Welcome to the Jungle
Sayen was born and raised in the Dyopi Lowlands, a huge swath of tropical jungle on Pachan. Life in the Lowlands is hard and cruel. The wildlife is hungry, vicious, and clever, the plants filled with malice, and what few hard-fought regions made safe from the wildlife are run by warlords.
For Sayen, this was all normal. Her peoples were semi-nomadic and stayed mostly in the canopies, on diets of fruits and small game. When she was young, she heard rumors of a new power entering the jungle from the east. Oral traditions of the jungle are rich with such tales, so-called "civilized" powers encroaching upon and eventually being defeated by the vines. Surely this would be no different.
Sayen migrated closer to the outskirts, where a few warlord-towns had managed to eek out a stable existence in the marshy coastlands. She found the village entertaining; the inhabitants tended to be easy to fool, easy to out-skill, and utterly lost in the jungle if they took two steps off their wooden paths. She spent most of her adolescence flitting between these towns and her native canopy.
Impromptu Commando
When the Empire arrived, it did so in the form of a few dozen dorks. Sayen had been expecting armies, armor, weapons. Instead, they sent scientists. She'd expected naive rubes, clueless to the ways of the jungle. Instead, they seemed genuinely curious, willing to learn, and with an inate respect for the vines.
The visitors — they never claimed they were anything more — were more curious about her and her people than anyone in the villages had been. She, in turn, learned more about them, their way of life. They brought medicine, and learned how Sayen's people made their own from orchids in the treetops. They brought engineering, and learned how Sayen's people made rope lines between boughs. They clearly disapproved of the warlords' general reigns of tyranny in their tiny fiefdoms. More visitors showed up, all sorts of different species.
They wanted Sayen to help them, to guide them through the villages, to end the warlords' grip on the villages. They wanted to make the villages better, not set against the vines but working with them, like Sayen's people did. At first she refused; what good could come of the meddling of these Imperials? But now she saw the villages in a different light. It wasn't silly naive ex-colonizers trying to force their way of life against the jungle. They were the long descendents of said colonizers, stuck in a hostile world, where all the fruits of thier labor was taken by the warlords, keeping them poor. Keeping them weak. Keeping them ever in danger of the wrath of the vines.
Sayen's adolescence made her the perfect commando. In the course of a few years, most of the warlords had been dealt with. The Imperials offered labor, advise, supplies, and technology, in exchange for the same. Sayen lingered for years, watching her world transform, the villagers now thriving in a world no longer designed at odds with the jungle, her own people living longer, working with the villagers and the Imperials to help cultivate the jungle. Things were looking up.
but Satisfaction Brought It Back
When one of the Imperial contacts who'd worked closely with her in those turbulent years offered her a chance to leave, explore the world, explore the galaxy, she agreed. Within a few years, after learning machines and materials, she was aboard the newly-assembled starship Xipi Totec.