#OH random but i may have also come up with a series name for Aphelion ;^)

[em-dashes]

Tell me about Shelby! I wanna hear about your OC of the Year :D

Shelby! Shelby Shelby Shelby. Shelby has the most simple backstory of the main trio. She got arrested for trespassing, dumped on a planet that is deep in an ongoing interplanetary war, and she wants to Get The Hell Outta There before the fighting gets super worse.

What's a girl to do?

Strike up a deal with a rando, of course.

There's like, a whole lotta intricacies I don't want to get into here. The basic stuff is, she transports mystery packages for a woman named Arada, and in return Arada will fix up a spaceship so Shelby can hightail it back home.

The problem (for me, not Shelby) is: even though I have all that figured out, I don't have her actual life figured out. I know she has a friend named Jes back on her home planet, and that she's a good pilot, but like...that's super lacking, and super boring, and I just needed to develop her story outside of the plot itself so she can feel like a real character. Plus, Jes makes an appearance in the sequels, so I definitely need to have their relationship figured out.

Originally, I had it so they were childhood best friends who scavenged the space battle zone, where Shelby suddenly vanishes (she got arrested), which leaves Jes feeling betrayed and bitter because she thinks Shelby left her behind and ran away with all their scavenged stuff.

But that makes no sense! If they were life-long BFFs, why would Jes assume Shelby left her? Wouldn't it make more sense for Jes to think something bad happened to Shelby? I definitely need Jes to be somewhat spiteful when she appears in the sequel, so something needs to change.

So comes the new backstory: they're NOT childhood best friends. In fact, they're not even best friends. They met in a prestigious flight academy. Jes has had to work hard her whole life just to get in, and here comes Shelby, a nobody from a random seaside village with a scholarship just because she happened to be at the right place at the right time for a recruiter to see her strut her stuff. Jes is JEALOUS as all heck. They're academic rivals, always at the top of their classes, always trying to out-do each other. But then reality hits them fast: neither of them have the funds to cover next year's tuition. So they form a grudging agreement: they'll sneak out of school and scavenge space and sell what they find until they have enough money.

They do this for weeks, maybe months. Their rivalry turns to tentative trust, turns to...friendship, perhaps, something neither of them wants to talk about because they're technically still ~rivals~ in school. And just when Jes is ready to call Shelby her friend, Shelby is (unbeknownst to Jes) arrested, and Jes is utterly GUTTED. Shelby has been playing a long con--pretending to be her friend, acting like they're in this together, only to take off with all of their precious scavenged stuff. What a conniving little ASS.

Anyway I realized that was more about Jes than about Shelby, but having this relationship backstory helped me figure out some other things too. That Shelby grew up in a small village; that she is so good at piloting, even as a child, that she caught the eye of a recruiter; that (very important! and also not mentioned above) she is an extremely good student with near photogenic memory (the only reason she didn't get more scholarship is because she has terrible issues with authority)(her having good memory is important for plot reasons).

So yeah! I just cemented down more of her backstory to slowly weave into the story, so it doesn't just feel like her life only started when she got trapped on the planet.