"Oh I have some discretionary budget and time. But, uh, making cool stuff for other people is limited anyway, tinker inventions eventually break."

"...Most things do, eventually...can't you just fix them?"

"No I mean it breaks faster than most things, and in a way only I can fix, it's basically impossible to explain the stuff I make to other people and when tinkers try to teach other people to fix broken tinker tech it just doesn't work."

"--Huh."

"No offense, but it kinda sounds like Hank's more useful."

"Well... that's fair. What's his specialty?"

"...Useful...things? Uh, I don't know enough engineering to know if he has a specialty the way engineers measure things. He's made, uh, a telepathic amplifier, and a suit that focuses plasma blasts, and a pair of goggles that prevent incontinent eye beams, and a suit that lets someone fly with his voice, and a room that does holograms, and..."

"...yeah that sounds like he doesn't have any. Maybe your powers just work completely different, you said there were repeats?"

"Each of us has one of our parents' powers pretty much exactly."

"'Pretty much'?"

"I do magnetism slightly differently from Dad and it's hard to tell if it's a difference in powers or if it's more like a mannerism."

"Oh that's cool! Different how?"

"I melt stuff a lot more than he does, mostly."

"More? Like, faster?"

"No, like more often. If he wants something to be in a different shape, he defaults to bending it, but I default to melting it."

"Isn't that, like, just a personal choice?" he asks, scratching his chin.

"To some extent, but--I was melting stuff in the womb, I wasn't choosing things then. Dad manifested when he was fourteen, and he bent a wire fence, he didn't melt it."

"Huh. That's cool. I don't think that's how it works for us at all."

"Oh?"

"Well no one's born with powers, for one, but I mentioned before we have no exact duplicates too, so."

"Mm. Prenatal manifestation is relatively common in cases where both mother and child are mutants."

"We need a trigger event, like something real bad and traumatic, except kids of capes have an easier time of it."

"--Oh. Wow. That sounds like it would have unfortunate knock-on effects."

"Like what?"

"I mean...if everyone with powers is traumatized? That seems like it would get you a whole lot more supervillains than if they were distributed in some safe way."