Herman Schultz walked into the near-abandoned warehouse. The lights were dimmed to a faintly dark tone to give little illumination, and the only noise to accompany him were the echoes of buzzsaws and electrical noise haunting the halls eerily. He hung his coat on a rack as he opened the door to a blue-lit room to find his partner in crime, former engineer Maxwell Dillon, working on their vile piece of villainy.
"How's the project?" Herman asked him.
"It's nearing completion... In less than an hour, you can wreak as much havoc as you want..." his partner replied.
Herman and Maxwell started working together when Maxwell was fired from Oscorp. In a fit of rage and a foul vendetta brewing in his mind, he agreed to bail Herman out of jail and offer him the power to cause mass destruction as long as he would eventually stick it to Oscorp. This was wonderful to Herman - the concept of their invention were two wrist-mounted gauntlets with a control panel on his palm. They weighed twenty pounds and didn't cover his fingers, allowing him to grab things and work the buttons when need be. He would wear the gauntlets made of adamantium while they were hooked to a rubber body suit (so as to conduct the electricity used shall Herman be exposed to it, rendering it harmless to himself) with electric prods on it.
The prods worked with a button on the panel that would rip the electricity out of power systems, like generators or telephone poles, so he could easily fuel the gauntlets or charge the blasts to further extremities with any electric technology nearby. (AN: In the Spider-Man comics, Herman is the Shocker and Maxwell is Electro. Maxwell won't be masquerading as Electro this time, but Shocker's abilities with this suit combines his powers with Electro's.) Herman picked up the suit he would be wearing to reign terror from a table and examined it. It fit his body perfectly, skin-tight as he held it up to himself, just as he requested.
"You're doing a great job, Dillon," he told his partner. "I'll get to your precious little Oscorp sooner or later, but for now I gotta hand you a payment - it's only fair..." He reached into his pocket and withdrew a stash of $100 dollar bills held together with a rubber band.
He handed it to Maxwell, who took a brief break from working on the panel of the gauntlets to accept the money. "There's more important things to me than materialism, Herman..."
"Hey - good workers always get a tip. And this is your tip. I'll get to Oscorp soon enough. Hell, use your imagination - you could use that to sue them or something." He looked down at the near-finished gauntlets. "How long is it till these are done?"
"Forty minutes," Maxwell told him.
Herman shrugged. "Better than nothing..." He paced around to the concepts table and carefully studied the functions for each button on the panel that were labeled there. "This is a great idea... An ingenious idea," Herman commented to his partner. "You know, if you keep thinking of stuff like this, maybe you can build your own industries... You can outsell Oscorp, and move on to something better than them..."
Maxwell sighed. "That's what I'd like to do..."
"What do you mean?"
"Oscorp's got more than two million employees working their asses off every day, and I'm just one sleezy old fogey who has nothing better to do than work in the basement..."
"That ain't the way to go about things," Herman said to him. "Lighten up. You can be a big shot just like Osborn if you keep working. It took me a while to pull off robberies without getting bagged. And guess what? One day, I rob a Washington Mutual in Queens singlehandedly, made them pour outta their pockets..."
"That's before Spider-Man was around," Maxwell noted.
Herman sighed in frustration in reply. "Yes, Spider-Man..." He added through clenched teeth.
"So, what exactly are you going to do with this first?" Maxwell asked him. "You know, what every good inventor's partner does - I'm gonna take it for a test drive..."