"Aaah!" cried Knight Lammle, or something like that, anyway. It was a perfectly reasonable response. He was standing at the bottom of the ancient rust-locked escalator, and the feral ghoul had been at the top. Most of the ghoul still was. The head, however, had some very good momentum and had not only rolled but actively bounced-
Oh, God, it was on fire. What.
"Paladin 101?" Lammle called weakly, doing his best to pull himself together. "What-"
"Sorry! Sorry." One armored hand waved from somewhere just out of sight up top. Her answering tone was a little sheepish, even through the helmet filters. "Should've warned you- are you okay?"
"Yes, I'm fine, but-" Lammle risked a glance sideways at the blackened, shriveled thing. The stump of its neck was still burning. "How did you- it's on fire."
"Um. Yes." Paladin 101 (she had a proper name but Lammle had never heard anyone use it, and was a little afraid to ask) stepped over what was left of the burning ghoul corpse and started to make her way down the stairs. "That's a- that's a pretty common- that happens."
She indicated the broad, short blade she often carried. Its edge was nicked in half a dozen places. It looked completely unremarkable. In fact, if Lammle had been asked, he would've said it looked like someone thought it would be funny to stick a random sharpened chunk of metal into a handle, stick some kind of lever or trigger or something on the end of it, and tell an unsuspecting initiate that it was really a sword in disguise.
That was not, however, the kind of sentiment that got you very far if you said it to your superiors, and so Lammle only looked from the blade to 101's helmet and carefully said, "I've never heard of ghouls spontaneously combusting on impact, ma'am."
"Oh, they don't." Her tone was outright cheerful as she drew the blade. "Nothing spontaneous about it. You have to pull the trigger."
She did. Lammle had exactly enough time to realize there were tubes connecting the thing to the odd blue tank Paladin 101 had strapped to her back before the blade burst into brilliant blue flame. "Now," she said as Lammle stared, "where did that head go?"
Lammle pointed. 101 nodded and found her way over to the lump by the blade's light. Which, of course, promptly went out as she let go of the trigger and lowered the blade to- "What are you doing with that head?" Lammle asked.
"Taking it back up to the rest of the body," 101 said, in a tone that would have been quite reasonable if she hadn't just decapitated a ghoul with a flaming sword made of landscaping equipment and picked up its severed head. "This was a person once, you know. They all were. We owe them whatever small courtesies we can manage, in the end."
Lammle was never going to understand the Vault-born as long as he lived.