It's not lying when you do it to officers!

Sooner or later we're all someone's dog.

The Auditors fluttered anxiously. And, as always happens in their species when something goes radically wrong and needs fixing instantly, they settled down to try to work how who was to blame.

Some of them wanted to sell me snake oil and I'm not necessarily going to dismiss all of these, as I have never found a rusty snake.

You can't build a plot out of jokes. You need tragic relief. And you need to let people know that when a lot of frightened people are running around with edged weaponry, there are deaths. Stupid deaths, usually. I'm not writing 'The A-Team' - if there's a fight going on, people will get hurt. Not letting this happen would be a betrayal.

You know, you're rather amusingly wrong.

The characters are the plot. What they do and say and the things that happen to them are, in a sense, what the plot is. You can't take character and plot apart from each other, really.