Quite a few people kept asking me why Jen is the least featured of my mustelid cast, and if I'm to be honest, I must say that she is, literally speaking, the odd one out of the bunch. Mel and Nat make up a perfect wise girl/straight woman pair, and Kim and Liz have a very amusing femme/butch dynamic that makes it easy to think up of scenarios for the four. Jen, however, is a loner from the beginning, and since her journey is about dealing with her anti-social nature, I don't want to show her interacting too much with other characters right away, which kind of makes it hard to think of of situations for her to be in that would showcase her characteristics (I'm open to suggestions!)

The Mustelady Rides series, though, gave me a pretext to do a little bit of fleshing out and reimagining of her traits and backstory, before I introduce her to the comic. And since rides are the theme of this series, I decided to make this part of Jen's development exactly about cars.

Yes, Jen Jenkins is still a loner, reclusive techie with a big videogame addiction. But her addiction ended up actually leading her to an interesting situation. Her love for racing games along with her interest for technology and engineering sparked an enthusiasm for vehicles, and particularly automobiles, in her. When she got her driver's license (a bit late, since she had to garner courage to actually go out and do it), she found out that, surprisingly, her gaming skills translated very well to the very real wheel of an actual, non-virtual car. After this realization, a timid dream started forming up in Jen's mind: what if she could, one day, become an actual race driver? After one year and a half of saving money obtained from a bunch of (not always legal) freelance jobs performed for darknet clients, as well as a few fortunate cryptocurrency and forex investments, she went and bought herself what she felt would do best as an entry level competition performance car: a 2019 Honda Civic Type R.

Turns out that Jen got quite a bit more than she bargained for her trouble: beyond the fact that she now owns a vehicle that, despite living up to her expectations, she is still very much afraid of pushing to the limit (who knew that driving an IRL car at over 200 km/h was so scary?), it now seems that a few of the illicit activities she performed online came under the scrutiny of some nasty people and organizations, who are now trying to intimidate her into performing more jobs, and pulling her into a world which Jen, even if she once dabbled in it, really doesn't want to be a part of.

Hope the sweet ride was worth it, JJ!

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