Liala: Never had to deal with them ever. They interacted only rarely with us. to come back to your first question I've read somewhere that they apparently have some rare mineral on their island, none that was ever needed by us but our civilization became quite different these last 10 years, perhaps it changed.
OOC: Yeah but even if she'd know a lot about steel alloys, she couldn't really guess the details of how the accelerator works. She could knew the gryphon have exotic mineral though event if as trivia.