Her face has been modified slightly by synthetic means: she has slivers of gold marking her cheeks and brow that look like tattoos until they flash in the sun.

For a while, things were chaotic but also quite good: instead of scraping for credits, she could ask for the simple food hunted and gathered by those who had already started construction of the Nidus. Her mother was worse off; there wasn't much to do for addictions when supply was poor. After a year or so, the pair were able to tough it out to a better equilibrium.

Then Braidie returned with her waylaid daughter, demanding Chea's help by bonding the young dragon. It was a shock, but also a delight; Braidie had helped her cousin infinitely for the time that Chea knew her, and she had big expectations of becoming a dragon rider! So far, it's been an interesting journey but sometimes a taxing one. Chea knows that Lisae had some kind of traumatic experience in her own past, and the young dragoness refuses to go into it. At least the pair are fitting into their wing with careful attention to detail. Chea, surrounded by people she's growing to think of as family, couldn't be happier.

Lisae was found by her mother some point soon after she had formed an original bond that, for whatever reason, was severed. For SCD mutts, such a failure to meld minds can mean an agonizing, brutal death (one of the few ways that such massive beings were made to bow to creatures as small as humanoids)... and Braidie wasn't willing to let Lisae pass. She made an urgent plea for the closest young woman she knew--her bond's cousin--to attempt to bond right away. It worked... but like a mind deprived of oxygen, others suppose that Lisae's brush with death has had a lasting effect on her.

What nobody knows, and what Chea only suspects, is that Lisae's experience has less to do with physical damage than emotional damage. She can feel Lisae's mind grip her own, sometimes almost painfully tightly. When Lisae asks deep, never-ending questions, it may just be a bid for connection, something that, in the back of her mind, needs comforting after a trying ordeal.

As Lisae grows, she seems to be integrating well with with her wing. She comes across as daft, but there is a method to her madness... maybe one day she'll feel safe enough to take more direct risks, but for now she needs to know everything and have someone by her side while she gets her grounding in life.