"The concept of playing games? No, not really. It's just the technology medium," El-Melloi II said. He paused, watching Roman's unfiltered reaction. Was he that unfamiliar with consoles? For fun, and because this might not be such a bad day after all if he could just talk Roman into loafing around the office playing video games, he switched it on so that Roman could get a better idea of what these kinds of games were like. "Again. Real world or mage world. Plus, Reines is the kind of person who enjoys picking up on something and then needling you about it into eternity."

Some sister. El-Melloi II shook his head slowly at the thought. How the hell he got stuck with her was still a mystery to him, even after all these years and all the kinds of help he had given her family along the way.

It was odd that Roman was so...insistent, for lack of a better term, about work and anything that seemed to be good about it. That took El-Melloi II by surprise, and it still was as the doctor in front of him chided about humility. Brushing it off was so much easier. "Look, I don't like giving real estimates without data. It's bound to cause trouble."

Maybe not this example, but overall? Doubtlessly. Moving onto a mage's self-isolating nature was much easier. "Well, most magi are wary of other people. To me, you might as well have just said fish swim and birds fly."