thinks. Not as durable, though.