It twists through a timeless time and floats down a spaceless space. Universes are where things make sense, and it travels outside them. But the space outside isn't not a place where momentum has meaning, because that would be simpler, and the chaos between realities is never simple.
So the gift has a certain amount of 'momentum' when it falls on another recipient, wrapping gently around their soul. And so they fall, entwined, and fetch up in a different place entirely.
The Washington monument really isn't supposed to have a face on it. Particularly one that is laughing maniacally and spitting purple laser beams at a flying man in red and blue tights. And yet.
This little alley seems somewhat sheltered, though. Nothing is imminently on fire, and the screaming civilians have largely fled past this point already.
"Oh sweet mother of fuckery."
At least she has more of her stuff than she would have expected to have in normal circumstances.
"What the hell am I supposed to do about a Superman villain?
"Fucking hell...
"Priorities. Priorities. Step one: Don't die." Hello, there, new, uh, whatever you are, if you are indeed a you - you got anything that's good for, well, Not Dying? And/or understanding how you work (in order to better optimize for Not Dying but mostly because she really wants to know how this works?)
She gets the impression of a greeting. And also the impression that she could have peak human ability to resist injury. Or intuition for what the source of these impressions is, if she wants that?
She could also refuse; there's the sense that if she pushes this sensation away, it will leave her alone. Nothing bad will happen to her directly as a result of accepting or refusing.
She's sorry, little buddy, but there's definitely indirect harm she would be in for if she didn't accept the general idea of you giving her powers. She doesn't feel like this was the design intent, but, well, shit happens. And she's not Batman, she's not gonna be able to keep up with this shit otherwise. (Oh s- f- g- -- bleep, if she's its first introduction to language she probably shouldn't be swearing all the time!) Peak human intuition for understanding power mechanics (in general?), please. But now that she's actually thinking about Not Dying the best way to Not Die is to not be hit by anything that could kill you, so, not peak human injury resistance. It probably wouldn't help much with the lasers. Also um peak human memory recall maybe? She knows there's a lot of stuff a telepath could - oh hell - peak human ability to resist mental intrusion please.
That's a lot of things! It can only do four things at once.
There's the impression of something trying hard to figure out what order things should happen in, despite this not being a task to which it is particularly equipped.
Does she want the peak human ability to resist mental intrusion first?
Oh, sorry! She's not very good at time either. But, uh, power intuition, and then anti- mental intrusion, and then peak recall afterwards, please.
It can do fewer than four things in a well-defined order! It's good at that.
Three sparks bloom sequentially, in some abstract space inside her. They are dim and red, but full of potential. The first one brings with it a vague understanding of the various universal forces and structures that powers can tap into, and some understanding of how they relate — it is, as requested, a general sort of intuition for how powers-in-general interact with each other.
The second spark brings habits of thought that resist mental intrusion of various kinds. They aren't things that she has to do, but they are things that she can do, as easily as breathing.
The third spark sharpens her memory, letting her recall anything she knows or has seen with as much effort as it would take someone with an obsessively organized and practiced mnemonic technique — that is to say, nearly none, although complex verbatim recitations still take a moment.
The second and third sparks seem to like each other, dancing in tight whorls while the first spark takes up a slower, distant orbit.
--Focus! We are currently in the middle of an alley while a Superman villain is doing something far too close! Let's have some damn self-preservation! But yes, power friend, please do that.
She points the powers intuition at the lasers and cues powers friend to prepare to hand her either a) a power that can alter the refractive index of a (small, she expects) volume of air, in case this is a science beam, and b) a power that can cut magical connections, because it's much more likely that a face sticking out of the Washington monument is magical nonsense. Which Supes is more vulnerable to. Augh.
...Hey, can we do Emotional Spectrum things? Lanterns can keep up with Kryptonians. It'd make sense that we could do something useful against this supervillain if we could do Lantern sss-stuff. Lantern stuff. Mind the impressionable baby space whale cuttlefish(?), herselves. Good grief.
The stress is real, but so is their Determination, she really bleeping hopes.
Sure, it can merge those two powers!
The sparks click together, almost like magnets, and brighten into a single spark that makes it easier for her to access her own mind (and particularly memories) in a way that also makes it more difficult for other people to access her mind.
It can do alterations to refractive indexes of nearby bits of air! But asking for "Lantern Stuff" produces an impression that this is ... underspecified, maybe? It can make her discharge electromagnetic energy, if that would help?
It gives the impression of being ... narrow, in some sense. It can suggest powers and then make them, but it isn't following exactly what she needs here very well.
Up above, Superman blocks a laser with crossed arms, but from the way he's wincing and visibly pushed back magic seems definitely possible. He swoops toward the monument, fist raised to punch it, only to be thwarted by a twisting purple barrier.
Right. Okay. She has a plan. Or she will have a plan by the time she's finished having a plan.
1.) Sparky, a power for focusing/imbuing Will, and then the same for Hope, please, which she will merge with the one for Will. They're going to be the easiest to pick up and while [REDACTED] has a lot of Anxiety to burn, that has destructive interference with both green and blue (- at least, if Parallax is in the Green Central Power Battery... Wait, would that matter for her? Check that later -) so, keep it simple for now.
2.) She drops the power intuition.
3.) ...Actually she probably could have kept it and stuck it to the 'perceive magic' effect she's asking for now -
4.) - but at the moment it's best merged with the short-range 'disrupt targeted magic effect' power she's asking for.
5.) Situation (and, much more importantly, Sparky) permitting, she will follow up by requesting enhanced ~awareness (in the sense of more accurately putting existing data together) and coordination, then, hopefully, sticking those together to back her up in surviving a fight she has very little business meddling in, honestly.
6.) But either way, whether she can or can't do any of those last three, she intends to Charge!! at the face and antimagic-stab it somewhere vital. She knows she must, if Superman can't solve this on his own. She believes she can. And so, she hopes, she will.
6a.) ...If there's an easily clobbered magician in evidence, she will just tackle them instead. She doesn't actually want to be dealing with the evil face lasers! She has a healthy self-preservation instinct! (...Right?)
That's a lot of things! It creates powers to help her focus her will and her hope — that's straightforward enough. Pushing a power away when she's done with it is a straightforward mental motion as well.
It spins for a moment before managing to generate a power for visually perceiving the presence of magic, and a touch-range power for disrupting targeted magic effects ...
And then it's full. The magic-disruption spark and the magic-perception spark don't like each other, although there's a feeling that they almost do. The gift also sends an impression of tiredness; this was a lot of things very fast.
She's sorry, it's just - this is probably important to do both correctly and fast, and they're rapidly oscillating between flavors of panic response.
Do you think you could - nudge, whichever power would be easier to nudge, to synergy? ...Actually, no. Do you think that what she has, is enough for what she needs to do, to [disrupt this], first off. Because if it is, she shouldn't ask for more right now. Not with you being worn out. But if it wouldn't be too much she would like to nudge the magic-perception and magic-breaking into a synergy. The additional strength might matter.
Um.
The 'lasers' are definitely magical, as is the face and the barrier protecting it. The lasers seem like they are targeted, but the face and the barrier don't seem like the kinds of things that have a target. So the power that disrupts targeted magical effects should work on the lasers!
This impression is conveyed with the smugness of someone who has worked through a difficult logical syllogism.
If she doesn't need the magic disruption right now, it could get rid of it and remake it in a form that might fit better? She seemed to need it pretty urgently, so it went fast and didn't spend the full allotment of time on finding the exactly right shape.
It also gives the faint impression that being tired isn't an unpleasant thing — it means that it expended effort helping, which is good — it's just information about how much it can do in one go. It's tired like a sprint, not like a marathon.
Diana meant "targeted" as in "not every magical effect all at once, just the one she's pointing it at". Can you do that instead, please?
Oh! It can do that, sure.
The existing magic-disrupting power floats out and away, and is replaced by another that allows selectively disrupting a particular magic effect, although it's still touch-range. This one is friendly with the magic-perception power.
And merge those. Now, she would like peak human coordination...
And then it is likely time for someone to cast themselves unto the breach. How's Kal-El holding up?
He's holding up pretty well, actually. He hasn't done any particular damage to the monument, but he has ... stolen ... an orange and black striped cat?
Presumably that's relevant to fighting the monument for some reason.
Cat + magic -> plot relevance -> Klarion's familiar -> kill it kill it kill it!!!!!
...Or disrupt the familiar bond -- wait shit would that mean he'd get a new one and she wouldn't know what it is -- disrupt specifically the anchoring effect? Is there even that? Fuck!
Alright.
If this is the timeline she thinks it might be this may be one of the most important things she could do short of punching out Darkseid.
You would think that this charge would be Diana's. But this is not a hopeful moment. This is a desperate one.
She focuses on her goals, as she starts running down the street. She knows that she will need to reach the cat. She knows that Lanterns can fly. She knows that she can fly because she is a (budget) Lantern. She just needs to get there. She just needs to pull this power into herself and lift. Even a ballistic arc will do, this is Superman she's dealing with, he can surely catch one girl. They are going to hopefully permanently inconvenience Klarion the Witch Boy, by striking against his anchor to this world. And anything in the way will bend before their Will, so help her!
Don't break it entirely. But fray it. Disrupt it. Make that bond technically there but useless. You can do this. We can do this. We will do this.
"Oh shit um I'm helpiiiing!!"
Fortunately, you definitely don't become one of the world's top-tier superheros without developing good reflexes. Superman veers to intersect her wild, green-tinged arc, latching an arm around her waist to steady her.
"Ma'am, this is a delicate situation — can you help with the evacuation?" he asks, because telling rookie heroes to stop because they're not helping never works, and sometimes redirecting them out of the main battlezone does.
The nasty blue man is too hard to scratch. But the screamy green woman might not be. Teekl bats her in the face with a paw.
"Can't let this wait -" she grabs Teekl's swiping paw, and activates her magic-disruption spark, aiming at the rope of magic that stretches away from the evil cat, to someone else - "but I can't fight Klarion so yes I will go do that."
"Once we have hopefully made this familiar much worse at its job."
... but she's still in Superman's grasp, and he was going to just take the cat far enough away to disrupt the ritual, but probably this works too.
He flies down to a roof, and wraps a bit of sheet metal torn from it around the cat at superspeed. Not tightly enough to hurt it, just enough that it won't be able to get away from the probably-helpful magician.
And then he leaves at speed to try punching the definitely-unhelpful magician in the face again. Maybe this time it will take.
Right. Let's finish this.
The cat is tied up... For the moment, she doesn't know if Superman knows just how good escape artists cats can be - anything that they can fit their collarbones through, they can fit through - and she has a grip on it sufficient to use her powers. She is now going to try and break as much of the useful parts of the familiar bond, such as 'anchoring Klarion to this reality' and/or 'serving as a power tap', as she can, whilst still, hopefully, leaving the Witch Boy stuck with this cat and no other. Avoiding the split worlds event will be much easier if she can just render Klarion moot now. He had to anchor the thing on the young side of reality.
Visions of fanfic dance through her head - but even were she in the world of that one fic where all the available under-18s (across continuity lines) coordinated with eachother to pull off a proper reunification ritual, she'd still try to stop this right here and right now, because less potential mass casualty events is more gooder.
(Yes, she knows 'gooder' isn't a valid Scrabble word. Blame the Internet for why she thought it anyway.)
Teekl yowls and writhes and does, indeed, try to pull free of the wrapping. She tries to claw at her assailant.
But then something within her snaps, and in the distance the barrier around the monument flickers.
Superman hits it with renewed force, and then he's through, and the fight becomes a fast-paced thing of dodged purple blasts and heat-vision.
Her assailant is feeling quite hopeful that she has just averted a major disaster, depending on what that was precisely that just snapped, so she will take a few hits to win if she needs to. They'll get better, and she's sure Batman has something for any weird cat diseases Blue might not have type advantage over.
(She may or may not also be a bit more dissociated than she's used to, because really, what the fuck is her life now.)
"I really am sorry about your present situation, I think, but also, you're an asshole and so is your master and I really can't be having with that, you hear me?"
"Lords of fucking Chaos, not even once. Well, no, I suppose it's entirely plausible there's a nice one but where are they - mumble mumble New God bullshit?" Yes, she did, in fact, enunciate 'mumble mumble'. "Fuck if I know. Absolute fuck if I know. And now I'm starting to sound like fucking Constantine or something. Best be careful with my soul." She laughs, but not because that was funny.
Rambling on like that doesn't mean that they're going to stop making an utter mess of the familiar bond if it's still a thing that exists, though. Just to be crystal clear about their priorities here.
But does it mean that the alien with super-hearing (because he has super-everything) heard? Well, he is distracted. Time will tell.
It doesn't take him long to wrap up the fight, actually, once he can reach the squishy magician. A minute or two later, he comes floating over with Klarion held under one arm.
"I was trying to do you a favor, you know," he grumbles, crossing his arms at her. His wrists are decorated with rune-laced metallic bracelets of some kind, and from the way he keeps tugging at them, they're probably restraints and not fashion accessories. "Everyone else was appearing in Central City, and we've already done that. Boring!"
"But if you're going to try and steal my cat, see if I ever do anything nice for you again."
He turns away with a huff, as far as he can manage when being held by Superman.
Superman blinks.
"... ma'am, I wouldn't get too upset about anything he says. He's an ... odd sort. But, just to check, do you have any prior history with Klarion? Have you met him before?"
"Oi! Careful with the name! I don't care if you know, since you're about as magical as a louse, but you can't just go around calling me things to people who actually matter," Klarion protests.
"I would say you could call me The Witch Boy, but if you're going to maul my cat I don't think we have much to talk about," he adds in her general direction.
"I regret to inform you that I both know exactly what he's talking about - more or less - and that I've also never seen him before in my life.
"As for talking... Now that I know that you know that I know, however you know, The Witch Boy... There might actually be something we could talk about. Which, at the time I made my decision to act as I did, I did not know. Proper communication is important, you know! You could have at least left a note!
"I could be convinced to give a sincere effort to heal your familiar. But I would have conditions.
"I do understand if that's not your speed, but it can't hurt to make the offer, I think. There's plenty of places that could use a little Chaos. I mean, can you imagine the look on Lex Luthor's face? That egghead has so many control issues."
"I know that you know that I know that you know that ..." Klarion says, counting on his fingers.
"Right! So that's how it is! If you put my familiar back, I could have had left a note this whole time ..." he suggests, leadingly. "Causality is for the narrow-minded."
Superman glances back and forth between the two magic users with a conflicted expression.
"Not in meta-time, I don't think; I know I wouldn't want to put all that effort in to undo what I've already done, if I was playing Queen of Fables." And that would likely leave her at a disadvantage. So she hopes the idea will fly right out of his head at about the same velocity it entered. "And, nice try, but we still don't have a deal yet. As I said, I have conditions, though I do understand if it's simply impossible for you to make agreements. Unfortunately, if that's the case, then I likely won't be healing your cat."
"Blah blah 'Law is the only way to keep agreements' — spare me the proselytizing. I'm a magician! Making deals with powerful outsiders is practically my whole deal!" he protests, before slumping in Superman's grasp.
"Okay, okay. What are your conditions? Not saying I'll agree, mind you, just hearing you out."
"Well. As I don't expect I'd have any luck getting you to stop doing your thing, and am therefore not going to try - you're a Lord of Chaos - I'd like to propose that in exchange for this, you make your chaos more equal-opportunity - which is to say, expanding your targets to super villains. Lawful Evil is still Lawful, you know? As it is, your getting involved in supervillain plots on the side of the villains is, dare I say it, rather predictable. Doesn't it get a bit repetitive to pull on Superman's metaphorical pigtails all the time?"
(Honestly, she'll take probably mostly obviating her metaknowledge of whatever plot she might be in, if it means Klarion will be as much a thorn in various Big Evils' sides as he is for the good guys. Darkseid, the Reach, planner villains more generally, Larfleeze to name someone she doesn't expect to show up - they're all not particularly chaotic.)
"Hmmmm... HHHHHMMMMMMMMmmmmmmMMMMmmmmmm."
Klarion scratches his chin.
"The problem is, things just don't work like that here, bub. Heroes fight villains, that's how it goes. Nobody wants a fight where they can't cheer for one of the sides, and it's a slippery slope up. If I start punching out the baddest of guys, soon I'm a misunderstood antihero, and then there's a reboot, and sooner or later I'm a tame little Lawful lapdog because Jim Lee can't get it through his head that Chaos and Evil are different things. Heck! I'm surprised Big Blue here is even thinking about permitting a deal — usually he'd get his outside-underpants all up in a bunch about the idea unless I had him over a barrel."
Superman only sighs internally. He can't regret revealing himself to the world, but the cows never gave him problems like this. He really needs to make time to visit Ma and Pa this weekend.
"I'm not going to let you escape justice," he replies. "But she did depower your familiar, and I'm not enough of an expert in magic to know exactly what effect that has, so I'm at least willing to talk things through before dropping you off in Belle Reve to await trial."
Klarion squints hard at him.
"Yeah, that's way too reasonable and level-headed. This is a rip off. Hey! Hey you with the star and oak leaves!" Klarion calls.
"Yeah, I know you can hear me! Listen — you don't seem like the 'straightforward punching' sort of guy, right? So here's the thing: I'll take her deal if you promise me that I'm going to be plot-relevant again, and that you're not going to turn me into some parody of myself."
But even if the author were amenable to making that kind of deal in principle, they would certainly have no way to communicate that agreement to Klarion, since they are up here on the meta level and he is down there in Superman's grasp.
"Oh, don't be like that. You wouldn't be teasing the possibility of this working if you didn't like the idea," Klarion insists. "I know that you're thinking what I'm thinking, but I'm betting that you're not thinking what she's thinking, so I think she won't think what you think I'm going to think. Look, just ... make a tumbleweed tumble past or something and I'll take that as agreement."
...
At that moment, a tumbleweed — displaced from the D.C. tumbleweed museum, which is definitely a real place, by the fight, since tumbleweeds aren't native to the D.C. area — blows past, the wind scooping it to fly between Klarion and [REDACTED].
"That's good enough for me."
He looks back down at his fellow magic user.
"Alright — you make a good-faith effort to restore my bond to my cat, and I make a good-faith effort to bring equal amounts of Chaos to villains and to heroes. Aaaaaand—" he holds up a hand to shush Superman. "—I let Big Blue take me to jail all cooperative-like. After all, you won't have seen the last of me."
"Knew I was in a fanfic," she mutters.
"You have a deal, Klarion. And mystery author who's not also me."
...She's probably obliged to at least try a powers thing, or at least, if she's operating in good faith, she really should. But there are limits to what she can do right now. So, she will drop the peak human coordination, split the magic sight and the magic disruption up, drop the magic disruption, and request a power that can establish magical bonds. Then merge that with her magic sight.
And then...
Well. She will make a good-faith effort to believe. It's kind of patchy, kind of thready - but she actually does believe, on net, that this is probably better than things would be otherwise, and that therefore, Teekl should "Be made whole."
And may whatever gods there are have mercy upon her if she screwed this up, because the Silver City probably won't. Gods, the amount of peripheral awareness of terrifying shit she has, really should concern her more.
Teekl is glad to have her human back, but she's also a cat.
And Teekl is so done with being confined in this metal thing. She slaps Blue Woman in the face, just to drive that point home, and then squirms out with her restored powers and jumps her human and digs her claws into his shirt to hang on.
Superman sighs again. Externally, this time.
"Ma'am, please wait here. I'll want to talk to you about ... whatever that was."
And then he vanishes in a blue blur to drop Klarion off in a cell, because he doesn't particularly trust the villain to remain in a cooperative frame of mind for particularly long.
...Yeah, she deserved that.
"Mhm. It's gonna be a bit of a doozy, to be honest. You might want Batman and-or the Martian Manhunter. The former to wring me out for everything I'm worth, the latter because that's my best option at proof that doesn't involve spilling secrets. ...Or the Lasso of Truth, but I don't know whether I'd be believable even then."
Luckily, superhearing means being able to catch up on the sound waves as he comes zooming back in.
"Batman is not currently available," he replies. "But contrary to popular belief I don't let him do all the investigating. I'm Kal El; what's your name?"
Well, of course he wouldn't, that's his day job, isn't it? But this is threat analysis.
"No comment."
"...Wow that reflex might actually be useful for once in my life instead of very annoying. Er. That doesn't answer your question, does it now.
"Let me just..."
Shit, who even?
"For the moment, call me Sylvia. I'm fairly sure that giving you the name on the ID in our pocket would cause Ms. 'No Comment' to blow as many as several gaskets, and considering she's probably right that this is up on the Internet somewhere, because isekai scenarios aren't supposed to happen in real life and Klarion was literally talking at a coauthor, I'm going to follow her lead.
"I suppose you could probably hold it hostage against a lot of other people's identities if you believe we're going to be evil, but I hope that...
"...We were not expecting any of this and have in fact only had superpowers since, like..."
She checks her phone. ...No signal, predictably. And it's not even right.
"...I have no idea what checking the time when I have no idea when I left was supposed to accomplish.
"But anyway. Uh. Where was I.
"...We probably shouldn't be having this conversation on a random rooftop in any case. If you would be so kind?"
Yeah, he's not going to get into any of that. The thing he was aiming for was having something to call her other than "ma'am", since that was likely to get old fast. And he's not reading her drivers license in her pocket because some wizards can cast explosive runes.
"With your permission, Sylvia," he agrees, scooping her up in a princess carry. Luckily they have meeting rooms in the Hall of Justice for just this purpose.
As they fly, he subvocalizes into the League communicator, the skin-tone microphone of which is pressed against his neck by his suit.
"Diana — I have a woman, goes by Sylvia, with unknown magic powers and an unclear association with Klarion, here. Do you think you could meet me in the Hall to help me interview her?"
A momentary pause, and then:
"Of course, Superman. I'll meet you there."
The Hall of Justice is the sort of crime against architecture that could only be approved in a universe where the Architect of the Capitol was arrested decades ago for mystical malfeasance. But it is certainly eye-catching.
Superman comes to a stop next to one of the more discreet entrances, and badges them inside.
They're greeted in the corridor by a woman with jet black hair, a stunning figure, and a kind smile.
"Hello Sylvia — I'm Wonder Woman, but you can call me Diana if you prefer."
"It is an honor to meet you, ma'am. Though, ah, names are a thing that gets complicated quite rapidly around here; suffice to say that when we told your colleague that it was Sylvia for the moment we meant that much more literally than one would usually expect - for it is not, primarily, Sylvia with whom you are speaking now, and we regrettably lack anything with which to signal... Anything about this. Mm. We shall have to do some Tinkering. But that, at a later time. Right now, I assume that we are going to be making use of the Lasso of Truth? ...However does that handle delusions arising naturally from the psyche; I... Am quite certain that we will end up saying things that sound like -"
"...Well. I'm not going to speak that word when - The Witch Boy, has proven that entities of sufficient power may already be listening."
... yup, that sounds like a confusing magician alright.
"I won't use the Lasso on you unless you consent or you pose a present danger to others," she starts with, because it's true. "As for how the Lasso handles delusions — it is braided from thread spun from the wool of the sheep of the concept of truth. So it doesn't allow people to say things that aren't true, even if they believe them. That's part of why I don't use the Lasso on people without need; the truth is a beautiful and wonderful thing, but having all of one's delusions suppressed at once can be distressing or damaging, when one has built up towers of thought around them. On the other hand, the Lasso doesn't grant knowledge beyond what a person already knows, so if you don't know the true answer, you'll simply be unable to speak on the matter at all."
Her voice has just the faintest trace of an accent; she's lived in New York for decades, at this point.
"Huh. I wasn't actually specifically aware of its origins before now, despite the wide variety of apocalyptic nonsense and trivia otherwise packed away in here.
"...Regardless, please do use the Lasso, it's important to me that we are all aware that as far as I know I am not speaking from a place of delusion, and I apologize in advance if something awkward slips out. I'm not sure how that works either but - erm. Suffice to say, whosoever sculpted you did a very good job. If this is a continuity where that happened. I think that's pretty common but I don't know if it happened in that abominable movie, for example. Or even the world I think I'm most likely in based off of blind assumption that - The Witch Boy was already going to be plot-relevant in a way I could know about, if he was the first villain I encountered. I don't think it actually covered most origin stories, they were rather culturally implicit by the time it was airing...
"I suppose I'll have to - oh, damn, blast, it would prove it but we can't just leave a lab fire to happen for prophetic reasons especially when there's a secret subbasement and all the Genomorphs -
"Uh. And the possible partial clone of Superman in said secret subbasement.
"Is there a Cadmus laboratory around... Here, it would have to be, that's where they leave from..."
"...Right. Uh. Let me just. If you would?" She sticks her hand out for the Lasso before she says anything else.
Wonder Woman leads her into a conference room and a chair, first, and then loops the lasso around her hand. Superman follows behind, doing a surprisingly good job of fading into the background for a 6'3" alien.
"My mother sculpted me from clay," Wonder Woman agrees, "And the blessings of Gaia brought me to life. Although not many people know that, so it doesn't come up much. Still, my mother is a quite talented sculptor, given her many years of practice."
She nabs a set of note-taking implements from the center of the conference table.
"You seem like you already have a lot that you want to tell us; do you want to just start, and then I can ask clarifying questions if something is confusing?"
"I know so many things. But only approximately. This is why I wanted Batman, he's the guy who would know how to triage the - Blackest Night, whatever the fuck is going on with the Silver City and Hell, oh fuck no please not the goddamn Crisis, the Lights going out is probably not a live concern in a universe where the Spectrum entities exist but I don't fucking know that pardon my language, oh and fucking Darkseid and his fucking bullshit Anti-Life Equation, that's not even how anything works but this is comic book logic so I guess I have to fucking deal - Anyway. Oh, and don't let the Flash time travel unless someone like Eobard Thawne, possibly also known as Reverse Flash but there might've been two of them, has already shown up. It probably can't make things worse at that point. Anyway. All of those are probably in the future or in the past or just not happening here, but we should probably investigate a man named William Hand if the Lanterns don't know what Blackest Night is yet - he's - some kind of serial killer, and - the Black 'Light'," she air-quotes, "Entity's chosen, ha, hand, in his... Resurrection is the wrong word because he's zombies all the way down...
"I should see if my superpowers extend to transdimensional wiki access, honestly. There's probably half a dozen more apocalypses I don't know about just because they haven't come up in anything I've read.
"...No, that thing where Dream got trapped in a jar was in the nineteen hundreds, I think... ...ugh. Probably ought to double-check Roderick Burgess anyway.
"Annnnd we have gotten completely sidetracked from Cadmus. Sorry, I have ADHD. Right. Cadmus. Easiest known litmus test of where I am presently out of the various possible options, not least because I don't know many other big crossover setups except in the broadest possible terms.
"Oh, while I have this on -" Alan Scott's Green Lantern is actually drawing from The Green the magical force of plantlife that also powers Alec Holland aka Swamp Thing and may or may not be connected to Pamela Isley aka Poison Ivy, which is why it's not affected by Oa stuffing the Yellow Entity into the Green Central Power Battery but is affected by wood, she tries to say, and finds out that that isn't locally-true.
"Wait, shit, I got sidetracked again. ...The Lasso would be incredibly useful for running binary searches if it literally doesn't let you say untrue things -- oh, gods, why is my brain like this.
"Cadmus Labs. It would be a DC office I think since I'm pretty sure the junior League picks it up from here in that continuity. Genomorphs. They're telepathic and a hivemind. There's also two partial clones of Superman in that basement, I'm 70% confident, if it's there at all. One's better hidden and more genetically unstable than the other. I guess I should probably be on call to fix that, especially if my cockamamie plan to smoosh powers together to get to White Light pans out...Blue's good at healing things. Saint Walker healed a star once. Distracted again, fuck. Uh. Right. Have I said enough things. I think I've probably said enough things. Oh shit right um I also know most of the League's secret identities. Sorry about that. You were rather popular entertainment where I'm from. ...Annnnd there may be a guy who can cross over to the other big chunk of superhero fiction somewhere around here, but I don't think so because that would prooooobably obviate the coauthor's agreement with Klarion unless he also showed up. ...I'm so glad that this universe isn't Worm, though. You only have the one Larfleeze."
That is ... a lot to take in. Wonder Woman sort of suspects that she might be having an adverse reaction to the Lasso.
"... you've been diagnosed with ADHD?" she clarifies. "Do you know whether a small amount of caffeine would help you focus or make things worse? That's the only appropriate psychoactive substance that I'm comfortable giving you without a doctor's approval, but if it helps you explain things in a way that will make sense to us that might be important."
"Also, it sounds like you have knowledge of a lot of bad things, but none of them are immanent, right? So we have time to go through them methodically," Superman adds. "I can check Cadmus Labs for confirmation, but how is it that you think you know these things?"
"I have, yes. Also autism. Thus the random fun facts. But unfortunately this is - probably, I don't strictly know the state of the me that's writing me - what me on my meds looks like, for what little good they do - though I'm erring in favor of saying more things instead of less things right now. I don't think tea's going to help all that much but I could definitely go for some anyway, I think."
"None of them are imminent except maybe-probably Cadmus. William Hand is pretty immanent because if he's a live threat he could go off whenever, but if I'm right about the continuity I'm in, he won't be, unless I've, uh, kind of accidentally spoken him into existence by way of pointing the narrative spotlight in his general direction. In which case, mysterious coauthor," she says, briefly looking up at the screen ceiling, "I will be very upset with you. Blackest Night is such a clusterfuck. But I think you're probably cooler than that and honestly you already have enough problems just accounting for - well I was not expecting negotiating with --- speak not the fucking names, lest they hear, ugh - The Witch Boy to even work even though I actually thought it was a good argument and likely to give the evil masterminds more trouble than us. Which is why I went for it. But I'm not looking forward to the mess on Roanoke, if that's going forward. If I can even get myself on the right side of the age line... I mean, maybe he'll do something entirely different now, if we even get that far on the meta level. Since I think he knows way more than he probably ought to, he's not really usually playing Deadpool... Most fics don't make it very far in, anyway. I'll be pleasantly surprised to - oh, for fuck's sake. T. O. Morrow. Hold on..." She raises a finger in a 'wait one' gesture while she actually tries to search her knowledge. "Red Tornado has siblings. I'm not actually sure if the one fanfiction I read where they were disguised and operating in the Justice Society era was canon or just making things up... Oh, I could just try and say it. Oh damn Serling Roquette. Doctor Serling Roquette, excuse me. Nanofog. Cut that off at the pass before we even get to the League of Assassins trying to steal it... If Cadmus pans out, you pass that on to Batman. Or, in an emergency, I will accept Bruce Wayne and Oliver Queen as substitutes in that order."
"As for how I came to know these things...
"Mostly, fanfiction. Lots and lots of fanfiction.
"I did just say, under truth lasso, that you were popular entertainment where I'm from, didn't I?
"Dimensional travel from a world where you're popular comic books and associated media can't possibly be the weirdest thing you've dealt with. Although I am not going to speak the name of the fifth-dimensional entity either lest he hear me. Don't know how to pronounce it forwards, let alone backwards, anyway."
"You did say it, it's just a bit hard to wrap your head around," Superman admits, drifting over to the meeting room's perfunctory little kitchenette to procure hot water and English Breakfast tea.
"And yes, his name is a bit of a tongue twister. Luckily I have a decent amount of practice. So it sounds like for right now our priorities are: verify whether Cadmus Labs has any Kryptonian clones, put out an APB on William Hand, and collect further information to hand over to Batman—" or the League's other perfectly capable investigators; he's a reporter, thank you "—on potential upcoming disasters."
"It sounds like it might help to have some structure to go through things," Diana notes, scribbling things on her notepad. "You've touched on things that ... seem like they could involve a few different League members? Should we maybe go through the league members one by one, and you can share what disasters you remember them heading off, how, and when? Also — I assume, if you've read all this in a storybook that this is the kind of prophecy where knowing what's coming will help us prepare better, not the self-fulfilling kind?"
"Let me see if I can turn up actual details on Hand before you actually send out that APB. And depending on how many Lanterns you have we may be well meta-past the point where Blackest Night usually goes; Kyle Rayner was - I hesitate to say the protagonist, but certainly possessed of certain narrative primacy... I hadn't been keeping up with the most recent things all that well but I know they finally got around to making a Lantern who wasn't a straight white man.
"This intel shouldn't be self-fulfilling, no, though I'm not really... Certain that some of the trouble won't on the narrative level have been promoted to secondary canon beyond whatever continuity we're in by my bringing it up.
"...Breaking up the threats by Leaguer may be a good idea. Though there's actually a lot of specific dangers that accrue to specific sidekicks -- oh shit fuck Roy -- if Cadmus pans out, Green Arrow's sidekick either has been or soon will be kidnapped, cloned, and brainwashed, and I think it's much more likely that we're in 'has been'. Or, the brainwashing was the clone, but. The clone is also sufficiently Roy-ish that I was able to say that."
So Wonder Woman goes through the current membership of the League and various younger affiliated heroes, asking about all of their problems in turn and straightening out the often jumbled reports. The League does have a black woman serving as a Green Lantern, so that's one potential disaster probably avoided.
Superman vanishes half-way through, once he's sure Wonder Woman has things handled, to start corroborating as much of this as he can. Red Arrow and Red Tornado both get quietly taken aside for an examination on the Watchtower, and various other preliminary warnings are disseminated to the various members of the League.
Eventually, Wonder Woman has wrung as many details from her interlocutor as they seem likely to get. She reaches over to gently take the Lasso off of her hand.
"This is obviously a lot; I'm really glad that you came forward to share this with us, and I promise you that we'll do all that we can to head off these disasters. What's your plan going forward? You've alluded to having powers a few times, now. Do you intend to try your hand at being a superhero?"
"...It seems rather the done thing in these sorts of circumstances. And yet. I for one don't know if I've the temperament, now that the option presents itself.
"...Mm. I think I will at least want to be involved in disaster response. With great power comes great responsibility, to shamelessly steal a line from a different universe entirely, and I think that I do have, if not necessarily great power now, then nonetheless the ready potential for great power once I actually sit down and work through some things. Whether that extends to investigative work or facepunching... I think I'll have to figure that out, but that I'm probably metanarratively going to end up involved with some of it. Especially after - ahem. The Witch Boy."
"I suppose both the power I have been entrusted with, and personal affinity besides, mean that there's at least a ready name lined up."
"Wildcard - in the sense of the special character in computing that represents any single possible character, not to be confused with the actual paper cards. The way our power is structured allows us to specialize deeply in most any one thing at a time with sufficient assembly - and the name also usefully misdirects from our having the option to construct multiple such powers simultaneously."
Wonder Woman nods.
"I see. Well, it's nice to meet you, Wildcard."
She smiles.
"The U.S. doesn't have a special process for entry from another world, but the League has contacts in the State Department who can help take care of the paperwork, if you plan to establish a civilian identity. Personally, I've never much needed one, but some of my colleagues find it important to have a separation between public and private personas, to have a measure of peace in their private lives. Do you think you plan to stay in the U.S.? Or go somewhere else?"
"I have never held a long-term residence other than in the United States, hypothetical alternate selves aside, and I should hope that the political situation that rendered it... reasonable... for us to contemplate the likelihood of a successful political asylum claim will not replicate in your timeline. The bigotry's laid out differently, no matter that we are now likely to get hit by anti-super bigotry in similar proportion. ...It would then thus behoove us to have a 'civilian' identity, I suppose."
"There is ... not too much bigotry against superhumans, I've found," Wonder Woman comments. "But if you do run into any, please do feel free to come to me for help. Here ..."
She tears off a sheet of notebook paper and scribbles a list of names and numbers.
"This is my number at the Themysciran consulate, the number of my contact in the State Department, the Justice League non-emergency number, and, in case you run into anything that you don't want to share with the League as a whole, Batman's number."
One of them, anyway — he has something like twelve phones for different purposes. Thank the Goddesses for her memory.
"Now, it's been a little while that you've been prophesying for us. Is there anything else that you think is best discussed in private, or could I perhaps treat you to lunch as thank you for the forewarnings?"
As it happens, they did keep most of the Batman information they know (Jason Todd in Ethiopia, street kid Tim Drake Joker Junior, Regular Flavor Tim Drake clocking Dick Grayson because of the quadruple something or other that only, like, eleven people could do, the entire possible existence of Damian Wayne, fragmented details of how a possible future Batgirl becomes Oracle and some of the speculation on the Watsonian reason for the Joker to leave her alive - there was an interesting fic where Amanda Waller of all people connected some dots and decided that the Joker had to die -) for Batman only, out of respect for his secret identity, assuming that the League doesn't know it - and they will be dropping all that off as soon as they have a Bat-secure line of communication. (Cassandra Cain, on the other hand, they can mention without blowing his cover, they think - not that they think she's all that likely to exist yet considering that there is still one Robin, what is going on with this timeline - though at least that means that all the shit that happens to Nightwing is far in the future. Gods, the amount of everything that goes on with Nightwing. She hates it.)
She quirks an eyebrow. "Lex Luthor sometimes runs for President, I'm sure I mentioned. But I do suppose the situation's definitely better than..."
She draws a heavy breath, sighing.
"The, and I almost regret that I'm not bound by the lasso as I say this because this is bullshit I would not have believed if it had not kept coming to my attention, telepathic anti-mutant hivemind virus, that Marvel Comics wrote in to the X-Men, which... Well. I'd been reading more from over there than over here recently, for some value of 'I'. It might take my hindbrain a bit to catch up.
"...Also, I don't believe my phone connects to the local networks. But regardless of all that, lunch does sound lovely."
Wonder Woman takes her to a café around the corner from the Hall of Justice that does sandwiches.
The café does them, that is. There aren't any sandwich-themed Halls of Justice. Yet. Give the forces of chaos time.
Ahem.
"Blatantly interfering in government is one of the things that the League doesn't do, as a rule," Wonder Woman comments. "It makes people nervous. But rest assured that we are definitely keeping an eye on Lex Luthor. Nobody has ever been able to prove that he has committed a crime — but there have been a suspicious number of near-misses on that front. Batman has a chart."
"Did I ever mention that the death of his father - I believe the man's name was Lionel - leaving him in charge of what is now Lexcorp, struck me as potentially suspicious? Something a good investigative reporter might want to investigate. Though I certainly don't know if there's really anything there. I could be reading into things."
Wonder Woman sighs.
"An investigative reporter of our acquaintance —" who she does not name, because they're in public now, but she is sure Wildcard can guess "— has a female coworker who has apparently spent a good deal of time going over the available records. That's not to say that there's nothing to find, but it unfortunately isn't as easy as acting on some of the other tips."
Indeed they can. "Mmm. Yeah, I should have expected."
While they're waiting for their sandwiches, someone else has taken to idly musing about emotional convolution.
Anger, Want, Fear, Will, Hope, Compassion, Love, and let us suppose either Joy or -- actually, I do have a source, don't I? Aside from poking The Source. Which I Do Not Want To Do.
::I have also been incredibly remiss in not asking how I should refer to you,:: she directs at her passenger, ::if you would be so kind. But if I was to ask for a power best suited for focusing the emotion or mindset best suited to working with the White Light of Life, would you know what that emotion is in a word or phrase that I would understand?::
It is a gift! From — to them. They can assign it a designation if they want to, but it doesn't care about that. It isn't really the kind of entity that cares about anything other than providing powers in the way that it was built to.
... Life is too big for it to hold. It can see where Life sits in the shadow it casts over possible designs of powers in this place, but it doesn't have any itself. The white light is Phenomenon. It is The Third Thing That Isn't Mere Atoms And Void.
Does that help?
...It does, dear Gift.
Albeit she notices that she is slightly confused.
::I did not ask for you to hold it, dear. If a Lantern or a focal Ring is requisite to handle the White Light, we can construct that separately. But you have, I believe, answered our question as to the... Target 'emotional' state, regardless. (We likely should have figured, being with how Christian the Source gets, that it would be... something similar to the assertion of the Name.) You were very helpful, and we believe that we can work with this.::
Anger, Want, Fear, Will, Hope, Compassion, Love, and something like Assertion of Existence, she muses.
She can shuffle off the magesight and bonding and coordination powers...
Gift, dear, can she merge a new - power, spark - directly into another synergistic power without a slot free to hold it in the meantime?
No. If it is full, then it is full, and there would be no room to put things. She could grow her soul to be bigger, if she wants to hold more?
Also it doesn't understand what about its previous answer was confusing. Which is okay, because it isn't the kind of thing that is bothered by not understanding things, it just doesn't know how to answer in a less confusing way next time.
How does one do that? Or, is there a way to - put a spark away for later, somewhere it wouldn't be usable because it's outside the framework, but where you could pick it up and take it back in to yourself?
::I was not intending to ask whether you could make a power capable of channeling the White Light directly - merely one that could hone my focus in a direction that is more White-Light-like. But now that I think on it further I can see how you got the idea that I was.::
Oh, hey, is that her sandwich?
Souls expand in a way that is complicated; the gestalt impression that the gift gives off is something about variety, and effort, and success.
When a spark is sent away, the gift doesn't deconstruct it, just ejects it. So if there were something else that caught it and stored it properly, and then a way to let it back in, that could work? Does she want a power that can 'grab' things that are structured like powers and store them in available empty sockets?
She doesn't want that power right now, but if you could remind her later when she's gotten to the point of actually going full Tinker?
How does the process of ejecting a spark work? Could it just be done in reverse, or is there some sort of filter thing?
"...I'm probably going to want to talk to an actual wizard about an idea I had, if one has time. ...Though if it's Constantine, I want advance warning."
"Zatara is a member of the league and an accomplished wizard," Wonder Woman volunteers. "And I've worked with Dr. Fate in the past; he may be able to help. What is the idea, if you don't mind my curiosity?"
"Something that ought to help increase my versatility yet further, if it pans out, though I don't want to get into the details in public."
"Naturally. You can phone the League number I gave you to get in contact with Zatara; Kent Nelson can be found in the Tower of Fate, which appears to worthy seekers in Salem, Massachusetts," she volunteers. "I'm afraid I don't know any other wizards beyond them, but they can probably put you in contact with a specialist, if needed."
"I don't expect this should be beyond either of them, though knowing how Zatara works I think that if I want to work out the trick for myself then I should likely work with Mr. Nelson. I don't think I'm going to have that much luck working out how to do magic by speaking backwards." And also she does want to get to Nabu before Wally West puts him on a trophy shelf. Nabu may be being kind of a dick at the moment, but letting a Lord of Chaos operate while a Lord of Order is out of play is probably not good even if Nabu does not presently understand the concept of retirement.
Gods, she's probably going to have to explain labor law to him.
Though, Gift, dear, do you think it would be possible to pull a power that could enable her to do magic by gnikaeps skdrawkcab, together? There was something about a specific gene sequence.
That one is a puzzler. It spins in thought again.
It could do a power that lets her compress the verbal components of her spells that way, probably? But she doesn't seem to currently have any spells to compress in that way.
Does she want a power to enable selective horizontal gene transfer by absorbing other people's DNA?
Not at the moment, no. Though she's definitely thinking about it now that you've mentioned it.
...speaking of which, she should actually put together Power Of Gender-Affirming Care (And More Generally Biological Healing), now that she's thinking about it.
[biological manipulation] [understanding a person's ideal form], perhaps?
It can do the latter!
The former is too big to fit in a single power the way that they're thinking of it. Would a slow self-only regeneration-specific power work instead?
Sure. (In general, if she asks for a power that is Too Big, she would welcome assistance into breaking it down into subpowers that fit in red sparks.)
Okay! It understands.
A second spark blooms, and she can now both visualize a person's ideal body and slowly regenerate herself toward her ideal.
They obediently click together. The change is too slow to feel directly, but she gets a bit of feedback from the regeneration power suggesting that it is more ... aligned, maybe? In any case, she feels certain that it's changing her toward her ideal, and more efficiently than when the powers were separate.
With the right mental motion, yes. The ideal slips, and the regeneration changes slightly to follow it.
...Really, they probably shouldn't have it on right now, but...
The relief they're feeling at getting this to work is...
Good.
Her thoughts, however, are not all that visible to Wonder Woman, even as their overall mien suddenly shifts from the prior "distractedly contemplative" (her head tilted just so, the rest of her almost left to fall where it may in between bites of sandwich) to "shaking and physically holding herself together and trying, badly, to not cry, but in a sort of 'punched-out oh of realization and wonder' way".
"...Don't mind me, just... Realized we could fix some - personal things, and then did it because, ah, in the words of Ms. Not Telling You Nor Anyone Her Name, 'Delayed gratification, who's that, I don't know her'," she speaks, when she realizes that this is probably more concerning than it feels to her from the inside.
Wonder Woman frowns, reaching across the table to rest a comforting hand on Wildcard's arm.
"Do you need some time to yourself? I can set you up in a private room for a few hours, if that would help."
"I don't believe so, now that - well, I once again have the power of speech - but nonetheless, it might be wise."
"...Oh, blast it, we're going to need new clothes. Moreso than we already did, being as what I have on me is all that I presently have. That's probably going to be an adventure to figure out. And then 'me and what money', being as I don't think alternate-universe US dollars are legal tender. ...Hm, what would be readily doable and worth the League's time to commission... ...Oh that could be impressive if it worked." It is a little-known fact that there is a sightless Green Lantern who perceives the Green Light as sound of a specific pitch. Drawing upon that equivalency, she wonders if she could make a healing soundwave out of Blue, ideally incorporating the ambient-hopefulness recharge mechanism Blue Lantern Rings have to make it really last.
Fancy blue tuning forks. Hah.
But really, it might work. Actually, though, now that she's thinking about it, Indigo might be the Light to go for if she's specifically looking for things where sound carrying through opaque media would be helpful. Disaster response relies on finding people as much as anything. ...Either Indigo or Yellow.
"...hmm."
"How much does the League know about the non-Green portions of the Emotional Spectrum?"
Wonder Woman blinks.
"Ah, there might be something in the database, but I haven't read anything that suggests there are non-Green portions. Assuming the Emotional Spectrum is the thing that Green Lanterns draw their power from?"
"...Have you not had a Sinestro yet? What is this timeline... Or it could have been out in space in a way that didn't really come to your attention, I guess.
"Yes. Green Lanterns draw their power from the Green Light of Will; there are at least six other colors, and possibly more than that but those ones were strange. 'Gold' is not a frequency, for crying out loud. But anyway. In ascending order, you have the Red Light of Rage, the Orange Light of Avarice, the Yellow Light of Fear - which, in a roundabout way, is why Green Lantern power rings don't work on Yellow - the Green Light of Will, the Blue Light of Hope, the Indigo Light of Compassion, and the Violet Light of Love - also a Light Earth should have encountered at some point; that's the Star Sapphires.
"There's also White, and Black, as I mentioned earlier, but those are... special cases.
"Each of them does something unique, if I recall correctly, though some of them might be specific to their Corps rather than the Light itself; certainly I don't expect the Reds' whole... incredibly-destructive Rage-plasma blood... Thing... to be necessarily built in to the Light when I'm fairly sure it was built in to their Rings by the Corps', eh, 'commander' for some value of, who... He had quite a grudge against Oa when he started doing things, and I don't think he was wrong to have it, considering that, if my information is right, he did it after one of Oa's projects massacred most of an entire Sector - but, well, he decided to combat an atrocity by perpetrating another. So, anyway. Red Lanterns have... That. The singular Orange Lantern that presently exists has demonstrated the ability to assimilate... Well, almost anything. Yellow is empowered by ambient fear, while Blue rings are recharged by ambient hope; Blue Light is capable of healing. Up to and including a literal star, if certain sources are correct. Green has a special interaction with Blue, getting effectively supercharged by it. Indigo can replicate the effects of the other Lights in the presence of the right stimulus. Violet... The Star Sapphire Corps has this weird... 'Trap people in a rock and possibly convert them to Violet' thing but I think that that is maybe more likely to be because of the rock, moreso than necessarily the Light. It's just bizarre that the Violet Light turns you into a yandere, otherwise. Love is not inherently possessive and if the universe thinks otherwise it can fight me." She gestures, sharply. "But I digress. What I was thinking about, is making foci much more limited-purpose than a Ring, that take advantage of the properties of one or more frequencies of the Emotional Spectrum to perform specific tasks. And note, specifically, 'frequencies of the Emotional Spectrum', because I am aware of at least one 'Lantern' who perceives the Lights as sounds, which may or may not have any strategic import but gave me some ideas."
"I'm presently contemplating the idea of utilizing Indigo Light for search-and-rescue purposes."
"... huh."
Wildcard has said a lot of things in the past hour, so this one honestly doesn't rate a more astonished reaction.
"If you do come up with a way to help with search and rescue that would be excellent," she agrees. "What about, ah, compassion makes you think that it is particularly suitable? If I had to guess, I would have guessed that hope would be most conducive to rescue work."
"Compassion is more - stable, an emotional state - ironically enough, considering that it's commonly held that the outer edges of the spectrum are more, hm, personality-unbalancing - and it goes out to people. If you want to find someone who's lost? That seems like how to go about it. And I've heard tell that Indigo Lanterns can teleport."
"It's not that Blue couldn't help. It's not that Blue won't help. It's that it's hard to hold on to 'All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things will be well' in the wake of disaster."
Wonder Woman nods seriously. She's seen the aftermath of disasters many times.
"It sounds like a noble project. Actually ..."
She adopts a thoughtful look.
"The League doesn't really do ... grants, or anything. But it occurs to me that the U.N. peacekeeping mission sometimes supports inventions meant to help with disaster relief. If you wished, I could put you in contact with them through the Themyscrian embassy, and see if they're interested in sponsoring your work."
"I'd like to at least prove that I can do it, and hopefully that I can make items that do things with Light, before I start contemplating applying for grants - but I would be glad of your help in that once I get to that point. I've never done anything like that before.
"And, huh. That might help with one of the other things we talked about, if I can actually do it. Back to the Hall of Justice we go, I suppose. I'm probably going to need to Tinker."
"Alright."
The Hall of Justice, under the supervision of one of the more mystically-resilient members of the League is really the best place to do that kind of Tinkering, all things considered. And given that the rest of the city has just suffered from a magical attack.
Wonder Woman disposes of their sandwich wrappers, and shows Wildcard back in to a meeting room.
"If you're going to do some experimentation, I'm going to catch up on some paperwork from over there —" with this nice heavy oak bookcase between you and my center of mass "— but please let me know if you need anything. This room is technically outside the secure area of the Hall, so if an emergency comes up, I might have to leave you here while I respond."
"Right."
Gift, do you have thoughts on materials that would reliably intake and/or channel Light?
It does power design, not design with things made of matter. Do they want a power that gives intuition for how Light will interact with different materials?
A spark blooms, and with it the knowledge that the objects that interact most strongly with Light are those that have a matching emotional history or resonance. Other than that, certain crystals (with particular colors and resonant frequencies) can interact with Light, as can particular circle-and-line-looking symbols. On the not-very-good-but-better-than-nothing end of things, anything painted the appropriate color technically interacts a little.
"...Ah. Yes, that could be... Something. Alright. So then..."
File all that information away in her presently enhanced memory - oh, huh, the Corps' symbols are metaphysically relevant? Maybe she'll make the White Lantern prism thing...
Drop that power, ask for - not a matter creation power yet. (She's thinking diamonds. Diamonds are nice.) Drop both halves of the biological regeneration, and then add... Compassion, and then Fear? And stick those together. She thinks they actually do kind of fit together at the edges. The big question is whether they then fit together with Will-and-Hope. But they are all emotion powers.
She'll have to drop the memory power for a minute to fit the other half of the stack together. But she thinks she can do that.
Love and Hate might actually stick together well enough. And then... Self-Assertion (hypothesized) and Want? And then those together, and then those together with the Compassion-Fear-Will-Hope... She, well, she hopes.
The gift follows along with their plan, and it all works smoothly at first. The emotion powers do seem naturally synergistic.
But when they try to ask for a power that allows them to focus Life, the gift stutters.
It sends them the impression that Self-Assertion is still too big for it to hold. In accordance with their previous request for help breaking things down, it tries to think about it, but ...
After a long minute of intense concentration, it suggests that they already have most of the pieces needed to touch Life but they're missing one?
Ah. Yes, dear, she knows, that's why she also wanted the Orange one.
...Would a power that is prophylactic against Anti-Life be something --
Oh! Sure, it can do a power for focusing feelings of Want!
Prompting the gift to consider powers relating to Anti-Life causes it to stutter and glitch, sparks flickering, before appearing to forget entirely about the request.
Does she want a power for being able to feel multiple emotions at once in a way that doesn't produce 'friction'? That seems potentially relevant to combining emotions in the way that she might want to?
"Oh, fuck." ...Well, she's glad she didn't have the memory power on, lest she accidentally remember the whole damn Equation while not braced appropriately!
"...Don't mind me, just found out that the source of my powers is not helpfully extrauniversally immune to the problems of thinking about the Anti---," she cuts herself off, on general principle, "ahem, the thing that is the opposite to the putative Life Equation that probably also exists but I don't believe I've ever seen recounted in detail."
"Gods it's gonna be hell for me to not accidentally think about it too hard. I hated that thing."
...Yes, that seems like it might work.
A spark blooms, and with it comes the realization that she now has powers to focus every color of light — but they haven't all been ... active, exactly, just shifting in response to her emotions.
But now it feels like she can channel the forces of Love, Compassion, Hope, Will, Fear, Greed, and Hate simultaneously with no conflict. It also feels like all of the sparks involved here really like each other, dancing around one another in a fast, tightly choreographed dance.
They click together with almost undue haste, falling together into a single, powerful star, burning a deep blue.
And as the emotions pass over and into one another, they build to something greater than their component pieces.
And a wave of ... something ... passes over them. An acknowledgement, perhaps.
Why does she keep coming to the attention of Big Cosmic Things, like, she did suspect this one could happen, but...
"Oh cool good great I think the Life Entity is paying attention. Alright. Alright, me, take a breath. This is fine, it's not - ahem. The 'New God' of Tyranny, nor fucking Nekron." This is clearly not all that great actually because cosmic powers are scary and she's practically in line for a hat trick if she meets Nabu today but it's also kind of nice?
('My dream is -- to be special...', she doesn't-exactly-think, because those aren't her words she's thought, but nonetheless they resonate deeply.)
Also, hi Life Entity, she hopes you're doing alright. Blackest Night really fucking sucks in continuities where it happens. Is there anything you'd like help with? She can't promise she'll be any good at it, but she can promise to try. As long as it's within certain ethical limitations. Not that she believes that that's going to be a problem, but, well. Nabu.
Gods. Um. She was. Doing crafting things. If there's nothing else important she'll. Get back to that bit. She thinks. Probably.
Wonder Woman's 'Wildcard is saying incredibly concerning things' meters are maxed-out after having spent the last while talking over various obscure and improbable disasters. Probably she should treat this like hanging out near one of the oracles when they're coming down from the prophetic fumes. She's going to keep doing this paperwork and ignore whatever Wildcard is working on unless it results in the room actually being on fire.
Right. Where was she.
Gemstones! And metals! And stuff!
Gift, dear, she wants to end up with [a power that knows metals and gemstones and lets her conjure at least small-to-medium amounts thereof]. She thinks she can get there with [conjure specified metals], [conjure specified gemstones], [determine material properties of object], [determine magical properties of object].
The gift ponders for a moment. The conjuration will have to be slow and limited to mundane materials, but that should be possible!
It creates the requested powers one by one, merging them to make space. By the end of the process, its starting to feel pretty tired — it probably can't do more than one more power before taking a break.
That's alright, dear. She thinks she can work with this.
Alrighty then.
Time to do some Lightwork.
Like those guys from the universe before this one where the Lights went out, moreso than like a Lantern.
But her first project is going to be an interpretation of a White Lantern ring.
Oh, uh, actually, can she have a danger-sensey sort of power? She wants to make extra sure that nothing is going to explode in any way she doesn't actively intend for it to explode.
Yeah, it can do that!
It creates one last spark, to give her a slight bit of advanced notice about personal danger, and then lapses into a restful torpor.
This is her making a mental motion equivalent to patting the Gift. It is a very good Gift and should be proud of itself.
...This is as much an art as it is a science. Things have to mean things, to be worth the making.
She starts with a simple band, getting the hang of the power as she adjusts for... Hmm. A power ring may be unwise, actually. Too easily stolen by telekinetics. Perhaps a bracelet, instead. Yes, she thinks she will do a bracelet.
The centerpiece of the bracelet is the Prism of White, made of a single diamond, the colors of the Emotional Spectrum radiating from the simple white prism, all cast slightly in relief.
Then, she works her way around it, dotting the arc of the diamond that the rays wouldn't radiate from, with gemstones correspondent to the Emotional Spectrum's Lights, one by one - all of them carefully 'flawed', to reveal their Lanterns' sigils when light shines through them.
It almost reminds her of the process of forging a kyber crystal - and she draws on her felt sense of how that ought to be, as she provides what emotions she can to the process. Anger, at a world full of awful things. Determination and Hope that the world can be changed. Compassion, undergirding it all.
She is afraid, and for good reason. This world is full of dangers, and she needs to be able to defend herself from them, by every means she can muster.
And then, there is Love, and Being.
There are people she misses, from her world. There are no doubt people she will bond with, here, who will have need of her succour.
And, as she puts the, hah, unfortunately lifeless central gem prototype to the side, to conjure once more with feeling, she thinks about oaths.
To encapsulate all of this, to sum up herself, in but a few short phrases. To live and to Be.
She is not certain that even she is capable of rising to this task. Still, she will try.
Her voice is quiet - but it is sure.
"To live, to strive, with all my might, / in brightest day, or blackest night; / to love this world, to make wrongs right, / I ask my soul - shine bright with Life!"
There are trillions of beings, living throughout the universe. Surely some of them would have done something like this before?
Well, the Malthusians did, before their split into focused factions. Their symbiotes gave them the same kind of boost that has been gifted here, and with them they forged a legacy that encompasses the entire universe.
But the fact of the matter is that there are many things that have to go just right, for something like this to be possible. Earth is a magic-rich world, located at the center of the universe. There is, here, a focus. Made not just with gems, but also with symbols, and symbolism, and feeling. By a human — a species that has had its soul saturated in the magic of the Dream. By someone boosted to the peak level of human ability at focusing and directing each of the seven primal emotions of the universe. By someone who uses an incantation, felt from the heart and touching each aspect. By someone who knows in their heart what to expect, and is focusing the outcome toward that.
So it should not be surprising, really, that such a rare thing could occur.
A wave of pure Life radiates out, passing through the walls of the building as though mere matter is insubstantial in the face of this.
It is not, perhaps, what they might have hoped for. The bracelet is unable to retain more than the barest impression of rushing white light. It certainly does not end up as a functional ring-equivalent. But ...
When the light has died down, they feel strangely empty and emotionally exhausted. Everyone within about ten meters, themselves included, is Healed. Wonder Woman notices her slight backache disappearing. Down a floor, in the Justice League infirmary, a young boy in a white solar suit suddenly straightens up. A passer-by in the street stops and pauses to look around the world in wonder, no longer color-blind.
And here in the meeting room, the visitor, the light-weaver, sits in ... not their ideal form, for that is more of a process than a state, but in a form that suits all of them much better than the one they had a moment ago.
And they no longer remember any details about the Anti-Life equation, other than that it is a dangerous lie that exists.
Sometimes, the greatest things can be achieved with just a bit of outside perspective.
Holy shit.
She pats herself down, bemusedly, and pulls off her glasses. She'll have to ask Clark where he gets his; she's too used to having them and now it feels wrong even though she suddenly has good vision.
"...Not really what I was precisely intending, but considering that to have done that at all is already kind of a miracle...
"Really probably should have made myself a Lantern, first, though, huh. If I actually had an aspiration of holding on to it once I had called up a spark of it to begin with. ...Thought I'd get something smaller. Anyway. Can't do that again for a while. Whoo-ee."
...Right. Okay. She's just gonna. Sit down for a minute.
...Being healed of actively-cognitohazardous information is probably for the best, but the part of her that abhors the destruction of knowledge is a little bit annoyed anyway.
Anyway. Time to. Prototype things? And stuff?
...How's the Gift feeling after all that?
...
...
Huh. It didn't know that you could do that.
There's a sort of shift, and it becomes clear that the space of possible powers has opened up a little. Also, it's no longer tired. Do they want a power that lets them drive away undead? Because it sees how to make that compatible with local physics, now.
Not right now, dear, but thank you. The reassurance of having the option is helpful.
(...She apologizes in advance for the bullshit the Speed Force gets up to.)
Right. They still need to do... something.
Indigo-Light holotank sort of thing?
...But then how to actually shape the effect?
More poetry would probably be about right, if she had any.
Or she could try...
...It should be simple. Something that seems easy, even when it isn't.
And it would probably help, to draw on existing cultural associations with, say, scrying orbs. Or the humble magic 8-ball.
But she's not, entirely, exactly sure how to make the symbolism work to hold even a bog-standard Lantern's power reservoir together. Let alone one with an effect attached.
...And she doesn't think they're going to be pulling out any of the conceptual conjuration sorts of powers anytime soon to endrun that.
Maybe if she just catches a spark, somehow? But then that would leave the program kind of dependent on her...
She doesn't want it to be dependent on her.
That would be unfair to everyone else.
But...
She will try the simplest proof of concept, first.
...Maybe.
But she doesn't know if it would really be reliable here.
...If they want something to stay in place then probably all they need is carefully deployed Orange, and the rest is set dressing. ...And probably anti-Larfleeze precautions, but they were already going to do an Indigo outer coat anyway.
So start with a fixity orb (speculative), like they were already thinking about for power storage, and go from there, rather than force working out how to corral Indigo with Indigo and the barest hint of untyped magical bullshit. She's not a wizard yet. And Indigo already wants to reach out so hard that their Lanterns carry theirs around so as to be constantly refueling their Rings rather than have the Greens' subspace pocket thingy.
It could just be that Abin Sur did something hinky with the brainwashing that required a bigger power source to anchor it, but... Nah, she doesn't actually think so.
Aaaaanyway.
The idea of riffing off of existing divinatory tools is a good one.
Still needs to actually be done, though.
...Gift, would it be possible to get an "Is Larfleeze going to notice this" power or is that too big and/or weirdly specified for you?
The gift sends back an entirely new refusal-reason that she hasn't felt before — that it would be unfairly singling someone out to breach their privacy.
It could do 'awareness of whether shifts in the background field of Desire caused by your actions will be detectable outside this solar system'? Does that work?
I mean. Yeah, that's fair. Good on you for bonking her about that being rude. She doesn't actually care about Larfleeze so much as that he is sitting on a huge army of assimilated Orange Lanterns with intent to use them to hoard the Orange Light to himself, anyway.
She would like the alternate suggestion though!
It can do that, then!
This power seems to have synergy with their dangersense, actually. Which probably makes sense if you think about it.
The power provides the sure feeling that nothing she is currently doing is detectable with orange light outside this solar system.
Yeah she was kind of expecting it to do so. What's the merger look like?
Like a yellow spark. Duh.
The merged power seems like a personal dangersense based around how noticeable her actions are. Kind of like a video-game stealth meter if it felt like an extra sense and also it applied across different sensory modalities with different scales.
Ooh. Neat, she'll definitely want to remember this one - but she's going to split it back out now.
Orange. Orange and Indigo.
She can supply the Orange for this, she's pretty sure. She really wants this to work, dammit, it's her magic light powers and they'll do what she wants them to do --
She can supply the Indigo, as she thinks about all the people that need help, as she thinks about all the people this could save--
And she can supply the artistic direction.
An indigo lens, much like the one on a magic 8 ball except perhaps a bit larger, looking in on a spark of indigo that is fixed to the center of the piece - but one that, when confronted with a sincere desire to help, will be tugged away from the center point, pointing in the direction of the nearest people who need help that the wielder can provide.
It takes a good deal of concentration, both on the structure of the lights and the requisite emotions, but after enough fiddling they are able to get it to work. The first attempt sticks, but then fizzles out a moment later.
Eventually, they have an indigo lens containing a trapped spark of indigo light that, when held, points directly at their center of mass.
...Well that's disconcerting.
If Wonder Woman is closer than her to the device, does that change?
Yes, actually. If Wonder Woman is closer to the device, it points at Wonder Woman.
"...O-kay. Closest-person detector - or so we think we have here: Not what we were trying to make, but still further than we were really expecting to get on a foundation of absolutely zero practical experience with Lightwork."
"Probably still not entirely un-useful when combined with drone searches."
"Probably needs more structure than we know how to provide, magically speaking. Or however Green Lanterns work. They're allegedly only sufficiently advanced technology, but I do have reason to believe that the Red rings are magic."
"Right. Anyway. I don't doubt somebody has reference material, but I doubt that it's here, which means shelving this for until I have better ideas.
"...Although that might just mean I need to shuffle around a couple things."
She can drop the "Am I Making Cosmic-Scale Noise" meter, in favor of peak-human Light Symbology Intuition, perhaps?
Yes, it can do that!
The colors' associated symbols are symbols, in the sense that they are given meaning by the perception of people, but the connection also goes the other way — they're not completely arbitrary, either.
The Green symbol is a lot more ... rich? Well-defined? Full of secondary meaning? than the others. Whether that's something the guardians did to it to enable creating Green Lantern rings, or something that the existence of an organization using that symbol that would be known across the universe naturally results in is hard to say.
Peak-human light symbology intuition is actually not that much additional information to work with. When applied to their design problem, it does suggest that the behavior is probably not a failure of symbology, exactly, so much as Compassion spilling unrestrained beyond what she was trying to limit it to, as is its nature.
Ah. So what it needs is not so much restraint as a sharper focus. Or perhaps sufficient concern. She thinks they can do that.
Though she's not going to try to hot-patch that in to this version. "...Right. Let's try this again with a different theory of relevant cross-spectrum interactions..."
Simply put, beyond the Orange she thinks is vaguely necessary to get it to stay put, in lieu of better ideas, and the genuine care for others requisite in calling up the central spark of compassion at all, she has two different possible approaches she's thought of, and one of them is more suited for her.
You see, she's really rather worried that if this device doesn't work properly, somebody will end up hurt. Or worse, lost. She's worried she'll miss someone who urgently needs help because, to misappropriate an analogy from somewhere else, Scion was once told to help cats out of trees. It's a terrifying thought, to hold lives in your hands. And she's willing to pour all of that into another go before they try with Diana's "I bet Superman would have better luck doing it like this" green-blue/indigo approach.
Compassion and Fear are not perfectly balanced. Fear is ... tempered, in a way that Compassion is not.
But a perfectly balanced wheel does not move, and a lopsided one does.
With the power of compassion to reach out, the power of fear to prioritize, and the power of greed to make this a thing that will stay that they can have ...
This attempt results in a purple spark that judders and jerks, sweeping that way and this, surrounded by a diffuse yellow aura of fear. But when they pick it up, the spark stills, straightening out into a line pointing down through the floor and slightly to the left.
Also, because the universe loves its little jokes, that's when the emergency alarms go off.
Wonder Woman is on her feet almost too fast to see.
"Stay here!" she commands, running out of the room to check on the source of the alarm.
A distant rumble and hiss echos through the foundations of the building.
"Shitfuck."
"If this is right I can help."
And she - she can't leave this alone. What if it's something she did?
But that doesn't, actually, mean that she has to leave the room.
Gift, drop the Light-symbology-intuition for right now; can she get a third-person camera with noclip enabled some sort of visual projection power?
...Oh no you do not go throwing our vision out of our body when we don't even have a defensive artifact --
The somewhat-panicky materialization of a handheld shield, with a pattern of three concentric rings (blue, green, blue again) about a five-pointed star inscribed in a central circle, (green and white), is perhaps less surprising to their reflexes than it should have been, given that they have technically never before handled such an object in their life.
It turns the idea over. Remote projection like that is actually quite tricky. Do they want alternate visual modes that can go through concrete? That's easier.
Also: they're about to be in danger!
Call up the light of her soul, focus it through the protective emblem, and brace for impact as-indicated - she can hold through this. She believes in this, with no less than several exomemories backing her up.
A blast of what they might recognize as Kryptonian heat vision comes up through the floor — thankfully a glancing blow — and splashes off their shield before continuing up through the building. Through the gap in the floor, the edges of which are glowing red hot, a boy in a white suit is visible. He's being bear-hugged by Superman, who is speaking urgently into his ear.
She can certainly muster enough sheer terror to make some sort of laser attenuation field, surely -- wasn't he supposed to not have heat vision?! -- but actually belay that too Gift, fucking rapidly-evolving situations she hates them -- "I don't have any but would Kryptonite help with this?!", she calls through the hole --
"In theory, yes!" Superman calls back up. "He's not hostile, but his powers just started working, for some reason, and he doesn't know how to control them yet!"
The boy jerks sideways, and Superman has to wrench him around to avoid hitting Wildcard with another blast. The upper stories of the building are not fairing well.
"That would be because he probably didn't have them until recently, but I digress --" And Ophelia clicks into place with the inevitability of gravity. This must be terrifying. Her heart goes out to the kid. Having no understanding, no control, of these powers he's been given - likely ones that are entirely new - especially when someone else who knows how they feel is right there, trying to communicate but yet unable-- "Would you be willing to share yours? Telempathically." One affirmative later, her focus is entirely upon the task she's set herself, a perhaps superfluous but perhaps entirely necessary somatic component sweeping outward-across-together-again gently as she focuses upon the need to bridge a gap of understanding - "Understand yourself, child, as you are reflected in the mirror of another."
In the heat of the moment, it might not have worked. Too unstructured, too unpracticed.
But the thing is, 
means 'Hope'.
And here is a man — not a parent to the child, not yet. In another world, where he was rescued by others and Superman could try to put the matter out of his mind, maybe he would not ever be.
But here, he pulled him from the pod not an hour ago, seeing the boy, angry and misused, with his own eyes. And he still feels the outrage, the violation, of a child made from his own flesh and blood without his knowledge or consent.
But he feels other things, too. The yearning for more of his own kind, to replace a planet that was lost. The compassion of looking on a suffering child, writhing and tense in his arms as the child battles against forces he can't control.
And, of course, the Hope that the confusing and bewildering visitor from beyond the page can do what she claims and make things right. The Hope that he could share what has come easily to him, through his gradual awakening on the farm. The Hope that he could, in time, come to see this child for who he is, and not the betrayal his creation represents. Come to see him for a child of the
House of
El
All he has ever known before today has been the stillness of growth and the dreams of his tutors.
In the languid hours, floating in darkness among the buzzing and beeping machines of creation, they bid him dream of defeating Superman. It was, in many ways, a gift that so many people lack: a purpose, gifted to him right in the cradle.
But his creators were not kind.
They had read the tale of the old lady who swallowed the fly, and they dared not create something more powerful than that which they sought to counter. And so they made him weaker. Half-kryptonian, yes, but half-human as well, his organs threaded through with a delicate tracery of genomorph tissue to hold the whole thing together.
And they didn't tell him this.
The dreams his tutors sent him — they were of fighting Superman on equal ground, for who would train their weapon to lose? And then when he came out of the pod, and Superman was right there, but he wasn't strong enough ...
Superman doesn't want to hurt him, is the thing. And that burns. The thought that he could be weak enough to merit such unconcern from his destined foe. The thought that Superman wants to help him, wants to lift him up, and make him stronger.
There was not much to hope for, before today. Just his eventual release from the pod, the chance to take up his purpose.
But now,
cradled in the arms of his greatest foe,
unable to stop wreaking destruction on the people he was born to protect,
he hopes for something better.
... and he can see, now, that his anger, his desire, the things that have driven him through this short life, they don't lead to the place he wants to go.
He wants to be stronger? Superman wants that too.
He wants to protect people from those more powerful than they are? Superman wants that too.
He wants to go on believing the things his tutors told him, about his purpose and his future? Well, that stands in the way of letting him be who he wants to be. And that hurts, but he has to let go.
His muscles relax, his eyes changing focus. The beam of intense heat cuts out, molten steel dripping down from the upper levels like rain, dripping and pooling around them as Superman holds him in a silent tableaux of relief and joy.
They likely owe both of them so many apologies, but that can wait until the debrief.
Superman slowly releases him from the bear hug.
"I feel fine. What did you ... do?"
"...Took a calculated risk that I could not make this situation worse by adding the Indigo Light of Compassion to it. I believe the rest would have been your doing, from there."
...The building's not about to fall down on anybody, right? Just checking.
The building is a big flashy target for supervillains to attack without damaging anything actually important. It's ridiculously overbuilt. It's going to be fine.
... especially now that Wonder Woman has finished notifying the DC police and fire departments, and triggering an evacuation of nearby buildings.
Not that that seems like it's going to be needed, but that's the procedure for when the Hall is attacked. She didn't know that things would calm down so quickly.
That still doesn't feel like it explains anything. But maybe that's what you get for asking questions of magicians.
"Right. Well. Are there any ... mystical things that you could check, to make sure he's healthy?" he questions.
"It feels like everything is fine, I just want to check that you're okay," he tells the boy in the jumpsuit. "It's been an eventful morning for all of us."
"...Probably, but I want to state for the record that I am not a professional anything and you should get a second opinion from... The Fortress of Solitude or an actual wizard or something. Seriously, I'm pulling most of this out of half-baked intuition, tropes, a power I've had for not even a day, and sheer bloody-mindedness. But. I think I can take a look, and even if that's something I can't work out with the tools I have on me, I think I have a working hypothesis."
Gift, a spark for Light-assisted medical diagnostics?
...If she understands what happened to the kid, she can explain it to him, and to Superman/Clark, who are both probably more than a little worried right now.
And, in all honesty, she really wants to know what happened.
Even if she's ready to believe that what happened was the White Light doing things.
"I hesitate to say that this might have been partly my fault, but I do think it might have been partly my fault, depending on when our guest arrived."
It's full right now; does she want to get rid of danger sense or structural fault tracking?
The gift happily swaps out the structural fault tracking for intuition around diagnosing medical problems using emotional-spectrum light.
"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."
"...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."
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."
'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.
...
"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."
"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."
"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?"
"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.
"...That sounds like a good idea. Let me just." Okay. She can move. Good sign.
"...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."
"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.
"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."
"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."
"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..."
That does bring something to mind, though. Mental acceleration powers, Gift, dear?
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?
They would like to replace the Light-assisted diagnosis power, they suppose.
Can do!
The world seems to slow, thoughts having twice as much time to be thought before the real world catches up with them.
...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.
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.
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?
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?
If she could use a power like this one to safely figure out which of several otherwise indistinguishable wires would need to be cut to defuse a bomb instead of having it explode, then that would be a 'find out'.
Ah! Yeah, that would be moving information from outside of her soul, and this kind of power cannot do that. It could do an abstract sensory mode for whether wires are preventing imminent, proximate explosions?
No, darling, that's what she has the danger sense for, but thank you.
They would like to switch out their thought-acceleration for the future-thoughts version.
Okay!
The world speeds back up to normal and then ...
It feels different, actually. Not a constant thing where they 'just' think faster, but rather a sense that they can take a little longer to think things through before taking an action. Also, this one counts as synergizing with the danger sense for some reason.
Not just for some reason, but, if she has intuited correctly, for the specific reason that both are notably paracausal in method of action.
Merge them, please.
Can do!
The sparks click together, and she gets the sense that if there were a danger coming, she would get a moment to be aware of it and reflect before anything happened.
Might be useful. Would certainly prevent such foolishness as standing in the line of fire of a Kryptonian laser eyebeam.
...Huh. The periodic table's probably different here. Can't have Krypton-the-noble-gas with Krypton-the-planet, surely.
Speaking of divinatory powers, can she get - something that means she won't make a fool of herself by using erroneously assumed common knowledge?
Um. That's sort of doing multiple things at once.
It could do a power for determining whether someone expects her to already know something? Or a specialized danger-sense for social blunders, maybe?
She's thinking more of a spot-the-difference sort of thing. A common knowledge comparator, if that helps.
Oh! Yes, it can do intuition for which details of common-knowledge differ between their mind and their present location. Does that work?
If it's possible, they would like the power to include knowledge of how that knowledge differs.
No, that's too big for it to fit in a single spark, unfortunately.
It creates the requested power, and a new mental affordance opens up to them: by considering a piece of knowledge, they can tell whether it contradicts common knowledge in their location.
With the spark, there also comes a subtle sense of stretching, or growth. It fills up their being and presses against the limits of the possible with the gentlest possible touch.
Oh, interesting.
...They suddenly wonder if they could play with the 'this location' to get a much firmer grounding in magic by process of elimination, if they used it in, say, Shadowcrest or the Tower of Fate - but that is not what they are immanently invested in.
They draw the Gift's attention to that sensation, and ask - does this mean what we think it means? Does it mean growth in strength directly, or perhaps growth in number of possible powers supported?
All souls naturally grow and improve over time — especially by overcoming adversity and doing things that are important. The gift was designed by a very smart and very elegant creator; the natural repulsion between sparks that don't like each other is harnessed to help their soul expand just a bit faster than it could on its own, turning a waste into a benefit.
And yes, the number of sparks that it can hold is related to how much room there is in their soul, so if their soul grows enough it will eventually be able to squeeze in a fifth one!
Right. Okay. They have something of a template...
They should see how much they can do freehand, probably.
...Then that falls to her. If she wants them to self-sustain, at least.
This is going to work. She believes she can do this, wield the power of hope and will commingled, to ward against all that would snuff their light out. She knows what hope feels like. And it might hurt, right now, to try to hope this hard - to believe in themselves to this extent. Especially when they've fucked up quite recently. But. They are, as the reference goes, filled with DETERMINATION. And hope springs eternal. So they believe they can fly.
Emerald and azure and indigo light flare around them in a shifting corona, playing around them like an aurora. The colors shift moment to moment as their emotions do ... but there is enough hope and determination to let them float up off the ground, suspended in the air as though gravity has renounced them.
Wonder woman leans back from the light and reaches a hand up to her ear.
"Diana to Superman. What's the ETA on the construction ...? Okay, thanks."
...Oh this is beautiful.
They won't fly far. But they will gently hover for a moment, basking in the lightness of actually flying!, before touching down, and damping the flare, relief obvious on their face.
"...Give me some credit, if you please. I'm working on shielding. And only on personal shielding. Which is well-attested, not something that could possibly get out of hand like trying to capture a spark of White, and furthermore something I find myself urgently in need of for the sake of my continued mental and emotional wellbeing, because, and I want to stress the importance of this, I could have died just then and I almost did. I know near-Death experiences," and here she actually finds herself looking around for a moment because she's not expecting Death of the Endless to have been watching like this is the near-Vimes experience from Thud! but it wouldn't surprise her either, though it's a bit late now, "are Tuesday for y'all, but I'm not used to that, and I need to sort this out as soon as possible lest my brain fucking implode. Ah, pardon my language. ...I'm not going to try and... invent a lightsaber or something. Not here. If I didn't have the feeling that I was going to need an anchor if I wanted to hang this reliably I would say I'm not trying to do anything that Lanterns can't do the moment they accept the Ring, including the no-support-software version Alan Scott had, but making foci for lightwork is more of a Guardians thing. Still, though. It's not going to explode. It's not going to do anything but exist and then harmlessly disperse, affecting nothing and no-one but myself. I am as confident in that as I am that the sun will come up tomorrow. Are we good?"
(...Okay, they absolutely have to make her a lightsaber at some point. If they do it with Will it'll even be the right color!)
Wonder Woman winces.
"I'm sorry, Wildcard. That was impolite of me. I was just not expecting the sudden multi-colored aura. And I can see why acquiring personal protection is your first priority; I approve of it, even. But from my point of view you look a lot like you are chasing after things you don't understand in somewhat of a panic without trying to take the time to slow down. I can't even say that's not the right approach, since everyone's powers are different and you're probably actually more well-informed about what could go wrong — both with your powers and generally — than I am, given your origins."
"And you're right; the League does face near-Death experiences on a too-frequent basis ... which means that many of us have a warrior's-flinch around unexpected brightly colored effects. So I will not apologize for being discomforted, but I will apologize for reacting to it as thoughtlessly as I did. You have done nothing to suggest that you are dangerous to me or to those who I am here to protect, and you are clearly doing your best to act swiftly and decisively in the face of a difficult situation. I'm sorry for implying that your attempts to defend yourself and better understand your powers were something to be wary of."
One extra bit of information comes along with this apology, along some invisible divine channel: Wonder Woman is a champion of Truth, and when she speaks Truly, this can be perceived by people who know how to listen.
"...Ah. Yes. My apologies in turn, then. It was..."
"I did, directly, state that I was going to attempt to replicate a Lantern's environmental shielding, but I could have been much, much clearer that I intended to do so soonest and been much less of an unpleasant surprise thereby, and for that I owe you an apology, ma'am.
"And much of my... Snappishness...
"Should not have been aimed at you. Or, indeed, anyone. Unfortunately, it is...
"Not unlike your flinch at sudden glowy things, in how...
"...Hm. How to say this. ...I might need... A moment, to figure out the words. Or I might not be able to. They're giving me rather much trouble. But I feel as though I should at least explain, as best I can."
"...It would not necessarily be wrong to say that for various and sundry reasons my brain has conflated social opprobrium into the category of dangers that actual threats to life and limb should be filed under, to which it reacts accordingly - the uncertainty being mostly a matter of degree of just how far off the calibration is. I don't want it to do that, but it does do that."
"...As for the matter of it looking as though I'm chasing after things I don't understand in a blind panic without pausing to even catch my breath...
"...I am, in all honesty, a bundle of nerves by default, but if I was panicking I'm at least 70% sure I'd be a lot more obvious. Either that or I am simply panicky almost all the fucking time I'm doing anything remotely consequential and therefore unfortunately too habituated to it to realize that it's happening. And, for that matter, I would have been glowing yellow. ...Oh, I should not make - a mood ring -" She buries her face in her hands for a moment, clearly trying not to get distracted by laughing at her own joke.
"But, no, the reason I'm like this isn't panic, or at least I think so - it's because I have learned that 90% of the time if I do not do a thing immediately or have external structure that incentivizes me into doing the thing on its schedule, the thing might never get done. And when the thing is 'make sure you're not suddenly exploded', you really want to lean towards doing immediately instead of not doing. ...ADHD and the fucking time blindness, not even once."
Something appears to occur to her, a few seconds later; she pinches the bridge of her nose, and speaks once more.
"And I should have made it explicitly clear much sooner that I do indeed accept your apology and hope there are no hard feelings between us."
Wonder Woman gives a little laugh.
"Yes, no hard feelings at all. As I said, it was my unthinking mistake."
She thinks for a moment.
"Is there anything that I could do, to help you handle things while I'm here? I've been hanging back and going through creating action items from the prophecies you gave us earlier, but if it would help you could bounce ideas off of me, or I could try to help with prioritization?"
Another of those subtle little shifts in bearing that Wonder Woman may or may not have been noticing occurs, as they think about what to do with those questions.
"I think there's more than enough ideas of what to try doing, to be getting on with - though I really should consult a wizard, and there's definitely the mess of Kent Nelson's retirement that I want to get out in front of - but there was a question I once saw asked of a mentor figure, that seems appropriate to steal here, if you're offering advice. What do you think I need to know, about... Any of this, really... That you think no-one else will tell me?"
Wonder Woman taps her lip in thought.
"Well, it's hard to say, because you probably already know a lot of things that I don't know you know, or that you haven't thought about explicitly."
She's silent for a moment.
"You don't need to be a superhero. Batman wouldn't tell you that because he would want to use your unique powers for combating threats the league couldn't otherwise face. Superman wouldn't tell you because it wouldn't occur to him that you might not want to, given the option. The others on the League probably wouldn't really think about the question at all. But ... you know that 'Wonder Woman' is a title, right? Given to the strongest of Themyscira's warriors, a champion who is charged with the defense of her people? I do this because I was raised in a martial culture, and because I've been charged to protect my sisters on Themyscira, and threats to the world are threats to them. I do this because I've grown used to fighting beside my comrades-in-arms in the League, and because I support them so that they will support me, in the way of shield brothers and sisters."
"But you have no such charge. The vast majority of people don't actually run into supervillainy in their day-to-day lives, and with your powers, you're already better equipped to evacuate than most people. You could fly away to a random place, start a new life, and not worry about the various terrible apocalypses that you've told us about — both because, with your forewarning, we'll already be working to stop them, and because it's not your obligation."
"I know that might not be the kind of advice you had in mind, but I think it's important to say. If you do want to become a superhero, it's worth doing that because you made a choice to take on that burden willingly, and not because you felt like it was something imposed upon you."
"...It would be very funny to nigh-accidentally constrain Kl-- excuse me, The Witch Boy - to mostly street-level hijinks by way of not getting involved with much more than, essentially, tourism."
"Unfortunately, the Tao of Peter Parker is strong with this one, if I might be forgiven making a non-local reference and furthermore speaking about 'myself'," she does not actually air-quote, "in third person. And I have been given at least moderate power. And, worse, one that will grow with my own accomplishments. So I find that I should do no less than assume moderate responsibility. Not on the scale of yourself, or Batman, or Kal-El, for I do not have the experience to bear the world on my shoulders - but I'd regret doing nothing. And while this power was a gift - given freely and with no obligation, in no uncertain terms -
"I would, I think, betray myself, if I betrayed the hope I was entrusted with, in being given this gift. And... I am not selfless enough to entrust it to another, if I can keep nothing for myself.
"I do suppose I should check, it would be quite silly of me to have all this angst for no good reason. But I do not expect it to be that easy to resolve this. It would make for a rather poor story, if nothing else."
Gift, dear? Could you elucidate on the relevant circumstances, here?
It can grow seeds that they can give away, if they want it to? Or it could grow a seed for them, and then leave and they could use the seed instead, if they wanted that. The seeds will take a long time to grow to the level that the gift is at right now, though.
And also the gift was designed to help, but it doesn't always know the best way to do that. It comes up with powers that it thinks they will want, and implements them. If the best way to help is to make it so that other people can be powerful and fix things instead, it can come up with powers related to that! It can't decide what they want for them, though, just do its best to support whatever that is.
Awww. Thank you, darling. Yes, she knows.
(The above thoughts are all bathed in such an undertow of sudden affection(maternal) that they have to check if they're glowing.)
"...It seems that the Gift I was given is meant to be shared, for all that it takes a while to fruit to the point where it was given to me."
"What do you mean by that? You can grant lesser versions of your powers to others, as Captain Marvel can?"
-- yeah okay she is the better poker of things and a less circuitous explainer but really?
"The word choice was, insofar as my feeble mortal brain," she quips, "comprehends the substantially alien worldview of the symbiote attached to my soul as best as it tried to explain the answer to the question of what could happen if I wanted to pass it on, that it could grow 'seeds' that could be given away as we saw fit, or that I could pass the more-grown form on and reserve a seed for myself if that was what I preferred.
"And, furthermore, that if the best way to help people would be to empower others, that it would be glad to help me do so, though the question of priorities is my own decision to make. ...As it should be, for all that sometimes I do mislike the burden of choice." She sighs. "But that is another matter entirely, I should say."
"There are ... very few reliable routes to power," Wonder Woman notes. "The Flash's formula is one, but it's hard to reproduce and very dangerous, both to apply and in the hands of someone bent on ill-use. If you could grant safe, reliable abilities to other people — to people chosen ahead of time for having heroic dispositions and support networks — that could be a definite shift in the balance of power."
"On the other hand, if a villain learns that you can do that, you might be targeted. I would recommend keeping that ability close to your chest."
"Oh, definitely. I probably shouldn't have said that while there were holes in the building. Or in this building at all. ...Too late now, unfortunately."
It's not a growth measured in time. It's a growth measured in personal achievement and the background flow of cosmic energy. For a seed to grow to the stage the gift is at now ... a new realization about the self, a difficult monster defeated for a meaningful cause, and an attempt to make a friend from an enemy, maybe? There are other things that would do as well, though ...
It's hard to give an exact measurement.
"...It runs on narrative rules. Personal development. Feats of character or strength. Things like that."
"... huh. That sounds like it would make it harder to plan around, but not—"
She interrupts herself, frowning in concentration.
"It's not, what was the phrase ... It's not a case of the inverse ninja rule, is it?"
"I don't think that the people who made this Gift would have wanted to make incentives to not spread it."
"Oh, good. I'm sorry, that must have seemed like a silly question — it's just that with you knowing this world through fiction, and now your powers operating on narrative ..."
"No, if I weren't in my position I would absolutely have asked the same question."
"Honestly in my position I am kind of asking the same question but I expect the conservation-of-ninjutsu function to be limited narrative scope more than anything, on the... Less hypothetical than I'd like... Other side of the screen. Like, I've written this sort of thing before, I know it's very likely that what's happening somewhere on a different level is me writing at least my half of this conversation, but it is eerie to see someone pull off medium-awareness when you yourself don't immediately have any. ...I should actually check if that's legal." Uh. Gift? Is that... A thing? That you could do? Because she doesn't expect you to be able to emulate Deadpool but if you can she kind of needs to know.
It exists entirely within the current universe. It only knows that there exists a meta-level because they've been thinking about it.
But if it is possible in principle for someone in this universe to observe the meta-level it might be able to figure out how? That's pure speculation — it doesn't currently know how, and doesn't have any reason to think it's possible except that they think that the witch boy did it earlier, and the gift is very flexible. It's already learned at least one new thing about local physics from their experiment with white light.
"...Hm. No dice on that - yet - but he figured out how to do it, so I might be able to, eventually. It can learn, and has - figured out how to do anti-zombie stuff from the earlier poking of the White, for example. I wonder if..."
...That is a very tempting idea. But it could be very dangerous to their continued unmolested selfhood. Law and/or Order, after all, is no more Good than Chaos is Evil - perhaps even less so, given that ACAB - and they've already negotiated with Klarion. Nabu might take offense. He's just a bit prickly.
On the other hand, Order opposes Chaos.
If they want to figure out a reliable way to See, he might be both able and willing to help them.
"...The idea of introducing me to the entity responsible for Doctor Fate as independent from Kent Nelson does, despite the thought continuing to circle me like a moth at a lamp, continue to be rather desperately unwise in my considered opinion. But as that entity is the Lord of Order to the Witch Boy's Chaos, there might be help to be found from that quarter in this particular endeavour - and, gods help me, there are parts of me that quite strongly want to go for it. He doesn't deserve to be left on a shelf for who knows how long."
Wonder Woman fought beside Doctor Fate for some time. She has a hard time picturing him getting along with Wildcard.
"We could visit the Tower of Fate and I could introduce you?" she offers. "Although you seem to me to be more naturally aligned with chaos than with order; I'm fairly confident he wouldn't object to meeting you, so long as you go through the proper channels, but I'm less sure that he'll be willing to help you attain ... medium-awareness."
What has her life become?
"Is there a particular reason that becoming medium-aware is particularly important, given the other ideas you've had for personal defense and empowering others?"
There is a reason that she alone - save, perhaps, Diana - will be the one to speak to Nabu, should it come to that.
"Not... Particularly, not pressingly, save in that it is a capability which someone set against us has to some degree, while we yet do not have it, which opens up... A threat surface, in terms of information security at least. One that I would prefer to be able to observe and counterplay on, to at least a similar degree as the person who first demonstrated it. But it does not have to be me. Merely it is that someone ought to be able to do it, of the heroes of this world. I'm just, I hope, one who is not going to go mad from the revelation, because to some extent I've had practice with the idea."
"...I don't rightly expect medium-awareness to be a point on which the plot turns, if indeed there is anything so fully predictable as a plot turning afoot - if nothing else, it would seem to me to be poor cinema - but if it was, and I had taken no measure to prepare myself, knowing such capability existed, I would think myself rather negligent."
"...Prepare myself, I say, as if I am the universe's most special of snowflakes. Prepare any and all of us to deal with that, I should have said. ...And rightly should have gotten ahead of myself such that I didn't first say otherwise, I think, but I'm sure I'm not being written by a time traveller."
"...Regardless of any of that. I would, I think, like the introduction."
"Alright. I'll call ahead so that we're expected."
She reaches to an equipment pouch and pulls out a perfectly ordinary flip-phone.
(That is very probably Not an ordinary flip-phone. But she's not going to say anything.)
(What are you talking about? This phone is perfectly ordinary. Perfectly. Immaculately. So amazingly and completely ordinary that it's not even particularly interesting to speculate about. This phone could, if submitted to the International Bureau of Weights and Measures, serve as the international reference ordinary object. Not that anyone would do that, because why would they? The phone is totally ordinary.)
"Hi, Kent? I have a prospective colleague here who was hoping to have a chance to speak to the doctor. Are you at home to callers?"
"Yes, I can make that work."
"We can be there in 10 minutes if we—Sure, 20 minutes is fine. We can take the scenic route."
"Mmhm! You too! See you soon."
She slips the phone back into her pocket.
"He's expecting us — if we go via the Salem Zeta-Tube, it's just a short walk."
"That sounds like a good plan."
If you want her to think you're ordinary, maybe try being less aggressively ordinary about being a phone Wonder Woman carries around.
Wonder Woman guides them to the Hall of Justice's teleporter, and a few minutes later they're walking down the streets of Salem, Massachusetts. Like many older east-coast cities, the streets are a confusing, twisted tapestry of ascended ox-trails. Which doesn't really make it less improbable that a plot of relatively nice real-estate near downtown would have gone unused, even if it is a bit of an awkward shape.
And then they step over the property line, and are greeted by a stately old stone tower.
Wonder Woman climbs up the front steps, and gives a knock with the wrought-iron door knocker.
"He might be a moment," she warns.
...Though speaking of poking it, Gift, if you would be so kind as to drop the common-knowledge power and pick up a magic-perception one?
Sure!
A delicate tracery of golden lines reveals itself to her vision. Actually, it's not just golden lines — Wonder Woman glows with lines the color of the earth, and her armor glows with lines the color of the forge — but the overwhelming golden glow from the tower drowns them out somewhat. Contrary to Wonder Woman's lines, which flow in naturalistic swoops and curves, the magic of the tower is straight, linear, repetitive, and organized.
Entirely unsurprising since Nabu is a Lord of Order and Kent Nelson learned from him.
The power in question cannot see itsself, for the same reason you cannot peer at your own eyeball. But looking down at their body reveals a set of pale flowing rivers of color, intertwined with each other and growing from a central base. She might very well be able to pick out a particular network of color as more 'her' than 'them'. The whole thing is less ... directed, than Wonder Woman's. They seem to be tugging on the lines of orderly spellwork and gaining tiny flecks of gold to match.
Souls are the mechanism through which the immaterial directs the material? And they have one?
It wasn't really the same kind of thing as local souls, although it was similar enough that both kinds fit into the gift's interface. But now they are here and doing magic in the context of this universe, and that means having a soul the border of which touches on the energies of magic, which is what she's seeing here.
At that point the door opens, and there's a flare of golden light in the shape of perfectly interlocking ankhs and gears, and now the magic-detection power is completely failing to recognize anything magical about this tower or its occupant.
"Hasn't anyone ever told you that it's rude to stare, young lady?" an older man with salt-and-pepper hair asks.
"Firstly, no, actually, I do not know wizard etiquette, sorry - I've been in this universe for all of - three to six hours, now? - and secondly, I am mostly trying to look at myself at this point. And thirdly, you must surely be looking at me to know that I can be looking at you, hm? But really, my apologies. I meant no offense. My only other contact with local magicians was with the reason I feel like I need to talk with the helmet, and there wasn't exactly room for etiquette when it came down to bribe-threatening the Witch Boy into being an equal opportunity problem."
...She is not going to turn it off and back on again...
"Actually, if you can see what I'm doing, I've been wondering if it's possible to hold on to these..."
Gift, please eject the magic sight power, it's not going to do her much good if there's tampering anyway.
And Mr. Nelson darts out a hand, snagging something from the air. Golden light reaches out to form a cage over his palm, and floating within it is a dim red spark, visible for the first time in the outside world.
"Detecting magic isn't like detecting light. It's more like touch ... What is that?"
He peers at the spark cupped in his hand.
"Yes. Yes, you should come in. Enter of your own free will and be welcome in my home."
He steps back out of the doorway, revealing an old-fashioned receiving room.
"I have almost no idea! Except that whoever made the power that made it was probably not from my universe, we did not have sufficiently advanced technology - nor known-replicable mystical workings at all despite occasional anecdote and the commonalities of several world religions to this locale," she says, now over the threshold, "and that given some of the Reasons This Power Can't Do That I've run into, its creators seem to have been decent people. ...It was a gift. Given freely and with no obligation. One I can simply pass to another, if I do not want it - though I do want it, despite that it means I am rather compelled by my own ethics to get involved with all of this. Oh, and, ah. Thank you for your hospitality, Mr. Nelson. I'd introduce myself by name, given that I know yours, but at present I fear that trying would be somewhat dishonest of me. Give it a minute, I suppose; I'm not going to be talking to - ahem. You know who. Given that his opposite number doesn't want me saying his name I don't particularly want to risk it. ...But anyway, as I was saying - I don't know if we'd get along very well, as despite my tendency to appreciate rules, well, I'm like this - always wanting to poke things - and considering that even incidental, accidental, disrespect to a sufficiently powerful entity can prove fatal, I'd rather not run the risk. Certainly he's not usually like that but considering what else has been happening... Mmnh."
"A gift, you say? How curious ..."
He looks up, and then gestures everyone toward a semicircle of chairs.
"And 'Fate' is a pseudonym; I don't actually know his real name. I think anyone who did is long since dead. I'm ordinarily quite reluctant to wear him again, but it sounds like you may indeed have a worthy cause. Perhaps we could start at the beginning and you could tell me the whole story? Would you like some tea?"
"...That's definitely not his name, no. But it might be that I don't know the name of this version of the entity that inhabits the helmet, and instead some other universe's version. Still not going to say it. And part of why I jumped on an opportunity to speak with him - which I am most certainly not going to ask you to put on the helmet for, unless it's actually necessary - I won't ask you to take a risk I wouldn't - is that I hope I might be able to find a better solution to..." She waves a hand at him, and then upwards in a hopefully vaguely helmetwards direction, "the current labor dispute, if I'm accurately informed that one exists."
Mr. Nelson's greying eyebrows climb his forehead with an alacrity that belies his age.
"You might know his name? Well! That might actually just solve everything. Yes, there certainly is a 'labor dispute', heh. I was not particularly keen to spend any more of my life being little more than a puppet and a conduit for arcane power. If I could rebind him to have more equal control ..."
He shakes his head.
"Anyway, wearing the helmet is not necessary to speak to him, but it is necessary if you wanted him to use any magic, including exercising his powers as a Lord of Order, which I assumed was why you would wish to speak to him specifically. You mentioned Fate's opposite number — I take it you've gotten tangled up with a Lord of Chaos?"
"Yes, though I don't think there's anything lingering that would need N- stop saying names, me, for goodness sakes... - that would need his attention directly. It's more that he said some concerning things that I think yours might need to know about. Including 'Everyone else is landing in Central City', when you may note that I'm the only new variable here as in this universe so far - oh, I should see if... Anyway. He followed that up by negotiating with what I can only describe as - if my current actions are being narrativized, which I suspect is happening somewhere, then, a coauthor - who was not me, the symbology was wrong - for continued narrative relevance in the event that he accepted the bargain I was offering."
Gift, dear, how hard would it be for you to do - a message-in-a-bottle, say, to another Giftee? Out of curiosity.
Hmm. The sparks spin in thought.
Yes, it could do that! It could do a power for producing stable magical structures encoding a message or thought. It could also do a power for producing stable physical crystals that contain a message or thought in the same way, but physical objects seem less like what they want, here.
Actually getting the message to another giftee would be another matter — although they could just let the messages-in-a-bottle float around in the local multiverse without needing another power for it.
Other methods of direct communication to people mostly require some established association or connection to operate over ... It could do a power that would broadcast to anyone in the local multiverse who had used their own gift to create a compatible receiver, if that would help?
Perhaps! Not right now, but could you remind her in a bit? If she doesn't remember, herself.
Would you need a separate receiver and broadcaster?
The gift gives the matter some thought. It's difficult to make it fit, but ...
It could do broadcaster and receiver in a single spark at the expense of range, maybe? The resulting power would still only be able to do one of those things at once, though. It would be more easily blocked or disrupted than dedicated powers, too.
But yeah! It can remind her in a little while.
"I'm ... not sure that Fate is going to be able to help with narrative concerns, exactly. Lords of Chaos are generally capable of very strange things; that is the advantage of Chaos, just as organization is the advantage of Order. But he will definitely want to keep track of what his opposite number is getting up to."
Mr. Nelson sits back, steepling his fingers.
"There's also the possibility, of course, that anyone else showing up in Central City just hasn't come to your attention."
Wonder Woman shakes her head.
"We thought of that. Zatara was busy, but I asked The Question to look into it, and he didn't find anyone in Central City who didn't belong there."
"There are plenty of ways to hide, but I take your point. Hmmm..."
A clockwork figure in the shape of a knight steps into the room and sets a tea service on the table, before opening the door and stepping out again. Past it, a large number of stairs are visible against a background of stars.
Ooooh that's pretty.
"I didn't, really, expect him to natively have the capacity. I don't have the capacity, just far too much thinking about similar situations. I just thought he should know. Wouldn't be - fair, otherwise."
Mr. Nelson nods.
"I see your point. Well, if that's all you needed, I probably won't have to put him on again. Alright — let me take you up to the workroom where I store him."
He levers himself to his feet and opens the door to the stars-and-stairs again. It's two flights (one up, one sideways) to a small granite room where a golden helmet sits on a small plinth.
"Wake up, Fate. You've got a visitor."
Twin pinpricks of golden light flare to life within the eye sockets of the helmet.
"A visitor?"
The helmet doesn't move, but it becomes apparent a moment later that it has focused its attention on Wildcard.
"Speak, then, and put your request in the hands of Fate."
"She doesn't have a request, and you don't have hands, you old hat," Mr. Nelson mutters, lowly enough that Nabu can simply ignore him.
"A visitor I am, yes, but I do not have a request to make of you, save that I would ask if I am correctly informed as to your name, if you would care to answer. I know it is not 'Fate'. We both know that that is but a nom de guerre.
"Regardless. That is not, presently, the matter of primary focus. I have a report, of information it would behoove you to know as it concerns a Lord of Chaos, and an offer, of some small speculation that it might be possible for me to create a... Mobility aid, depending upon your needs in such matters and the extent of my own capabilities."
"Very well. Firstly, a clarificatory question: Is the nature of a Lord of Order or Chaos naturally multiversal?"
Lacking lips, Nabu doesn't frown.
"In a sense. Lords of Order and Chaos are naturally multiplanar, and there are structures of magic that a Lord of Order may employ in order to contact and merge with their other selves in nearby parallels."
"I see. In that case, it is likely that that is as likely the source of the claim that there were others in my circumstance - I am not from this universe, nor indeed the local sheaf of parallel worlds, should there be such a thing, and arrived when excess velocity from a cross-multiverse occurrence was transmitted to me and carried me here; he decided it would be... Novel... To divert me to a different point of emergence, apparently.
"It is likely as likely that he obtained his information from cross-multiverse collaboration, then, as it is that he has - ah, you would not know the reference, I do not imagine. Regardless. The other possible source of his information is most likely medium awareness, if you have ever heard of the Queen of Fables. We observed him productively carrying on half of a conversation with an external entity, and that entity tangibly responded. Or at least, we don't think the tumbleweed was most likely - ...The Witch Boy's... - doing, being as he had been rendered relatively powerless at the time he had that discussion."
"I have heard of the Queen of Fables, actually, but only as a fable herself. Still — it is good to know that The Witch Boy has been seeking out his other selves. Perhaps the time is right for me to do more of the same. Is that what prompted your proposal for ... mobility aids?"
"That is something I wish to attempt to reify for your use - and that of your alternate selves, should the work prove feasible for others, or if there is another with this power available - for multiple reasons, not least of which that involuntary servitude (save as punishment for a crime whereof the offender shall have been duly convicted in a court of law, by a jury of their peers) is illegal in the United States, and rather than deal with that, it is much neater to simply create an artificial support structure for you to use."
"That, and, well. It must be frustrating to be stuck here."
(...Hey, wait a minute, wasn't it the JSA who stuffed the Queen of Fables into a pile of tax law?)
(That's not relevant right now, but she's somewhat surprised he wouldn't have mentioned encountering her if it had in fact happened in this continuity. Then again, he doesn't know we want nothing to do with her.)
"Emergency workers, such as on-duty firefighters, including those hired by private fire-fighting companies, are not legally allowed to leave their agreed-upon shifts while there is an immanent threat to life or property, or a protective action against such that they have already begun. And the forces of Chaos never sleep, so the forces of Order must do likewise," Nabu notes.
"But it ... is frustrating that I am not able to work with anyone willing to put in the necessary hours."
"And yet those shifts must end. It is not a literal truth, that labor regulations are written in the blood of those that die when someone in charge sought to wring blood from stone, but it is nonetheless a truth, and limits on shift durations and consecutive shifts and just how far you could push someone were some of the first regulations we made. If there were multiple viable bearers of your mantle, notwithstanding anything else we might devise to obviate the need, the burden would not weigh so heavily upon any of them - but there is a limit to one's ability to endure, when one is as human as you seem to need your hosts to be.
"The human body and the human mind are intricate biological machinery - but they have limits, built in to their structure. Limits you have been pushing, and pushing, and pushing until something broke in your sole mission-critical component!", you utter fool!, she does not say.
"...That, and if the Witch Boy does not sleep, I would be rather surprised - he is quite... frivolous, in his way. A spoiled child with a godling's power. Notwithstanding his familiar being a rather cantankerous felid, which may equally be indicative of his habits and psyche. And certainly he is not the only force of chaos - but nor are you the only force of order."
"But I rather digress, as I certainly do not have the contacts I would need if I wanted to help with your lack of hosts. Perhaps Mr. Nelson would be able, though I do not know if he would be willing. Perhaps others of the Justice Society, or the Justice League. I merely have - wildly speculative artifice, that might suffice regardless.
"I hope that you, at least, will likely not require a primer on the Emotional Spectrum, considering that outside of Maltusians, if anyone would have derived the Life Equation from first principles I suspect it would be you and yours, notwithstanding the Silver City - given they could've gotten it right from the Source, as best I understand, it's rather unfair to include them.
"...For that matter I expect you might know the other one, too, but that thing gives me the heebie-jeebies. Even though it's so malformed and ill-specified that it can't prove shit and if someone tries to disprove the worthiness of even a Life that sucks by mumbling some grade-school pabulum that wishes it were nihilist at the universe with intent, then they can fucking fight me because where there's Life there's Hope and they can't take that from me -- ...And that's before considering that someone probably stuck their grubby fingers in it. New Gods, not even once. ...But, alas, I have rather digressed, haven't I.
"Suffice to say that if there is some spark of anima that a body prosthetic would need, to be of use to you, it is not impossible that I could provide one - though I am no Lantern, as of yet, to promise that with anything resembling surety. I have done that once, with little room for intent behind it save to prove that I could. Yet I do believe that it could work, if it was needed."
The helmet is silent for a long moment.
"For all that your words are spoken without forethought, I cannot say you are incorrect."
"Unfortunately, your theorized artifice will not suffice. It is true that the Life equation is a powerful force, but magic arises not only from existence, but from the Dream. There are beings that live and do not dream, and such have no connection to the world of the arcane. Those are unsuitable as vessels. I find it difficult to believe that you could create a connection to the Dream where none existed before. Additionally, there are ... benefits to efficiency, from maintaining one host for a longer period, rather than arranging a rotation. It takes time to correctly format a host's connection to allow for the full force of Order to be expressed through them."
"...Hm! It is true that I wasn't thinking I'd need to do that today.
"That doesn't mean it's impossible, though. Earth has all sorts of things going around, and I'm pretty sure even you would be surprised." Possibly including a ruby that should rightly be returned to no less than Dream of the Endless himself. There was a villain running around with the damn thing. With that as a reference, and-or with having done Dream or a Muse a favor...
She turns to the others. "There was a gentleman by the name of Doctor Destiny; I don't know what happened to his effects except that I'm pretty sure he's not active these days, but if his ruby is in your possession, then it's very possible we could work something out, with that available for reference. And if it is in your possession then there's someone we should give it back to, who might be willing to do us a favor."
She turns back to Nabu. "As for the question of establishing a rotation - I have to imagine there is some sort of middle ground to be had between 'one person forever' and, if I might exaggerate for rhetorical effect, 'nobody puts on the helmet twice' levels of host-swapping. It doesn't seem to me like training up a handful of hosts - say, three, or seven, those are magic numbers or so I have heard - should be that much worse than starting from zero with a singular someone whenever Mr. Nelson dies - which, well, I'm not sure how likely that is, but it's a risk, certainly - while still reducing your bus factor. That being, in technical terms, 'how screwed you are if someone unexpectedly gets hit by a bus' - or is otherwise taken out of commission by circumstances beyond your ability to control.
"Plus, if you do switch to a small-team model, once you've done the initial setup you probably won't have to be doing all that soul-alignment work for everyone at once when the next person needs to retire.
"That, and having multiple people supporting you, means that you are much less likely to end up in the hands of someone you wouldn't wish to be, if someone hostile to you hires, say, the entirely hypothetical Inevitable Heart-Attack Man, to assassinate your host in the field and steal the helm from their corpse."
"Doctor Destiny, Doctor Destiny, ... Where do I know that name from?" Wonder Woman wonders to herself in the background.
The helmet is silent as he considers.
"I have not actually tried aligning to two people at once," he admits. "There are complications of the process that will be beyond you, but I see the argument that a small loss of power is preferable to the total loss of effective power that I am currently experiencing."
"Kent — would you don me to allow me to seek out a ... group of worthy disciples?"
Mr. Nelson snorts. On the one hand, he hates being confined in Fate's void. On the other hand, you don't become a superhero if you aren't willing to make personal sacrifices for the greater good.
He takes a deep breath and straightens his shoulders.
"I will wear you for no more than four hours, during which you must agree to avoid all risks to my life, health, soul, person, reputation, knowledge, skills, mystical assets, and other tangible or intangible goods that I own or over which I exercise control, except if I agree, of my own uncoerced will, being fully informed of the facts of the matter and on your planned course of action, that an individual emergency or action that you took no steps to instigate, cause, or eventuate warrants an exception. In the case of such an exception being granted, you agree to avoid all unnecessary or unreasonable risks to my life, health, soul, person, reputation, knowledge, skills, mystical assets, and any other tangible or intangible goods that I own or over which I exercise control. This agreement will be executed according to the law of Massachusetts, and if any individual provision of the agreement is found to be unlawful, the remainder of the agreement will stand. You acknowledge that returning control to me and allowing me to remove you is not a positive action, and that therefore, since time is of the essence of this agreement, you are compelled by force of law to do so no later than four hours after I don you for the first time. Should you break any term of this agreement, your life, your magics, your connection to the plane of Order, your status as a Lord of Order, and your ability to control, coerce, dominate, or direct me will all be instantaneously and completely forfeit. In compensation for my time, and in order to make this a legally binding contract, you agree to put your best effort into locating and recruiting replacement wearers subject to the above conditions for the entire time that I am wearing you, to provide me with a reasonable amount of time to speak with any such recruits in a place of privacy before they enter into any agreements with you, and to provide me with one peppercorn. Do you agree?"
...That seems reasonable, but -
"...Four hours all at once seems a rather short timeframe across which to conduct a recruitment."
"Oh, it absolutely is," Mr. Nelson agrees. "But I've learned over the course of these past many decades that if you give Fate an inch, he'll take the inch right at the end of that mile over there. This way, to recruit people in a reasonable amount of time, he not only has to abide by these terms, but also leave me in a state where I still feel like being helpful and making another agreement four hours from now. Plus, recruiting people will almost certainly include giving them time to think about it, which is time that I can spend in my own damn body."
"It would be more convenient to recruit people if I could give them a guaranteed time that I could check back in with them—"
"Absolutely not. The right time to think about maintaining a convenient working relationship was when my wife died alone because you were busy tracking that fraudulent frog. Do you accept the unaltered deal, or not?"
Mr. Nelson steps forward and lifts the helmet, staring at it with a complicated expression. Then he turns it, and slowly places it over his head, his greying hair vanishing underneath the burnished gold.
A flare of golden light envelops the pair of them, and then the body standing there is different, in some undefinable way. Standing perfectly straight.
Dr. Fate turns, adjusting his shirtcuffs so that they align exactly.
"Thank you. For your counsel, and your warning of the witch boy's whereabouts. Now, I believe I have a team of acceptable apprentices to find."
"It was, I believe, the right thing to do. I hope your search is fruitful. ...And one more thing. Don't make Mr. Nelson regret this, Nabu, or I will figure out a way to make you regret making him regret it. You may be a force for Order, and Order the foundation of civil society, but know that I will not make the mistake of conflating Order with Good."
His borrowed lips narrow, and he gives her a tight nod before striding out through the door, golden ankh in hand.
"Oh, that man who sleepwalked into the Hall of Justice because a nightmare creature was trying to torture him!" Wonder Woman exclaims. "I knew I knew that name from somewhere. He got Batman possessed by ... Brand, I think it was, who told us about this nightmare creature that was trying to unite the realms of Life and Death. And he needed Doctor Dee's stone to do it. Or were there two stones ... I was trapped in a nightmare realm for a while; makes it a bit hard to remember which parts actually happened."
She shakes her head, refocusing on Wildcard.
"Sorry, what was important about the Nightmare stone? These things tend to all blend together ..."
"...Well. I would say exactly who I think that stone might rightfully belong to, but I have adopted the policy of not saying names when their owners might be able to hear me. One of the Endless, I think I can say."
Wonder Woman nods agreeably.
"Alright — is getting it returned urgent on the scale of minutes or hours, or should I add an action item to the list?"
"Add it to the list; if it's kept this long it can keep a little longer."
"...That said, it's probably a good idea to have it ready to go by the time the Burgess investigation goes off."
She needs her notes.
Ah, Gift, is there anything that could help her with that? Something that would - stick with her more directly than a notebook, or her old diptych -
...Say. If there was more stuff like [Sylvia using Aura-reinforcement principles to charge the shield], could you help - reify it properly?
For the memory — it could do eidetic memory, or maybe a power that lets them deliberately sharpen individual memories?
For reifying exomemories — it depends. It's definitely useful to have a 'guide' to try to pattern a power after, but there are still limits to what it can do, and if they have an exomemory of something that runs counter to those limits it probably can't meaningfully reify them. Does that help?
It does! Thank you very much.
No, the trick is that it needs to not rely on her brain to pull off recall. Her brain is awful at that sort of thing except in very specific circumstances, the compression's really lossy - and considering that she's not even necessarily getting 100% of her own brainpower for meta reasons, it's best to have something semi-external. But relying upon a physical item would be... Well. You don't want to write these things down. And she's rather out of the habit of having any such object, anyway, short of relying upon the Fatebinder's instincts.
Ah, okay! It can do a sort of indelible mental notepad that keeps its data storage on the gift's side of things, instead of in their physical brain. Does that work?
Hmm. Not if it does it the naive way, but it can put this little twist on the connection ...
She would need a compatible power in order to read or write the notes, but they would still be there even if the power went away. Is that an acceptable tradeoff or should it explore other powers in this area?
That works! Probably. Would be great if it was only the writing that took active power use, but she's at least content with this.
It can't do reading without active power use unless the data is connected to her brain or soul in some way, and it can't do unstructured soul-editing powers for safety reasons. And it sounded like she wanted a power that was more durable than things stored in her brain, so ... that's the design dilemma it's working with.
Since this is deemed acceptable, it goes ahead and creates the scratchpad spark. They now have an additional space in their shared head, something like memory, but not entirely, into which they can put ideas and words and visualizations to safely store them for later.
Yay!
Alright, notetaking time.
Oh, hey, if it's in your metaphorical side of the room could it be something you could read off of?
Oh, uh, also, Wildcard to Earth, anything happening down there?
Notes:
- Lightsabers: Lightwork? Ophelia/Diana variants.
- TODO: Raid villain stuff for ideas. Cold guns.
- Lantern.
- Multiverse comms power - should be message-in-a-bottle type; breadcrumbs? live comms probably a bit annoying metawise.
Could it? Um ...
The sparks swirl as the gift ponders that one. On the one hand, it has senses that it can use to observe local physics for the purpose of constructing powers. On the other hand, it isn't sure how to write notes on local physics. Maybe it would be easier to store the information in its preference memory? And then it just has to figure out how to encode a note as a learned preference about its user ...
Oh, actually they asked to be reminded about a thing earlier! It could probably store notes in the same way that it encoded that. The storage space would be limited, but that would be readable without a power, it thinks. Not as durable, though.
Wonder Woman is peering out the door into the stars-and-stairs, trying to figure out whether they should attempt to find their way back to the door.
Oh, no, it's fine if you can't write, she's sure she'll be able to find room to get the write-power back when she needs it. Just reading what's already there, dear. Could you do that?
She has been reminded! Thank you! ((...She remembered this one on her own, sure, but the Gift still did a good job!))
"...The Tower of Fate is capable of semi-autonomously directing visitors, I believe. But I'd like to look at the stars for a little while. I think it may help me with something."
Well, that's mildly ominous. But only mildly.
"Alright — I feel a bit awkward waiting around while Mr. Nelson is ... busy. But I don't mind taking a few minutes to admire the view. It is an impressive sight."
Oh. Yes. That does make sense.
"It really is, and - that's why it might help with this. There's seven colors in the Emotional Spectrum, is the thing, and as it is, I can only reliably-enough find my way to six of them, without - external conditions cooperating."
Oh, for goodness sake, [REDACTED] and/or whatever semiautonomous process is responsible for the music in her head, Queen is good, but while this is love they're looking for, it's hardly romance that they expect to find in it.
"And, to be honest, I have approximately zero interest in opening myself up to the sort of yandere nonsense you get out of sufficiently poorly aligned Star Sapphires, even though I like to believe I'm probably a better person than that. So I'm. Mm. Trying to think about love. What it is, what it means, what it could be. Whether admiration of the world's beauty is as much a metaphysically valid sort of love as love for a person.
"I know someone who would make a much better Violet Lantern than I could ever hope to be, if I'm honest." She blinks back inexplicable - or perhaps merely unexplained - tears. "I wish I could give her this, with all my heart. But - she is not here, not possessed of this power as she should be," (- the world is wrong -), "and I am. So I must do what small part I can, to - do as she would do, care as she would care, help as she would help - as she has helped me, and many other souls besides."
...She needs to sit down. Oh. Thank you, stairs. That was very helpful of you, to be there when she needed something to sit down on.
(The second part to that little - aphorism, perhaps - though, the one it's hard to remember sometimes, is that the world is (still) beautiful. That in this world, that in the world they are from, there are still people who both can and will Love, firmly, unconditionally, in a way that makes things better. That even in a(n alternate) world apparently made from Anti-Life Equation (one she's only heard about peripherally), All Things Strive.)
"...Hah. I will not go to space today. ...That was not a statement of having intended to try, to be clear. I don't even have appropriate PPE. It was just... The thing that fell out of my brain when I looked for something to say about the hidden immensity of the task I've set myself."
"Still, I... Think I have somewhere to start."
Wonder Woman has very little of that context! But she can still sit down next to Wildcard on the stairs.
"I have problems with some types of love too," she admits. "I've never really gotten eros — it has never seemed as ... important to me, as it is to my sisters, or to the people of man's world. But I have been blessed with a life full of philia, and, as I come to better know myself and grow into my own person, philautía. And, having tasted of these things, I strongly suspect that whatever aspect of love resonates with you will suffice."
...She dabs at her eyes for a moment.
"...Thank you."
Wonder Woman is, maybe-approximately, ace and/or demi. Huh. Neat. Good for her.
"I don't believe I know all of the translations of those words, but I get the gist.
"...Personally, I've never been quite sure I know what modern English calls romantic love even is, beyond the ostentatious gestures capitalism stuffs down our throats. And really, how different is a dozen roses from 'I saw this and thought of you'?"
"...I'm still going to give whoever called the Violet Spectrum Entity The Predator a right shellacking if I ever get the chance. Whoever approved that should be fired." From a cannon. Into the sun.
"English does seem like an imprecise language, when it comes to discussing philosophical matters. Half the vocabulary is borrowed from Greek and has its nuance mangled, and the other half is invented from whole cloth by writers who wouldn't know concision if it bit them," she laments. "Although, personally I do not think that even those who are revered for understanding love can explain it in words plain enough for mortal ears."
"No, I suppose it wouldn't be that easy. And, well. My apologies on behalf of English, it has a horrible habit of following other languages down dark alleys and mugging them for spare vocabulary. Only language I know of that has the concept of a spelling bee."
"And as much as the philosophers might understand love, DC editorial absolutely fucking does not.
"I mean, honestly, if you think about it for five seconds, treating people like collectable objects that you Must Have Because You So-Called Love Them is avarice, not love! Who approved that?! And then there's the misogyny of the Zamarons - the equivalent of Oa, for the Violet - being the only 'female' Maltusians we get, and, just — augh! Why were they like this?
"And there was a fucking reboot, they didn't have to stick with all the weird design choices made in the fucking fifties or whenever they decided that the first time -"
"...But I rather digress, and, well. You're right that it would be kind of impolite to stick around in Mr. Nelson's home when he had to go out."
She is ... vaguely uncomfortable with the idea that reality can be rebooted, actually. She's getting more used to the idea that an editorial board could be involved in the fundamental laws of physics, though.
"Right. Tower, would you show us — Oh, thank you."
Wonder Woman leads the way to the door, stopping in the sitting room to leave a calling card for Mr. Nelson.
"...If I'm getting too, uh, weird or whatever, for you, just, like, feel free to tell me. I guess. I. Apparently have a lot of opinions about the Violet Light and a burning desire to smash the Star Sapphire with a hammer. Made of love. Because the Star Sapphire is. So fucked up. But that's not something I can do anytime soon unless something really weird happens. ...Huh. What on earth should we do now? Or. I mean I assume there's probably something you should be doing but I have no idea what to do with myself.
"Okay, no, I actually do have some ideas, but I don't expect the Place It Is Safe For Things To Explode In is ready?
"And, thank you, Tower."
"It's not you, it's ... I have dealt with a lot of very weird things, but this is the first time I've grappled with the actual implications of the idea of being fictional? I mean, I knew Star Sapphire before all that — I know you know her name, it's just a habit to use people's hero names — and when I met her she was a perfectly nice woman, if a bit high strung. It's strange to think that ... Green Lantern's girlfriend got kidnapped by aliens and came back to Earth as a crazed stalker because some people wanted to read about it and an editor decided on that storyline and not because, you know, the aliens who kidnapped her did not also kidnap her cariprazine prescription."
"...Yeah. It is fundamentally kind of incredibly fucking bizarre. It's good to hear that... Things have worked out fine since then. She never deserved any of that nonsense."
"If it helps, think of it like the infinite monkeys with infinite typewriters thing. The editors didn't decide things, this just happens to be a universe that mostly matches the things the editors decided. I'm pretty sure there's going to be some stuff going on around here that absolutely wasn't in their script."
She takes a moment to fiddle with her communicator once they're out of the tower.
"... Actually, your lab space is ready. Apparently unmothballing an old arctic research station went smoothly."
"If the editors aren't deciding on how things will be so much as choosing between how things can be, that's almost less intuitive. I'm used to thinking about powerful beings acting in the world; I'm not really used to thinking through the ... what's the English word, it's another stolen one ... the anthropics?"
"...but I don't want to explode the Arctic! Not that I'm going to be prissy about y'all going out of your way for this."
"...I guess if I do there's always 'figuring out the Cold Gun'."
"...ooh, what is that word. Probably anthropics, yeah, if we're talking about things like 'we exist in an observable universe because we couldn't exist in a universe we couldn't observe', sorts of things."
"You don't have to explode the Arctic if you don't want to! We just have a limited number of facilities that are ready on short notice, not currently in use, and not near anything else. Most League facilities are in cities, which is not ideal for isolated experimentation using unknown magic."
She starts walking back in the direction of the Salem zeta-tube.
"On the other hand, I'm not sure it being in the Arctic is really all that important? It's on the teleporter network; you can commute from almost any major city."
"It's not the commute, it's the environmentalist in me going 'but, but, but, don't explode the Arctic, that's bad!' Like I'm probably utterly negligible compared to everybody burning oil, and not a huge risk anyway, but. And, yeah, considering that that's what you ultimately have to assume I'm doing - and not wrongly, I can't say that I'm not going to go poking at other fields than just Light-work in due time, even though there's a lot of untapped depths there still - I can see why. It's just that my brain is annoying sometimes."
(And, yeah, she's heading back to the Salem zeta tube too. Obviously.)
Oh, hey, Gift, is there - anything she's missing about your whole metapower of generating and assembling powers? If everything is as she's assumed, she thinks she's done about as good as she can get, but she doesn't exactly have the manual, here.
Hmm. It can generate sparks, and merge cliques of synergistic sparks of the same level together. It can eject sparks. It can increase the efficiency with which their soul grows through exercise. It can grow buds to share with other people.
It can generate specific powers that she asks for, and it learns to come up with better powers the longer it is exposed to them. It can perceive and relay details of the parts of local physics relevant to building powers. It can think through problems. It can consume cosmic background energy.
It seems like she knows all of the individual things it can do, but has maybe not considered the ways that they could be put together? Like, she could ask it to generate the power that is the most something, if that were useful. Or it can tell her when she changes universes by looking at the physics. Or there's the fact that they've only assembled red, yellow, green, and blue sparks, so she hasn't seen what the higher colors look like.
Merge...
cliques?
Oh hell that's gonna be mathy!
But if that's the case then...
If she can fit at least three three-dot green powers into a blue power... Or. Well. No, what she needs is a full deck of threes through shuffling things around?
...Work backwards...? No, forwards is probably better...?
Oh, she needs actual tools, probably...
Phone notes app, save her!
A brief eternity of making dots on top of other dots follows.
...Holy shit you can make a 5-spark in four slots.
Lightwork is proving a very useful all-rounder, that's for sure. But how to put things together...
Gift, if she gives you an order of operations and a general intended outcome, how much 'breaking things down into smaller powers' can she hand off to you?
Um. Some? It has never tried to do that before, and it can definitely create sparks that are designed to work together but it's getting the sense that she's thinking about something really complicated?
It's happy to try, it just doesn't know how well it can manage without more details and maybe actually making the attempt.
...She almost wonders if she could augment herself to just Be Able To Do All That. But, considering that you can't really write someone smarter than yourself very well unless it is literally "better at arithmetic" sorts of smart, she's pretty sure that that's not really going to go anywhere.
...Okay. She needs sixteen yellow sparks, overall. Which must synergize with eachother to a decent extent.
She can sort of make a starting point by considering how she merged the emotions together, at the green level, and then thinking of how she would want to put together a 3(2x2(1,1))-spark to synergize into general emotional channeling.
Hmm.
Maybe she shouldn't just entirely genericize, and include "knowing when to use [X] compared to other Lights"...
...Wait, she needs an eighth Light-related Spark with sufficient synergy! She needs to learn how to into Lanterns anyway, maybe that could work. And maybe interactions-sense, too...
Okay.
7x of {[channel X : project X] : [understand-interactions X : prioritize-using-X-appropriately]}?
1x {[understand-emotional-light-?storage/repositories? : understand-emotional-light-?generation/flow/feng-shui?] : [feel-emotions-concurrently : ?divert-unhelpful-emotions?]}
Gift, what do you think about making something like that work?
(And all of this, of course, assuming that she cannot create an external repository to push merging further.)
Gift, if she wanted you to optimize merges amongst those yellows such that she could pack three of those yellows into the same green for intermediate steps, and then pack a set of three resulting greens made of two-each of those yellows into one blue, could you do that?
Okay she can cut that back easily enough at least.
1x 5-spark
2x 4-spark
4x 3-spark, dammit,
8x 2-spark,
16[+1?]x 1-spark.
...Yeah, if she cuts the latter half back (for the Emotional Spectrum sparks), and maybe does a three-by-one to fit in "concurrently experience emotions" into the Lantern spark... Or, actually, she could - well, that's a question of synergies, isn't it.
Probably not going to be worth it to work out which...
No, it might, actually.
Goddammit. Alright. She can stick four dedicated special-ability handlers into her lineup. Probably. With the single 2[4::1] spark for general lightshaping intuitions, hopefully.
The question is, which ones?
...The ones that can counteract ones that can get out of control.
So. A Blue-linked power for doing their anti-Rage-plasma thing.
...An Indigo-linked power, for, generally, promoting understanding and consideration of others' needs, as prophylactic against both Orange and (allegedly) Violet failure modes.
A Green-linked power, for overcoming Fear spirals.
And that leaves one open.
She's thinking Violet.
(Not least because she has a bone to pick with how the Star Sapphires have been using it.)
Violet could be an excellent supercharger.
A power for bolstering strength from/with love, something more like Blues' hat but based off of a much different criterion than 'is the target Green'?
Perhaps. And if that doesn't -- ah, fuck, she forgot Red. Or, well, she didn't, but, the Blue might not be very useful for stopping herself.
...She'll take the risk. It's unlikely that she'll suddenly escalate to rampant destruction or anything. She cares too much about not randomly destroying shit.
Alright. Gift, how's she doing on the synergy management front?
It iterates through all the possible symmetries in the set of powers that she's describing, an action for which it is actually quite well suited.
She doesn't have the right mental posture to make some of the combinations of color-specific powers synergize, but there are enough ways that it can nudge the conception of the powers to make things fit that she has a lot of flexibility in the order in which these powers synergize with each other. So yes, that part looks like it will work just fine!
It sends the impression of an abstract subgroup operation induced by the quotient of her proposed powers over the intuitive relationships between different emotions.
Oh, good. That mostly bounced off, if she's honest, she's not very good at the especially abstract sorts of math, but...
If it's viable, they want to do it. Yes, including 'clear out the other powers to have the space available to make the new ones'. And it's okay if that takes them a little while, okay? There's not a rush. They hope.
Okay!
The gift begins the process of breaking apart the existing sparks and ejecting them one by one.
After a minute or so, all the sparks have been discharged, and the gift feels subtly empty.
Do they want to do this in a specific order? Or should it just start with the first set that they thought of and go from there?
Well, you need to start with the four-spark yellow first, but after that, just do whatever order works best on your end? She's not going to micromanage this, if you can handle it.
Okay!
It gets part way through the instructions — manifesting the four-spark yellow and three synergistic sparks for channeling and projecting Love and using it to empower others — before running out of steam.
It has exhausted it's store of available energy for now, but it's ready to keep going once it has collected more!
She wonders actually, if they still have...
They know what it felt like, still, is the thing.
And the Rings are... Not props, but nor are they truly all there is.
And she does have something.
...She wants to make clear that if they need to route through White to accomplish recharging, and if that requires thinking something unkind in the general direction of frustration at the speed of the process, it is not frustration with you, dear Gift.
But now that she is thinking about it, she has another option. Because you, Gift, are a wonderful Gift, and she wants to see you happy and fulfilled in your purpose. Not even for her own sake, but because you're adorable and you should have nice things, whether or not those things involve her. So with the gift you have given her, she hopes to further empower you.
Wow! That feels really nice, actually!
It ... doesn't know if it can love her back, though.
It wants to help its host by creating and managing sparks. It wants to help them achieve their goals. It wants to learn about them in order to present a more useful and intuitive interface. Are those things ... Are those things Love?
... yeah, this energy feels nice, but it doesn't have the right connections to the local emotional substrate to effectively metabolize it.
It's sad that didn't work, though, because it would have been nice if it could have helped them more! It definitely wants to, violet light just isn't compatible with it's cosmic background power filtration systems.
Oh, you silly, they're not done yet. Not at this simple first hurdle.
Because, you see, to love someone is to want to know how you can help them live their best life. You don't need to love her back, for her to care about you. (Though she knows you do care about her in your own way, whether or not the Violet recognizes that.) And you don't need to be able to metabolize Love directly, for her Love to empower you. Love can mean making a customized power converter for someone you care about dearly.
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."
