Legally speaking, him charging her only one dollar would almost certainly constitute her receiving a gift from him, which would necessitate all sorts of complicated bureaucratic form filing on her part.

(This wouldn't actually be difficult for Dragon, she files that many forms almost daily, but she's not going to mention that as long as they're negotiating over this.)

She's going to be treating him the same regardless of the price, of course.

Of course she is!  But really, think of the poor shape of his nonexistent bureaucracy. He has no powers to let him run three jobs in a day; all he is is a poor struggling engineer (tongue firmly planted in his cheek) and the cost and administrative burden of having to locate and donate such funds - while he still needs to set up his business and hire both lawyers and accountants - is really much heavier, and so for the good of the world, she will need to only give him a single dollar.

(Dragon is 50/50 on him having powers at this point - his work wasn't tinkertech but it was weirdly good.)

That sounds really difficult! She can recomend a good PA to help manage all that - her payment will more than cover their first year of salary.

He's grateful for her recommendation and will be sure to take that under consideration, but if he's donating it he can't hire anyone with it, really.

Also, won't she be investigated by the CRA if she receives the suspicious exact donation that she just paid someone? So then she'll have to do all the paperwork, anyway.

- Minus one dollar, of course.

That's a good point about the PA and donation money, she'll have to pay more to cover both. Careful, or she'll be overpaying him, and neither of them want that, do they.

(Also, she does not run any organization that accepts donations.)

But then he'd be receiving an unjust fee for his services, and as she just observed, that's really not acceptable! He feels that the central issue is that he benefits directly from her having better technology, in that he is more likely to live, and this means that almost any split would inherently be unfair if it suggested she, not he, benefitted more from his invention. If she really wants to she can donate it in his name!

Oh, but this works both ways - the world benefits from the legible existence of a monetary incentive structure that encourages people to develop advanced technology - making an exception for one person undermines the welfare of everyone else! Why, neglecting to pay him for the value of his labor would undermine the core tenants of the very civilization she hopes to use his work to defend.

(The initial reply to Tyrant's offer was handled by a subprogram, but at this point Dragon is happily writing her own responses.)

Ah, but there are two flaws with this argument! First that the monetary incentive structure is fundamentally structured around the idea of voluntary agreement, and no one is going to think that he was cheated if he voluntarily accepts a single dollar - twenty thousand, perhaps, zero, perhaps, but not one, especially with her sterling reputation - and second that he is going to be exceedingly compensated when he licenses the patents to other people. Really, given the nature of the patent systems of the Anglosphere he is probably going to be overcompensated, since probably someone else would have invented the ideas anyway in a few years if he hadn't gotten to them (this feels intuitively true to him but he is aware is almost certainly false) and he'll have a monopoly anyway. So for the sake of universal justice, and for the sake of the core tenets of the very civilization she hopes to use his work to defend, she clearly must pay him one dollar, or else he will get completely unfairly rich off of this and that would be a disaster.

What Dragon would like to do us continue negotiating, but she actually has several hundred things on her todo list for today so instead she will graciously admit defeat and pay only one dollar.

The rest of what she'd like to pay him she'll instead donate to a nearby vocational school that retrains people in manufacturing jobs - she has a few ideas for specific skills that might be in demand in the near future.

And of course, Dragon will put him in touch with several venture capitalists! This one is a tech billionaire who now specializes in speculative but high upside technologies, this one is a PRT consultant who does some angel investing and has useful contacts, and this fund invests in companies that might aid law enforcement.

Bwahaha he is victorious and has triumphed in his key goal. (Of getting along with Dragon and winning valuable PR, once this leaks as it inevitably will.)

And the Tyrant is then going to spend the next few days interviewing private security companies! (Also secretaries.) He wants competent people with plans for if supervillains show up other than "roll over and die" who are willing to let him talk to everyone in their hierarchy with enough influence that, if they secretly were working for Livia, they could let her perfetti kidnap him, and confirm that they are honest and honorable and not selling information or working for any supervillain, mundane crime boss or national government knowingly or unknowingly. (He doesn't explain it to them that way, of course; instead he describes it as wanting to understand their organization. He can give the impression of someone rich and important enough they really want to secure his contract, and pays very well.) If there are no such organizations he'll have to build one, starting with whoever the most competent and honorable and underappreciated subordinate is in the organizations he visits, but he expects someone isn't leaking, it's a big country.

He's also going to want to start pitching investors, or at least scheduling meetings with them. His company's business plan is to have a prototyping facility here, near where he lives, which will focus on doing fairly small production runs to test his armor designs, while licensing the technology to other companies for mass production for the army and the PRT. He expects large income in the short term and then a steady income flow from improving his designs over time, and intends to sell only a minority of shares in his company...

(If he gets that far before something interesting happens, he will come off as both indefinably slightly foreign and as quite old-fashioned, like he's much older than he looks. Also both extremely brilliant and very, very prepared.)

It makes for a busy, but largely boring, week, interviewing prospects and talking to potential employees and security firms and investors.

On Monday, a PRT consultant named Thomas Calvert cancels on him, but nothing else disrupts his routine.

Interesting.

On Tuesday, nothing unexpected occurs.

Fascinating, maybe...

On Wednesday, nothing unexpected occurs.

Huh. Annoying. What if...

On Thursday, nothing unexpected occurs.

Goddammit. If he just orders his mercenaries to...

On Friday, nothing unexpected occurs.

Shit. How did that go worse.

... He needs more information, and as much as he distrusts her, Tattletale is the tool for this particular job.

On Saturday... well, it has yet to be determined whether or not something unexpected occurs.

Tattletale is pretty darn sure she's in a throwaway timeline, an attempt by Coil to gain knowledge about some newcomer to the area without any intention of keeping around whatever fallout results. The trouble is she's not completely sure - if she were completely sure she could fail on purpose, probably get herself killed, just to screw over Coil. However, she's not, so she actually has to fucking try at this.

On the plus side, whoever is holed up in this (custom, Thinker-designed, heavily secured) building sure has got Coil annoyed as all hell.

Maybe they'll be friends.