Captain Salome Jones

Role in Story
when flamboyant low level Data-shoveler (or something) Salome Jones Inherits a spaceship from her long-lost great uncle, she sees at last a chance to sell it and get her head just a little higher out of the muck. When she sees the near-derelict ship, however, she realizes that she'll be lucky to sell it for enough to cover the dock fees.

just when her hopes for a better future have been crushed, the ship's pilot and a mysterious and unscrupulous stranger see an opportunity to make some money. All they have to do is convince Salome to go along.

Goal
she just wants to drag her head a little further out of the muck unfortunately Skyler and the pilot have other ideas. She resists getting caught up in bigger conflicts, but keeps getting drawn in by her better nature despite her best judgment

Physical Description
5'8" 130 kg of green skinned female pulchritude with long riotously curling hair the color of Tyrolean fire opals.

Personality
Vain, flamboyant, confident. Outwardly a femme fatale, she can't resist an orphan or a stray. A pair of soulful eyes, and all her good intentions (to look after herself first) go out the airlock.

Occupation
low level data shoveler suddenly and unexpectedly elevated to "captain" of a spaceship.

Habits/Mannerisms
admiring herself – shoes, toes/fingernails, adjusting her hair, clothing etc. – while other people are trying to talk to her.

When they're done, it's clear that she has heard every word and responds more or less appropriately given her inexperience.

Matt: You're right. It is going to make her unsuitable for command. She'll have to grow as a person and a leader. Meanwhile, the crew is going to have to struggle to cope with her while they're trying to make a living and evade everyone who wants to get their hands on ship and crew for nefarious and unpleasant purposes. I figure she'll make a solid start toward being a good leader by the end of book 1.

One of the things that makes this complication interesting to me is figuring out what situations are bad enough for any of the original crew to hang around? For me, that forces me to really put the screws to all of the characters to explain why they are there and what their needs and conflicts are. It adds obstacles to the action plot, and the action plot puts pressure on the characters' internal conflicts and interpersonal conflicts.

Background
An orphan of unknown provenance, she was raised in state dormitories until she was turned out at the age of 16 and assigned to low-level poverty-wage government-managed jobs. It's a tribute to her strength of character that she managed to preserve any individuality, sense of independence or resistance to authority even if it did pound out of her all but the tiniest seed of hope for a better future.

'MT: Her back story makes little sense considering the situation we find her in at the beginning of our tale. If she's a forgotten nobody, how then does she have an "uncle" leaving her wealth or even a way out? Why wouldn't the uncle help her out of her situation before he died? Something has got to give here.'

''Backstory has changed, baby! Deal with it! Okay, no, ha ha. Yes, backstory has changed. Not logical for her to be a captain already herself if she doesn't already own the ship. Plus, it doesn't work too well with the pinch-space technology. So she's a low-level drudge who receives a windfall out of nowhere. The question of why an unknown uncle would deliver his ship to a distant relative he has never heard of will emerge as a complication in a later episode.''

Internal Conflicts
Her intrinsically warmhearted nature is in conflict with a culture and station in life that reward self interest and discourage initiative and ambition. Too practical to dream big in a world too small to contain her, she's big enough to grab an opportunity, no matter how impractical, when it comes along.

External Conflicts
lack of financial security, nobody's happy to have her as the owner of the fantastic blindness, and a nobody like her with the ship full of losers and failures is never going to be able to make a living with a ship like this. And that's before you bring in all the people who want to get their hands on Salome, her ship and all her friends.