Limit Dragon's Breath disintegration to ingestion only

[Kubius]

I only did it once myself. And I've not seen someone else do it.

You're Dickson Ormus, right? If so, I've only been penned by you once that I can remember. That said, I've gotten penned several other times that I can very clearly remember - once, I was repairing a hull breach near Genetics and someone ran up to me with a bio-suit and incinerated me while I was repairing, and another time while I was a Quartermaster camping in QM trying to make money.

As another example of something I thought was quite annoying to get hit by, there's Seething Tomatoes via mail, which share the ability of an immense amount of firepower with very little warning after time invested to build them up, but have a few heavily mitigating factors: First, you have a brief moment to run, second, you know where it's originating from, third, it can easily be found by AI or onlookers, and fourth, it restricts you to mail targets. Dragon's Breath via pen has none of these downsides: it's precise, leaves no evidence of who was killed, entirely without collateral damage and almost completely unavoidable.

If ashification was limited to INGEST only (because it's a drink), that would require a brief stun. This has two effects: revealing their identity to you and any onlookers, even if only briefly, and giving you an opportunity to run before they can stun you. This would eliminate my biggest problem with Dragon's Breath via pen which is the inability to react - if I was being dealt extremely heavy BURN damage, I would probably still die, but I'd have a chance to call out over the radio / apply healing chems / etc. It'd basically turn INGEST into EI NATH and sleepy-pen injection into Immolate - still powerful, but not an insta-firegib.