Players characters evading direct questions

[Kish]

While this is true, Talakeal seems like the equivalent of someone who can't get on a plane without at least one engine falling off halfway through the flight.

Yes, this. If I knew someone who had ridden a plane many hundreds of times over twenty years and every single one of them involved some horrible wreck story, I'd absolutely tell that person to avoid planes (pretending for the moment that that person had not already been arrested for clearly sabotaging planes in some way even if they couldn't figure out exactly how).