"Fans like this, please don't..."
Lee Si felt a chill run through him, and his face twitched slightly. Without changing his expression, he pulled his hand free from the bald manager's grip.
The bald manager clearly hadn't noticed Lee Si's expression. As soon as they finished shaking hands, he eagerly circled around to the back of the van and went over to Bumblebee, stroking him with a look of amazement.
When the trio had attacked earlier, Lee Si hadn't let Max get out of the van. He'd simply ordered Bumblebee to lock the doors, so Max had stayed inside the whole time—and ended up coming face-to-face with the bald manager.
"Hello, I'm Max, Mr. Lee Stein's assistant."
"Oh, a pleasure to meet you. I'm..."
To Lee Si's surprise, Max seemed to hit it off with the bald manager. He even stuck his head out to introduce himself, and before long the two were chatting away enthusiastically.
"Is Max... showing off?"
After listening to them talk for a few moments, Lee Si suddenly found the scene strangely familiar.
It was that sort of "I'm xxx's xxx..." or "I know xxx" feeling—a very clumsy way of showing off, usually seen in the comic relief characters of all kinds of stories.
As clumsy as it was, the bald manager was the perfect audience, responding with admiration one moment and questions the next, all of it completely sincere. Max just got more and more animated, leaving Lee Si watching in a daze.
But it didn't take long for Max to run out of material. He was really just repeating the same few points with different wording. He managed to keep it up for a couple of exchanges, but he wasn't much of a conversationalist to begin with, and soon the bald manager was the