<span style="font-style: italic">...if that <span style="font-weight: bold">monster</span> wasn't brought down here!</span><br/><br/>Her eyes finally flicked from Viktor and towards the female speaker. Her upper lip twitched almost imperceptibly, like a very sedate dog right on the precipice of delivering a swift warning to an unwary hand. Monster. As if this group of provoked individuals, currently writhing in the grip of mob mentality, knew anything of real monsters. Liliana suspected that most of them had only heard the stories, maybe directly from sources who had experience but second-hand nonetheless. Even the ones who had taken down the occasional dangerous mutant or bandit seemed to have been caught up in the turmoil, abandoning their reason to the passion and shouting of the moment. The blonde woman found herself very vaguely disappointed in the people of this station, but she wasn't sure why she had expected more of them.<br/><br/><span style="font-style: italic">... nothing but trouble!</span><br/><br/>The dead gaze switched to that speaker, brow darkening just a little. Trouble. The confidence in the blustery accusations gnawed at the fringes even more than the words themselves. A faintly curious gaze snapped to the man with the KO'ing atonement, his laugh sounding like a sandpaper sandwich, if it was sandwiched around rougher sandpaper. Still, the cadence to his response was oddly non-threatening, even the admittance that his apology was usually lethal.<br/><br/>One of them pointed a gun at the girl when she moved. A hidden reserve of faith in humanity drained away, but Liliana quickly smothered any disappointment with her customary blankness. Is this what they had come to, then? Aiming a loaded firearm at an unarmed, understandably-unnerved child? The abuse whizzed past and around her like poorly-aimed bullets, harsh words and biting names appearing to either bounce or be harmlessly absorbed into the empty person. A small piece of her recalled that she had been familiar with many of these people; the harvesters had definitely had relationships with them. People from the small pubs and bars where they sold the redwood bark, or the men and woman that sold them food or ammunition, even folk that they had seen only casually but still offered a smile and a wave in the interest of amicability. Those same people now flung abuse as though it were boiling oil, wanting nothing more than to return destruction the way it had been visited upon them. To hurt. It would solve nothing, and Liliana suspected they knew that, but it changed nothing. The image of the man pointing the rifle at Inga burned into her memory, almost symbolically, but she had little time to linger.<br/><br/>The little<span style="font-style: italic">thunk</span>of mineral colliding with flesh-padded skull widened her eyes, even prompting a very faint glitter of teal as Viktor stumbled. It faded when the man remained upright, even when he drew his weapon on the violent mob: he hadn't been shot or hit hard enough to die.<br/><br/>A short period of deliberation followed, allowing the natives of the area to regain a modicum of logic. Judgment passed and the remainder of the group appeared. She took a swift step back, then adopted a stride barely behind and to the side of the man closest to his head. Just behind him, yanking one massive arm, walked the young woman with the nice face and homemade bracers. Liliana gave no indication that she had even heard the question, but she placed the girl in the non-threatening category alongside the man with a voice like some kind of super-galactic file on steel. It would be strange if she had seen anything of Rock besides insane, rampaging violence, and yet she was willing to speak for him, approach him and even touch him without so much as a flinch. The group of Stalkers that came close had at least seen enough of him to know he was not always a destructive head-case; the helmeted individual had no such reassurance. Liliana wasn't sure what that meant, exactly, but it did mean... something.