Money. Everything revolves around it and depends on it. To fund both a research based Pharmaceutical company and a homeless shelter that was constantly having to be built and re-built, Lori needed a lot of it. They couldn't always run on stolen good and ill gotten gains. That meant soliciting investors, third-party or silent partners preferably.

She had a pretty good song and dance that kept the gravy train rolling. Barring that, she was a woman of less honest means not afraid to use any tool in her arsenal to get what she wanted. And right now, Lori wanted money.

So the blonde sat in a black leather booth in the back corner of the Maltese Falcon, an upscale restaurant in the heart of Manhattan waiting for the man who her contacts had recommended to her and who had, in turn, recommended her to him. He was supposed to have the money and they had agreed to meet here for lunch.

In her silver-gray skirt suit with her hair pinned at the back of her head in a french curl, she sipped water (no ice) from a class cup with a straw. It was too hot for anything fancier.

The sun had stricken upon the earth a great wave of misery and heat. Upon the car infested, heat soaked streets road a man in a jet black Lamborghini. The air had been turned on to keep cool while Orson drove to his destination with ease and no haste in his momentum. His contacts had told him that doing business with this person of interest, that they had recommended would be a great financial movement. He pulled up to the area of choice for the discussion of business.

The Maltese Falcon, a place Orson was familiar with and had visited on occasions. Before going in he looked into the rear view mirror and made sure he looked presentable for the meeting. He got out of his car which he had parked in a handicap spot with full realization that he had done so.

He slowly made his way in, passing the stand where others were checking in at. He remembered he was supposed to meet his new associate in a back corner booth. The only one that seemed to be taken was one that had a woman sipping water from a cup. Orson approached steadily, he then slid into the opposite side of the booth. He put on a stern face of moderation and waited for the woman to talk.

Her contact arrived, blew past the hostess and slid into the booth without introducing himself.

O-kay… so he was either new at this kind of thing or was far too used to shady dealings.

"Orson Voronkov, I presume." She would have to keep her temper in check if she wanted something from this man. Of course, if things went south she could always blow him off and find a better donor…

"Lori Faust of Faust Pharmaceuticals. It's a pleasure to meet you." She did not offer her hand. In fact, she kept her glass cup in her hands. That left them nicely visible in case the man was the type to spook easily. He might be rude but she could handle rude as long as it came with rich.

The hostess, too timid to deliver the menu herself, sent the waitress. She slipped a menu to Orson, dropped off a glass of ice water and a straw before looking between the two of them. "Is there anything else I can get you?" She was asking if they wanted food. If not, as was the custom for booths at the Maltese Falcon, she would draw the lush curtain closed.

No doubt there was another mob boss in this very establishment right now, though, Lori figured no other mob had a business plan as solid as her own. The blonde waited for Orson to answer their waitress with a pleasantly neutral expression. She would follow his lead in this.

"Pleased to meet you as well Ms. Faust." Orson kept his stern look on his face and didn't take any time to even look at the waitress who confronted him and merely waved his left hand in her direction telling her to go away.

"But enough of the welcomed pleasantries." Orson took up his glass of water and in one fluid motion pulled the straw out and tossed it to the ground. "You need money and well, I need some new business." He then began to gulp down the water in seconds.

He placed the cup back on the table and took a deep breath as he put his hands behind his head and looked the woman across the table in the eyes and spoke. "Now what would I be investing in?"

Rude. Lori watched him toss his straw on the floor in front of the waitress with budding dislike for the man. The waitress apologized and pulled the drapes closed before he threw anything else. Disrespecting the service industry was, in Lori's opinion, just about the stupidest thing ever. Maybe she had a soft spot for waitresses and bar keeps because she had been there, but she also didn't particularly enjoy the thought of someone spitting in her food.

He didn't address Lori with much more respect than the waitress. Rude and pompous. She could play into that.

"I can see you're a no-nonsense kind of man so I won't dance around the niceties. You would be investing in the future of mutant kind. We've been developing some pharmaceutical advances that all sound rather impressive when I string all the technical terms together." But she didn't think he had the brain power to spare on that kind of thing so she was giving him a mix between the fellow mobster and elite socialite version of her pitch.

"In reality, what we're doing is more impressive than our research. Our current focus is the refinement of an X-gene activating drug. The end goal is to get every x-gene active.

And of course we have our forays into the insertion of an x-gene in the human genome." That was a very cleaned up way of explaining the M drug. She hoped that they could use the funding to further refine it's method of insertion since as of now there seemed to be no permanent attachment. "Eventually, if we could get these two pharmaceuticals to work together everyone willing to pay could be a mutant. There's your profit return right there." They could turn into mutants... or a gelatinous piles of decomposed goo. Early field tests of combined M and Active-X had resulted in the melting of a school full of children. Not that that particular field test went into their official records.

The woman had caught Orsons attention with the talk of mutants almost immediately as the look of interest flooded his face. "Mutants eh?" Orson began to think what benefit would you gain from awakening the x-gene and creating an entire world of super powered individuals capable of who knows what. Well aside from the profit from selling the drug of course.

"Money I can get behind, but unleashing a wave of people wielding mutant powers?" Within his subconscious the two entities of his intentions fought. Greed, to take all that he wanted from the profit, or to go with his better judgement and continue questioning.

"What purpose could you have to make a drug that would give people powers?" "Other then taking in a large amount of profits, and to be honest I don't think just making a drug like this would just be for money, trust me I know something about greed." The snake of gold had held his fangs in for the seeds of curiosity to take root upon his question to the woman.

"To be honest, I haven't considered the socioeconomic impact of a successful drug release. I'm not in the business of sociology. I'm in the business of science and money. If you're not interested in those things, I can find someone who is." She sipped her water though the straw in her cup and smiled for Orson.

Orson sighed in disbelief of her honesty towards his question, but all in all he had high hopes for this drugs profits in the small amount of time it was mentioned to him. Not only that but this would surely bring in more money for him. He reached for his checkbook and pen in the right pocket of his suit coat and put the pen over the checkbook.

"How much do you want as say, a down payment?" In Orson's mind only a small amount of curiosity remained as he thought signing this would get him closer to figuring out the bigger pictures or finding out there was nothing behind this drug at all. Orson began to feel that there was something he overlooked. He wondered what would happen if this new wave of mutants triggered by the drug came to even greater powers then his?

"I am sold to the funding of your drug, before I fill out a number, I need to know, what is going to stop say a revolution, led entirely and made of misguided mutants?" "What possibly could stop them?" Orson said this in a monotone voice as he filled out parts of the check.

Lori gave him a number. It wasn't a small number, but it was less than what she would ask for from someone she trusted or liked. She didn't want him to even think he had anything to hold over her. Because he didn't. He was parting with his money of his own volition.

And he was teasing her by stopping right before he got down to finishing out the check. "What can stop any mutant, Orson?" She asked in all sincerity despite the fact that she personally knew of several things to refute her own argument. She was not going to make his own arguments for him. Her cup now drained, she slipped it onto the table. If he hadn't been so stupid as to frighten away the service, she could have had another.

"We are still in the research stages of these pharmaceuticals." In other words, people had melted. "There will never be a revolution if there is no drug and like I said already," She so hated repeating herself. "Society is not my expertise. Science and making money through science is. If you deign to make plans to shape that society, so be it. Is that your expertise, per chance?"

"No, my forte is making money." But a stable economy is needed in order to do so, and knowing what he could do he could only imagine what other mutants could possibly do. He signed the number that she requested onto the check and added his business card on top of it and slid it over to her side.

"Call me if things go well with sales, also on the back of that card I wrote an address of a warehouse where I would like you to drop off a sample package of the final product."

"But before I wrap this all up I want to ask you one last thing." "To make a drug like this you would have to have some kind of connection to a mutant or mutants right? "Who do you know that's a mutant or in any way is affiliated with a mutant?"

"We're dealing with dangerous and patent sensitive materials. We can't release them, but if you would like to have a tour of Faust Pharmaceuticals for a demonstration, we would love to show you our progress. Also, you will receive the annual report as all donors do." They were still in development for some of what they were working on.

As for his question of who she knew that was a mutant, there was a simple neutral answer for that. "This is New York City, one of the highest density populations of mutants in the world. Everyone knows or is affiliated with a mutant here. In fact, about 30 percent of our staff has an active or inactive x-gene." They were quite over the government required minimum, but not the most heavily mutant concentrated company in the city. Not by a long shot. In fact... that Mansion might still hold the highest mutant to human ratio, though they didn't employ too many people over all.