When your spark first gets lit, all you've got is the basic armor your ghost can transmat for you. From there you're on your own to scrounge up whatever you can wrestle from the baddies between wherever you got rezzed and The Last City. Or maybe you get real lucky and find an arms cache. And then you spend a whole lotta time cycling through incrementally better junk until you can put down enough glimmer to get yourself something like the Ace of Spades. That thing never left my hip 'til I wound up here, so as far as I can gather that portal has a serious problem with "No Fun Allowed."

And as for what bad thing got us ... well, it's hard to explain, exactly, but we call it the Darkness.