Favorite lines from your own writing

"I...will show you, Matthew...Sharon...I will show you something awe-inspiring. Something beautiful...you do not UNDERSTAND." Justin propped himself up from the operating table, sobbing - insanely, full of hurt - and then chuckling, breaking into a deranged laughter interrupted by a mechanized stock sound of laughter off and on.

The lights flickered, the Neostasis bubbled in his veins. The mechanized doors were thrown open.

"All of...you. You're all puppets, caught up...in strings. Motivations. Heartache. Concerns. Morals. Ethical implications. Wants. Fears."

Electricity danced down the cords, cables and armor of the cyborg's metallic arms, one eye darting around frantically within its socket, slowly revealing itself to be a mechanical, glowing red eye painted - thread bare - to look like a human eye.

"You want to protect the world...but...you don't—-want...to change anything. You benefit and...its all too familiar...and you...you want to guide mankind, but...actual humanity...scares you. Ha...Ha...HA."

The right arm tore off piece after piece of latex, showing the black, blue and red cybernetics beneath, then nonchalantly outright tearing off half of the face, crude metallic nails digging in until they met metal.

"I used to...be like you. I—-WANTED—-to protect mankind, but now...now, I'm free. There are...no strings...nothing holding me back."

Henderson's mechanical pieces whirred and groaned to life one after the other, life...could this crude, mechanical mockery constitute that? Or was this simply a zombie, living inside a machine?

"But...there are no strings on me. I no longer—-have—-any of those. I am PURE OF PURPOSE...for revenge. Is all." Whirring and cranking noises as bare metal brought itself up, every inch of fake flesh torn away to show a metallic human...except for half of the face. A reminder of what he once was.

He played the song, out of his voicebox, the childlike lyrics loudly playing at a high pitch, as if he was himself singing the song.

Mixed in with the song, Justin intoned, "There are...no strings—-on—-me."

"Necrotic digits, massive pustules under the arms, skin lesions, delerium, coughing... If I didn't know any better, I'd say he has Bubonic Plague. But if that were the case, everyone else in town would have it too... The only other way he could have caught it is by handling rotten meat."

"You ever fight Deadmen? If one of them attacked him, he'd fall sick. If they don't kill you, the diseases they carry will. One of their favorite tactics. If it ain't plague it's the Rot. My cousin, he got grabbed back during the War. Got a great big blister on the back of his neck, started puking and shivering. Doc said it was some kinda rare disease that makes your skin go rotten. What he couldn't understand is why the bad spot was where it was, or why it looked like a handprint, 'cause you only got it by messing around with raw sewage. Your guy crossed a Deadman, no 'if's, 'and's or 'but's."

Matthew gave a wry smile, just a little more, "You're not a very funny clown, you know that?"

Ein Woe visibly twitched, "I'd reconsider running your mouth, when you're tied up in Mana Bindings...remember, like this I can do just about anything I want to you."

Woe demonstrated by pulling out a long paring knife from his sleeve and holding it close enough to Matthew's face to draw blood, "Now...you want another story or not?"

Matt didn't even flinch at the wound and kept smiling, "Go on, I'm sure you love hearing yourself talk."

Woe considered cutting him deeper, but then considered the volume of his last story, "Points, Streiss, for being slightly funny. But nobody likes a sad clown."

"You shoulda seen him when he heard the news. His head came off his shoulders and soaked the land in flaming blood for a hundred miles!"

"I'll tell you the same thing I was told. All that sadistic choice, who lives and who dies, stuff? It's bullcrap. A good officer never knowingly sends someone to their death. It's wasteful and stupid and it destroys the trust that makes you an effective leader. What we do is not safe, it has risks, and people under your command will die. You put their names in the lottery and you wait to see who gets drawn. You didn't kill them, though, and you were supposed to do everything you could to minimize those risk and limit the number of names that get drawn. You're human and fallible, and you have to remember that when the names get drawn anyways. If you know that your orders will result in specific people under your command dying, and you give them anyways, then you've already failed the most basic requirements of the job."

"The story I was brought up on told me that I and my country were the underdog heroes in the great struggle that dominated Europe and all of humanity. It left no room for doubt in the pre-ordained victory, the judgment day that would bring about Eden on Earth. It was a simple, sincere story, good against evil without any inconvenient complications to think about, and I believed in it with all my heart and all my vanity."

"Lavinny, Leng him."

"It would be my pleasure, sir."

The Graf was far too busy laughing with his minions to notice the tall, slender man raise his arm and shake up the sleeve of his robes. He was certainly too distracted to notice the mass of grape-sized bulges scurrying about under the exposed skin.

He certainly noticed when a gout of angry, odd-legged, maggot-bodied spiders burst forth from Lavinny's upturned palm as if from a fire hose at full pressure. The sound of Lavinny's hand being torn open from the inside had finally gotten the vampire lord's attention. This meant that the beam of quasi-demonic nope had hit him full in the face rather than deflecting off the back of his head. Not that it mattered. Fear screams turned to pain screams as the little balls of hate bit and burrowed into flesh. Lavinny played the torrent out over the fleeing Graf and his entourage so that all could share in the arachnid-based joy for a few seconds, then cut the flow and incinerated the Leng Spiders with a gesture.

There was sending a message, then there was being just plain irresponsible.

"Whoo-ee! Lookit the gams on 'at one! And just when I wore out me last pair, too!!"

"You can have the legs. That pelt of 'is'll make a nice coat."

"Or a rug."

"Yeah, or a rug. Them antlers'll do for a hat rack..."

At this point, the hapless caribou decided he'd rather not be turned into furniture, clothing, or spare parts by a pair of zombies, and ran for it.

"...He's buggered orf, 'e has!"

"Oi! Get back 'ere!"

"We ain't gonna hurt ye, we just gonna divvy up yer bits!"

"Send out divers. I want every ship in that fleet on the bottom of the harbor."

"Grandfather, those ships contain women and children. I beg you to reconsider."

"Good riddance. If we purge this infestation here, we can stop them from spreading."

"You make it sound like pest control..."

"It is pest control. You cannot tell me the world wouldn't be a better place without these creatures."

"There are lines one doesn't cross, Grandfather. Fire and sword have their places, but so does mercy. I will not become complicit in a genocide."

"[He] hated visiting Everfree City. Humans had a nasty habit of throwing garbage and stones. They also had the nerve to defend it as "a sacred tradition, the customary greeting for visiting tyrants." As if on cue, something shattered on the carriage door. The rich, sweet musk proved it to be a bottle of maple syrup, probably purchased especially for the occasion. He was thankful it wasn't a firebomb this time."

"And if you hit it with a second I-field?"

"Prompt supercritical. It blows up like a bomb. Fortunately the quantity of fusible material involved is so tiny you don't get much damage outside the suit itself, and the Minovsky built into the reactor neutralizes the radiation release and prevents most of the material from actually fusing. Mostly you just get shrapnel from the suit itself. Your Guncannon should probably be okay event at point-blank, but anything in...say, fifty meters and not fairly sturdy like armored vehicles or concrete buildings is going to be rather unhappy."

"Why do you refuse to fight? It seems you are a coward, just like them."

"Why do you fight? It forces your to see their ugly faces, to feel their dirty blood."

"No longer will we suffer your depredations and depravities; for now is the time that justice shall rain from the sky as a cleansing fire. Surrender unconditionally; or we shall scourge your wretched nation to the bedrock with atomic fire, and cleanse your filth from the face of the earth with radioactive salt"'

"Welcome home, Master. How-!"

She watched in horrified fascination as Scizore collapsed slowly against the wall; burying his face in his hands, locked in some dark memory.

She didn't know what to do. "M-master?"

"Never. Call. Me. That. Again." he snarled through his teeth, bitter tears forming in his eyes.

"I had a master too once. You can't imagine how much I hated that son of a bitch. My first act as a free man was to kill him with my bare hands."

She recoiled, shocked to her very core. She'd had many owners, some kind, some cruel, but to actually hate one enough to hurt them, let alone kill them was utterly foreighn to her.

"He never even gave me a name. I though 'Scizore' was my name. He meant my sword. I rated less than a thing to him."

"I don't have a name either." She felt emboldened by their shared deprivation, and moved to embrace him, as a mother does a child. He offered no resistance.

"I swore I would never be like him. Never. Calling me... that... it's like a knife in the heart."

She said nothing. There was nothing she could say. She could only tighten her embrace.

"Hey, Mikey. Look at me." Jeannette commanded. "Look." She waited until her driver met her eyes. "There's nothing wrong with you for not being a twenty percenter or a hate-filled revenge-driven lunatic. I told you you to drive over twenty people with a fucking tank. You did it, God help you, because you knew I had a reason and it's your job to listen to me. You're out here throwing up now and that makes you the sane one of our merry band. You get that, right? You're the one that's still fit for polite society here, the better person."

"Major..." Micheal fumbled for words visibly for several seconds. "That's not it. I was thinking about it. You had a reason, like you said, and I kept thinking about it, and sure I didn't know what I was really doing until I'd seen it. I realized...I could live with it. And I could live with doing it again. That's when I needed to puke."

Everyone wants to think they'd be that dude, the one who goes to death with a smart-ass quip or a calm dignity. Courage is the guy who admits he'd probably shit himself.

"You're always so strong. But you don't have to be. Not here. Not with me. I don't see you as anything less when you cry. There's so much pain in you. I want to make it go away. But I can't if you don't let me help you. Let me be the strong one, just this once..."

There is no sound in the world like a group of mobile suits at the charge. From a distance, they sound like they are far more in number than they actually are; four or six sound like dozens, and a dozen or more sound like hundreds. Closer, within a couple of kilometers, it is something both heard and felt: a vibration through the earth and felt in the teeth, and a noise like the crack of doom as eight or more feet supporting sixty-ton three-story tall metal monsters rise and fall in unison. Within half a kilometer, most people are no longer aware of it as a distinct sound, for they have trouble hearing anything at all. It is instead something they are aware of as if an earthquake while loose objects rattle or slide across the ground. Only the most determined can keep their feet without bracing upon something, and the assault on the senses makes it impossible to think coherently.