Lain is a brilliant engineer, designing several classes of star ship and able to jury-rig nearly any tool. However she has been forced to live with the stigma of being a member of a savage race. Her tribe did not understand her creations and banished her for contracting with demons. She threw away her clan name as they had thrown away her and took to the stars in one of her "Demon rooms". She has traveled to several systems, however her designs and creations were nearly always discarded at a glance by the more "civilized" races. Whenever thefts or minor crimes were committed she found herself at the top of the suspect pool and was often forced to pay for replacement in spite of her innocence in the crime. Her patience worn thin and her wallet empty, Lain abandoned all hope of finding a place to belong and settled to wander the ocean of stars alone.
Sounds too perfect a skillset. I play engineers as well. Engineers is too broad a word to use. Engineers can be broken up into different things and most, if not all, are specialized in a certain subcategory. Smokestack was a trade-taught mechanical engineer that handles mainly the sub-discipline of mechanics. He was trade-taught in shipcraft, mainly in engine repair and production and bodywork. Willow is a self-schooled electrical engineer and machinist. He works in the subcategory of power engineering, and electronics. He learned the mechanical engineering sub-discipline of composites through machining. Basically, they have their ups and downs. Smokestack can fix engines and some electrical. Sometimes he can fix and build ships but they're all mediocre and based on designs passed down unto him. He can't fix major robot damage, fix inner ship systems, create complex weaponry, or make things outside of ship stuff. He has limitations to his knowledge as an engineer. Willow can make parts for weapons, fix most electrical systems, and make electronic based equipment. But he needs a specific environment and equipment. He can't fix ship specific equipment, repair robots, design ships, etc. He has only the skills he learned. What I'm trying to say is that it's not a good idea to have a character that is just a "brilliant engineer" and has designed "several classes of star ship" and be able to "jury-rig nearly any tool". Not because I'm rejecting the whole idea. I'm saying that an engineer has a specific field of focus and definitely has limitations. Limitation don't always make them less than brilliant, it just makes them brilliant at that specific thing that they do. I'm also gonna assume the character is a female floran that's being outcast due to intelligence. We've had a few characters like that pop up. My character Smokestack is in essence an outcast as well as an avian. Our stories are similar in that they've both been isolated though Smoke was isolated from running away from his sins and yours was from wanting to belong. Our stories are edgy which is not bad per se but they're a very common trope. tl;dr I'd focus your occupation to a specific category and have limitations so that you could avoid a Mary Sue. Your backstory is a tad bit too edgy. Don't mean to offend in any way. Just trying to help.
I agree with Smokestack here as there is a crap ton of engineering types. Fernpetal is mainly a Mechanical Engineering type with a some skill in electrical engineering allowing her to do what she loves and the normally is fixing and repairing things. Also frankly and floran that is not wanting to stab the crap out of everything and then eat it. Is an outcast and needless to say that is the Meta for a floran.
My only reason for clicking this was because I thought of the bad group of Outcasts when I saw the title. PTSD Flashbacks.
I was trying to use the "many classes of star ship" as a quick way to explain how a runaway got a high level star ship from a tribal society, Lain's specialty is actually constructing general use, simple tools. She is limited to mostly mechanical objects and is nearly helpless at programming so robotics, navigation, and computer systems are beyond her abilities. She mainly sets up a machining shop where she lands and makes objects as needed until she decides to move on. I was also trying to explain my somewhat blind stumbling around the galaxy with the "outcast with no where to return to" cliche. She's my first attempt to make a character so obviously it wasn't going to be a perfect backstory. Thanks for the advice. I tried to loosely base her off of the main character in the first half of the novel "Derelict" where a combination of where she lives and who her family is forces a girl to steal a star ship she salvaged in an attempt to escape her dead-end life as a maintenance tech on a backwater outpost. I actually wasn't trying to be edgy when i wrote the idea, but looking back i guess i laid it on pretty thick there... sorry.
