"Only as a loan," he protests, "looking down, for the purpose of. All right," he says patiently, "thank you, but all I'm saying is that I haven't seen anyone do a good job while devoting fewer hours to it, since he's the only other person I've seen hold the posts."
"Ah; naturally."
He runs the stanza through his head again, and frowns. "Bad example?"
"If the whole Ministry were killed," Severus points out, "or even a significant portion of it, the wizarding population in Britain would be decimated. It's our most reliable employer. Unless you mean just one limb each, to teach them something."
Severus gives a loud sigh, and goes over to the bar with joints apparently well-greased as compared to earlier, asking in a just-audible-to-the-quartet voice if Al might have such a thing as a coffeepot. He goes back without waiting for an answer, rolls a two, makes a face at it, and places a skinny but symmetrical pyramid of double twenty, double seven, double two.
Since most of his darts practice in the last twenty years has not been on an actual dartboard but instead on photographs and particularly bad essays, Severus may have lost track, a bit, of the attraction of playing for points.
Oh, I know; I'm saying I think Kurosawa may have been used to it by then. ;)