RttS: Talita's Growth Timeline (Patreon)

Centaurs start small and don't stay that way. 

Talita was left as an infant on the Nexus Jovia youth foster care facility doorstep in a cat carrier, and chaos ensued. The facility was not prepared to deal with an infant alien in any way, and they tried arranging to send her back to her homeplanet but the Jovian embassy on the centaur homeplanet quickly informed them that would be a death sentence for her. Centaurs don't really.... do foster care. Especially for random infants who can't even talk yet. The local clans they asked for advice recommended culling her. (Both centaurs and scuds are r-selection animals that hastily adapted social strategies for dealing with having too many babies when they got smart, i.e., reproductive hierarchies and strategic infanticide.)

The human foster workers, not too keen on killing an abandoned infant, ended up learning how to take care of her with the help of local xenophysicians and researchers. A worker named Douglas Esteves especially took an interest in her care and is largely the reason Talita ended up as healthy and well-off as she is in current RttS.

I'm probably going to be going over her foster-care backstory in the second book. Sirawit also shows up in the second book, not coincidentally, and I'll probably be making a post about some of the changes I'm making to their character soon.

I'll probably clean these up and post them publicly at some point, but for now I gotta take a drawing break.