1 {scene: A table in a tavern, where a villager and a couple of the town guards are chatting.}
1 Villager: So what are we going to do with these adventurers we caught?
2 Guard 1: We could shove them through the teleport gate to Cragfoot and let them deal with them.
3 Guard 2: That won't work; they'll resist. One's a fire wizard, and one's a lizard man. We'd never survive.
4 Guard 1: That's not what I'm most afraid of.
4 Guard 2: Oh?
4 Guard 1: That hobbit looked primed for punning.

Here's a look at what some of the minor incidental characters get up to behind the scenes, in the wake of the major characters.

Some interesting works of fiction have been created dealing with such characters. Probably the best known one is Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, which deals with the two so-named minor characters in Hamlet.

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2019-07-13 Rerun commentary: Concentrating on minor characters makes this strip is a lower-deck episode of this comic. These guys are heroes of another story, which we are not privileged to see beyond this tiny snippet where they interact with our familiar heroes.

Also: Lambert is indeed primed for punning, as the previous hobbit pun was in strip #1896, and so by my self-imposed statute of limitations on hobbit puns (one per hundred strips), we're due for another one before too much longer. This was a deliberate fourth wall reference when I wrote this strip.