Robert Stikmanz

“If you don't leave room for the unexpected to express itself in your life, you close yourself off from the possibility of miracles.”

“They intend to make people's very appetites the next weapon of uncountable destruction. They intend that your people will lust themselves into oblivion in front of little boxes of changing light. Addictive light. A light that makes you feel like you live a life, when all you really do is eat what the light tells you to eat and squirt pee and pump poo. And watch the changing light!”

“If we fail, the planet will grow sterile and your people will die in hunger, thirst and waves of plagues. Our people and the thrm's will die more slowly because the poisons here will render us unable to conceive. The skies will cease to be blue, the land will lose its verdure and the seas, well, the seas will be the first to go. Anything that does survive will be broken, mutant, discontinuous from us and mutually exclusive. It will be the new life of a shattered world, a world for chitinous, crawly things, not one for soft and tender emotion. I hope, child, I have answered your question."Meg said nothing. None of it made sense, but she still felt an urge to deny it, deny it, even though Ekaterina's strange, rolling words carried a ring of truth. Suddenly, the autumn chill cut through all her layers of bundling wraps. She could not stop shivering.”