She gives him a droll look. "We try to screen them out in the pre-hire process, actually. There's plenty of other merc organizations they can join, if they really can't stand working with other sentients based on how many horns they have, or which hand they wash their faces with. It's a big universe, after all. Well," her mouth twists, "it was, anyway."

Her eyes go wide as she tries to picture this on her world. All the adults gone...the children would run wild of course, you'd have to start culling right away, take down as many of the untrained children before they all went feral - and what if the underclass children decided to open the cages.

She visibly shivers. "That must have been a nightmare." She looks at Howard with a little more respect now; he must be tough to have survived something like that. Even if it was with human children. "Was it worldwide? Any unusual solar activity beforehand, or maybe reports of scientific breakthroughs?"