Lazarus Oldman/Quotes

## Quotes

* "Hey. I need to apologize for Pearce's misbehavior. I've known people who've had to deal with stuff like what I think you might be dealing with for all sorts of reasons. Pearce thinks it's funny to pick around inside people's heads like that, and because he's not going to apologize for it, I will. Because it's not a fucking game, and I am sorry."

* "He is an asshole, by design. Pearce has given up a lot and lost even more to be where he is, and he believes that the best way to protect himself from losing anything else is to prevent anything from getting close enough for him to care about it. Which is unfortunate. I wish you could know the Pearce I know."

* "I would like to apologize for my demeanor the other day, sir. My friends and I had just endured a particularly harrowing encounter, and I was not fully in possession of my wits in that moment."
* "You are known as a man who knows more than any man should really know. Have you heard what they call you in the Righteous Brand? The Eyes of the Empire. So I was hoping that perhaps you could provide us with a bit of guidance regarding a certain curiosity we've encountered: something called the Augen Trust."
* "Overheard in a tavern, from someone who'd had one too many drinks."
* "I really only have one question regarding this Trust. In our current troublesome situation, can we count it as friend, or foe?"

* "You remind me of a kid from my hometown, so I'm wondering: when you were growing up, did you dream of someday working for some sweaty, toothless scoundrel shaking down civilians on the road to Nogvurot? Or did you dream of doing something... bigger? Something more important?"

* "Sometimes, when we lose even little tiny pieces of ourselves, we don't understand why we don't function as well when all the rest of the pieces are all put back together. Like: everything looks the same, because the only piece that's missing is a tiny sliver that no one else can see, but that's the thing. It's a little tiny sliver on the inside, and it used to hold the rest of the pieces together. So we can arrange the pieces properly again, but we have to learn a new way to keep them all together, and until we figure that out, the rest of the pieces fall apart very easily. It takes a lot of work to figure out a new way to hold the remaining pieces together as consistently as the missing piece used to."

## "Whisper on the Wind"

* "Why does my past always have to interrupt my lunch?"
* "They're real good at killing shit; they're not real talkative."
* "You know I don't trust people who trust people."
* "I never travel with people that are safe to be around."
* "This is what happens when you play mind games with body people."
* "He's good people, but he's also not-so-good people, `cause he's a Changeling, so he's a lot of people, and most of them are assholes."
* "I don't need people knowing I know him."
* "Who's the *real* bad judge of character: him or me?"

## The Sarcasm of Youth

* "I think that adventuring... is a search, and I think that search looks different for everybody, because everybody is looking for something different. Some people are looking for fame and fortune and glory; some are looking for revenge or resolution, and some are looking for redemption and forgiveness; some are looking for purpose, or meaning, or truth, or answers; and some are just looking for a bit of excitement. We're all trying to find something, and sometimes we might just be trying to figure out what the hell it is we're trying to find. But what do I know? I'm just an old man who hasn't outgrown the sarcasm of youth."
* "The rest of who I used to be."

## A Phantom in the Darkness

* "Where did it go indeed? It's quite a story, if you'd like to hear it. Remember a couple of years ago, when Prince Eidys traveled out to the Menagerie Coast to attend the wedding of the daughter of some foreign dignitary or another? Big pretentious affair with a bigger, even more pretentious reception during which a Kryn operative tried to assassinate the Prince, except he failed because some idiot interposed himself between the Prince and the assassin. That was me; I'm some idiot, and I got stabbed by the assassin's blade instead, and I spent the next three days in a catatonic state before the court clerics were able heal me enough to bring me back. Except it wasn't just three days. Not for me. For me, it felt like months... years... seconds... I felt like I was trapped inside a nightmare I couldn't remember how to wake up from in a place that time couldn't reach. I only ever told three people what happened there: my mother, and then my father, and then Pearce. And what I told them was that while I was unconscious, I was fighting a phantom in the darkness outside of time. Because that Myriad operative was a Soulknife, and the blade he stabbed me with was a psychic dagger that shattered my mind into a thousand jagged splinters. I fought him, and I fought him, and I fought him until neither of us could fight anymore, and as we both lay dying in the wreckage, I used what I was certain would be the last thought that I would ever have to tip out the source of his power, and bury it inside my own mind. And that was when I woke up with the single worst headache of my entire life... and no accent. And so I started faking it; impersonating my old self, just so I could feel a little bit normal again."
* "Gods: that was almost fifteen years ago now..."