It's WoLmond verse, so L'sta is traveling with Almond and the Ilsabard Contingent to do the whole Garlemald part of the MSQ story.

If I'm remembering right, Aidan is the third in command of the Xth legion who contacts the contingent to surrender with his part of the legion. L'sta is sent to escort them back to Camp Broken Glass, but they're intercepted by a section of Aidan's men who refuse to surrender - Aidan negotiates them taking himself and L'sta in exchange for letting the rest of them go, since the rest of them aren't the ones the loyalists have issue with (it's mostly Aidan for surrendering) (it's not very logical they'd only have beef with him, but story needs what story needs).

Soooo... Aidan and L'sta end up captives until they're eventually freed, in the interim the whole Drugging Thing happens, but you already know about that hahaha.

AS FOR THE TRAUMA...Aidan's honestly fine with being around L'sta. If anything they ended up being a weird sort of friends after it, actually (like war buddies, but, y'know, noncon drugging). They both sort of opt not to talk much about it, for better or worse.

YA she did.
He's a posthumous character, RIP Volund Cordwyk. 😔

And she's the same age in both (roughly - slightly older in her real canon, but same ballpark).

There's nowhere I've written it down Yet™️, but I've got...plans to make a carrd profile thing eventually. Maybe.

The short of it is her real name is Nicolette (Almond is a childhood nickname). She's a refugee from Werlyt to Ul'dah, escaped from under Garlean occupation with her grandma when she was very little (~6 ish). Things were fine there for a good long while until her grandmother fell ill and was moved into residential care.

They couldn't afford to keep the bills on that paid (haha Ul'dahn prices), so Almond went to the House of Splendors to buy the medical debt in exchange for becoming one of Rowena's -na girls. (She considered other options, selling herself, so on and so forth, but that wasn't...appealing to her.)

She worked like that for a while, learning how to run a business under Rowena and the other girls, until she met Volund while doing business deals. They got to chatting and Almond told him her story - Volund, being comedically impulsive And an even bigger, more hopeless romantic than Almond herself is, offered to buy the debt from Rowena in exchange for Almond's hand in marriage.

So Almond ends up surprisingly happily married to a wealthy merchant(/arms dealer) she just met, now largely debt-free, and...her grandma is suspicious about the arrangement but as long as he doesn't hurt her granddaughter then, well, the girl can make her own decisions.

Of course he gets murdered a good while later and Almond, by the time her real canon picks back up and she meets L'sta, is still in mourning and L'sta's similarity to her late husband might've been part of the initial attraction, but.
Vague gestures.
Y'know.

(I write my character lore as taking place in a similar time bubble to canon FFXIV's storyline, if that weren't immediately obvious by ALL OF THIS taking place in a relatively short time lol)

hahaha honestly it's MOSTLY just the result of me finding mods that fit my mental image of her better, so to speak (aphantasia gang).
Coupled with a bit of me learning more about how to mod the game and being able to make some simple things for myself now, anyway.

Some of it's Decidedly Not Canon, I Just Think It's Neat (the teal hair*), and some of it's just her changing her own appearance pretty often (the hairstyle swaps - it's got an approximate set length but she does it differently quite a lot).

• actually the teal hair is based on her design in the Demon AU Thing i have with Sarah, just to make it more complicated to explain

This is partly what I vaguely recall discussing with Jash once upon a time and partly me updating things on the fly, but:

Canon-verse: She put out a work request because she needed things done around her house that she couldn't do (carpentry work, etc etc) and L'sta just happened to be the one to answer it.
She fell in love (or something like it)...almost at first sight, or at least once she started to talk to him a bit.

WoL-verse: Similar to the above, but hiring a bodyguard to escort her to Gridania from Ul'dah. Which, I mean, she could've just taken an airship - but she wanted to travel 'normally' because she hadn't seen much of the world between her grandmother taking her from Werlyt to Ul'dah (and that was when she was almost too young to remember it).
(copy+paste the "she fell in love" line for the above to this one, also.)

...Almond is a hopeless romantic, if you couldn't tell by now.

In her CANON-canon she's just a civilian merchant who inherited the business after her husband's death lol
(class: wife; job: merchant)

As for the WoLmond AU...canon, she's a white mage - which she sort of stumbled into following the conjurer questline story linearly (the whole help Sylphie > help the Padjal perform the Quieting > become WHM line).
She picked up VERY basic conjury reading books she'd managed to get her paws on about the subject - eventually traveling over to Gridania to learn it properly.
She's got a sick-but-stable grandmother (thanks to a combination of conjury and medicine) and was interested in the idea of learning to help others in a similar situation.