Intuition for applying will defensively, and skill at shaping will into patterns both bloom to life within her.

It's now obvious that she has been doing the equivalent of shaping sand into rough castles for her ring: the will within has taken on the shape she was pushing for, but only in the roughest strokes. With more precise visualization and focus, she should be able to shape it into something more detailed and solid.

"I can imagine!" Miss Martian agrees. "What was university like? M'arzz is too far to pick up most broadcasts from Earth, but we used to get TV shows before everyone changed encoding formats, and there were a lot of shows set in high schools, but not really any set in universities."

When they reach her chosen room, she spends a moment scanning the available space before setting the luggage in an available corner and giving it a kind of telepathic poke. The luggage unfolds into a vaguely skeletal-looking bookcase containing a set of crystal disks, a remarkably normal wooden box, and a bundle of something like leather.

She'll merge them when they're done, please and thank you! 

"It's a little hard to describe! I think the biggest differences I noticed is that there's a lot less structure, in some ways? There's even less of a 'class' as a social unit then in elementary or high school, so there's a lot more social spaces you just have to sort of figure your way into. And there's a lot more open time - the classes are a lot longer but a lot sparser. It makes it sort of feel like you're just living your life and have this interruption of the class and the homework, rather than being quite as much the center your whole life orbits around five-in-seven days of the week, if that makes sense? Sometimes that makes it a lot less stressful, but since the work keeps getting harder as you go, it can still really take a toll on you." 

She strolls over to the spot where her luggage is, crouching down to take a (hopefully polite) closer look at it. 

The sparks snap together readily enough; the overall combined power gives her the intuition and precision to layer defensive will into an object.

The luggage is strange. It is, on the one hand, clearly alive. A close look reveals that it isn't just bone-like: it's primarily composed of actual bone-analogue.

On the other hand, it's just a shelf. It's not putting down roots or anything. It seems perfectly content to just hold Miss Martian's stuff.

The stuff itself is equally interesting: the leather is also clearly alive, although it doesn't seem to have a skeleton of its own. The disks aren't alive, but looking at them brings a set of not-quite-memories she's never had before to mind — at least until Miss Martian does something, and the disks stop reminding her of journaling and start reminding her of reading the blurb off the back of an autobiography.

"Oh! I guess that makes sense — the shows weren't really clear about how much time people normally spend in high school? Because sometimes characters would be there like, all the time, and sometimes they would just meet up there and then go do other things? There were a lot of opinions in the, uh ..."

She stares into space, visibly trying to work something out.

"... fan-anthropology group-thinking project? I guess? I don't really know the English word for it. Anyway, there were a lot of different theories about what a high school schedule actually looked like."

Oh goodness!

Telepathic data storage! And not just telepathic data storage, something that at least sort of works for non-telepaths! The living technology is also kind of interesting. She smiles slightly at the sight. They seem pretty small and readily available too, which is a promising sign. 

"It varies a little, but I think about 7 hours a day is pretty typical - mine was 8:30 to 3:30, if I recall correctly. As for how to say that... 'fan club' is probably the most idiomatic way to describe a group of people who meet up to talk about a media property, though I guess that depends a bit on how much the telepathic component makes it structurally different? You make it sound like it's maybe something closer to a mind-to-mind forum discussion or some sort of academic project, perhaps?"  

Oh, that's a slightly larger defense bias then she was expecting! Probably worth recomping at some point, but for now... Probably the lowest fruit to pick is unmerging the four pointer and getting it reunited with the original willpower power? If she can, she'd like to keep the aura compression adjustment, but she doesn't know if that's the sort of thing that persists through mergers and all. 

Okay, yeah, no, she needs to do something about this, even if only for other people's sake.

She hums and pops back up to her feet. 

"- Have you talked to Martian Manhunter about etiquette around telepathy here, by the way? It's been a really interesting experience feeling all these new sensations but it's been a lot, too, and I don't want you to get the wrong idea about how you should expect people to treat it." 

Miss Martian's bodylanguge freezes for a moment in what is, counterintuitively, obviously embarrassment. Then her thoughts catch up, and she puts a nervous expression on her face and rubs the back of her head.

"I know humans aren't telepathic, and he did warn me about not reading unshielded surface thoughts — And I haven't been doing that!"

She waves her hands, starting to get agitated, as though to ward away the thought.

"I've been leaving your thoughts alone, I promise! But I'm ... not really sure how much you can feel me? Like, for a long time we thought humans were just intensely isolationist, because you guys never responded to our messages. And then you started putting out radio broadcasts, and we realized that you weren't telepathic, and that's crazy. Only it seems like maybe you can do receptive but not projective telepathy, and you were hearing our messages the whole time but couldn't respond? But I don't want to just treat you like, like, a table ..."

She takes a deep breath.

"Sorry, I'm babbling. Do you want me to ... shield more? Can you hear the furniture or my outfits? Because I can't really make those any quieter than they already are."

...She kind of wants to hug her, poor thing. 

She tries to let that slip outside of her mental defenses as best she can, if that's a thing? She might try to sneak a peek and even if she doesn't, the power is kind of overly comprehensive enough that she's not totally sure if it would actively make it harder for a telepath looking at her to get a sense of her emotional state, so... 

"Just speaking for myself... It's basically okay to poke me, as long as you don't try to probe my private thoughts? My power shapeshifts me a bit in a way that makes me more able to control where my thoughts go and some of the details of what comes out, so I don't think it'll be a problem long term? It might take a little bit of adjustment for me, though. I can't hear your thoughts passively, or that of your furniture or outfits, though I could feel when you tired to access my sense of direction, earlier." 

She gives her a small open smile, then pauses in thought, the intuition guiding her a little. 

"but I think I might be able to if you focused really hard, for idiosyncratic metahuman power reasons?" 

Her lips purse as she tries to remember a bit of her research - it wasn't really a focus of hers but... 

"Humans can be telepathic - and telekinetic, for that matter - in a way that looks from the outside like what martians do? I remember hearing about Adam Blake who had an unusual mutation that made him a pretty powerful one - he was a superhero active in the 60s, I think? I think there's a few other people like that out there, though they're probably a lot less impressive than what you are used to. A good amount of humans have learned magic, too, and I think that there's probably a bunch of ways to do mind to mind communication through that, too? I think an average human has never even heard of the concept of telepathy, though, much less developed a faculty for it - I'd be surprised if having some way to communicate mind to mind or do parapsychic tricks is more common than one in a million or so, so even if it's theoretically possible for any given human to hear that sort of thing, they wouldn't have any sort of sensitivity training or much context for what to look for. And part of that means that there's no - set up social expectations about what kinds of telepathic access are okay or unobtrusive, just the knowledge that telepaths can do lots of scary things to you if they want to and they're powerful enough, and a vague sense that they're probably not all bad if Martian Manhunter is on the league." 

She pauses, and steps a little closer to her tentatively. 

"I hope that makes some sense to you?" 

The body language and deliberately putting her hug-feelings outside her defenses is enough for M'gann. She wraps Topaz up in a hug, getting a little bit shorter to fit under her chin.

"I'm sorry — I didn't even notice looking at your spatial awareness earlier," she tells Topaz's collarbone. "It's a reflex, because nobody likes midair collisions. I ... guess that means you probably don't have much idea of what's even possible with telepathy?"

:[A mental image of traffic through the main cavern outside her neighborhood, the many streams of hovering martians seamlessly splitting and weaving, twisting around one another in a flowing braid that somehow never seems to result in a crash or even a traffic jam; the low hum of a hundred minds reaching out to touch each other, building a gestalt impression of the shape of the cavern that glows against the walls, making the place itself seem almost alive.]:

The bright spark takes a bit of prying to come apart — but it does come apart, into two lower-level sparks: one for her regenerative aura, and one for boosted willpower and avoiding mindreading.

The orbit of the remaining sparks is a bit chaotic; the two that were merged still like each other, but the willpower boost also likes her green-light-imbuement suite. But the green-light-imbuement and the regeneration don't like each other, which keeps all three sparks from orbiting in synchronicity. Instead, they form a chaotic double pendulum sort of arrangement.

She hugs softly, and leans into her, a little untensing sigh slipping out her chest. 

"It's okay. It's just something you should be mindful of going forward, you know?" 

She lets her reaction to the thought slip out of her defenses, just basking in the moment of simple closeness, tamping down her nerves as best she can.

That's pretty to watch - it reminds her a bit of that animation she saw of an animation of a pathing algorithm of hundreds of people just seamlessly swarming and stepping past each other. This seems a bit more improvisational, but it's no less beautiful for that. It seems kind of... intimate, too, in the way that sitting together on a long train chatting each other up is, for all that it's a fairly transient connection. A highway really doesn't compare.  

"I really don't know too too much - my power gives me a bit of an instinct for mental defense, but that doesn't translate particularly well for understanding what's going on with telepathy. And I don't have much of a sense of what it's like to be telekine, either." 

She merges together the willpower imbuement suite and the willpower et. al boost once they settle into place. 

They go together without too much trouble, the combined power deepening her control.

Miss Martian radiates the sense that she doesn't want Topaz to be nervous.

"Yeah, you're right," she agrees, determination filling her voice.

She pulls back from the hug a little way and smiles up at Topaz.

"I wanted to come to Earth to explore, and that means there will definitely be new things I need to learn and remember," she decides.

She releases the hug and floats over to her shelf, flipping through the storage disks.

"I don't know if I can really describe what telepathy is like either, though," she muses. "But for the opposite reason: I'm not really sure what it would be like to not have it. But I know you can share some of the sensations ... aha!"

She pulls out a disk that doesn't look any different from the others, although looking at it is reminiscent of the track list of a CD.

"My cousin is part of a dreaming quartet — sort of a sensory jazz ensemble — and I have one of their albums. This one has pretty good impressions of group telepathy, I think. We could sleep on it tonight?" she suggests, voice becoming a little hesitant. "Like a sleepover! And I could paint your nails?"

She laughs brightly. 

"...You know what, sure! I've got an appointment with batman for 17:00, but I'm sure I'll be able to fit in some time for some R&R." 

She nods along a little. 

"Maybe you'd want to start with what you like the most about it? Being able to ground it in particulars helps a lot with explaining it, I think. Beyond that... I think the most important thing is that people don't expect to feel someone else in their head? I don't think it's a big problem if for now you end up feeling where people are and getting a few other stray details for now, as long as you don't end up unsettling people and you keep following the sort of rules that you would on mars? Some of the heroes here might also have some training there, too, so you might want to be extra careful about doing it with people with powers and costumes, too." 

The new power makes it - not quite easy, exerting your will to bend the shape of the universe is not something that natively comes in 'easy' - but approachable to weave in a little more detail of the defenses, to the imprint the structured static and firmly supported seals of thought into the ring, making it nestle in with the environmental shield she's been building and the formless fuzz of potential, to ward her mind and nestle in a net of will-wire to keep her private thoughts safe and sound. It's slow work, still, especially when chatting like this, but she can feel it helping a little already. 

She puts one hand on her hip and the other to her chin in an obvious thinking pose.

"I guess the thing I like most about it is just how it lets me get to know people?" she muses after a moment's silence. "I like learning about people, and body language is a really cool way to do that, but it's not really the same, you know?"

"Yeah..." 

She hums, and plops herself down on the bed, posed across from her. 

"There's a certain - instinctual immediacy of being around people, of being able to see or even touch people that's hard to replace, for humans. I have to imagine the difference is even more dramatic for a telepath." 

She taps her thigh lightly in thought.

"I think... that's part of why I like reading people's thoughts in text so much? It's just divorced enough from the sensory experience of someone's personhood that it doesn't compare too directly to physical closeness, but it can really give you a lot of insight into where people are coming from that you can't usually get anywhere else." 

She blinks, processing this.

"Oh my goodness! You must have so many autobiography recommendations," she deduces, bouncing excitedly. "Do you ... think that I could find someone who would be willing to share their ability to read?"

"If it's not too involved, you can share mine? I'm sure there's plenty of people who'd be willing to consent to that sort of thing for a superhero, honestly." 

She hums thoughtfully. 

"As for autobiographies... I'm not totally sure if these exist in this world, but I'd recommend "Surely, you're joking, Mr. Feyman", Stephen King's "On writing", and maybe Anne Frank's diary, if you're okay with something heavier? Unfortunately, a lot of them I only really know from reputation or excerpts I've stumbled across - I'm a lot more of a blog or fiction reader, really."

And putting a pin on the fact that telepathic skill sharing is possible - that's so cool and she has so many ideas already for making use of that. 

A telepathic probe tries to settle on her, touching parts of her language center and muscle memory.

"It's not involved! It just requires some prolonged contact to pick up a skill in a permanent way," Miss Martian explains. "And it's a bit easier if the person donating the skill actively uses it, but that's not a requirement. What kinds of blogs and fiction do you usually read?"

She lets it settle, relaxing back her barriers and refocusing her spare attention on making more physical shielding.

"I'm a bit of a sucker for xianxias and crunchy litrpgs? But I'm happy with any fantasy or sci-fi you can name as long as it has enough soul in it. As for blogs... I think a lot of them are too recent to be around here, but I followed a few with a bit of a focus on psychology, statistics and politics - there's something viscerally satisfying about following people along on the journey to fix things and figure things out, for me." 

The conversation quickly turns into an interrogation on different kinds of Earth media, during which it becomes apparent that Miss Martian is, in some respects, a terraboo. That impression is borne out by the shopping trip, which somehow ends up with a wardrobe mostly suited for a 1980s sitcom protagonist, although she does get some more modern clothing on Topaz's advice.

She's pretty sure she'd be so insanely outed if she was even a little bit less ignorant of human culture and how clothes work when they aren't on a screen or some sort of shapeshifting telepathic organism but she is so! 

She buys a nice swishy blue dress, a set of fairly modest undergarments, and a small handful of shirts and tank tops, some yoga pants and a few hairties, just to try them out. She nabs a thumb drive while she's out and about - there's a lot of things that she wants to try in that direction when she has the time. 

When she gets back, she shows her around the computer system and shows her a few more things to watch and read as she settles in. 

With that dealt with, she goes off to her room and starts poking at all the things she's been so excited to look at! 

Her instincts are a little a mess here - there's so many new sparkly things to deal with! But in terms of prioritization... 

Magic things, big downside risks from supervillains, figuring out something for immortality, and helping the green lantern corps out are all reasonable places to start, and seem at least kind of tractable? Magic research probably is something that she'll need to get a bunch of consultations around before she can really get much of a sense of what's reasonable to do without being directly babied by her power or just going into the research cave and plopping in a bunch of powers around various subfields and writing herself primers on what's what. Call that plan B. 

She pokes around online a little - back home, there's the FBI and Interpol most wanted lists for the most notable criminals still at large - is there something like that here? The league does seem kind of criminally undersupplied with trackers, in her opinion, and she should be able to change that with a bit of work. 

Oh and... speaking of supervillains... Sinestro has a ring like the green lanterns, but with a different color that looks to work a little differently? If there's two, there's probably more. Can she get a power that tells her something about the different colors and what they do? Honestly, a power for that isn't likely strictly necessary, at least for identifying the colors, since she can just poke the Gift with a big list of colors and/or emotion words to try to figure what colors have what emotion and then try to get it to pitch powers unique to each color? Yeah, that sounds like a reasonable idea, let's! 

Themiscyra is weird! An island of immortal women patroned by the Hellenic gods is not exactly within her experience. There's got to be something that she can do with that - it's not like there are no people who are already faithful off paradise island, and a lot of people convert. Really, it depends a lot on the leadership situation and what the magic there actually requires. She goes and tries to book a time with wonder woman - if nothing else, she does want to talk to someone about her options for weapons and combat training, and hopefully she'll be able to enlighten her a little about the situation, there? Being polite and taking it at least a little slow is probably better than trying to rush it as dramatically as she really wants to. 

As for her powers... 

She does really kind of want to break down and reoptimize the green light stuff - the aura half of the 4 pter is pretty tangentially related. The basic core of the imbuement skill power, the willpower power, and the deepening power is good, and adding an associated skill is probably a good way to make use of a 3 pter slot. As for what she can do with the rest of the points, if she's doing a dedicated build... 

Something around 'lanterns', whatever those are? More skills - she really does want to pick up some sort of mobility option soon... She's not touching magical bond powers until she can get some oversight there. Probably the guardians have figured out most of what there is to figure out about the purely green light side, but she wouldn't be surprised if she could upgrade them meaningfully in a different direction. Does the will-shroud effect linger on the items she imbues? If it does, that's an angle all on it's own to try to upgrade the entire corps. It's probably not a huge edge, but if it's an indefinite buff to control and makes it easier to use inconspicuously at important moments... That could be huge, even before considering other things she could add. 

Decisions, decisions. 

Most wanted criminals: various unofficial lists, but the authoritative source seems to be a set of documents sourced from the FBI's Uniform Crime Reporting database.

Wonder Woman: bookable via the same League-internal appointment calendar, although she doesn't actually have a free spot until late next week due to something that is only marked down as "The Thanatastic Games".