"Admittedly knowing that if push came to shove he had my backing probably helped." 

"Yeah." He looks pensive. "You... like people, huh."

"...Mostly, yeah. Not, like, all of them, but in general, yeah."

"That sounds like a nightmare, to me. Liking that many people."

"Because they're not Kryptonian, and can get hurt?"

"What? I- I guess, but also just... you'd have to care. About practically everybody. Couldn't hurt them, couldn't hurt anyone they liked, not even by accident, or you'd just be hurting yourself."

"Oh. Yeah, that's...I mean, it's not really hard not to hurt people. I mean, not physically at least, but I don't like people so much that if people decide to get offended by me I can't brush it off as their problem. But as long as I don't use my powers on them...the world's set up to make accidental harm harder. Sure, there have been a few close calls where I threw something and it almost hit someone half a mile away, but hey, it got that one guy to give up drinking when a tractor crashed out of the clear blue sky next to him, so no harm no foul. Um. This isn't helping, is it. I don't...it really mostly isn't hard for me to not hurt people. You're right about how it would be hurting myself if I did, but--you know that thing where it's hard to bite your own tongue hard enough to hurt, on purpose? I get a little bit of that towards other people." 

"I don't think I have that."

"Then it might make caring about people harder. And I...caring about people isn't without its hardships for me. But the people I love, they make me really happy. So it's worth it. Not everyone is like me, I'm an unusually friendly person." 

"...I guess what I'm trying to say is that you seem like a good person. And it's nice to know that you exist."

"Oh. Thank you."

"How much longer to the mansion?"

"Ah, sorry, we were talking..." zip. 

Zip!

"Lex! Julian!" she calls, stepping into the foyer. "You'll never believe what happened!" 

"I sincerely doubt that," a man with an unusually high baldness to age ratio says. "Who's this?" 

"This is Xan-El, he's from another timeline where lesbian superheroes won World War I and Krypton blew up several decades earlier! His birth parents' names match mine but he got a memory crystal instead of an asshole AI. It's 1968 in his timeline." 

"...Well, I wasn't expecting that. But I believe you." He stands up and offers his hand to Xan. "Lex Luthor. Pleased to meet you." 

Xan shakes Lex's hand. "Xan; I don't usually tack on the El. Similarly pleased to meet you. I'm told you have an R&D budget!"

"I do have an R&D budget. What are we proposing I do with my R&D budget?" 

“The answer is not ‘give it all to me’, you can relax. I have Kryptonian tech schematics in my head, courtesy of Jor-El’s memory crystal. Back home, I resigned myself to having to reinvent the wheel until I could build myself a computer that didn’t look like a Model T engine, but you have people. People who do this for a living, and more importantly, aren’t working out of an elderly couple’s barn. I’m not going to pretend I’m not a little self-interested; I want to get my hands on some of this tech, and I don’t want to have to solder all the chips into place with my own heat vision. But my self-interest is to your benefit.”

"...I didn't think you were going to try to extort me," he says, amused, "Clara wouldn't cooperate with that. 'You have the schematics for Kryptonian tech in your head' is the answer to the question I was asking. And is a very good answer."

“You didn’t think I was going to try to extort you, but the idea that I was going to scam you can’t have been far from your mind; you’re a businessman, and I opened with ‘I’ve got a brilliant way to make you some money.’ At any rate, yes, Kryptonian tech. A lot of the really interesting stuff depends on island of stability elements, but until they exist I can at least give you a massively unfair advantage in the field of consumer electronics."

"If you were going to try to scam me, you were hardly going to say so up front." 

Xan nods. "Anyway, I can talk to your people whenever, or if you'd like I can give you an overview in person first. I'm kind of excited about all this!"