My positive science fiction setting and stories to revolve around the traveling Arelu and the living starship Melissa has been slow coming. I wrote a good bit recently but haven't been satisfied with it.

I know what the typical arc in the series should be; Arelu and Melissa arrive on a planet, Arelu does some tasks in exchange for supplies, Arelu learns about the locals and leaves a positive impact on them before she and Melissa depart.

Other arcs I've considered are ones of wonderment about an alien biome, arriving on an uninhabited planet and collecting in an ecologically conscious fashion things for Melissa's bio-reactor such as rotting fruits, dead foliage, etc. A chance to talk about unusual nature and maybe give a little focus on Arelu and Melissa interacting with each other.

A third possible one to do is a focus on Arelu and Melissa providing transportation for someone or a small group and them interacting in transit talking about various subjects.

I have a goal with Arelu; I don't like that it's very common in sci-fi works for the religious or spiritually minded to be antagonistic. I want to show Arelu's spirituality as complimentary to her benevolence and explore the positives of religion in a space fiction setting. Designing what her spirituality is has been slow. In the setting it derives from the Star League of Elom and is presently a pantheistic religion with a dichotomy of positive and negative universal energies- the light and the dark. So Arelu is consciously striving to be empowered by the light and to spread it through positive action believing that one gets what they put into the world or more specifically that the world around one's self becomes darker or lighter by the actions of those souls within it and for the sake of a better tomorrow for those who come after one must strive for positive action.