"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.