Oh.     Oh!

There's a crackling fuzz somewhere inside their soul, lambent violet streamers pouring out through the place where the gift and their native soul meet.

The guardians would tell you that the violet light is unstable, just as rage, its dark mirror, is unstable. They would tell you that as you move further away from the center of the emotional spectrum, things become less reliable, less biddable. And this is true — which only goes to show their folly.

You see, Love has a way of breaking through.

The barrier between one heart and another. The barrier between the possible and impossible. The barriers of distance, and of separation. Even the barriers between an evolved creature and a designed one — all these are revealed as no more than illusions when illuminated in the violet light of Love.

The gift is a complex working of narrative and soul. It contains no user-serviceable parts, and it is not designed for this. It's creators were wise, and powerful, but they were operating under enormous constraints, to make something so complex, versatile, and resilient. There is no easily accessible power port. There is not even any dedicated energy storage that does not also perform half a dozen other functions. The gift is a piece of delicate, fractal design and it was not designed for this.

But Love opens up the closed-off mind.

Love doesn't have to be reciprocal. Love doesn't have to be returned. Love doesn't need to be restricted to some set of people or things. 

Love ... IS.

 

Love gives us courage, bold and strong,
To face the trials and move along.
It lifts us up, it clears the way,
And fills the dark with brighter days.

No greater force can shape the soul,
Than love that makes a person whole.
It changes hearts and helps them see,
The best of who they’re meant to be.

There's a cracking sound, like ice breaking on a frozen lake. Not in Salem, where our protagonist stands, no. In your head, when you read the words that I've written to describe it — a crack in the wall between our world and that of the story.

There are sights and sounds and sensations that exist in separate minds, joined only by the tenuous thread of language and by the miracle of the internet.

And the truth of the matter? Laid bare by an attempt to push past the boundaries of the scenario? By the attempt to channel the most powerful force of interpersonal connection through a metaphysics not designed to handle it?

Those sensations are the cosmic background energy that the gift feeds on.

The gift gains energy not according to temporal concerns, but according to narrative ones. When the gift is tired, it is because I have made it tired, as a way to encourage the recipient to go forth and do something interesting with their powers. And when they have appeased me in this way, well, the gift is fed!

If the gift's powers were made out of particles — if it operated at the level and in the way that a fixity field does, for example — they would react in a very different way. But the gift is an experiment in seeing what people will do, with a system that lets them flexibly build large powers from small ones.

And the answer to the experiment seems to be: write fun stories. And do mathematical optimizations, and make spreadsheets. And keep pushing until they find the edges of the scenario, and then keep pushing further.

And is that not a kind of love?

I think we all love the gift, at least a little. We love the daydreams it brings, and the discussion. We love the premise, and the opportunity.

And always, as the universe whirls away and time progresses, we love finding out what comes next, free from the burden of the lock-step march of time:

The sparks click together, new ones blooming in the space left behind, faster and faster as energy pours through their link.

There is a buzzing, rumbling, tumbling feeling that builds in the teeth, powers swirling together like the sparks from a bonfire. Until ...

With a sudden finality ...

The process is done.

A dark purple spark burns brighter and deeper than any other. Contained with in it: nothing less than a complete comprehension of the use and manipulation of emotional spectrum energies.

And in Salem — in the real world, where objects are made of stuff and not of narrative agreements, where it takes more than a "yes, and" to blow past the boundaries of reality — Wonder Woman lowers her bracers and peers cautiously over her crossed arms.

"Wildcard, are you okay?"

She's just going to... stand there, with her mouth open in a faint 'o' of surprise, for a good few seconds.

"I...  Would hope that I am," she murmurs, "for I hope that I have just done something a friend of mine would be proud of."

"I am...  Unharmed.  Surprised, oh how I am surprised, and - I believe I should have put myself on the Zamarons' radar, if they were at all paying attention to what just happened here - but I am in good physical and emotional health, to the best of my own self-assessment.  I..."

She dabs, gently, at upwelling tears.

"I chose to love something, as I have chosen before and will choose again - and that love, here, has power enough, by the laws of this world, to make a difference.

"I think...  I saw something."

The words tumble from her lips, almost without her conscious intent to say them.

"Love gives us courage, bold and strong,
To face the trials and move along.
It lifts us up, it clears the way,
And fills the dark with brighter days.

"No greater force can shape the soul,
Than love that makes a person whole.
It changes hearts and helps them see,
The best of who they’re meant to be."

"It is - these are not my words, I do not think.  I would not have put quite these thoughts in quite that order.  But," she smiles sheepishly, "I can hardly say I disagree with them."

"To sully the sentiment with an analysis of power would be almost to betray the reason I earned it.  But let me say, I suppose, that I did a bit of refactoring.  Not a significant change, really, for all that it took some significant effort.  Just...  A bit more depth, in my existing connection to the Emotional Spectrum, after my having rebuilt it, given new knowledge.

"The surge of Violet was...  Ah, but to say that I did it for power would be a lie, no matter the truth from certain points of view!  And I would not, could not lie to you!  Not about this!

"Regardless...  I do not think something like this will deign to happen twice, if that is something that worries you.  Emotional revelations about the meaning and nature of love resulting in a dramatic powering-up are more of a once-per-story occurrence."  She stifles a slight laugh.

"I really must do something nice for you, with how you've kept getting caught up in all of our everything, but as it is, I can but humbly offer another apology for yet another unexpected surprise."

Not one surprising thing Wildcard has done has ever happened twice. And yet.

How about she just ignores all that and hopes it goes away? It's not a typical strategy for her, but it's certainly a tempting one.

"That poem — it's familiar. I read it when I was comparing Man's World poetry with Sappho ..."

She snaps her fingers.

"Byron Pulsifer! That's his name. I mixed him up with Lord Byron for months until one of the embassy staff set me straight. The words just came to you?"

"I can't say that they didn't, but nor should I say they did, I think.  One would tend to think that that precludes all possibilities, and yet.

"I do not think they 'just came to me', so much as 'I was given them', by, depending upon your point of view, a determined connection to the Violet Light of Love as I sought to exalt another - or, perhaps, by momentary insight into the authorial hand of someone other than myself, for I can say with confidence that I knew that poem not, before today."

"Huh."

What, exactly, does she say in response to that? 'I'm glad the writer of the universe decided to share some poetry with you??'

"So ... what did you actually do?" she asks, continuing to head toward the teleporter, because apparently she can't avoid poking the subject with a metaphorical stick.

That is why she provided a perfectly reasonably Watsonian explanation for you.

...Surely they've reached the zeta by now?  She'll wait until then if she must; keeping limitations secure is important.

"...It's much harder than I thought it might be, to put what exactly I did into words.  It was all feelings.  It was the adorable earnestness of a Gift that only wants to help.  It was the thought that Love can uplift and exalt, that Love can empower, not just imprison.  ...I have such words to have with the Star Sapphires.

"It was the thought that sometimes, Love is a steady work of craft, not some dramatic display - though, I suppose it was rather dramatic, in the end, for all that I had not tried to be.  It was the thought that Love need not be reciprocal to be real.

"It is...

"Even this I would deem an incomplete explanation.  It's still missing the...

"Well.  The feeling.

"But as far as I could claim to understand the mechanics of it...

"You may recall that I mentioned that Blue Lanterns - of Hope - can supercharge Greens and their apparently-metaphysically-real-enough Willpower?

"I did that, but with Violet, and...  Well, I haven't the slightest clue what this Gift I've been given is really made of, if it can be said to be made of things.  I half expect to turn around and see - well, you wouldn't get the reference, I don't imagine, so I'll refrain from speaking it aloud."  Eyes of night and falling stars, she doesn't say, for the audience.  Nevermind that the Gift has nothing so plebeian as ordinary human eyes.

"Regardless, the Gift had...  Run out of its own power.  And I saw a readily available substitute, and substituted it.  After a bit of...  Finagling."

The zeta beam terminal isn't that far away, but Salem is an old Massachusetts town — there are no straight roads that go directly to places, and precious little space to hide a secure Justice League facility between tight brick buildings. Still, they do indeed reach it as Wonder Woman finishes mulling over that explanation.

"I suppose that as excuses for making a public spectacle go, being tired and emotional is, at least, traditional," she jokes.

She taps her badge to the little hidden reader on the side of the building and waves Wildcard in.

And she will follow, obviously.

"If I'm honest, it was more that - being without something that is likely to become the cornerstone of a versatile toolset for responding to sudden problems, in a world like this - even for a short while, when you don't expect a lot to happen - is kind of terrifying.  Certainly there's more mundane risks I'm taking, ones I'm habituated to - cars, for goodness sakes, I don't know how anyone drives anything faster than a golf cart without becoming a nervous wreck, especially given how reckless other people can get on the Beltway - but the size of the black swans and even the simple disasters I have to try and anticipate as an aspiring superhero, they're...  Much larger than I'd like them to be.  I shall have to hope that I can find a way to upskill quickly.  ...Perhaps I shall have to continue raiding the closets of alternate universe selves for spare memories, and ideally their accompanying reflexes.  It saw me through dealing with the entity calling himself 'Fate' well enough, if I might dare say so."

...Speaking of that, she has Lantern alts.  That's probably worth investing in.  Especially if the plan is to go for something like an Indigo's staff as a primary focus, and then...  Well, it's probably going to have to be a Ring.  The thematics are just too much to really cast aside.  And then maybe soulbind it?  Make it impossible to deprive her of it.  Probably something to pass off to the WoW expyverse counterparts...  And the WoW expyverse counterparts are a good basis for general magicking.  Alicia Thorn's "I am now playing Glitch" tricks, especially, give her conceptual leverage...  And WoW-Light has transferable mindset to at least one of White, Blue, or Green, she's damned sure.

The question is whether they can realistically fit something in to make that an available option.

...They could try to pack three yellows into a green.

([<access-exomemories>, <memory-enhancer>, <learning-enhancer>], [<exopower-reifier>, <exopower-substitution-intuition>], [<generalized-magical-spark>, <magic-intuitions>]), [<biological-refinement>, <self-image restore>]...

Hm.  Clara.  They can't leave her out, it wouldn't be fair, but how on earth do you really handle flipflopping between silicon and carbon?

She's sure there's a way.  She's just not sure it'll fit.

...Wait.  The whole point of this is reifying other powers.  She could just throw the question to Alicia Thorn.  Arcane magic has Polymorph, though this is a far cry from sheeping somebody.

...Sheeping somebody would be very useful to have on hand.  Probably not natively available, though...

Clara would be interesting to do up as...  Probably a mixed-discipline construct.  Yeah, it's all coming together...

Assuming that the green coheres.

Hmm. The <exopower-reifier> concept is a little big for a single spark. It can probably work out individual sparks for individual exopowers, subject to its restrictions, like it explained. But building a mini-gift within itself that can generally reify exopowers just doesn't fit, as a concept.

It could do intuition for designing thaumaturgic spells based on exopowers, instead? That way they would bear most of the 'complexity' in getting the designs to work and storing the associated power and knowledge, which lets it shrink the concept to fit.

...One would think that communication problems would be less likely when speaking, approximately, mind-to-mind.

Come on, now, you know we're just flinging words around in fancy brackets.

Anyway.

She doesn't expect you to build a whole mini-Gift, here.  She just wants to - imbue the concepts behind the exopowers with extra throw weight, basically.  They're going to have to reconstruct things the hard way for a lot of this.  But she wants the fact that she's reverse-engineering RWBY![REDACTED]'s Semblance, or any of the variety of spells from WoW (and related projects) that they can feel themselves wanting to reach for, to mean something.

To say nothing of Fatebinder Vaudelle, whose whole skillset is ambiguously based on emulation of Archons as divine figures.  She's probably going to stick around, and she won't want to go propitiate someone else about it.

(We are, of course, not getting into Ninuanni metaphysics right now.  That's several entirely different λ-kettles of λ-fish they'll need to fry.  Alicia Thorn's magic is probably substituted well enough by the confluence of Dream and Order that would empower Nabu, if they can learn it, but to actually wield an Eide?  That wouldn't feel sufficient.  ...Not that they want to take Clara Cneph to war.  But she deserves something too.  And who knows.  Maybe she'll have an opportunity to Ascend a different sort of Fallen Angel.  (Though that feat was hardly hers alone.  To say nothing of the entire DC religious metaphysics mess they want nothing to do with.))

... oooh, that is a good deal simpler. Hmm ...

A single spark can't put all that much weight behind a borrowed concept, but it sees what she's going for, now. It's pretty sure it can make a spark that will fill that role suitably!

That's why she's planning on being able to combine it with others!  And to put work into building things up the hard way, she hopes.  Do you think you could make those sparks right now?

Sure!

It starts producing sparks and ... apparently just doesn't run out of cosmic background energy now? So it can continue through the entire requested sequence over the course of the next minute, creating and merging and folding until a deep green spark sits alongside the bright purple one.

Ohhh yesssssssss.

This is good and they are not going to think about why the cosmic background is permitting this too hard.

They really do need to do...  Something.

Oh that might be interesting.

She wonders what the intersection of RWBY's Dust and local metaphysics is like, because she thinks she could definitely set something up if she was going to try to create elemental crystals as Alicia Thorn...  And they really do want Sylvia's shield back properly.  Complete with the gravity shenanigans to make being budget Captain America actually viable.

Really, the big question is how she's going to provide the reificative force for that purpose.  She doesn't really know if Diana knows Lightwell or equivalent, and she never did Lightwork.  She's not going to count the Princess's memories, they're much too disconnected from anything she ever did.

...Hm.  She needs to make a super suit.

That might be a good first project.  That, or...

No, she can't hardly go replicating their RWBY loadout yet.  That's not magical, that's based off of real Earth engineering, albeit...  Perhaps fudged around the edges.  The coilgun parts of Varatha, she has not actually worked out on Earth.

...She really hopes she's not going to need ordnance even that heavy, but...

Well, she put herself on a Lantern-scale radar, probably.  She supposes it depends on whether the specific universe she's in would predominate, on a Doylist level.  Young Justice doesn't seem to into space very much, unless they needed to get the adults out of the way.  Which...  She may have actually completely derailed The Team.  Which is...  Not something she wanted to do.  ...Regardless.  She's really expecting Zamarons any minute now.

She wonders how the name-reading thing would even work on them, honestly...

Anyway!  Distractions aside!  Uh.  Lab, yeah?