Watching Dresden operate was usually one of two things: mildly amusing or positively terrifying. On a scene, his whole personal manner always made me think of autistic kids. He never met anyone's eyes for more than a flickering second. He moved with the sort of exaggerated caution of someone who was several sizes larger than normal, keeping his hands and arms in close to his body. He spoke a little bit softly, as if apologizing for the resonant baritone of his voice.But when something caught his attention, he changed. His dark, intelligent eyes would glitter, and his gaze became something so intense it could start a fire. During the situations that changed from investigation to desperate struggle, his whole being shifted in the same way. His stance widened, becoming more aggressive and confident, and his voice rose up to become a ringing trumpet that could have been clearly heard from opposite ends of a football stadium.Quirky nerd, gone. Terrifying icon, present.Not many "vanillas", as he called nominally normal humans, had seen Dresden standing his ground in the fullness of his power. If we had, more of us would have taken him seriously — but I had decided that for his sake, if nothing else, it was a good thing that his full capabilities went unrecognized. Dresden's power would have scared the hell out of most people, just like it had scared me.It wasn't the kind of fear that makes you scream and run. That's fairly mild, as fear goes. That's Scooby-Doo fear. No. Seeing Dresden in action filled you with the fear that you had just become a casualty of evolution — that you were watching something far larger and infinitely more dangerous than yourself, and that your only chance of survival was to kill it, immediately, before you were crushed beneath a power greater than you would ever know.