#umbral decoder

“I don’t care if the Cryptarchy cleaned it up. I’m still not touching that thing.”

“Oh come on. This has so many more safeguards than Drifter’s prototype, you couldn’t hurt yourself if you tried. And he’s not even the one collecting the umbral residue now.”

“First of all, if you believe that, I’ve got a bridge to sell you in the Manhattan Nuclear Zone. Second, even if that’s true, you think it’s OK letting the Cryptarchy pile up a stock of Darkness goo? The same Cryptarchy it turned out had live SIVA stashed here in the City?”

“Well... shouldn’t the cryptarchs be studying Darkness? We need to learn whatever we can to fight it, right?”

“Studying it? Sure. Collecting it? Nope. Especially not with Drifter’s shady tech that does who knows what under the hood.”

“But it must be above board if the Vanguard is OK putting it in their brand new command center.”

“...Are you serious?”

“Yeah, I mean—hey, where are you going?”

“I am not touching that thing.”

“It won’t bite.”

“I don’t care what it does or doesn’t do. I don’t want anything to do with it.”

“But the loot...?”

“Don’t need it. Plenty of loot out there to be won without messing with Drifter’s shady contraptions.”

“Just because a Gambit bank malfunctioned and shocked you that one time—”

“My Ghost had to rez me eight times.”

“OK, so yeah, that must’ve been rough, but this little guy’s nothing like a big ol’ Gambit bank. It’s completely safe.”

“A creepy cotton-candy machine Drifter rigged to scrape residual ickiness from contaminated engrams in hopes of, what, getting to use the Darkness for his own ends? Sure, sounds perfectly fine.”

“Look, I’ll feed it one of mine, and you’ll see how easy it works, and—where you going?”