OOC character history:

[I created Samaya initially to be a minor NPC in a Star-Fox based roleplaying game. She was initially intended to fill out the roster for one of the player's wingmen. The player in question suffered through a disastrous battle with his squadron in his backstory before getting promoted. I felt it would be interesting if I brought one of his surviving friends in as a changed person, so the player could understand the consequences of his character's promotion. Once cheerful and cocky, Samaya was now recklessly suicidal, sullen, and wry. She had survived the battle, but at the cost of a portion of her body. She somehow became a popular NPC with the players, and as more people interacted with her one of them managed to break through her emotional shell and help her heal from those old wounds. By the time the game ended, she was the most developed NPC in the entire game.]

IC character history:

Samaya Corvi was the second child born to a pair of colonist otters on a savage, waterlogged jungle world filled with nasty predators. The family of otters were poor farmers and port workers who lived outside of the city wall that kept the predators out. The farm they kept was only large enough to feed the family; most of the money was made hunting predators that strayed too close to the city and turning in the kills for bounties. Starting from a young age, Samaya was groomed for this, and once old enough, would earnestly accompany her older brother on hunting expeditions. By the time she was a young teenager, war with the alien Hepas was starting to break out, though her home planet was well within the Lylatian Federation's borders and thus, isolated from the fighting.

After completing her tutoring, she split her time between hunting dangerous beasts that came too close to the family farm or city, and working in the interplanetary dockyard with her father and brother. When a tragic dock accident took the life of her father, she began to obsessively seek out ways to get her family within the city walls, where it would be safer for them to age. To earn money, she decided to join the war effort and went through boot camp training towards being a pilot. By the time she graduated, the war was serious enough of a threat to earn her an immediate deployment to a star cruiser called The Victory. There she flew in two or three battles, successfully repelling Hepan strike fighters from assaulting The Victory, before flying in defense of a colony the Hepans were attacking. While drawing fire away from ships containing lylatian refugees fleeing the colony, her fighter became disabled by enemy fire and collided with an enemy ship.

The enemy ship exploded, but hers didn't. Stabbed through with shrapnel and ship parts and losing blood an oxygen, Samaya gave herself up for dead and passed out, only to awaken sometime later back on The Victory with an entire side of her torso replaced with metal bionics. She was told that they had recovered her body after the Hepans had been temporarily repelled; she had been dying but was alive when they found her. Unfortunately, the damage to her body was so severe that she would not have survived the time it would take to regenerate her body, so bionics were chosen instead.

She did not take the trauma well, becoming angry and sullen. Expected to retire, she signed right back up to rejoin the fight instead, no longer feeling satisfied with her life and wanting to give it for a good cause, rather than just throwing it away. She flew in a record number of flight missions and her skill became such that she was recognized as an Ace and given her own flight wing to command. It was at this time that she met the young pilot who would change her outlook on life and eventually help her to come to terms with her bionics.

She went through several other adventures during the war, including another instance of being shot down and joining the Marines on land, spending about two years marooned on a planet, and running missions in the civil war that ignited after the truce with the Hepans. As time went on, she became more at peace with herself and her life, even if peace seemed to elude the galaxy at large.

As the civil war plaguing the Lylatians began to simmer down, Samaya was abducted by the last surviving colony of crows; she had been discovered to have been a direct descendent of the corvid royal line, and as the last avian royalty left alive, leading what remained of the avian species fell upon her shoulders. After her old wingmates "rescued" her from the crows, she formally retired from the Lylatian military in favor of returning to the ruined world the birds had come to inhabit, acting as their warrior queen.