Jim and Coll stopped at the dark stain on the ground outside the outpost entrance. It had dried into the pale soil in a wide radius, the color deeper than the surrounding wasteland, almost violet where it had pooled thickest. Jim crouched slightly and studied it with his glasses adjusted forward. "What happened here?" He asked, already bringing a pinch of the dirt closer to smell it.
"A Corruptor." I said, evenly. "It was being kept inside this building."
Jim immediately dropped the dirt.
He straightened without another word, but the quality of his silence suggested he had just updated his internal rules for terrain sampling to ask first, touch later.
Coll watched him brush his hand off on his pants. "You were going to taste it next, weren't you?"
"I was not." Jim said, firmly.
