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In which the authors display a gift for fish-out-of-water comedy
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It's full right now; does she want to get rid of danger sense or structural fault tracking?

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Structural fault tracking can go, please.

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The gift happily swaps out the structural fault tracking for intuition around diagnosing medical problems using emotional-spectrum light.

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"I got here 32 minutes and four seconds ago," the boy in the jumpsuit offers, mumbling a little. "But there was a ... thing, and my eyes tingled four minutes and 49 seconds ago."

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"...Ye-es.  That...  Was probably me, then."

"I...  One moment.  Need to figure out how to put the right words in the right order, here.  Hm."

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As much as she doesn't think she necessarily needs to diagnose this, now, she thanks the Gift anyway.

"I had not intended for there to be the White Light of Life running loose in the Hall of Justice.  But it happened anyway, due to inadequate design and, to some extent, too much enthusiasm on my part - which is to say, while I was confident that it could not cause first-order harm due to its nature, even if I failed to do what I had intended to accomplish, and went ahead on that basis, I should have restrained myself and at least checked that it would not cause second-order problems - notwithstanding that I had not expected anything of even this magnitude - and it is likely that that is what happened to your eyes, because it definitely realigned my body with my own self-image when I called it up but failed to hold on to it.  Or.  It did that as best it could when there were multiple competing images to work with, but that's a whole 'nother story and not one I'm getting into right now.  Not entirely sure why I even mentioned it to begin with, except that that is, retrospectively, part of why I'm fairly sure it hasn't lingered, because if it had, I'd surely notice it continuing to do the thing by now."

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'Science experiment gone wrong' is a perfectly reasonable explanation. He's watched the workplace training seminars. Well, had them telepathically beamed into his head, anyway.

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...

"I see. Thank you for explaining. I think, given the day we have all had, that I would like to politely request that you do any further experimentation with your still-very-new-and-unknown powers somewhere outside a population center. I can set you up an isolated lab on an ice floe, if you'd like."

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"I think I understand the Emotional Spectrum well enough, but you're right that I don't have practical experience with it, let alone with anything else I might decide to spec into.

"...And as far as 'place to work that's somewhere very far away from anything we care about not exploding', in this case to include the Arctic or Antarctic ice, I would appreciate that very much.  I don't know why I didn't ask sooner.  ...Well.  No.  I do know why, and it's an anxiety disorder, and also that I thought I was appropriately supervised.  Though I probably shouldn't have.  For all that she lives up to her title in all aspects, Wonder Woman did not make most of what she uses.  ...Oh I should absolutely try to reverse-engineer all of the Miscellaneous Villain Technology.  And dig up some of the things people had but nobody's currently actively using."  That guy with the sleep powder, perhaps.  And she needs to see if the Purple Healing Ray is a thing in these parts.  And cold guns make great firefighting gear, surely.  And that's only five seconds of thought on the matter.  "How did it take me this long to think of that.  ...I suppose I was legitimately busy with all the maybe-apocalypses."

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"Alright; I'll get a work order for that put in and let you know when the space is available," Superman assures her. "Still, it seems like no real harm was done — I'm sure ...

He turns to the boy, and has a moment of trouble trying to figure out a term of address. 'Son' seems wrong, even if it's what he might call a random young boy who he was talking to. 'Boy' likewise.

But he was just thinking about this, and there is really nobody more qualified to say who is a member of the house of El than he is, at his point.

"... do you think you would want a Kryptonian name?"

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"Alright, the fire department is on their way, but it sounds like everything has—" Wonder Woman announces, flying back into the room. Then she spots Superman and the boy in the jumpsuit having a moment. "Ah."

She sets down next to Wildcard.

"Would you like to relocate to a room that features fewer holes and less molten metal?" she offers.

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"...That sounds like a good idea.  Let me just."  Okay.  She can move.  Good sign.

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"...I think I rather ought to prioritize personal protection, now that I've the seed of what I intended for searching worked out.  I can't have my life weighing on anyone's conscience but mine if I'm going to involve myself in these things."

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"I think getting yourself some defensive gear is entirely sensible," Wonder Woman, wearer of heavily enchanted armor, for all that it leaves much of her chest exposed, agrees. "What kind do you have in mind?"

She leads Wildcard down a hallway, badges through a door, and shows her into a slightly more cramped multipurpose room. There are table and chairs in it, though, and fewer holes.

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"Well.  I've never personally done anything that put me in armor in a way that could actually help me figure out how I should go about it now.  But I figured I'd ask Batman what he'd do, and add appropriate metaphysical reinforcements as an extra layer of survivability."

 

"This cashes out as attempting to replicate a Lantern's environmental shields, I think.  As much as I think that that might more properly be filed under ringslinging than Lightwork."

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"On the third, invisible magic hand, I should probably not stick to just Lightwork anyway.  But I don't rightly know where to begin, when it comes to magic.  Or theurgy."

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"And on the other foot, the best defense is 'not being there when they try to hit you', but I don't want to step on the Flashes' toes..."

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That does bring something to mind, though.  Mental acceleration powers, Gift, dear?

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It can't do 'faster than the speed of light' mental acceleration — at least, not as a single spark — but it could manage a power to let them think twice as fast. Would that do? Would they like to replace the danger sense or the light-assisted diagnosis powers?

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They would like to replace the Light-assisted diagnosis power, they suppose.

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Can do!

The world seems to slow, thoughts having twice as much time to be thought before the real world catches up with them.

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...Huh, she would have vaguely expected there to be synergistic elements between it and the danger sense.

...She assumes that "no thinking faster than light" also includes "no handing off hypothetical future thoughts to the past-present self tricks" but she'd be remiss if she didn't actually check that.

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She can react to sensations from the danger sense more quickly, but they don't fit together neatly because they operate very differently.

It could do a danger sense that was more about rapidly putting together information from other sources instead of capturing fragments of prophecy, and that implementation of the power would synergize well with mental acceleration. Do they want that?

As for handing off future thoughts to one's past/present self ... the response is not actually a flat "no". It's a more nuanced sensation that involves the flow of information and how it ... folds into the flow of the motion of particles through the universe, or something like that. The gift has a clear idea of what's possible here, but is struggling to put it into understandable concepts.

The sparks tumble around one another for a long moment.

Moving information around within a soul is something that it can in principle make a power for, even against the flow of time, although not very far. But it can't move information against the flow of meta-time, or outside their soul.

The gift feels faintly smug for having figured out how to explain that.

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That makes sense!  She thinks.  Good job explaining.

(Honestly she thinks at least one of them got a better impression from the impression than the human-readable version, somehow.)

Would it be accurate to say that a) such a power can't retcon things and b) it also can't give her information she's not going to find out?

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The first one is straightforwardly true. The second one is ... probably true given what it thinks she means by 'find out', but if she has something specific in mind it could answer better?

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