It's true. We need volunteers for the slaughter.
There's an open secret among those who have been running games for a long time: if you're running a game, you expect all your characters to die. And yet, we come back time after time, carefully nurturing along all our NPCs, equipping them, working to understand them...only to have them die in horrible, gurgling agony (unless, of course, they die in silent, writhing agony because they've had their lips sewn shut...who are the good guys in this game, anyway?).