Time passes...

It would have been hard to ignore the crackling display of electricity from the rooftop over there at the best of times, let alone late at night. I glanced over that way, shifted course to bounce off an office building with Repulse to alter course, and power-glided my way over to the roof of the bakery below it.

He had his green and yellows on, but under a trenchcoat and sweats, so he didn’t stand out that much, and had kept off the crazy five-point lightning mask. I wasn’t worried about him as he waited there, letting his display of electricity fade away so as not to draw more attention, always a possibility here in Queens, even as the rebuilding of the damage to the city continued stoically.

“Max Dillon,” I greeted him, landing lightly on the edge of the roof. “I really hope you aren’t intending to trash this place. They make good croissants.”

He seemed surprised I knew that. “Uh, yeah, they do,” he agreed, blinking. “No, I’m not hitting them. I been here for a few days, waiting for you to fly by.”

I altered my patrol routes every time I went out just to avoid someone ready to use predictability to snipe me. Technically I didn’t have to worry about it, but Mysterio had already worked out Spidey having a Spider-Sense, and extended it to the other Spiders. If he got to talking with Doc Ock or some of the actually smart bastards out there, that could proliferate to techno-blocking of the entire effect, so I didn’t want to rely on it.

“There’s four warrants out for you, Max. Wanna tell me why I don’t just haul you in?” I asked, although my faith in New York City’s legal system hadn’t improved at all. Since the last time I’d seen him, he’d clashed with Peter at least three times, and even ganged up against him with Doc Ock and some others, but the girls had bailed Pete out of that mess.

Their senior year was definitely turning out to be eventful.

“I wanted to know if that job offer you were talking about back then was still standing,” he blurted out at my tone.

“Job offer? Oh, that way to make tons of money without having to be a lightning-tossing douche?” That had been a long time ago. I crossed my arms and looked at him. “I wouldn’t call it a real job offer, as it’s mostly dependent on you and how much money you want.”

“Yeah, that one.” He looked a little fidgety.

“You owe someone a lot of money?” I asked calmly.

He winced, like I’d caught him at something. “Yeah, I got a little too happy with the dice...”

“Six figures, or seven?” I asked, without any surprise in my voice.

“High sixes...” he admitted after a minute.

“Okay, sit down there while I go over this with you.” He looked back at the chimney there, leaning back while I sat down above the edge of the roof. He seemed a little amazed I would even take the time to do this.

“There’s two levels to this: the one you can get away with, and the one you can’t. By that, I mean the one you can do and still be a crook, and the other, where the real money is, where you’re gonna have to go straight. You follow me?”

He nodded. “Yeah...” he said cautiously.

“Okay, cheapass way out.” I pulled a small bundle of cable out of my Masspack, tossed it to him. “Know what that is?”

He caught it easily. “Volturium!” he blurted out instantly as it sparked in his hand. Lightning Copper was some good stuff, in high demand for electronics all over the place, worth more than twice its weight in platinum, easily. That short cable there was a thousand bucks.

“Can you make that?” I asked shortly.

He paused, holding the insulated cable, and let his power run through it as he stared at it intently. Eventually, he shook his head slowly. “No. I don’t know how to do that,” he admitted, frustrated. “I’m not sure I actually can...”

“No surprise. That would be the ‘fuck off, Dynamo, I’ll just make volturium in my down time and get stupid rich without you’ solution, right?” Despite himself, he nodded. If he could make Lightning Copper from the normal stuff, he could basically sit in a chair and earn himself a few thousand dollars an hour, or something.

“But, can you Six Sigma its conductivity so it’s a superconductor at room temperature?” I asked him.

He blinked at me. “Whoa. That’s... a pretty good idea,” he admitted, probably mentally kicking himself. He looked at the cable in his hands sharply, and the lightning about his hands began to pick up and cycle through the frequencies. “Yeah... yeah, I can see the impurities, the misalignments, the stress points in this. Give me a little time, and I could iron this out to pretty much perfection,” he agreed, looking up sharply at me. “What would this be worth?”

“A tiny little cable like that? It would triple its value as a novelty. The real money is if you can do it en masse, so it could be used in electromagnets or colliders, power cables and supercomputers. The bigger the cables you can work with, the more they are worth. Talking ten times the money, maybe more if you have a true room temperature superconductor available. Hells, you could probably sell everything you could make to Con Ed under the table, and they’d take it all.

“Hide where it’s coming from, and so would Ferrus. On a personal level, if you can’t make much, Stark would probably still pick it all up for his personal stuff.”

“Yeah, yeah, okay! I get it! The big brains and the power companies want perfect cables. What else?” he asked, starting to get excited.

“Next step up is non-metallic superconductors, things like germanium, silicon, and the like. Those things are used in high-end data and computation, and the market for that is, well, literally wide open.

“There is no way anyone can match what an electrokinetic as sensitive as you could potentially make. Work out the proper mixes of the material, how to apply them, make them, figure out the machinery to duplicate what you do as much as possible, fine-tune the rest, and you will have a stranglehold on making the finest computer chips in the world.

“EVERYONE would buy from you. You would be one of the most important computer engineers in the whole world. You’d probably hit ten digits in worth within five years.” I sniffed at him as his jaw dropped. “If you think you can do that running around in yellow and green, you’re a fucking idiot, Max Dillon. All you have to do is do what you are best at, instead of something you suck at, and you’d easily be one of the richest men in the world.”

He stared at me in disbelief. “You’re serious, aren’t you?” he finally asked.

Voltage danced between my fingers. “I’m not an electrokinetic, Dillon. My control is restricted to my Kirlian Field. I can’t do what you can do, or I’d be taking the steps to do so right now, and in five years I’d be giving Stark a run for his money. In ten, Midas would be looking askew at me.”

Dollar signs were dancing in his eyes. “Oh, God,” he mumbled, staring at the cable in his hands. “That would take a lot of work and money and investing...”

“Yeah, but none of it works without you. So, it’s all on you. If you can’t deliver, nothing is going to happen.

“You’re a crook and criminal who steals things for a living. You’ve got authority issues. That voltage going through your head almost certainly makes you bipolar. Nobody in their right mind is going to invest in you, so the only person who can do that is yourself.

“The only way I’d let you work for me is a Geas, and you’d probably try to find any way out from under it you could as soon as it came down. I could easily make you a billionaire if you let it stay, but you’d probably crack it open just to see if you could, I couldn’t trust you, you’d slack off and go flarking looney again, and everything would crash.” I shrugged and tossed up my hands.

“A Geas, hunh...” he repeated. “I’m not sure what that is...”

“It’s a magical or psionic promise that severely punishes you if you don’t live up to it. Like, say, reducing you to a quivering slob on the floor with all your neurons short-circuiting if you disobey it. Say, if you agreed to a Geas to stop smoking, and went and lit one up.”

His face twisted. “So, it would kinda force me to live up to something I promised...”

“It’s magical and acts on the brain. So, it would interact with electricity, and eventually you could work out a way to cancel it out, sidestep it, or protect yourself from it.” His expression was kind of weird as I basically gave him credit ahead of time for beating it. “So, it would only work for a while, and then everything would go to shit as you got away with the stuff, until it all blew up in your face as you became happy fucking yourself all over again.”

“Looks like you don’t believe in me, either!” Challenge and sneer.

“I don’t believe in your powers not fucking up your head. See, I got a report on your life before you had your powers, Max, and you were actually a pretty normal guy.

“Since you got them? You’ve got crazy mood swings, swinging from pure villain mocking laugh moments over to hyperobsessive focus on pointless minutiae.” I tilted my head in sympathy, and his face twisted again. “Part of your brain is acknowledging what I’m saying is true. The other part is ranting about how you were a weak average pussy-dicked nobody that everyone took advantage of, and now nobody can do that to you... except that’s not true.

“There’s still people manipulating you and using you. Doc Ock can play you like a puppet, and so can most of the guys who hire you to do something.

“If we go to it right now, I can totally beat you to a bloody pulp, and if you dare to try to do anything about it, then I’m going to beat you to a broken and very bloody pulp.

“I remember what that part of you tried in that bank to win our fight back then, see. I know what you’re capable of, and I don’t forget that shit, Max Dillon. I’m not someone who sees the ruthless ability to use bystanders as distractions and a viable tactic as a positive personality trait.”

He twitched at the ice in my voice.

“By the way, heard you took out five vamps on Hunt Night. Thanks. Don’t know why you did it, don’t really care. Five less vamps in the world is a good thing.”

He puffed up despite himself. “They weren’t anything too tough!” he declared proudly.

“I’ve killed dozens of vamps, of all ages. Don’t tell me how tough they are or aren’t.” He clamped his mouth shut at my warning. “The Beetle killed seven of them, too. Silvered up the pincers on his suit and went limp-snipping, spraying garlic juice everywhere. Saved a bunch of street people. Got his suit totally wrecked doing it, too.

“Hell, I heard the Vulture managed to ambush a couple and take off their heads.

“By the way, vamps have open bounty marks from the Tribal Consulate. If I know you killed five vamps, so do they. You walk in there to claim your bounties on them, they’ll cut you a check right there. Jenkins snuck in there, and they even helped fix up his suit.”

The Beetle had killed more than he had. I could see him twitching again.

“So, I got mental problems?” he growled again, not wanting to believe it.

“You’re considering fighting me over that, despite knowing that I’m going to break a bunch of your bones when you try it after you were the one who invited me over to talk.” I spat off to the side. “I’m not Spider-man, Dillon. I don’t have a running mouth and a sense of humor like that. What you get from me is what it is, blunt as a hammer.

“If you don’t want to believe that, you come on at me, and I’ll put you down.

“And if I ever hear of you killing someone who didn’t really have it coming, then you better realize that I’m going to do the same to you. I don’t have a bleeding-heart. You’re just not going to be there one night after I stumble onto you.”

He bridled, voltage started sparking on his hands.

I just stared at him, and his amps quickly cycled back down. He was breathing harder, trying to fight down his emotions... and, if he was honest, his fear of me and everything I’d said. I did have a very nice Intimidation modifier, and if I couldn’t use voltage displays to impress him, the fact I wasn’t using them was silently daunting all on its own.

“So, what do I do about it, Dynamo? It’s not like I can shut my powers off!” he finally blurted out.