[hider=OOC]Bonus points if you get the reference...[/hider]

Tom's mouth curled into a thin smile as she gazed at the knife. He nodded at her thanks, then returned to working at his desk, hands moving almost too fast to follow.

"Why didn't I? Because I am mostly unknown, and I want to keep it that way. If everyone in the Ruins knew about the sort of stuff I have, I'd be fending off attacks all day. Even something like the spray-clean would be enough to draw hundreds. Most people know me as "the guy with Ancient stuff", so it's not too bad to offer tech from my lab, but if they knew exactly how much I have and how rare some of it is..."

He shakes his head.

"I prefer to keep it quiet. Only a few people know that I don't live in a shack like most everyone else, even fewer know what I have inside it beyond the main hall. Nobody but me knows the way through the labyrinth or where all the exits are. I get some fairly steady traffic through here, since I offer use of the spray-clean to people who can find me an interesting bit of Ancient tech, but they're all blindfolded so they really don't have a clue about any of this.

Besides, some of the things I've got are really not suited for use in an area with lots of innocent people. The Ancients either had fights on a scale we've never seen or they just didn't care about the innocents, because there are some things in the Vault which you could hold in one hand yet have the power to kill tens or hundreds of people at once."

Suddenly standing up, he moves through the aisles of shelving until he reaches a particular spot. He jumps and grabs one of the many bars set into the ceiling, then pulls himself up another foot one-handed and holds himself there effortlessly as he looks through the things on the top of the shelf.

"Broken... broken... hairdryer... bingo!"

He drops back down holding a long cylinder which he takes over to the desk. Picking up whatever he's been working on, he slots it in with a [i]clunk[/i] and it lights up, humming gently.