"Oh, jeaze, well, uh, you know, you plan for, for, for years, for centuries for this moment, you've got your, your hostage hanging perilously, you have your army of recent dead--thank you for your help there, really, I mean that--and they're going to, to be your obedient minions for, well really forever, I guess, and you're going to conquer the world, or at least an impressive portion of it, with them, and you've got a scrappy, a ragtag band of foolhardy adventurers, of moral absolutists who think you're evil--they blame you for their problems, and they're going to try to stop you by attacking you with, with swords and bows and arrows when you're, I mean you're literally making an army of remorseless rotting soldiers out of the people that they've, they've already, uh, uh, I mean, I can't believe this, and when I say centuries, I mean centuries, since you were a boy, just a tiny boy, and you wouldn't believe what something like that, that kind of devotion to planning, does to you, to your studies, and I'm not kidding you, I started going gray before I turned twelve--I remember because I asked for bone meal and a wand for my birthday, and my mother, you know she was very conservative, and before that she refused, refused to let me have any severed body parts in the house, but she finally said I was old enough to have some, some bone meal, but then she took it away when I reanimated a tiny little bit and it turned out to be fish, fish bones if you can believe that, and my mother was mortified so she threw it in the river, and somewhere there's probably still my little bone fish swimming around--but you can see why my hair would turn gray, oh, and the heartburn, I used to stay up nights, my heartburn was so bad that I couldn't lie down without burning a hole in my pillow, so I would just sit up at my, my, my roll-top desk and read, or really re-read, because I must have read every word of some of those books two- or three-hundred times, about rates of decay and the comparative usefulness of skeletons and zombies and how the latter depreciate in value from the moment you help them back to their feet, I mean, do you know, you wouldn't believe, do you know that I used to, sometimes until four or five in the morning, sit up making spreadsheets of the time value of zombies, and if I reanimated it X days after death, then I could expect it to last Y days before it broke down, and even if you calculate that kind of thing, sometimes you just get a, a, a lemon, and it shambles sideways and falls into a ravine, or it has such bad cataracts that it can't tell you from the bully at school, so you have to dismantle it before it, well really before it cracks open your skull and eats your brain like a big bowl of strawberry ice cream--and after all that planning and preparation, the big moment comes, you're stepped out on a grand stage, and you can't think of a single thing to say."
