He leaned forward to put his elbows on the comconsole, and lace his fingers together, and regarded Miles with a kind of clinical disapproval, as if h… - Lois McMaster Bujold

Tej nodded again. “Then he turned up on my front steps. I thought he might be a capper stalking me. So I invited him in, and Rish shot him.” The cousin jerked slightly. The emperor’s eyebrows went up. “Stunned him, sweetling,” Rish corrected, urgently. “Just a little light stun, really.” “And then we dragged him up to our flat,” Tej went on. “This wasn’t in the ImpSec report,” said The Gregor. “It wasn’t relevant by then,” said Ivan Xav, in a distant tone. “Forgive, forget . . .” “So we tied him to a chair for the night,” said Tej. The Lord Auditor Coz made a strange little wheeing sound. He was biting his own hand, Tej noticed. Ivan Xav pointedly ignored him.

I won’t dismiss it from the list just yet. But it needs verification. Everything needs verification.

Puzzles. I hate puzzles. Ivan liked flowcharts—nice and clear and you could always tell just where you were and what you should do next, everything laid out neatly. No ambiguities. No traps. Why couldn’t life be more like flowcharts?