Wonderful craftsmanship, Simon decided with the expert eye of one who had played enough computer games to know art when he saw it.

You learned a lot by playing RPGs, although not all of it was useful, or real for that matter – unless you really believed that wolves normally carry seven gold pieces, a flawed garnet, a scroll of ice storm, and a lock pick somewhere about their person.

Tradition, thought Merkin, was not the most reliable thing in the world. Tradition had this nasty habit of asserting itself overnight. A new species of funny-shaped, bioluminescent invertebrate found sixteen thousand feet under the ocean might instantly become part of the Chinese traditional medicine, for instance. You never knew.

It was all kind of fuzzy, as if his mind was doing its thinking in limericks.

Simon did not solve problems, he just shamed them into going away.

He knew for a fact that he was so hopelessly bad at seeing through camouflage that, if left alone in the forest, he might even attempt to make fire by rubbing two snakes together.