The Mountain came out the emergency exit from the stairs, got into the plain white panel truck parked nearby with Grounds & Landscaping written on the side, and drove down the road. He parked for a moment at the side of Regent Street; I walked up all in black, got in, and he drove off smoothly.

“That was a bit unexpected,” I noted cheerfully, as my blouse returned to white and the filter rose up from the smooth face of my mask, revealing my lips and chin once more.

“Did you even get a chance to take any of them out?” he asked gruffly, saying nothing about the color changes of my clothes. He’d seen fancier stuff.

I flicked up a card, which gleamed with crackling Wrath, and stowed it away just as quickly. “No. One of them tried to get into my head and got his brain fried, but that was about it.”

“What’s the haul?” he asked directly.

“Looks like 450k.”

He grunted. “Not bad pay for a few hours of dealing cards to bloodsuckers.”

“Hell, Mr. Hill, if I could have scammed just their jewelry, I could have doubled it. And I’m sure I saw a Picasso in the hallway.”

“Chopsaw’s got bills to pay, too. Gimme twenty thou and I’ll call it good.” I slapped the stacks of c-notes into his hand almost as he finished, and he shoved them away without comment. “Nice and easy work. How intent are you on following up?”

“On the dealing or the stealing? Both.”

He grunted in thought as we drove along. “You interested in doing contract work?” he finally asked after some time.

“You seem to be expecting my burglary skills to be the equal of my dealing?”

“They aren’t?” He sounded reluctant to believe that.

“I don’t have exposure to enough modern security systems to say so. Anything traditional and mechanical, I’m pretty sure I can do fine.”

He rumbled to himself, thinking. “Anything you’re in mind to steal?”

“What do you want to eat?”

He gave me a slow and lazy eye. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“That drink I fixed for you had jeweler’s rouge in it. Diamond dust. Along with some heavy metal oxides that would have killed a normal man outright. I’m guessing you need to eat Energized metals and gems to stay healthy and active, maybe even to get stronger. It’s fairly standard for earth elemental-biased sorts like you. You eat ‘normal’ food just because it tastes so much better than rocks.”

“Huh.” But, he didn’t deny it. “Sounds like I got an expensive diet.”

“Yeah. Are cut stones or raw better for you?”

His largely unmoving face looked kind of weird for a moment. “No one has ever asked me that,” he admitted roughly. “Cut stones and shaped metal, if it’s done right, taste and feel so much better than the raw stuff. I can live on it, but it’s like eating raw beef, versus a good prepped steak.”

“You ever make up a list of taste-equivalents?”

“Huh. Not really.”

“I got really lucky on that drink I fixed you, then. Was it really that good?”

“It was alright. Kinda like a thick lemon shake with heat, or something. More important, I had a buzz for almost two hours after drinking it. I ain’t had a goddamn buzz in years.”

“Are any normal rocks palatable?”

“You mean like granite and shale and stuff? Nah, it’s like eating straw. If it’s organic-based, like limestone, it tastes like someone shit on my tongue. It’s gotta be an ore of some kind, and cheap ass shit tastes like cheap ass shit. I get sick of quartz real fast now.”

“But diamonds you can do all day?”

“Pure diamonds taste like sugared ice. I can suck on ‘em all day. The better they are cut, the better they taste. Impurities are just flavoring. With a diamond, even brown ones taste like chocolate. Yellow ones are like creamsicles. Had me a pink diamond once, tasted like cherry ice cream. Sucked on that thing for like two days.”

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“What about metals?”

“I dunno what’s the logic behind ‘em. Ain’t never had a base metal taste better than platinum, stuff is like fine veal. Gold is like a good pork chop. Silver’s like eating salami. Copper is like eating dogfood, but I can live on it. Copper and quartz are like my meals when I’m broke.”

“Adamantium?”

“Had a nail made out of it once. Tasted like utter crap. Whatever they make it out of ain’t a real metal. Now, adamant... I won a bet off Hercules and he gave me a piece of scrap off Vulcan’s forge. That... that was ambrosia.”

I made a mental note to get some uru samples for him to try. “Vibranium?”

“That was an experience. Had a Wakandan spear-user jump me once, and took the spearhead off him. Still got part of it. Eating it makes me hypersensitive to vibrations, and I can hear stuff from a long ways off. Stuff is damn good, melt-in-your-mouth whitefish or something, mind you, but I gotta be in a quiet place to eat it, or I get real twitchy for most of a day.”

“The radioactives?”

“Well, they, um, kinda fizzle and feel funny. More distracting, than anything. Like frozen fizzy stuff, or deep-fried chicken, or something.”

“No side effects?” I was kind of surprised.

“Maybe? I ain’t never eaten enough to really see if the butterflies could turn into a volcano or something.”

“I imagine you could make good money just disposing of solid nuclear waste if the taste isn’t too bad.”

“Huh.” I could see him thinking about that. “I know a few smart guys who like messing with that stuff. I’ll float it past ‘em.” Getting paid to eat decent food was kind of the dream, wasn’t it?

“But it sounds like you spend a lot of money on good food.”

“Yeah. I prefer to be paid in gold or diamonds, not cash. Exchange rate on hot gemstones is much cheaper than cash.”

“Knew I shoulda filched them cufflinks,” I muttered under my breath.

“The ones on the vamp? Yeah, those were nice sapphires, they taste like blueberries.” He shrugged. “I’ll call up Chopsaw and buy them off him. No sweat off my nose.”

“The earrings on the women vamps were pretty nice, too. Hells, they probably had almost a pound of gold between them all.”

He smacked his lips. “Now you’re making me hungry, girl!”

“So, I’m guessing you’ve got a personal ability to ignore gravity on you, right? Because with a diet like that, no way you only weigh several hundred pounds.”

He gave me another wary eyeball. “You are way too sharp-eyed,” he warned me slowly. “Yeah, my personal gravity is my own business, although I got limits. It seems to be just enough to make me weigh what a normal man built like me might, but it works even if others are making gravity dance.”

“Yeah, well, not even Primus being able to move you if you Root yourself is pretty hardcore, although there’s a new merc out there who can probably do it.”

“Yeah?” His attitude was somewhere between curious and defiant.

“That Juggernaut dude, messing around with Cassidy. He’s a Warlock powered by a demon called Cyttorak, basically His champion on the planet. His whole thing is that he is unstoppable once he’s in motion. He can be slowed down a great deal, but he can’t be stopped. He can literally force his way through a mountain, although it might take him a while.”

“Huh.” He chewed that over mentally, flipping his cigar from one side to the other with no hands. “Noted. Is there a way around it?”

“Well, someone like you would just slow him down enough he couldn’t do anything else. You’re probably just as strong as he is. But normally you just send him on in the direction he’s going at rather too much speed.”

“Hur hur! So, like a wrasslin’ move, just send him flying in the direction he’s going? He like me, no flying or superjumping?”

“Pretty much. He can work up a good head of steam if he charges, however.”

“How invulnerable is he?”

“Pretty much immune to most anything you can throw at him, unless you can take his connection to Cyttorak down and cut the magic off, at which point he’s big and strong and losing power fast.”

“Sounds like a decent guy to tussle with. I’ll keep all that in mind.” He didn’t call me out for my sources or experience or anything, or ask how I knew that.

“As for the jumping stuff... you can probably do a reverse heavyfoot jump, you know?”

He blinked in surprise, actually taking his cigar out and flicking the tip out the window. “What the fuck is a reverse heavyfoot jump?” he repeated stonily.

“Your ability to Root yourself is what made you famous. That ability to anchor yourself, solidify your footing and not be moved is called heavyfoot. It contrasts with lightfoot, which is anything that helps you, oh, run up walls, jumps that defy physics, move faster than your legs are going, dash across water, and so forth. Some of that you can do with pure speed, but you’ve seen Core-users and some martial artists pull off stuff like that, right?”

He nodded once. “Sure. You go into the Orient, they love that bouncy-jumpy stuff. If you aren’t some wussy fist-flinger who can hit someone five times in a second and jump about like a monkey, you’re automatically considered a brain-dead idiot or a victim. Guys like me they consider little better than cattle, because my style is all about strength, and so any of their trained people are naturally better an’ faster an’ smarter than me.” His grey eyes gleamed in a special way as he said that, and he bit into his cigar with some emotion.

“Well, you aware of how normal physics works when you hit things?”

“Pretend I didn’t complete fourth grade.”

Which, since he was in the army with Hawkeye, was wrong. “Energy from impacts disperses evenly. Half goes into what was getting hit, half goes into what’s doing the hitting.”

“Rebound and recoil. Sure.” Being able to withstand the recoil of your own blows hitting something was a hallmark of Powered super-strength, otherwise you’d smack a brick wall and go flying from the rebound.

“Well, reverse heavyfoot, or Heavy Release, is about holding onto the ground really, really hard, and then lifting one foot, while not letting go.

“Then, let go.”

He blinked again. “Fuck me hard.” He glanced at me to make sure I didn’t take offense. “That actually works?”

“There’s a difference between Power and Might. You know it, because you see it in Primus and Hercules. They can hit and move much faster than you can, even if they can’t actually lift more than you. Reverse Heavyfoot is like stretching a rubber band, and letting go, instead of just flexing at a couple hundred mph and taking off.

“If your Rooting is that strong, you can probably take off real good.”