“So what toys did they sell you cheap, thinking they’d get them back?”

Fixer dropped a slate and slid it over. I picked it up and went down the list. “Nice, nice, nice, nice, meh? Oh, okay... nice, nice, oh sweet, nice, okay, okay, very good, hmm, nice, nice, okay, okay, nice, how the Hell did you score that?...” I murmured for them to hear, continuing for another few seconds. “Porn files?” I asked archly, and both of them blushed at the fact I could actually read what they were.

Norbert rallied gamely. “It turns out their tastes aren’t that much different from ours, they just actually have tentacled monsters and stuff around, and a much wider variety of sex organs,” he reported in a neutral voice.

“You experts on porn?” I asked them both, which raised interesting looks on their faces.

“Experts? I’m not an expert...” Jenkins admitted carefully. “It’s just passing entertainment to me.”

“What do you mean by expert?” Ebersol asked warily.

“Can you tell pros getting paid from enslavement, coercion, peeping toms, or the like?”

“Oh, yeah, easy. The production values are way different, and they focus on different things with the lighting, sound, set designs, and so forth,” Ebersol nodded confidently.

“Anything done by pros for distribution is fine to resell, I’m sure you’ll find a very interested market. Anything not, you flag it and set it aside. Make sure you set aside the standard rates on sale of copies and get them converted to Galactic Credits, or you might find interstellar commission collectors coming down on you. I think twenty percent is standard.”

They were giving me odd looks again. “You’re not into porn, right?...” Jenkins had to ask.

“No. But everyone has to make a living, and as long as it’s fair, I’m not going to judge, any more than I do the two of you. Extend the same courtesy to them.”

Ebersol nodded quickly. “And the ones I set aside?” he inquired.

“Dealer can track down the filmers and the actors, if they are still alive. There might be repercussions.”

The two men looked at one another. They both knew that Dealer was very dangerous, very powerful, and crossing her was at least as bad as crossing me. Messing with a sorceress wasn’t a very good idea, after all.

“They actually had a quasitronic neutron balancer for sale?” I had to ask. It was basically a necessity for investigating high-order exotic energies.

Jenkins smirked, and took a deep breath. “Thayt awld thang? Ish bin shittin arown gadderin’ dust fer yeers nohw. I sellz eet cheep, cheep I doz!” he quoted in a heavy, wheezing voice.

“The tech levels on this stuff are all over the place, Dynamo, and the principles they operate on, too. Plus the idiots got no idea of our tech level. Some of them think we were press-ganged and we’re still in the great age of sails or something, wearing scruffy armor the Xandarans wouldn’t be caught dead in,” the Fixer sniffed. “Basically, a lot of them were totally convinced we didn’t have the slightest idea what we were buying.”

“How much scamming?” I had to ask.

“Oh, the scam stuff is on the next list. Some of that turned out to be not bad, too, but most we’ll probably just break it down for Isotopes after figuring out how they work. Idiots don’t realize that the basic technology is actually more important than what the tech does most of the time. We tried to get scammed by as many different lines of alien technologies as we could.”

I held up a fist to both of them, and they bopped it with relieved grins. “You deplorable cheaty criminal bastards, contributing to smuggling, theft, and unrestricted trade in technology to underdeveloped worlds.”

“Unsung anti-heroes of the underworld!” the Beetle agreed with a straight face.

“Now, I’m asking this as a warning, not judgmental. How many people have you contacted to sell this tech to?”

They both winced, but I just stared at them calmly. “A couple dozen?” Ebersol admitted.

“Paying REALLY good, I imagine?”

“Well, I don’t need the money, but yeah,” Fixer sighed. Jenkins, not being so ungodly rich, didn’t say anything.

“I’m warning you that selling and reselling alien tech that could present a threat to the planet is probably a terminable offense in the eyes of the Great Bear and the Hag,” I informed them calmly. “All technology winds up sooner or later getting into the hands of those who want it, but there’s a trick to making sure the counters to it get into the hands of those who can stop the planet from popping at the whims of this or that Schmot Guy with a hinge or six loose in his brain.”

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“Doc Apoc and Mechanar are on the list. There were, uh, a lot of threats attached to including them,” Jenkins admitted quickly.

“Oh, gawd, those two fruitcakes.” Both men nodded despite themselves. “I don’t know why the Hag hasn’t snuffed them both.”

“Doc Apoc is the best synthesizer of disparate technologies on the planet, and nobody is better than Mechanar at cyborg tech,” Jenkins stated firmly, making both Ebersol and me blink at him in surprise. “What? I track that stuff. The Tribes and Russians have a lot of restorative psi and stuff, but we don’t here in the States, so armor and cyborg tech is a LOT more popular here.”

I glanced at the Fixer, who shrugged and nodded agreement. I just sighed. “They’re on The List, too.” Both men blinked in astonishment. “Ho, Schmot White Guys, buy back your life for your shenanigans, you two idiots,” I muttered in a nasty Tribal accent for them, and they were happy I wasn’t talking about them.

“Okay, let’s handle it this way. Reverse prioritize everything on this list from least dangerous and complex to most. Stuff at the top is going to be done last, and shipped off to the Baxter Building for them to work on first.

“You two start working on the basic tech, the floor-building stuff, and start coming up with some money-making ideas BEFORE you sell it off to the likes of Midas, or he’ll scoop the opportunity out from under you. If you can’t, you make damn sure you license it properly.”

“Money is important,” Ebersol said in an unnecessarily deep voice.

“Damn right!” Mr. Hill added as he strode in, making the two of them jump. “Break it down for me, stupid stuff first,” he said, his personal slate-hued Disk unloading and scooping up under him as he sat down at the table, big hands clasped before him. Extremely big and heavy guys should always carry their own chairs around. “Complex shit is wonderful and don’t amount to much of shit. All that big brain stuff from Richards is useless in the real world. Alien shit, now, a lot of that stuff has been around for centuries, if not longer. It works, it’s useful, and it’s proven.

“Make bank on the good stuff, then do yer wild and crazy shit. Do you realize how much fucking money you could make if you could make a decent battery that didn’t cost a couple million dollars to put together?”

Ebersol winced. “Hey, the Antennae tech is decent as it stands...”

Mr. Hill pointed directly at the Beetle, who was still in his armor. “It’s a goddamn hundred grand just for the power unit on that thing, and fifty grand for the Isotopic core. If we want to market a usable power armor, even if we dumb it down, you’re talking half a million a unit, and we’d need, what, ten thousand units to get some economy of scale?”

“And that’s without a usable flight capacity,” I noted. “Sure, we can try lifting the Vizard’s anti-grav tech, but if we don’t charge for the Isotope, we’re stupid... and unless we can find a source of it, the amount we have is strictly limited to what Dealer and I can produce.”

“What about that Green Goblin Glider?” Ebersol asked, looking at Jenkins. “I saw you messing with it. That’s a pretty damn good flight platform, isn’t it?”

The Beetle rolled his eyes. “That’s what I thought.” He sighed. “The bastard stole the Vizard’s tech for the anti-grav, and uses a Fire Radium configuration for the propulsion. I figure it costs about a thousand dollars a minute to fly the thing.”

“Seriously?” Even the Fixer rolled his eyes. “Should’ve known. More money than brains on the bastard.”

“Anyone wondering why the military didn’t bite on the thing, raise their hands,” I quipped. None of the men twitched. “Funny, that. Same way Disks are tools for the rich, and not general equipment everywhere.”

“That could be rectified if we could get our hands on ungodly amounts of gold or platinum for cheap,” Mr. Hill pointed out. “Or gemstones.”

“From off-world? It would all have been auto-smelted and would need to be Energized to regain its viability at an alchemical level.” I rolled my eyes. “We don’t have enough stuff to Energize right now?”

They were totally aware that the amount of stuff I could Energize was measured in cubic inches of hard material per spell, and the better the stuff that Dealer or I could make, the less we could make at one time. If there was Meta-room to Widen the spell, it could potentially expand the volume eightfold... but eight cubic inches a Caster Level still wasn’t going to supply anything resembling an industry, although the Vizard would have fallen over crying if I could produce large amounts of Levitalt.

“Energizing shit and the production tech,” the Fixer muttered, smacking the tabletop between us all. “Fucking bottlenecks. How’m I supposed to design and build a viable starship with fucking bottlenecks?!”

“Yer going to visit two interplanetary civilizations. Take some tours,” ground out Mr. Hill. “And some really good passive scanners. Talk to certain kinds of people willing ta sell us production tech below the radar.”

“Doc Bronze is currently the only one running mining operations on the Moon, and he really doesn’t have the wherewithal to expand operations, given all the other shit he’s got on his plate,” I mentioned, meaning there was some opportunity up there.

“The Blue Area is an idealized place to set up factories in a non-competitive situation,” Jenkins spoke up eagerly. He’d naturally heard about it while working on the Starholder.

“Probably why the Tribes, Russia, and Wakanda all have carefully discrete operations up there for one purpose or another. If there’s ever a low-gravity factory set up, it’ll probably be up there, but I think they are mostly going through the Skrull and Kree technology around them.”

“Can we set up a Portal there?” the Fixer asked eagerly.

“Not without permission. The Hag will just collapse it by batting her eyes at it. We’d also need a power source to keep it active, or like five hundred pounds of gold. If we’ve nothing to offer, there’s no reason to allow us to run around up there, right?”

“Damn world-ruling killer woman,” Ebersol muttered to nobody in particular.

“You going with us or the Asgardians to the Coronation, Mr. Hill?” I asked him.

He seriously considered it for a moment, then shook his head. “If I could make it back home here from out there, I would. But I can’t do that yet. I’m pretty sure that things will get exciting if I go ta a new world, and I’ll suddenly discover I’ve got bunches of things ta do...”

The first time he’d wandered out back to have a smoke, opened his eyes, and found himself sitting on a rock in a cavern down in Subterranea had been a rather emphatic revelation that the planet was going to make use of him. As he got stronger, it was going to be easier for it to do so. He’d just sighed and strolled forward to take out the demon Summoning ceremony the primitive downworlders had been undertaking at the deranged ravings of their head priest.