Robin responds with a list of reputable jewelers of which they are aware, mostly in Gotham.

I look forward to working with you again, as well. The operation was substantially different from the training exercises in which I have participated previously — but that is the point of doing this kind of work-study.

Batman indicated that he would be going over our reports and rendering suggestions, but it occurs to me that he might want us to try doing that reflection ourselves; would everyone be available to meet up in the training room at 6:00 to talk about things?

👍

I'm game! 

She pokes around the list of jewelers, and settles on one of the ones from a bigger chain. 

Alright so! 

For now... 

Oh, looks like her desire for a specific power was a little too indefinite, so - 

Gift, could I please get a power to help with learning spellfixing, and a power to help with learning thaumaturgy, preferably as a pair suitable for merging? 

She's got some reading and comparison work to do! 

But first before she chickens out... 

To Joan: 

Hey! 

I was wondering if you'd like to go flying and/or swimming / diving with me sometime soon? I haven't really had the chance to explore the beauty of this world, and there's always something magical about getting to see the sights from new perspectives and places, and I want to get a little more used to what I can do with my rings, so I thought of you. 

That... hopefully doesn't sound too much like a straight training request? She's not sure it makes sense to ask for anything too directly date-date-y, but 'seeing the sights with a cute girl', up to and including going to see the fishes if she'd like totally sounds like a valid timid lesbian backdoor date to her! 

Oh! Yes, it can do that.

Two matching sparks, one giving learning-oriented spellfixing intutions and one giving learning-oriented thaumaturgy intuitions, bloom inside her.

Green Lantern rings are amazing, but the League systems don't have any FTL transmitters; Joan will see the message when she arrives back on Earth.

There is this to say about the Citizen's Assembly of Rann: they have excellent lung capacity.

Mergey merge time! 

She settles in to read through the spellfixing book excitedly. 

Spellfixing is simple. This is not the same thing as 'easy'.

The basic idea is just as Zatara explained it: take your own inherent magic, and mix it with some other kind of magic. Different people find different metaphors for this helpful: 'winding' or 'mixing' or 'overlaying' or even 'growing a root network through'. The point is to subtly insinuate your own magic, over which you have control, into the magic that you want to capture. The hard part is doing that without disrupting the target magic.

Once you've done that, you can command your magic to be still, and halt the natural motions and fluctuations of the other magic, putting it into a state of suspension. At that point, you can technically carry the frozen magic around with you all the time, but you have to maintain concentration to keep it isolated from the environment. More practically, you can 'fold' the magic and place it into a specially prepared vessel that will handle keeping it isolated from the environment for you.

Leaving your magic cut off from you like that will gradually weaken your hold on it, but not in a way that risks waking up the captured magic unless the captured magic is still actively resisting. That's one reason that it's important to make sure that you have completely stilled the captured magic before bottling it. Once your magic has been cut off from you by the vessel, breaking the vessel will naturally make it come undone, releasing the captured magic and leaving it free to move.

That explanation covers the first chapter. The next chapter is a list of suggested exercises for feeling out your magic, entwining it into something else, and doing the 'folding' necessary to fit a large piece of magic into a small bottle. The following chapters are about specific techniques used to safely bottle spells, plants, creatures, enchantments, ritually significant times, and raw elements.

Overall, spellfixing is a lot more wishy-washy and intuition-based than thaumaturgy. On the other hand, it's not as 'point and feel' as emotional light manipulation. With her enhanced intuition, Topaz can see some of the overlap between spellfixing and thaumaturgy, though: the former refers abstractly to 'flows' and 'tangles' that seem to correspond to the same underlying energy patterns that the latter is all about creating from ambient magic.

She hums interestedly. 

What does bottling a ritually significant time actually do? How do you control or direct (if you can at all) a spell with a broken vessel to make it not just randomly kind of explode everywhere? She presumes there's some advice for how to manage things to be able to capture your own spells for later, right? Does it say anything about capturing emotions or thoughts? 

It seems kind of interesting? It seems like a pretty practical field to take up if she wants to keep on messing around with her magic, and it seems like it's a decent basis for intuitive spellcasting? But on the other hand, her power means that she can sort of - skip ahead a decent bit on that sort of thing, so the advantages she'd have might be a bit less pronounced? Still, it seems plausibly worth pursuing. 

She runs through a few of the first exercises it recommends. 

Using a captured ritually significant time is actually very easy: just crack the bottle when beginning the ritual, and the ritual 'counts' as having occurred at that time, instead of whatever time you actually cast it. It isn't an absolute effect; doing a ritual with captured midnight at high-noon will usually give you less good results unless you went out of your way to capture something like midnight of the longest night beyond the arctic circle. But it's handy for rituals that need to be done during a thunderstorm, or once every thousand years, or something like that.

There are ways to control the release of bottled spells, yes — primarily using shaped glass vessels that can be uncorked or opened in specific ways. It requires a little knowledge of the structure of what you're storing, and you have to 'orient' the spell correctly when you 'fold' it, but you can rig it so that when the vessel is opened it rebinds parameters of the effect such as 'target' in a controllable way.

Capturing your own spells is actually one of the recommended exercises, because it's much easier: your magic is already present in the spell, after all. So it's not a good way to practice the 'infiltration' step, but it is a good way to practice the 'folding' step. (The explanation in the book seems to assume that you cast spells with your own inherent magic, rather than shaping ambient magic into a spell framework the way that thaumaturgy does. Capturing a thaumaturgically-cast spell does not seem to offer the same advantages, but on the other hand that means it's exactly the same process as capturing anyone else's magic.)

This book doesn't include anything on capturing thoughts, but it does mention capturing emotions briefly in the section on ritually significant times: it's important to know whether your ritual requires 'the moment that light first touches the mountains' or 'the emotion of seeing the beauty of light first touching the mountains', since those are different things. It doesn't include any separate details on how to capture an emotion, though.

The exercises seem mildly impossible, until her intuition suggests that she doesn't currently have a sufficiently strong source of inherent magic.

Does she want a slowly-refilling reservoir of magical energy?

Hm. That is a bit of a downside... 

She digs up the book on spirit calling, and takes a look at that - is there a nice way to get 'inherent' magic in that sort of way from a spirit contract? And while she's there she might as well get a decent sense of what is in that book. 

That book is less of a textbook, and more of an autobiography mixed with an encyclopedia of summonable creatures. It includes sketches of the different creatures, and details of what D.A. Chesterton has learned about their likes and dislikes, observations of their powers and behavior, and stories about how he discovered and made contact with them. Their powers and abilities are widely varied — there is almost certainly something that she could summon in order to grant her magic that is usable with spellfixing. There are mentions of some powerful creatures that can grant boons or wishes, should they be inclined, and they would definitely be able to do it.

For beginning summoners, Chesterton recommends fire sprites. They are easy to see, and easy to banish using a sympathetically-linked candle. They are often young, curious, and mischievous. They will often do tasks in return for new things to burn, and they are quick to forget any transgressions, especially if one makes an offering of oil or tallow. On the other hand, they should be kept away from matches, libraries, and stamp collections. Unlike many other spirits, they don't have any ability to form binding contracts, but they do tend to hold up their ends of deals, more so if you've repeatedly summoned them and built a relationship with them. They can set things on fire, but they can also be used as scouts (although they tend to report on things in a way oriented around flammability) or messengers. Some of them will help keep things at very precise temperatures for alchemy if you explain what you're doing as you go.

Summoning a fire sprite is done with a relatively simple magical circle, three dribbly candles (yes, the dribbles are important: using fresh candles will sometimes fail and sometimes get you a snake instead, for unclear reasons), and a sacrifice of powdered coal or charcoal. Gasoline also works, but tends to get the fire sprites too worked up to talk to.

Hm! 

That seems like a not necessarily terrible place to start? Though most of those uses seem likely not to be the most difficult to replace with a bit of grit and general interest in making modern tech things work for you.

Hm.

Honestly if anything that really suggests that if she wants to go down that path, she should ask things and talk to people, rather than just go research? That's the sort of thing that you'd definitely want a teacher overseeing and guiding in detail rather than something that you can just sort of go do. 

For now... 

Hm. 

She has a decent amount of powers left, by the feel of things? 

She goes through the list of emotional spectrum colors she hasn't figured out yet (red, orange, yellow, indigo, violet) and pokes the gift for an appropriate crystal for her to make for using each of their powers - she wants to feel out each of the colors a little bit more, even if green and blue are probably going to be her mainstays for the forseeable. Maybe she can bundle that together into fewer than 5 distinct powers? It shouldn't make a huge difference long term either way, she supposes. 

How is her power generating capacity feeling after that? 

If she wants to generate samples, they'll have to be separate powers, but if she just wants to know which gems are appropriate on a generic level it can probably bundle them? Either way, the gift happily creates the requested powers.

Answers seem to be: ruby, carnelian, citrine, amethyst, and tourmaline, respectively.

And the gift is ... not fresh, but not tired. But some of its energy is going to ... stretching? Growth? More than it ever has before, although still not very much on an absolute scale.

It's still good to keep experimenting, at least.

Awww! 

No need to generate samples - she's got a power for that already! 

She doesn't need these to be big, just say... a few little blocks about the size of her rings for each of the colors in each of the materials? If all goes well she should be able to make a power reserve for each of them through tyhe power of hope - maybe make some more elaborate reinforcing cycle or rainbow or what have you to see how she can blend the complete suite of colors. She queues that up now, and spends a bit of time adding the hope of her tentative experimentation to each of them to get them started on having a power intake system. 

She idly goes and reads through the thaumaturgy book a little more as the powers shift and the crystals form, before with an idle thought she prioritizes the tourmaline and queues up violet imbuement as her next power. 

How does it feel different from blue and green? 

The violet light of Love is ... less stable, less amenable to direction than Hope and Will. It is a striving power, wanting to reach out, to nurture, to kiss, to touch, to feel. It flares with power when she thinks of those she loves, and dwindles to a dim spark when not acting, supporting, reacting to those people.

Love is powerful and all-encompassing. With Love, she could do anything if she just leans in, feels the thrum of the universe.

She blushes a little at the feeling. 

Alright so... 

Hope leads. The hope that you'll get your crush reciprocated, the hope that you can be your best for your love, blending into that - intimate connection of reaching out and sunning in their brilliance, their brightness, their boldness. Hope helps you feel that connection, because it raises you up and lets you fly, and you need to fly to fly together and flock together, she's found? Love is so much about - building things together with the hope that you'll bring each other closer and make each other bolder and truer. 

She swirls the two of them together in her mind, a little, and imbues it with a spark of violet vibrancy. 

She leans in and checks it with her senses, leaning on her new little expertise in feeling things out with the blue light. Has it settled well? Has it tied into the passive recharging effect like she managed with the green, or better? Love feels like the sort of thing that'd be - clingy and eager for connections, perhaps, even if love unreciprocated is perhaps a little... simpler? than hope unfounded and alone. 

Hope fuels Love and it flares bright, but ...

It doesn't catch. It lingers in the crystal a little, but the recharge effect doesn't take. Her imbuement intuition whispers to her that she's missing a key ingredient, here.

Oh... 

Hum hum hum. 

There's a few things it could be? 

Spitballing... 

It's possible that there's something about - being able to imbue the love of a love network between several minds, and that anything that she'd try to do without radically rearranging the structure of her mind is totally doomed to failure. She hopes it's not that, though honestly that isn't necessarily the most infeasible line of research, on net? 

It's possible that it's about - completing the circuit - turning love into hope, hope into love, loving hope into hopeful love. Or alternatively, there's just not quite enough love in the mix? She's not entirely sure she's thinking enough in love, even if she can feel the start of the simmering soft glow of it in her chest. 

She prioritized hope a little much in her thoughts, and that seems like it might not quite be right way to do it, when what she wants in the end is - complicated blooming blossoming love, rather than straightforwardly fueled and fired will, like in her blue-green will. 

She takes a deep breath, and tries again. Think about love, thinking about - the circuit, the cycle of love, and love love, this time, to drive it forwards. It's okay if this isn't the thing, just yet - just... feeling out the sparks of her passion should help, and some of the thoughts are recycleable into her other ideas. 

Love leads. Love makes connections, makes you feel, makes your motive force, your fire, your flush, your ferocity. Love makes you want to take the things of the world, makes you want to challenge the world and tear down everything that displeases you - it doesn't have to be jealous, but it can be, easily. She's... not the most experienced in love, but she's had enough of her own relationships to know that loving makes you hope, in a way that few things even can. It makes you hope for her smile, makes you hope that you can ease the way for her, and that she can make the world brighter and warmer, that the brightness you feel sunning in the radiance of her soul is something real that you can touch and enjoy and forge into something tangible and firm. Love makes your hopes come true, and love is one of the most primal hopes of all. 

That seems to be much closer. The energies thrum and circle and feed one another, but they still ... don't ... quite ... catch. The emotion is fine, the cycle is fine, the ties between the emotions are right ...

It's just not quite ...

who what is is it it for for who what why for whom what why for whom for whom for whom

She lifts her hand up to her cheek, rubbing it as she thinks it through a little more. 

hmm.

Aww! 

It's too impersonal, isn't it? 

She focuses out into the diffuse feeling of being her, to help alleviate the embarrassing blushiness of it and mulls it over a little more. 

Girls are so cute! It makes you want to just - jump up and pinch their cheeks, it makes you want to see them smile at you, bright and warm and excited and engaged, or wistful and yearning and aching and blushing. She's always - wanted to - be a part of... completing someone, you know? Making them more themselves, making them - grow more, strive more, have more to hope for, and make them... softer? There's some power in love that she craves that - makes the straight lines people force themselves into break, makes the - flow of what it means to them work in a way that's so so perilously hard, when you're on your own, to make yourself a vision of love by seeing the hope in your partner's eyes...~ 

She trails off into warm floaty memories, for a moment. 

Love brings people together, and binds them, and hope forms that into a goal, a shining star, something more to be than just 'closer', for all that it really really helps to be simply closer, sometimes. She wants to - find her way to be the person that people love to hope for, the kind of person that can be 'super' enough to be a 'superhero', the kind of person that can be naturally loved and admired and adored, and can have that success (some thoughts flicker into being for a moment, thoughts of things more carnal, more physical, more directly delightful than simple praise and solidified status) and... be apart of it all. 

She loves - intelligent girls, driven girls, ones with styles and passions and clear visions, ones with a creativity that lets them lead and shine and make things that are truly special. She loves people too, sometimes, the ability to just - be in the dragnet of clarion connection and in the room with dazzling dancing lights, twining and twisting together and being a part of something big and warm and fuzzy. She knows that she can grow to love a lot more, too? That's part of the - hope of love, that you can explore the space of people and find gems akin but not quite alike what you knew to like and love before, and find a way to return their love. It's... always an adventure, and she's hopeful she can go on that adventure many times, you know? There's no one answer there, and that's part of the joy of love. 

She strokes her glowing fingers along the gem like a lover's caress, and tries to get a sense of how it feels, now.