Editing FallingTowardstheSun:Thera (section)

==History==
Thera Chui was 6 when her parents went missing during a trip to the outer system. Her Aunt and Uncle told her they died in a atmospheric containment failure, but Thera has had more than enough hints that there was something more to the story. In her youth she tried several times to discover the truth, but it has become simply a background mystery for her, an unimportant detail she wonders about sometimes on a slow night. She lived with her Aunt and Uncle and her several cousins in the small country of Liberia until The War. She still thinks of it that way - while she sees the destruction they cause first hand, the tiny conflicts that have occurred since seem petty and minor to her in comparison to the One Year War. When the Zeon armies landed, her family fled, first deeper into Africa and finally off-planet to Side 2. They never returned to Africa, the news and messages from friends and family remaining there convincing them that far too many Zeon troops and partisans remained. 

Living conditions with her family on Side 2 quickly became intolerable to Thera, however. She had never gotten along well with most of her cousins, and the cramped quarters and privations of refugee life drove everything to a boil. It all exploded when Thera grabbed (stole, her elder cousin insisted) the attention of a slightly older Life Support technician and moved in with him 3 months later. As soon as she graduated high school she married, in retrospect mostly to get some distance in her life. The marriage was friendly, but quickly grew passionless and they never felt they were in a position to have children. It also soured her remaining relationship with most of her siblings - her barely elder cousin had had a thing for the same boy, and the fallout of that was never fully healed. In the end, she and her husband just grew apart and separated. They still talk or exchange letters occasionally, but are nothing more than old friends. That's the way a lot of her relationships over the years have gone, actually. They come, they go, life goes on. Sometimes she wonders if she's just incapable of falling in love... 

Without a husband to support her and no desire to move back in with her family, she found work where she could. In this case, it was as a pilot - first doing local deliveries, but eventually a more long term position working for an NGO doing disaster relief. It was here that she found her vocation. For the first time she became invested in the work she was doing, spending more and more time helping out at the actual disaster sites. Eventually, she left the motor pool to work in assembly and construction, and finally trained as a frontier doctor, providing basic and emergency care on the shoe-string budget and constant supply shortages of disaster areas. She cycled from site to site, before eventually taking on a tour to provide health care services to remote outposts in the outer system, people living in stations or ships that may need a visit from a doctor who could work astronomical distances from the nearest medical supplies.