Then it can do both of those!

Okay! 

She'll make those both, merge them up if possible, and then do the sploinky yoinky to merge up a new 3 pter! What does it look like ^_^? 

The combined power results in a very thorough understanding of what makes a blue lantern (i.e. a fragment of immortal hope suspended in a complex framework that splits off flakes of it in a way that does not result in the immortal hope being diminished, because hopes are not diminished when they are shared) work, including how to make one that can hide itself in a subspace pocket, anchored to a point in space or to another blue device. But the power has a much broader application than that — she can also see how to 'reverse' the blue charging process to turn an immortal hope into a device that makes people in the surrounding area more hopeful, for example. Or apply small 'hope-aligned' stable subspace pockets to other things.

Fun fun fun fun. 

She lets all the ideas run through her - she's got so many little ideas for the wiring system, for dimensionally isolated charge points of various little things, and of course there's no way that being able to do that sort of thing won't be helpful for being able to make proper ritual spaces and workshops for future more magicy projects! 

She nabs her lil violet power supply and feels out the structure with her new intuition, and just sort of... eases the structure up a bit, smoothing out some of the rough edges and contemplating how she's going to be able to integrate it into the whole shebang. There's a lot that she can't do without a bunch of skill in violet light manipulation that she can't do right now, but that doesn't mean that she doesn't have ideas for how it would be generally possible she can store up for later, and there's still a framework of blue light in there that she can work with. 

no horny brain, she is not going to think about right now making a love-aspected bedroom space for totally innocent elemental experimentation, for all that there's probably a billion mission related reasons why it would be helpful to have eventually

Okay so... 

Can she pop in the two spellfixing powers she sketched out earlier, merge those, and then make the magical reserve power? She thinks it'll be better if it's a little more settled and the magical power has a chance to build up a bit, and she'll probably have to do a bit more fussing on this in the morning. 

She pops out of bed begrudingly and goes to do her last little nightly routine, brushing and all to get herself ready to settle into a nice long sleep. 

The gift fills up the requested slots with sparks, and then settles down for the night as well. It has fulfilled its function, and now it can rest a while.

She smiles bashfully at the services of the gift, and tucks herself into bed. She's still honestly getting used to having afab-y estrogen levels in her system, so it's still just... a little suprisingly warm and good to get to be a little clingy, you know? 

She dreams sweet dreams of hope and love. 

She wakes up a little later than usual after the busyness of the day - about 9:20, it looks like. She go fetches some pizza to reheat for an impromptu breakfast, brushes her teeth in the morning as well like a good girl, and then goes make the final preparations for the bottle that needed her to have the innate magic source - she feels a little silly just babbling over the blue-speckled glass and waving her hands around, but there's still... something bright and fresh and wondrous in the air that makes it all feel... right. 

She goes and checks her messages quickly. 

Oh! 

To Joan: 

Aww glad! 

And yeah, no worries about sometimes being busy - just don't want to make things more complicated for you than it has to be, and I'm honestly pretty used to basically asynchronous communication? Don't mind waiting a while, so long as I feel like I've done my part making sure that everything is arranged properly. I'll whip something up in the next few days for that, I think, then! 

We'll have to see! And besides, we won't necessarily be working on this the normal way - I can get powers for teaching and sharing memories and doing cooperative green light manipulation, making imbuement tools or whatever ends up being helpful to speed you along, if you're comfortable with that? The - structure of the gift's powers that I've used to get this far seem to think that these things are at least theoretically conventionally learnable and usable without any tools, but there's no need to limit ourselves to that. As a pie in the sky goal, I'd like to figure out how to teach people conventionally and share it a little more broadly, but that's neither here nor there. 

Do tell what you have in mind for preferences for things for me to set up! There's a bunch of symbological homework I could give you that might help, but I think probably the best place to start is exploring how you wield the green light and showing you some of the simplest things I can do to see if you can feel your own way forwards - I was thinking of maybe getting Miss Martian to help me store a memory of how I go about doing it and using that to help, along with maybe a green light recording of my focus, and making a few blanks for you? Up to you if you're comfortable with that, or more invasive possible options. 

She thumbs up Diana's message. She has so many ideas for offerings, but she'll have to wait on working on them 'til after she's finished her work lantern making. 

She goes take a long luxuriously warm shower - power ring protection is the best for making the scalding intensity bearable - and generally takes a good chunk of time making sure she's at her Sunday Best, so to speak, decked out in a relatively modest blue dress affair. Ritual purification isn't the biggest thing in thaumaturgical hope rituals, from what she can remember, but going through the motions of hoping that you'll be able to set up everything nice and right is still something that helps, for sure. 

She sets up the ritual space with the big circle, making sure to wire things up properly according to the instructions, grabs her printouts (of the stars, the ritual instructions, and of the magic contact list that batman gave her a while back, for reference in a possible discussion with him) and her little artwork of her own, the physical shell of the lantern she's already made and meditates for a while with her lil violet-blue power supply thingymajig in lieu of a better blue light power focus, waiting for her maybe possibly sort of supervisory sorcerer teaching person, if not for her actual master in the arcane arts? She's not really sure what professional relationship he's trying for, but he's been nice ^^. 

Zatara arrives only a few minutes late, lightly smoking.

"Good morning! Sorry for the delay — there was a problem with the fog machine at work. But I think everybody is back to being the correct shape, so no harm done."

He glances around at her ritual preparations.

"This looks neatly done," he says approvingly. "Would you walk me through what everything is for and what you'll be doing with it during the ritual? I read your notes, I'm just quizzing you to be sure you have everything down, and double-checking the actual implementation at the same time."

...She was under the impression that he separated his magic work and his 'magic' work more than that? But she's not really in any place to judge. 

"So." 

She hums lightly. 

"Basically, I've got the circle down as a guide for the process, my blue-violet power core as a secondary beacon and source of hope and the lantern shell to guide the process of actually creating it afterwards. I'm going to go through a series of invocations to summon the hope elemental. I'll start with calling upon the hopes of the past, walk over to the other side of the circle, and call upon the hopes for the future. Then, I'll request a connection to the honden of hope, and infuse the circle with blue light from my ring, and entreat for a suitable entity of hope. From there, I'll offer my offerings - here the depictions of stars I arranged - and sing a song to help focus my hopes and guide it to share its own hope with me. From there, I'll just give it a brief thank you and let it return to its business. I've got an outer circle in green to help make sure that it won't overrun the inner circle and to prevent splash over, too, and a supervisor to help with anything else unexpected that might happen. I have the complete ritual script on me, alongside instructions for a banishment that I think should be appropriate, if I need it. It'll take a while for the whole process of dimensional link-up to complete and for it to flare to life once constructed, so I should have plenty of time to use the bottle to capture the time, and if not, nothing about this process particularly forces me to go through with trying to spellfix the moment, so I can simply avoid doing so and try again next time." 

Zatara nods along to the explanation, carefully walking the perimeter of the circles to check for any breaks or weaknesses.

"That all seems to be in order," he agrees. "You've got the bottle on you, so that you won't have to reach across any of the active elements to grab it?"

He carefully steps away from the diagram to take up a station in the corner, and avoids hoping that things will go well. Normally he would, but a magician's soul is a weighty thing, and he isn't going to channel hope right next to an untested ritual based around manipulating hope. That's how you end up with things worse than a fanged fog machine.

She nods! 

Alright, so... 

She takes a few deep breaths. She isn't in a rush, and the ritual doesn't ask for speed, just a certain amount of mindfulness. 

She makes sure that the lantern is centered just right, that the blue-violet power core is nestled correctly in the little curlicue correctly, and then steps into place to start the ritual. 

"I call upon the hopes of our forebearers, that lead to them fording to finer lands and forging finer lives." 

She reaches her finger down, and gently touches the outer ring of the circle. There's a faint - thrum in the air, as she starts to step through the motion, before the world largely quiets, again. Her forebearers aren't here, not quite, but she's part of the world's soul, now, and she's touched the blue light enough that they feel like hers, too, now. 

She straightens up, and slowly and methodically steps to the opposite side. 

"I call upon the hopes for our future, that lead them to work to build and be wise to build." 

There's a stirring, in the air, the ephemeral glint of spectral dust floating in the air, sparkling and swaying like a mirage as she steps back to her starting place, contemplating the hope for the future. There can be a - simple wisdom, in that, to know what you hope for, more than even what you want, to be able to cultivate something... real, and good. A faint smile graces her face as she sets her down again to continue. 

"May the gates to the glory of the honden of hope open.

May my prayer pave the path to the plane of wishes. 

and may those that dwell and dream there hear my call." 

Both of her rings spark to life, as she reaches in and lets them fill the space like floodlights, for a moment, before dripping into the sapphire facets of the circle, sucked into to it 'til it shines like the roiling sea at sunset, glimmering with reflected glory, shining radiantly and somehow warmly as the power builds. 

"May a creature of cyan, an angel of azure heed my call, 

to make and shape, 

the world to come, 

with faith and hope in the spark of all." 

She knows that some people probably can't hope, properly, but there's... still that connection, you know? To what could be, to the world that expects it, to what they want or what they'll need, and what it is, to be a thing, to have stars above to reach up to and reflect that light. And... there are so many brilliant lights, out there, and she can't do it alone, for all her strength, so she's happy to share hers, and help till and tame this wild wonderful world 'til things are right. 

She's right — hope is a universal force, pervading every soul of every being throughout the universe. So it is not quite right to say that the flickering spirit of blue arrives in the circle, but it does appear, condensing from the air into a beautiful blue shape half like a bird and half like a flame. It looks around at Topaz and at the ritual chamber, perhaps in curiosity or perhaps simply because that is what it does.

"You hope that you can make a difference. You hope to make a place for yourself, and to do something great. You hope that you can lift others up, and be lifted in turn."

The words are not spoken, exactly. They travel through some medium more substantial, more real than air, and Topaz's hopes resonate in response.

A little reflexive "M-hm!" spills from her lips as she burst out into a wide grin. 

Hiii hope pheonix-y thing! You are very wonderful and aesthetic and this is totally as cool as she hoped it would be!

- Focus. 

Her hands slide down to grab the printouts and her own little glimmering artwork, feeling the little tiny touches of hope she imbued, of how she feels, when the awe of the stars overtakes her, and when she thinks of what people could build, someday. 

"I offer you these gifts, wrought by artifice and arcanum, to symbolize the boundless scope of the spark's light, and the sharing of our hopes. Please accept the gift, and reach out, so you can share in my hopes-to-be." 

It doesn't frown, because it has a beak, but it couldn't hear most of that.

"You hope for my hopes to be your hopes. I hope to help increase hopes, so I hope I will be able to help. I hope there is some way to understand you so that this can be accomplished."

Awww. 

Yeah, the ritual was a bit loose here. 

She focuses in a little more... internally, and tries... to let herself be innocent, and her hope speak for itself. 

Hi! Here's my art I found and my art I did! I hope you like it! I hope that following the forms and going through the the little rituals of exchange helps? There's something always so - bright and exciting about getting to just - give people things that they're excited for and it's always so charming and uplifting when - people are just - moved by their gratitude to make new things they couldn't otherwise? Hope lifts you up and makes you whole, and there's something that she needs to be made whole. Here, look see? 

She gestures at the proto-lantern in the center of the circle, all the designs for facilitating power and sharing and some finnickier details about spatial things and the vaguest hints of the connections of blue to the other lights. 

You don't have to understand it all, I just need to start, and then we can dive in and go through things by the seat of our pants, okay? It'll work out, I promise. Oh and! 

I have a song for you! 

Wanna hear it ^_^? 

Oh! That makes much more sense! Hopes expressed and hopes fulfilled, as is the correct nature of things.

A feather, or a candle-flame, or both, separates from the figure's wing and floats to hover between them.

"I hope to hear your song! I hope to receive your gifts! I hope this fragment of Adara's light is what you need to ignite your beacon of hope. I hope your beacon shines bright and long, bringing hope to the places it is hard to see and to reach."

She tiptoes up and hands over her gifts, clearing her throat.

Hope leads, Topaz! 

Her voice is warm and soft and light, if a little imprecise, reaching up to hit the notes and accent it properly, wrapping around the words of the song as reverentially as she can. 

"Countless winter nights ago
A woman shivered in the cold
Cursed the skies, and wondered why
The gods invented pain." 

The preamble is a little on the darker side, but that's okay! Hope shines brightest against the night. It's okay to be upset, it's okay to be hurt, it's going to be okay. We've invented painkillers, and they help so much. We've invented so many things to ward off the cold and the dark and the shivers, so we can feel the shivers that we want, when we look up to see the skies and stars. 

"Aching angry flesh and bone
Bitterly she struck the stone
Till she saw the sudden spark
Of light, and golden flame." 

She bobs her head a bit to the lyrics, gliding out the sounds. It's fun to sing, and something about the glimmering blue lights makes it feel like she's singing to a campfire, which is all cozy. 

Hope is good! It's okay to be angry, it's okay to be scared, the light comes and sweeps and swaddles you up in time. We can make things, we can make our own light, our own wonderful lives, in time. 

"She showed the others, but they told her
She was not fit to control
The primal forces that the gods
Had cloaked in mystery" 

Hope reaches out, and lets you see, and more importantly, hope lets you see the good in what you have in front of you. Just a spark, just the start of a feeble flame is something so little, but something with so many possibilities, for the hearth of love and the compassion of cooking for someone who can't, and for refining so very many things. She hopes she can - reach out for something primal herself, here, and hold it in her hands and heart, and make something that can spread like a flame. 

"But she would not be satisfied
And though she trembled, she defied them
Took her torch and raised it high
Set afire history"

And hope builds. Hope builds the will to set forth on a new path, and it sets out like the streaking of sunlight down your paths, paving the way for people to strive forth for something beautiful. 

She grins, wry and warm, and belts out the chorus with a gleeful smile. 

"Tomorrow can be brighter than
Today, although the night is cold
The stars may seem so very far away.
But courage, hope and reason burn
In every mind, each lesson learned
Shining light to guide our way
Make tomorrow brighter than today."

She hums along merrily to the non-existent accompaniment, and sings out more wordless preening hope, reaching out to the spirit to start things properly, now.

"Oh................
Oh................
Oh... Brighter than today!" 

The elemental cocks its head, listening to how she tells the story of hopes en-kindling. On the last line, it trills along to the music — an eerie, inhuman sound that nonetheless echoes around the room and around the head of the listener. It doesn't make things brighter, exactly, but it reminds that things can be brighter, that together they can make them brighter. It is a beating, driving hope. A hope that urges the hearer to move, to be, to do, to take action, and, by taking action, to realize the hopes that burn inside their soul.
I hope. I hope. I hope.
The feather floats down to gently land in Topaz's outstretched hands. The flame tickles gently, incredibly soft and delicate, yet somehow more present than any object she's held before.
I hope. I hope. I hope.
The elemental cradles her gifts to its chest, enfolding them in its wings. It watches intently.

She takes it, feeling it brush along her hand, all fuzzy and bright and breathtaking. 

Alright, showtime! 

"Ages long forgotten now
We built the wheel and then the plough
Tilled the earth and proved our worth
Against the drought and snow" 

She reaches out filaments of hope to touch it, to embrace it, to feel the little rush, to feel the basic brilliance of it all, forged into the universe long long ago by the first hoping things, pushing aside the dreary darkness of the universe to make something special. 

"Soon we had the time to fathom
Mountain peaks and tiny atoms
Beating hearts electric sparks
So much more to know" 

There really is so much more to know! She's only just started on inventing things and constantly she's figuring out new fancy little tricks to pull and new interpretations and new things to make! She couldn't dream of making anything remotely as complicated as this little strand reaching up, like a vine of yggdrasil up to the honden, couldn't fathom the flickering facetted details of the spatial tricks to make it able to pocket itself up and hide to hope another day, and there's so much more, more more more to do, more to cherish, more to sing and smile for, and so many opportunities to see and feel and ooh and aah the spark. 

"Tomorrow can be brighter than
Today, although the night is cold
The stars may seem so very far away.
But courage, hope and reason burn
In every mind, each lesson learned
Shining light to guide our way
Make tomorrow brighter than today."

The chorus feels as warm and filling and fluttery and good as ever, like grace from heaven, an eager flush flooding her cheeks as all the power twists and turns and twines, forming the core, filling it up in every detail, making the six-then-sevenfold paths of power, each just a little different, each pane reflecting a different facet of hope bathed in the pure radiant rawness of the thread of immortal hope crossing planes and worlds to bring the light for her. 

"The universe may seem unfair
The laws of nature may not care
The storms and quakes, our own mistakes
They nearly doused our flame

But all these trials we’ve endured
The lessons learned, diseases cured
Against our herculean task
We’ve risen to proclaim:" 

Hope connects, and make things clearer. There's not always there, quite the hope you want to reach for, but that's okay. Hope builds up on itself, and make you whole, even when it has to seep in through the cracks. There's so so very much to do, so many things to face, and all she feel right now is just... quiet wistful wonder, and anticipation for it all, seeing things be brighter than today with her own eyes and her own soul. It's going to be wonderful. 

"Tomorrow can be brighter than
Today, although the night is cold
The stars may seem so very far away.
But courage, hope and reason burn
In every mind, each lesson learned
Shining light to guide our way
Make tomorrow brighter than today."

She sings the chorus one last time, breathless and ruffled, capping off the flow of that freeing energy, settling it into it's steady pulse, reaching up to push the capacity as high as she readily can, pulling every last spare bit of her hope into it, to make it shine, to make it last, to make a proper shining beacon on the hill to make her proclamation from. 

She lets the last trailing hums fade away on her breath as she emotes to the spirit, a dazed dreamy smile on her face.

Thank you! I think that'll be all? You were wonderful and really really helpful. I'm going to get to build so much with this and I'm so excited to get to show Joan this and get mr. magician man all ooy and ahhy about what we've done. This hope is completed, for now, I think, though there'll always be more things to hope for. You know the drill ^_^. 

Thank you, again. 

She bows her head slightly, and reaches down to grab the glass, ready to capture the moment. 

An outcome hoped for, an outcome achieved, as is the correct nature of things.

The elemental flares with brilliant azure radiance, and when it fades ... it is not gone; hope is never gone. But it isn't focused on the ritual circle, isn't manifested here, anymore.

Good-o! 

She mumbles out the incantation, waves her hand over the cup, and scoops up the moment like drifting motes of dust revealed in the light, capping it off with a satisfying clack. She'll even physically fuse up the glass a little to help make sure it stays fresh. 

She turns to her kindly magician patron, and does a little curtsey. 

"Hope you enjoyed the show! Everything should be back to normal, now. Feel free to take a look at it! Also, I don't think you've seen this lil thing?" 

She reaches over and grabs the lil violet cube, feeling it the threaded lines of blue streaming through the structure. 

"Feel free to check it out too. Oh, and I've got the gifts I made for Wonder Woman and her mom..." 

She smiles bashfully, and shakes her head. 

"Lotsa stuff to talk about, I suppose." 

Zatara checks that the ritual is discharged before stepping up to Topaz and running a hand through the air near her.

".stceffe laudiser tceteD"

"To say the least!" he agrees. "First things first: well done handling your first ritual. I don't think the protections worked quite as well as they should have to prevent, ah, spillover of hope, and I'm not sure why. But other than that, things seem to have gone according to plan."

"One thing to be cautious of: you're a little over-full on hope right now, which is probably to be expected. It's not serious — a bit like being tipsy, or having a sunburn; you'll be back to normal in a few hours — but just in case, I recommend finishing up with your lantern and clearing the ritual space, and then taking a break from magic for the rest of the day. That includes making any new emotion crystals. You can get back into it tomorrow, though, without problems. Also, try to avoid operating heavy machinery until then."

"I'm not sure I fully caught some of the subtext between you and the elemental there; did anything come up during the exchange that you want to talk about? How are you feeling?"

She laughs timidly, and rubs the back of her neck. 

"I think it was because the ritual was about the spreading of hope, and I probably overfocused on the narrow definition of 'protection' laying down the wards? Failing to preserve the status of being magically normal isn't really harm, even if it might makes things a little messy to manage afterwards." 

She stares up into the air in thought. 

"Or if it was a mechanical failure, it would be that I was doing work with planar and spatial physics and the boundary was too traditionally three dimensional? It doesn't feel like that was it, but I don't see any reason why it couldn't be that, either." 

She flounces and bounces. 

"Communicating the exchange I wanted was a little harder than I thought? It understands words, but it doesn't really... have the ability to readily contextualize things outside of what it means to hopes, I think? So I focused on - the silly little hopes that undergird trying to make an exchange work, for me, and doing a bit of show and tell. I'm - just generally kind of like that sometimes? Which isn't to say that the ritual and everything didn't contribute, but as best I can tell right now it didn't feel like I was being a me out of my normal distribution?" 

She hums a little, and tries to settle a little. 

"I feel hopeful, as you said. I feel... curious, and maybe a bit manic. It feels so much more - tempting to go and reach out to people and ramble about things, right now? I just sort of..." 

She swishes her wrist around, and stretches out her hand. 

"I just sort of want to go poke things with a stick and see what happens? Though..." 

She smiles shyly and ducks, and rubs her hand sheepishly up against her cheek. 

"I feel all... big girl and small girl, mixed up together, sorta? For all that I wanna go and blabber and chat about things and do a bunch of research or do a bunch of staring at the lantern to see how well it did, I also just wanna curl up and dream and think about big things without having to - go anywhere or decide anything? And I do feel a bit... run through, emotionally? Like I snuck in a big cry somewhere in there. Makes me wish I had things a bit more - figured out and in place for me to just go and curl up and enjoy the coze? But there's still a lot to go and figure out, now and..." 

She sighs quietly. 

"Yeah."