I see Lolita as someone who, at a young age, is in love with the idea of being sexy. Humbert's attraction to her, she feels, gives her license to experiment on this "movie star"-looking older European. She gets disillusioned very quickly, though ‚- she doesn't seem ready for what being a sexual creature entails.

Dash, like Humbert, becomes obsessed with an idea -- Humbert's is that of the predatory nymphet, while Dash's is of being able to travel through time. Constructing these machines gradually eats up his/her life, until s/he is doing illegal things to fund it, much like Humbert's desperation to keep Lolita to himself enables him to live on the run with her.

I see this character forking off from Humbert Humbert at the beginning of Chapter 28, when he and Lo are stuck in a room with one bed at the Enchanted Hunters Lodge, just after her mother has died and he has picked her up from summer camp:

Gentlewomen of the jury! Bear with me! Allow me to take just a tiny bit of your precious time. So this was le grand moment. I had left my Lolita still sitting on the edge of the abysmal bed, drowsily raising her foot, fumbling at the shoelaces and showing as she did so the nether side of her thigh up to the crotch of her panties--she had always been singularly absentminded, or shameless, or both, in matters of legshow. This, then, was the hermetic vision of her which I had locked in--after satisfying myself that the door carried no inside bolt. The key, with its numbered dangler of carved wood, became forthwith the weighty sesame to a rapturous and formidable future. It was mine, it was part of my hot hairy fist. In a few minutes--say, twenty, say half-an-hour, sicher ist sicher as my uncle Gustave used to say--I would let myself into that "342" and find my nymphet, my beauty and bride, imprisoned in her crystal sleep. Jurors! If my happiness could have talked, it would have filled that genteel hotel with a deafening roar. And my only regret today is that I did not quietly deposit key "342" at the office, and leave the town, the country, the continent, the hemisphere,--indeed, the globe--that very same night.