Sitting on one side of the table is a young woman of about Topaz's age, wearing an elegantly tailored black suit jacket that strikes a precise balance between remaining entirely professional while still advertising her curves, white gloves, slacks, and fuzzy pink bunny slippers. She stands to greet Topaz.

"Hi! It's so good to meet you! I'm Zatanna. It's been forever since I've met another practitioner our age. Dad was telling me that you've just gotten started with Thaumaturgy; how do you find the difference between manipulating ambient mana and—"

Zatara coughs and points at the bread.

"... right, sorry. Would you like some bread and salt? Dinner will be out in a few minutes."

She sits again, and gestures Topaz into a chair.

".ti ekil yeht sa aet rieht enoyreve ruop dna ereh revo taolF" Zatara mutters to the tea set.

She waves cheerily, before sitting down at her seat. She's just as cute as expected in person, which is heartening to see! She should get slippers like that sometime... 

"Lovely to meet you too! I'm Topaz. And I would love some bread." 

She goes and nabs a roll, preparing and buttering it up a little. 

"Has your father explained my power yet? I'm not really much of a practitioner yet, but I'm looking to change that!"

She hums lightly. 

"Thaumaturgy is... interesting. Mostly the biggest difference I've noticed from other forms of magic I've tried out so far is that it feels less... direct? Or maybe a better way to put it is that it feels like I'm waving my hands through water to make the current align in just the right way, whereas when I've spellfixed, it's felt more like I'm manipulating something solid." 

She takes a deep sniff of her tea - a nice rich black tea blend, with just a dash of milk and a cube of sugar - and sips it lightly, before chowing down on the bread roll. 

"I didn't want to tell her too much about you before you actually met — it seemed impolite — but I did mention that you have your own powerful bloodline-ish-thing going on, if a bit different from ours."

Zatara takes a sip of his own tea.

"I think that water metaphor is a good way to describe Thaumaturgy, yeah. I do most of my magic that way, just because I can compress the incantations, but dad has been having me learn a bit of sympathetic telekinesis, too."

She nods! 

"I can definitely see how thaumaturgy would be a good place to start for a foundation, given how broad the principles are." 

Though she's now wondering a little if it's like, the best way to grow your magical power, given how one of the main selling points is that it lets you bypass some of the normal requirements of having your own personal supply of magical power. Part of him being a bit shy about training her more militaristically, perhaps? Though she doesn't really know enough about that to judge. And besides, telekinesis feels like the sort of thing that you might mix in to have a relatively direct way to train raw magical power. 

"I'll give you my notes on what my power does a little bit later, but the basic gist of it is that I was given... 'the Gift', a sort of - free floating soul construct automaton that latched onto me, and lets me generate arbitrary magical powers, at a rate of something like a dozen every 12 hours or so. They can do most anything, as long as it's not too power intensive or relies too much on some kinds of particular metahuman power mechanics. Though, there's some structural limitations that mean that powers past the first four have to be related enough to each other to be 'merged', and I can only hold... 22, I think the number was, base powers worth at a time for now. Right now, I've been focusing on lightwork - doing the sort of things that green lanterns do, and making equipment that sort of works like theirs, though sometimes with different emotions - and I've been poking around a bit with thaumaturgy and a few other things." 

Zatanna whistles.

"That's really powerful. How 'most anything' are we talking, here? What have you tried?"

Can you raise the dead?

She purses her lips and stares off into the middle distance for a bit, sipping on her tea and thinking the question through as seriously as she can. What could she do? And... given the look on their faces, there's a... particular question in mind. 

...Could she? That doesn't sound the most impossible, actually - she already knows that she can store empathic patterns, and she has a sense that the seven lights create a sort of - complete cycle. It probably wouldn't be impossible as a long term project to at least create some sort of... 'soul back-up' system by upgrading that enough, right? And even if she couldn't store everything about a person's emotions perfectly, her intuition tells her the honden of hope stores an at least notionally complete record of the hopes all beings feel (and she's pretty sure there's the same sort of system in place for the other colors), and you could call that back with some work, maybe even well enough to bypass the need for a storage system... 

And she's pretty sure she could get a stack of powers to let her clone people, given how easy doing the stuff with the cold gun was. Given Zatara's trick of integrating people into the thaumasphere, everything she knows about the lights and how they can fit together... 

She tentatively asks her powers if there is any obvious reason why a set-up like that couldn't work? 

It ... isn't sure. There are places where a system like that would work, and places where a system like that wouldn't work, and it isn't sure which one this is because the proposal involves too many parts outside of what the gift understands and manipulates directly.

The big question is whether any gods of death would prevent it from working, probably. And about her standards for people being 'themselves' and how much being filtered through realms of elemental emotion changes a person.

Zatara grimaces and looks away.

...She hums. 

How to put this. 

"There's not a lot that I've tried that definitely couldn't work, given the right build. I can get these complicated divinatory powers that give me intuitions about how the universe works, an ideal form based healing system, some different buffing spells, insight and affinities for fields of magic and lightwork, a conjuration system using a type of magic that Zatara hadn't seen the like before, reserves of magical power, that kind of thing? I think it's a little tentative about poking at some deeper facets of the universe, so it's hard to say much for sure. It's not really... a great source of raw power or impressive feats on its own, either - there's a reason why I've focused on calling on elements of nature and setting things up to - work well, mystically." 

"I've made powers that can - store emotions and thoughts, even given myself basic telepathic abilities, before. And I know that - there's a lot of amazing things in various elemental and divine realms, out there. Part of what I'm working on is - trying to grow my power and my abilities so that I can answer questions like that, you know? I have some ideas for some... really wild things, but those are going to take a while to materialize, if they ever do at all." 

She's... going to have to talk about this more directly with Zatara. And probably Wonder Woman, actually - she has pretty good relations with her gods, from what she can remember, and the story of Orpheus is... plausibly true in this world? So it's not like the system categorically denies the possibility. And seeing about becoming a godling is on her list, though... And really, she wouldn't want to even try without a better understanding of the ways the colors connect to each other, the soul, and ideally a perfect circle of lanterns to manage each subpart of it. And that's her list before working how doing it in real life rather than handwaved theory would work, so...

She shakes her head, and snorts lightly. 

"But I'm getting ahead of myself. We can definitely do some experimentation about possible powers, sometime, and the gift takes questions well enough, at least for base powers." 

"Yeah, sounds good! Ooh — I wonder if you can get anti-magic for sparring; that could be great for training. I've mostly been working with these training dummies that Shadowcrest provides, but it's not really like the real thing, you know?"

"Hm. That's one of the things that I tried and wasn't able to fit in a base power, if I remember correctly?" 

She ditches the green two pointer and the technical writing power, and double checks her memory, there, poking the gift for a fully general magic disruption tool. Also... could she in principle get a power specifically to disrupt thaumaturgical casting, or something like that? It seems like disrupting ambient magic would be the sort of thing that would be simple enough to fit in a base one. 

Yeah, "fully general magic disruption" is too big for a single spark, but it can definitely do a power to disrupt thaumaturgical casting! Does she want a touch-range power that completely prevents it, or an aura power that makes it harder in a range around herself? Or some other implementation?

She nods. 

"Yeah - though I could make a power that generates background magical interference that would work well against thaumaturgy, something that makes it at least nearly impossible to use at touch range, or I think probably something to mess a bit with sympathetic connections to make your telekinetic tricks harder." 

No need! Just poking at possibilities for now, and you've always seemed a bit more comfortable doing that with free space, that's all. 

The two remaining sparks spin around for a moment.

It isn't really the kind of thing that can be comfortable or uncomfortable, but it does have more free energy to send to its power-planning mechanism when less is being spent on power upkeep. So it's good that it can answer about possibilities effectively!

"Huh. I wonder if that kind of background interference could also be useful for setting up larger thaumaturgic rituals," Zatanna muses, now that she has a more concrete mechanism to speculate about than 'do anything'.

"I mean, that's why some rituals have to be done in a cleaned or consecrated space," her father points out. "Eliminating background disruption; it sounds like the effect Topaz is proposing is sort of the opposite of that."

"Yeah, but I was thinking more along the lines of ... setting up a wider, slower motion than a single thaumaturge usually uses ..."

Zatanna makes an illustrative circling gesture with her hands.

She nods along at Zatara's explanation of what she was thinking. 

Hm...

"There's lots of stuff you could do, really - in theory, you could do something finnicky in space, providing all of the 'ambient' energy manually, and I could certainly create some big structure for a thaumaturgical ritual or do some sort of geokinetic manipulation thing to mess around with the patterns of energy in the soil or something like that. Guiding all the energy in an area..." 

She pokes the gift - she could probably do some sort of... base power to modify the general trend of magical flow in a smaller area and build it up bigger, right?

"Might be possible, but I'm not sure that'd be more helpful than what you could do without it." 

Hmm ...

Yeah, depending on the details it could do a power like that!

It doesn't generate specific suggestions, though, since it thinks she's still just checking capabilitites.

"Well, it's not something that existing rituals are designed around, right? So I bet you'd have to do a bunch of redesign to really take advantage of it. And I haven't really gotten to that point in my training yet, but I feel like the principle should extend from spontaneous gesture-based spells?"