No! No, brain. 

Bad, bad, brain.

She is going to get a power specifically for making that water element demo unit for atlantis (for a fire, water, air, earth system, if that's available, so she doesn't have too many robot things to make before she gets back in balance), updates her shopping list and quickly expanding notes document, goes to have a shower, sockets that ideal form healing power from earlier in place of the elemental robot stuff, double checks to see if there's any new info on when she needs to be up for Team Stuff:tm: and then in the famous words of Samuel L Jackson, go(es) the fuck to sleep. 

The gift dutifully generates an "Elemental Robotics: Water" power that is compatible with a traditional four-element system. Since this is less of an overview, she gets more concrete details on how to actually assemble a channel for elemental water energy and use that to power a robot.

She's going to need, at a minimum, a bunch of sheet metal, metalworking tools, wire, blue LEDs, and a few computer components. A 3D-printer, nuts and bolts, pressure tubing, a computer-controlled milling machine, and a set of CMOS batteries would not go amiss, either. Oh, and grease and sealent to make things move or stop moving, as appropriate.

Nothing else comes to interrupt her as she completes her planned evening routine.

Morning morning, morning dawns! 

- She has a cute lil idea for doing a thing for an offering to Apollo and/or Artemis that means that she might have to reschedule things a lil sometime but oh well!

She'll go and make breakfast and check her messages and the team chat and her schedule and everything - what's the day looking like? 

She'll pop out the healing power 'cause she shouldn't need it, though she doesn't have too much in mind for her remaining slot - probably some powers for specific light skills to make and drop as needed, at a guess? But she'll decide on those later once she sees how busy her day looks like and what she's up for. 

Her morning is unscheduled, and no new messages came in the night to disturb her. The team has been asked to assemble at 1:00 PM in the mountain to make a plan for investigating the Venom situation.

When she gets to the kitchen, Miss Martian and the clone they rescued from Cadmus are attempting to determine how to convert a carton of eggs into breakfast. Between one's telepathically-implanted knowledge of cooking and the other's real-life experience with touching actual objects with her hands, they have at least not managed to set anything on fire.

"Oh, Topaz! Hi!"

"Hi and good morning, M'gann!" 

She waves with a light fond air. 

She noms her toast and amiably listens along to the din of the morning. Ahhh, she could get used to this. 

"Oh one small thing - I've got some unactivated memory crystals that I've been hoping to use to transcribe some stuff - I could just nab a power for it but I think you'd be better at it than an all-in one package I could easily make, so... Could you help me out with that? Just been looking into making some notes for how I've been lanterning and making things that might be a bit more - hands-on and useful than a text description. I imagine it's the same sort of deal with telepathic disciplines, sometimes?" 

"Oh, sure, I'd be happy to help with that! Transcribing things is easy."

:Send me the specific stuff you want to record?:

Doing this a little awkward, but having the empathic powers helps a good bit - part of the function of them seems to make it easier to just... call them to mind and hold them there, to feel them thumping in her heart, and that makes dragging forth the fullness of the memories a good bit easier. 

:These might be a little more intense than normal, so be careful, okay?:

There's a good few of them! There's her initial efforts with that silly knife, the proper green ring, the blue-green ring... She'll even send over her work making the green empathic barrier around the ritual and the warding talismans and the lantern creation ritual, since they're something that she expects will be of interest, even if they're less directly applicable to her teaching Joan than the fundamentals like the shift of thought towards the determination to build and the inevitably of creation or her own process for making things work well with Will. 

Miss Martian carefully relays all that into the provided crystals.

:This is really interesting,: she comments when the details have been recorded. :It's kind of like the posture-of-mind needed for telekinesis in some ways, and completely unlike that in other ways.:

:I can imagine! There's a lot that I don't have to think about when I'm able to call on an instinct power like this, but there's so much to poke around at when you stop and think some more.: 

And with that, some brief thanks, and wrapping up the rest of her meal, she's off to the rest of her work! 

She's got plenty of day ahead of her, now - even with the appointment pending, there's plenty of room for worky working more. 

Right now, she's still got the lantern creation complex around, so she might as well make good use of that - there's the skillsets for the subspace stuff in there, and there's got to be something more she can do with the immortal hope stuff. And she's feeling... good, and stable, and earthy? The lingering effects seems to have stabilized by now, so that's a good thing. 

Quick brainstorm of things that she could do with that - make a proper subspace pocket for herself, make the key for the lantern for transporting that around, see if there's anything she can do to upgrade the violet power core - to make it less prone to spillage, at least, she's pretty sure she could do even without getting a violet power, and...

hm. 

She knows that straightforwardly the subspace pocket stuff should work, but what she's not as sure about is what she can do with having a nice little source of immortal hope, here. 

There's... probably some sort of transubstantial mysticism she could do to get a decent immortality by internalizing sufficient immortal hope into the structure of her soul, or something? There's got to be something there, even if having a lantern doesn't help her too much with accomplishing that.  But the thing that seems likely to be more readily achievable is doing something with the power core - could she sort of... get a thread of that immortal hope and twine it into the structure of the violet system to make it something of a lantern? She doesn't need it to be fully featured, but it seems like it'd be nice to have the option and there's a decent chance that having a source of the appropriate immortal emotion can help with making rings or what have you, beyond the additional charging capacity, now that she thinks about it? Though she wouldn't want to do that if it was particularly risky to the functionality of the lantern, given the amount of prep work that took and how hard it was on her even with a dedicated setup and everything. 

As she thinks, she pokes around the internet for some basic dimensions for an arrow for a later project, and starts making a sunstone arrowhead to some specs she finds online. 

It seems like she should be able to create a hybrid Hope-Love lantern that uses immortal hope as a power source and then converts it to love. Or at least, no reason comes to mind why that wouldn't work. It would have a limited throughput, though — the conversion process is both slower than a normal lantern's charge output, and lossy.

Well, she doesn't have the intuition for what immortality methods would work anymore ...

But based on the general knowledge about the soul and the lights that she's retained — it wouldn't help with biological immortality, at least not directly, but it would make her soul more like the kind of soul that can safely endure the turning of the ages.

Oh that is interesting! She was definitely expecting it to be something more tied into physical things, but that's a good benefit to get too. 

She'll slot in the violet imbuement power again - it seems imprudent to not. 

So... 

In that case... 

She gets out her lantern, the power core, and stares at them a little, before kneeling on the floor, and opening up the lantern's floodgates a little. 

It's... honestly still a little counterintuitive how working with hope often is easier when she's a little unfocused, when she's daydreaming and thinking about what could be. Which isn't to say that the approach of using it as a reason to stay focused doesn't work well for her - it works just fine, but... she likes relaxing in hope, feeling the warm rush of faith and promises roll over her. It... makes it simpler for her, in a way. 

She closes her eyes, and reaches out with heart, spooling a thread of hope in her hand, letting it pool in her raised hands, cupped as if in prayer. Connecting to something like this is a little tricky, but she's worked with this before, and... it's nice, to get to reach out and not have to know it'll work exactly how you want it to, but that you can guide it home. And she did build it with this in mind, at least a little, so... 

She starts to let the hopes she gathered mingle with the power core, slowly, just letting it breathe it in a little and bask in the new source of light. 

- She's going to fall in love with people, here. She's going to get to stretch her arms and get to have a home, have a (love) life, have something of a family. Everyone has just been so kind to her - it's been so - disarming how accepting and liberal everyone is and she just - really loves it? She hopes she'll get to keep that up and that things won't get too messy with all the drama. Still it's.... worth fighting for, a place where people can love and hope and build things and make things all go and work and...~

It's been heartening to see how much the Zatara's care about each other and... that really cemented that she wants to have that here, too, someday soon. 

She sighs fondly, and twists the violet light together with the blue in her hand, reaching out to the structure of the violet-blue power core, adding a bit more size and mass to the crystal to accommodate all the little changes - enough structural stability to prevent leakages when she wants to, and just... accommodating more hope, more love, in forms structured and unstructured. She's... really probably about as poly as they come, and she's so excited to get to know people, love people, maybe even be a part of a family here or at shadow crest, see all the extremes of what people can do when they have the blessings that only this world can offer, and just - who she can find, now that she's all physically girlified and can see herself as the girl in the mirror, you know? And... 

She laughs slightly, a little shy blush on her face. 

She does kind of want it to grow alongside her heart, a little, even if that's a little silly.

She opens her eyes from her reverie, and takes a good long look to see how her little treasure has grown. 

The power of Love is a curious thing — it cannot be ordered, only guided, but, once it has set, it is tougher than diamonds and stronger than steel. It isn't logical, and it isn't rational, and it is sitting here, curled in the palm of her hand.

The hope and love flex and shade into one another, power flowing from one to the other hand back again. She can definitely tap off a regular supply of violet light from the crystal. At the same time, there's a sense of ... thinness, almost: this crystal is made from her hope for love and her love of hope, but love is more than a maybe, more than a longing sigh on the wind. The crystal feels like she can't deepen it much to increase the power throughput without experiencing and channeling other facets of her love.

Sparkly~! 

There's nothing wrong with that - she should be able to store the output of a lantern conventionally, right? The main thing is being able to generate a source of the (immortal) emotion at all, more than being able to make the biggest quantity of it she can arrange, really? Though of course more is betterer. She'll want to make the upgrades later when she's doing more with the violet light in her powerset, anyways - just the imbue skill works, but it's a little dubious when she's trying to work with something this fussy and she's sure she could do much better with even just a threefer, much less a complete rebuild. 

Speaking of...

She runs over to a computer station and opens up a document to start thinking about what she should plan out for her build. It's a bit of a blank for a while, then she opens up a spreadsheet file instead - there's... something she's pretty sure she's been missing, in optimizing her powerset, a little niggling thought in the back of her head that she could do at least a little bit better than the current configuration, for all that it looks nice and natural laid out like that. 

After a span of time closer to an hour than thirty minutes of mathematical fiddling, she's staring at a few different pages of a spreadsheet.

She's missing out on a decent chunk of powers, isn't she? Even if the power cap is based on the number of slots, she's still missing out on the optimally large third tier power, and she's just been... assuming that's the case for now reason, like her earlier thing assuming that she would need to do binary merges in most cases. 

So... 

Can she do all of that, make that fifth tier power composed of 48 base powers inside it with just the four slots? And while she's asking, how is the budding process going? 

Um.

Well, the bud is fine. It's — actually, hold on a minute. Three, two, one ...

There it goes! A little more than one fourth of the way done.

As for the planned sequence of power creation and merging steps: ... Yes, yes, that all looks possible in principle. It can't tell whether any specific pair or group of powers will merge correctly without knowing what they are, so she might have to experiment a little to find a set of powers that's consistent with the plan? But the plan itself — each step looks like something that it can do!

Nice! 

Okay, so...

What does she want, for this? It's not like it'd be impossible to come up with 48 different blue light powers, and there's probably enough fields of related enough magic that she could do something there, though it'd be a bit less straightforward - it'd be an interesting experiment to see how hard it would be to mimic the Zatara's bloodline or make a super compatible matching one, if nothing else. But one of the big things that jumps out at her is the last little proof she wrote down - the optimal build of a third level power is one made up of seven base level powers.

And guess what else has seven elements? And she was thinking about experimenting with the white light anyways... 

There's got to be something that she can do with that - having some sort of unifying structure, making them as power 'bundles' is probably something that'll help a lot with generating enough to fill the space and possibly help with making the resulting powers more... regularly structured, with less needed to stretch between them. And besides, the first third level power doesn't have the convenience of being able to bundle up to 7 before having to worry about compatibility, so there's going to be room for some finnickier powers. 

Looking at it... 

There's smaller clusters, but there's still clusters. 1-4, 5-7, 8-10, and 11-13, that all (at least a glance) need to synergize with each other, and need to be viable powers, and 1-13 needs to make a power that merges with all of the other 3 groupings. The 13 pointer is... probably a good place to do something with something 'life-y' that doesn't fit nicely as something that she can get from each of the colors. 

In terms of possibilities there... 

(absentmindedly, she dismisses the love imbuement power - she'll see if it makes sense to grab something more specific to help this later, but for now, a bit of extra headroom in candidate power generation and analysis is worth more to her than the opportunity cost of maybe having to wait a bit to get back that particular skillset.)

The gift mentioned 'vital energy' being a thing, once, when she was poking about possibilities for a resurrection system. She could probably get say, a vital energy manipulation power, a vital energy healing power, and a vital energy physical enhancement power as one of the three clusters? Maybe replace one of those with some sort of knowledge suite, depending on what she's looking for, there. Those should all be reasonably possible, she expects, but it doesn't hurt to ask if they're reasonable candidate powers. 

The gift did mention that it can't channel the white light, but that doesn't mean nessscarily that it can't do lowercase-l life magic, right? Maybe throw in something about - biological magic, if that's a broader overarching category that it can do, or something more specific like specifically bloodline powers. A power giving more knowledge about souls or maybe the soul-brain system could help, too, and those should probably all fit together reasonably nicely? 

She probably doesn't want to use a seven stack on symbology and material understanding, and things that don't require actual channeling of the white light are still game and should have a certain degree of connection to the rest of the lights, especially in a big merged up power. She bets that it'd help a bit too have all of the three stacks that she ends up using having the domain of specifically 'life as expressed through the white light', too, so that's a consideration. She's a little unsure about what she can get away with in terms of other design powers - could she get a power for understanding purely the design of say, white light rings? Actually... The direct channeling of the blue light was as best she remembers an optional extra that she threw in because she had the capacity on hand, not an actual requirement for the thaumaturgical summoning ritual for the blue elemental. Could she get say, a power for that same sort of thaumaturgical summoning ritual for entities of white light? She'd like the gifts thoughts on that sort of approach, too - thaumaturgical manipulations are inherently indirect, in some ways, but she totally understands if it's too profound for the gift to readily understand how to manipulate it, even at a remove. 

She's guessing not, but oh well. Best replacement that she does expect to work is some sort of thaumaturgical enchanting skill related to the symbols in the symbology power, or just the rest of the life-related powers that she ends up making, so that might incentivize it being at the end of the stack, so that the gift has more to work with, in terms of making it fit the design she's thinking of? 

There's also nothing wrong with conventional 'life sciences' too - medicine and neurology are her two first picks, but she's not too sure what else she'd include. Cloning, maybe, if she's going to be looking into that anyways? She's not sure if something like psychology would work for making a big old biopile, but then again, it would probably synergize with at least neurology, which would be enough to make it a viable power. Really, the question is less if she can make a viable second tier power, which she's preeeeetty sure she can, but if it would work with the other clusters she's been poking at?

And of course, all of these powers could need tuning as well...

(and also strictly speaking, she should probably generate more candidate options then she ends up using, but...)

She has a bunch more thoughts but that's more than enough of them for her to stop and take a bit of time to digest some answers. 

That's a lot of thoughts! The gift churns for a while, working through them.

Yes, it can do powers to manipulate vital energy, heal using it, and reinforce physical systems with it. She might also want a vital energy sensing power, if she's coming up with additional candidates?

It can do lowercase-l life magic, yeah! The easiest would probably be a sympathetic bond to the Green, Red, or Grey — the three mystical domains of plants, animals, and fungi. It can't do a bond to the Megahertz-band Radio or the High-Energy Coherent Gluon Radiation because she's too far away from the relevant kinds of life. And there are lots of possible less-generalist effects that come under 'life magic'.

Knowledge about souls and how they interact with brains is doable. Knowledge about bloodlines is feasible, but powers that actually manipulate or create bloodlines are too big to do at once.

It can't help with the design of white light rings, no. Knowledge powers of that type are technically a kind of specialized divination that channels small amounts of the compatible light to extract patterns from, so since it can't channel white light it can't do knowledge powers that require direct knowledge of it either. The symbology powers get around that because the symbols of the lights are ... impressed, sort of, in the fabric of space. On the other hand, it can do knowledge relevant to the thaumaturgical summoning of white-light beings, since that's a question about local thaumaturgic magic, and not a question about the white light directly. It might end up less efficient and safe than the blue-light thaumaturgic summoning, since it would lack a supporting symbology power, though.

It's generally pretty capable of setting up thaumaturgic knowledge powers about things that are otherwise too big? Because her understanding, effort, supporting materials, etc., are all standing in for the hard parts that the gift couldn't do itself. And that means that thaumaturgic enchanting is totally possible, although again it will benefit from relevant symbology powers.

Peak human skill in conventional life sciences is easy. Cloning is only slightly more complicated, but she will need a bunch of equipment to actually use the knowledge, it thinks. Psychology is also definitely possible, and it ... thinks that it would synergize with the light powers? It can't be sure without actually creating the powers in question and apprehending their structure.

In general her plan here is big and complex and not fitting in its working memory. So it's happy to help plan, but it's not tracking the precise details as well as she is.

hmm. 

No worries! 

She furrows her brow and pokes the gift a little more on what each of those colors mean in context.

- Oh, the red and green seem neat and useful! Animals and plants are the main thing that she'd want to work with, anyways. The grey seems... maybe a bit awkward to use, honestly? And if she isn't going to get the full set bonus she'd probably want to skip out on it unless she had a compelling need for that as a particular solution...

Yeah that vital energy set looks nice, and detection seems useful, especially if it's usable for diagnostics? Having the concept of 'detecting and analyzing life' in there somewhere could be good too, and make the whole thing a decent 2[4]... 

Equipment shouldn't be too big a problem with money and a bit of time! So she could do something like... a general life sciences one, cloning, and psychology? Or alternatively a power about like, neurology to make the link up tighter... Cloning doesn't seem like the sort of thing that should be in a big stack like this, on reflection. Tossing in a cloning power on an as needed basis seems fine to her, and she doesn't actually know if she doesn't want to idk, make people element robot bodies instead or if Zatara has a nice body reconstruction solution lying around. 

Summoning honestly seems like a good trick to fit in with the symbology and vessel set, though she could do a more general manipulation power? That doesn't seem as worth it, though, especially since she's suspecting that a general magical toolkit for each of the colors will be one of the seven stacks she does. 

So her first draft of this all would be... 

( (vital energy manipulation, vital energy sensing, vital energy healing, vital energy body enhancement), (Life sciences, neurology, psychology), (the green connection, the red connection, ???), (white vessels, white symbology, white-thaumaturgical-summoning)), with an alternative module of (soul-understanding, bloodline-understanding, thaumaturgical biomanipulation) as an option if she doesn't want to go for more bonus planar powers... 

(...She kind of wants more bonus planar powers, even if that probably makes things more complicated for her.) 

She's not sure what would fit in well with the red and the green - maybe something like a (thaumaturgical?) skill / affinity with connecting to and using the power of elemental realms, or something like that? That's probably a little overbroad to get the full effect, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. Should that be doable, gift? 

If she had enough space for it, and if she comes up with a ??? that fits, and merges everything in the right order, that looks doable?

It can do a spark for channeling power from mystical realms to which she has a connection. Or skill at designing thaumaturgic mechanisms that draw on such connections, maybe?

That first option sounds good to her! She'll ponder it a bit and ask the Zataras about it later, probably. 

She'll write that all up, and save it for later when she doesn't have her powers all locked up in the generation process. Oh, and she might as well do a bit of work on the basic ring blank for a violet ring...  

Which leaves... the question of what she'd want for the seven stacks. 

A magical expertise set and an infusion set seem pretty required, for what she's been doing, which leaves the question of... three more. 

She could do more specific engineering powers, affinity powers (the blue and green affinity powers have worked for her just fine, but... she's a bit less sure about the other colors, even if she does try to make them more tunable). A decent candidate for a generally useful power that she'd want for all of them would be something like... 'constructs', for the more physicalist manipulation and as something she can build on and that's probably more related to the crafting skills, and something more... esoteric? 

She's thinking either something about working with them as - parts of the soul, or perhaps something about working with the respective hondens and the sort of - structured planar psychometric imprints associated with each of them? She's not entirely sure what that would have to look like - any ideas, gift? 

She could do a dedicated enchanting power for each, or something about offense, defense, mobility, dimensional manipulation or understanding around the immortal versions of the emotions, too. 

hm. 

Another problem with this is that it's not exactly the best design for making some sort of - synergistic package based on the differences between the colors? Part of the point of getting each of these is that she can get as much of the benefits of all of them working together as she can, but that makes building the inner powers... harder. 

There's... some overlap between those, though, right? Hope heals, and she would be surprised if Compassion doesn't have its own special sauce for that, too. Though it also depends on if "you know, the bits of this light that aren't part of the general baseline suite of things that any emotional spectrum color can do" is a valid base power and how easy it would be to make everything align internally for a big ol' suite of those. She's not the most optimistic, but she'd figure she'd ask? Concievably you could get a 'common core' power to match that as well, and that could be a nice matchy match? idk! 

She jots down some more notes! 

 [emotion] magic (tune each color individually when you get to it ^_^)
Infusion (see if you can get interesting differences in the biases of this, too - might be too prespecified but can't hurt to check!) 
Honden? / As emotion / soul part? (Something for working with - spiritual patterns and working with it as a feeling, possibly including like, psychometric-y stuff, if can get it in the mix?) 

2 of (special sauces / common core / constructs / enchanting / synergistic design / mobility / immortal understanding / dimensional manipulation / offense / defense, in very rough preference order?) 

- She should do a survey of what each of the colors do differently from each other, honestly - just go down the line and read up on each of the colors special benefits, but that's probably a bit too much to ask of the gifts working memory for now, so... 

She'll leave her questions at that for the moment.