Ripley's lip quirks, she looks sidelong in the opposite direction. Satisfied with the results of her little test and not the slightest bit flustered by the tongue that darts out for strawberry and chocolate...

"Sounds like you made their lives hell. Which is to say; well deserved." Chocolate and sweet fruit crack under her own teeth. She wipes her mouth with the back of her hand. "I look forward to seeing if you're as good as you chalk yourself up to be."

There's not a doubt in her mind.

"Yeah, clothes weren't worth keeping on for us either. Not because you'd get burned, just that you'd wake up feeling like a wet dog."

Ripley looks thoughtfully upward, considering the question in all of its facets. "Well, we didn't make it far enough to run into anything else— not until the end, anyway. The furthest I've traveled was thirty or forty light years. Lots of planets in the Zeta Reticuli system with valuable ore; that's usually the area we kept to. That's commercial travel. What the government was up to, I have no idea. There's a chance they might have sent their own expeditions further into space, but they rarely do their own hard work." Her brow knits tightly. "Usually it's people like us that do the traveling, the logging and things like that. And if there's something valuable, that's when they come in."

To take it. And to squash those who might get in their way. But this goes unsaid.