[quote=Mr. Zero] "This also works as a surgical laser, and it is difficult to use vocal commands without a larynx."[/quote]

"This." Poe said in an utter deadpan as he hefted his plasma defender to point it at the ceiling. "Also works as an industrial metal smelter. And it is difficult to make threats when you are very clearly not designed for combat, Mr. Dummy." He gave the robot an easy smile as it drifted away, meeting its rear-facing optical sensor his very best eerie leer through his goggles. Once it was out of sight, he frowned.

"And I don't have to beg to make you dance." He stowed his plasma defender back inside his coat, and then approached the windows of the penthouse suite to look down at the city below. No longer set to 100% opacity, the polarized glass once again provided a splendid view. Peering down, his eyes skimmed over the brilliantly lit casinos. He didn't have any interest in them. His eyes likewise skipped past the NCR embassy and settled on a large, warehouse structure. There was a neon-light sign over the entrance, but he was too distant to make the letters out. It wasn't a casino though, he could tell from the conspicuous lack of people coming and going. He didn't know what the place was, but it was still a preware warehouse complex. Even if it had been scavenged over and occupied, there was always something he could repurpose there. One way or another.

As he gazed down at the warehouse, his thoughts drifted back to Mr. Zero again. After thinking for a moment, he tapped at the polarized glass, a smile stretching across his face again as an idea came to him.

"I need a camera." He announced to nobody in particular.

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[b][u]Michael Angelo's Workshop[/u][/b]

Poe stepped into the quiet workshop and scowled. The main floor was neat and tidy with not so much as a bent tin can in sight. Descending the short flight of stairs onto the main floor, he approached one of the few machines present and examined it for a moment. There was a series of glass rods stacked neatly on a side-bench, and the machine itself appeared to be a jury-rigged - if neatly and cleanly so - assembly of three furnaces, all powered by the same portable generator. There was also a diverse selection of tools carefully arraigned in a leather case on the side-bench along with the glass, including oddities such as a paddle, a house, a pick, and a tiny set of shears. The machine was a lampworking station. To the sides of the main workshop floor were a series of neon signs stacked against the walls - this place was used to produce the brilliant neon signs about New Vegas.

"Can I help you?" 

Poe turned his head and glanced at Michael Angelo's apprentice. He was growing old, but the lights of New Vegas had to burn bright. She was a young, plain-looking brunette, and although they had almost nothing in common Poe momentarily mistook her for Hirune due to the shape of her cheeks. He shook the image away almost immediately and turned fully to appraise her.

"How much to use the station?" He asked. The apprentice frowned. 

"What are you going to use it for?" She asked, cautiously.

"Nothing big." Poe said, thinking ahead of her objections. "I don't need more than two rods. And I know how to work glass, I won't make a mess."

The apprentice quickly subtracted her mentor's disapproval from X where X equaled profit until she reached an agreeable amount. "600 caps." She announced, partly piqued and determined to see this wastelander out of the workshop. She may have been more lax than Michael Angelo, but she still wasn't eager to let just anyone use the lampworking station.

Poe didn't even consider haggling. It just wasn't in his nature. Barter meant the same as homicide to him, but he could also tell that she would be missed if he killed her. All the Casinos would be furious with him, even if the group returned from the trip successful. Still, 600 caps was a bit much. He didn't really have the patience to argue with her, and he hadn't even brought up that he was going to use rarefied gas yet, which would surely drive the price up even more. He decided to resort to something he was good at other than violence: Intimidation.

"Do the casinos know that your cathode vacuum lights are emitting Röntgen radiation?" He asked. In truth he had only seen one sign that looked like it had been using a reconfigured X-Ray tube, but all production work was the same in the wasteland. People used what was available. It looked like he had hit his mark with the guess too - the assistant was briefly taken aback before assuming a careful poker face.

"I'm not sure what you mean." She answered simply.

"WHAT I MEAN..." Poe announced dramatically, waving a hand through the air as though gesturing to an invisible audience with his voice raised, "IS THAT YOUR NEON SIGNS ARE EMITTING IONIZING RADIATION STRONG ENOUGH TO ACT AS A CARCINOGENIC INFLUENCE WITHOUT REGISTERING ON GEIG-"

"Shut up, shut up!" The assistant hissed, looking down at the ground with a strained expression. "I'll let you use the station for the cost of the glass you use. Fifty caps per rod."

"I'm also going to need some of your rares. Where do you keep them stored?"

"We circulate and store them in pressure chambers in that old generator shell over there." She said, gesturing to the large, box-shaped structure right in the middle of the workshop. "What are you going to make, anyway?"

"Oh, you know." Poe said as he turned back to the lampworking station. "Just a late night art project."

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The assistant woke up in the middle of the night - there was something different in the air, although she couldn't quite place her finger on it.

Then the blueprints for one of Angelo's new billboard schematics floated through the air seemingly under its own power and glued itself to her face. When she pulled it away, her hair clung to it. Looking out from the bedroom door into the workshop, she could see purple light...

Heading out onto the workfloor, she saw the wastelander from earlier and his proclaimed late night art project. It looked to her like a simple plasma globe - impressive to anybody who didn't know anything about vacuum physics, but otherwise something equivalent to a parlor trick. Except this was something else - it was perhaps twice the size of a man's head, and the central electrode had a visible stream of excited gas swirling around it, as though something were stirring the internal mixture of gasses. Extending out from the base of the globe was a series of exposed filaments branching out in the air, each visibly visibly showering the air with small sparks, like a number of small fireworks going off. Throughout the entire workshop, scraps of paper and poster fluff was swirling around as though caught up in a dust-devil as they circulated through an invisible wind centered around the globe. The wastelander sat on the floor next to the globe's base, thoughtfully gazing into it with his hair stuck on end and with his entire body being consumed by a deluge of sparks.

What struck the assistant the most was how silent the entire spectacle was. The fiercely careening paper and scraps created a constant, fluttering, ruffling sound - and that was nearly it. The globe gave off a powerful hum and the spark-emitting filamet had a gentle hiss, but both were nearly inaudible over the sound of the the paper floating around the room.

"What [i]is[/i] that?" She gaped.

"It's an electrohydrodynamic halbach-chambered electrostatic coupling dielectric harmonic oscillator!" Poe called out to her cheerfully. She blinked a couple of times, and then a small poster telling her to holster her weapon at Gomorrah slapped itself across her face.

"A dynamo in the center powered by your generator circulates charged rarefied gas through a number of rotating pressure chambers to generate a dipolar electromagnetic field exhibiting internal halbach negation with axial depressions acting as high potential alternating terminals, wirelessly channeling electrostatic current to freely suspended filaments!"

She looked at him with a raised eyebrow and a frown of disapproval. "Try again, without the bullshit."

"It sets things on fire." Poe supplied with an eerie grin on his face. The assistant worriedly looked around the workshop, but the decidedly harmless sparks hadn't done anything of the sort. She looked at the wastelander again, annoyed. Poe silently reached down to a sensor module on the side of the base and flipped a switch.

The spark-emitting filaments immediately extinguished themselves, and all of the flying rubbish in the room started to blacken and smoke. Seven seconds later, the workshop floor was filled was clearly smoldering, burning paper, dancing through the air around the globe as they burned. Poe idly flipped the switch again as the assistant cried out in alarm, turning the filaments back on. The flying paper and scraps continued to burn for a few moments before the embers creeping across their surfaces vanished.

Once the assistant had calmed down, she looked at the spark-spewing globe appraisingly. She hadn't understood even a third of what the wastelander had just gibbered at her, but the globe was still an interesting piece of work. He could have sold it to any of the casinos, and they would have put it on a pedestal in the middle of their gambling floors, and thrown in a barrel of now mostly worthless pre-war money to fly around it excitingly just for the thrill. It would have been quite the marvel, going perfectly with the glitz and drama of New Vegas. "How did you make it? You've only been here around seven hours."

"It's just scrap metal and electronics, some fission batteries, two steam gauge assemblies, a few sensor modules and pilot lights, and of course your lampworking station and gas." He continued to smile eerily as he dug out a small bag from his jacket. "Borrowed most of that from your stores, by the way. This should cover it." He tossed the bag to her, and it clinked with caps as she caught it. She was so intrigued by the impossibly cobbled-together globe that she barely even felt that angry over the wastelander stealing her shit to make it. As she examined the device, even through the veil of sparks she could see the seams of the junk he had listed and where he had used what - the scrap metal for the base and stem, the steam gauge assemblies for the electrode, the pilot lights for their filaments and their valves. From his technojargon earlier, the electrode probably doubled as the dynamo he mentioned, and he had likely used the pieces of the assemblies for the moving parts. If he could make that from over-the-counter crap, she wondered what he could have done with real materials. 

"What will you do with it?" She asked.

Poe got up from the floor easily, and hefted the previously unseen baseball bat that had been lying on his other side into the air.

"Smash it to pieces." He answered.

The assistant shrieked and cringed in a startled panic as Poe brought the bat down and shattered the glass globe, bending the central electrode and knocking it loose from its socket. The air around the electrode seemed to burn for a brief moment as the gasses dissipated, along with the electrical current exciting them. Poe didn't stop - he raised the bat and brought it down again, caving in the base plating made and causing it to rupture at the seams where he had welded everything together with the blow-torch from the lampworking station. He raised the bat again, and again he brought it down like thunder to batter the now unrecognizable mess of metal and glass shards into worthless scrap metal.

The entire room had fallen silent, the burnt remnants of the swirling papers having fallen to the floor as their wind was killed. Poe kicked the ruined remains of his work, sending several pieces to clatter against a support beam for the catwalk overhead. He then turned and headed for the exit.

"That mess won't clean itself, little mote." He called over his shoulder errantly. The assistant, still trembling with shock and confusion, just stared at him as he left.

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[b][u]H&H Tools Factory[/u][/b]

Poe grumbled to himself halfhearted as he approached the factory, chewing on a few pinyon nuts he had picked up at the Atomic Wrangler. He was now nearly dry for caps, and he had no real raw materials left. A quick search of his travel bag had revealed he was down to just 7 MCF grenades - no more frag or plasma grenades or mines, no tin or pipe bombs, no time bombs, no pulse explosives, no dynamite, no cherry bombs or bottlecap mines, no molotovs or other incinderaries, no rig-clusters, and he had somehow managed to misplace his detonator. He distinctly remembered leaving Kansas City with plenty of everything, and while he supposed he had made good use of a few individual pieces here and there along the way he couldn't quite believe it was all gone. That left him with the thankfully still plentiful ammunition for his 40mm grenade launcher and plasma defender, but the only real high-yield demolition, excavation and doombringing tool he had left to his name was the single Nuka Grenade buried at the very bottom of his pack. He had spent nearly all of his remaining caps on food and drink at the Wranger, and so now he had basically nothing. 

[i]'Todo: Make a shopping list for the bullet catchers.'[/i] He thought grimly as he leered at Victor.

"Howdy there par-"

"Stuff it, mote." Poe issued, walking right by Victor and heading inside. Seeing that several others had already arrived, he scanned them for familiar faces - the Mr. Dummy robot and the NCR sprat were the only real ones that registered. They were his main priorities, and until otherwise proven the rest were just coffin stuffing.

"Hey little Mote." Poe gave a rictus grin to Sabin. "So is that outfit the one you pissed in or the one I shot a hole in?"