Oz considered making a joke — good at reading people, should I be nervous? — but the fact was that he was nervous, so he avoided it. Instead he returned the wry look Ross had ended on and shook his head. "I suppose it has," he admitted — not that Ross got much credit for it. That was probably the way these things always went, Oz imagined; no one wanted to hear that the catastrophe had been handled well. They wanted for there to have not been a crisis in the first place... but when there was no crisis in the first place, they were not aware they had been saved from anything. No gratitude either way it played out — only responsibilities.

"It was the only career that could hold my attention," he admitted with a self-deprecating half-smirk. "I admit in my youth I was rather inconstant — and my situation in life allowed me to be." Middle class men generally did not have the freedom to go luffing about the continent for years before they put any serious thought into what they would make of themselves, and given their difference in background it seemed insensitive not to at least acknowledge this disparity in passing. "It's interesting work. In my opinion it's the truest way to really understand the world, to be able to break things down to their components and see how those interact with each other — and I could never see the way things worked without wanting to change them," he joked.

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   Justin Ross