Multitasking

[J. Alfred Darrow]

Alfred was a man of considerably few talents--or at least, he had never considered any of the things he was good at to be talents, really. Talents were the things people were born with, or what they excelled at in school. For Alfred, that had been very little. Everything that he was good at now was only the case because he'd picked it up through hard work and experience and years of exposure. One of the particular foibles of the naval career, however, was that even once he'd mastered these particular skills, he had no one to observe them except people who were already much better at them than he was; for that reason, Alfred had never particularly thought of himself as a person who could do things. The fact that someone he sort-of knew was balancing a career and a family and running for the highest office in the country was nearly enough to make his head spin.

"Many talents, indeed," he said, trying to shake off the brief feeling of intimidation that passed through him. There was no reason to feel that way with someone whom he'd already met and who had been so cordial at their last interaction, he told himself. Instead, he took a glance around at the decor of the ballroom and nodded appreciatively, pretending for the moment that he was the sort of person who would be able to tell a good party from a bad one (ridiculous, really, since he hadn't even been in a room of this size in the past five years, but probably a bluff no one would call him on). "I'm enjoying it all very much. You've done an excellent job. Though it's hard to go wrong with a costume party," he said with a shrug. He certainly felt more comfortable outside of the stuffy, proper clothing, but that might have just been him.

"Is this what people do when they run for Minister of Magic? Throw costume parties?" he asked--his tone was sort of a tease but he honestly didn't know what running for Minister entailed, and he wasn't sure he had anything intelligent to say on the subject of politics at the moment.