For a moment, shock meant Kali could barely think. For a full minute, enough time for the others to chime in with their insights, she could do little more than listen and watch. They all seemed so calm, some even cheery, and yet to her it seemed they had all taken leave of their senses. She had thought their enterprise would be guided with the wisdom of career criminals - those who, presumably, had only survived so long in the dangerous underbelly of galactic society through caution and care. She had relied on their abundance of experience balancing her noticeable lack. Instead, she had been greeted with a plan that seemed as hurried as it was reckless. It had an attractive simplicity to it, true - even she could see how an overly complex or overwrought plan could go awry if but one cog in the machine failed - but even so...
Unlike her new companions, Kali did not scan each man or woman through the door. She simply knew them to be both experts in their fields and (mostly) morally dubious, and therefore dangerous. Instincts such as those - such as the habitual analysis of any newly-met players of these illicit games - would only be honed by time spent interacting with said players, and Kali's childhood on the Flotilla had not trained her in dealing with snakes, with the sly and the cunning. But she had lived on Omega, and was not blind enough to miss the hesitation in many of those around the table, even amongst those who stayed, despite their bravado and show of blasé calm. They knew this plan was risky - maybe even crazy.
In some ways, that reassured her.
Excluding her moral questions and doubts, her greatest concern regarding joining this patchwork crew of disjointed, conflicting individuals had been her inexperience. They knew more ways to take advantage of her than she knew ways to put together a combat drone, and her training prior to leaving home had not been designed to guard her against intentional, prolonged dealings with some of the worst scum in the galaxy. She knew no more of night-time raids and bloodstained battlegrounds than she did of sex and sin; in other words, not much. She was all but an innocent, but compared to those in this room she had a soul of gold and hands as purely white as theirs were blood red. The suddenness of this woman's plan had defied all her assumptions with cruel mirth, and until she had seen the doubt in the others' eyes she had felt the absence of her experience as keenly as a knife edge, convinced that she was in far over her head if her expectations were so far removed from the reality. Their uncertainty, their obvious unfamiliarity with the rapidity of this plan, gave her hope that she was not as clueless as she had briefly, but terribly, feared. Their uncertainty gave her surety, a thing she desperately needed at that moment - a moment in which she committed herself to a shadowed fate, and pledged her support to fighting an army.
The same tremulous but fierce determination that had filled her when she left the Flotilla settled within her chest again. Young, spirited and foolish, reminded of all that enthralled her about life away from the limitations of the Flotilla, and remembering the purpose of her rebellion after the swiftly-told but sad stories of the drell and her fellow quarian, she made her choice - and remained in her seat. She exhaled slowly, her mind made up. She was committed – and now that the choice was past her, all she could do was throw her lot in with those of the diverse group around her.
She resisted the urge to make a speech or declaration of support as the female drell had, however, despite her newfound dedication. Kali was wise enough at least to play her cards close to her chest, and now that her confidence had returned, she found it easier to veil her fear. She settled back into her seat, appraising those around the room for the first time as she contributed her two cents - shiny new copper where her compatriots' were corrupted, pitted and black from many a crime.
She could only hope her nervousness had not been too widely noticed, as she responded to the other quarian.
"I can handle myself in a fight, though I won't pretend to be a soldier, and I have enough experience with electronics to crack the systems on this heap of a station." She turned her head, speaking to the whole room now, trying to sound like she knew what she was talking about. She was green, an unknown sitting amongst legends of the Terminus. Her only chance of being taken seriously was to act as if she should be – yes, one's attitude is more instrumental in how they are treated than anything else. "With the salarian to guard our backs, and Sleuth, myself, and my fellow quarian to tackle the station's systems, we should be able to lock down the ship in both physical and communicative terms. It may also be worth seeing if we can send C-Pat on a merry chase around the station with false alarms. In my view, the less actual damage we have to do to keep them distracted, the better – for a multitude of reasons." She glanced at the salarian as she finished, though the motion may have been lost behind her tinted visor. She did not like the callousness with which he suggested fun in causing 'mishaps' for the station's residents, considering her motivation for joining this little venture was to protect the individuals and way of life of the Terminus.
