Three important things happened in 46 BBY.
First, Padmé Naberrie - better known as Padmé Amidala, Queen of Naboo - was born.
Second, in the 'civilized center' of the galaxy, on the green and peaceful planet of Chandrila, a girl named Mon Mothma was born.
And third, on the edge of colonized space, on the windswept planet of Virujansi, a boy named Antoc Merrick was born.
At the time Antoc was born, Virujansi was - and had, for a millenium, been - a fiercely caste-based society. The ruling caste, the Virujiran, lived in fantastic palaces, thousands of meters above the surface, you know the drill. The merchant class, the Virujneran, moved goods between the farms on the surface and the cities above. And the farming class, the Virujoran, lived on the surface and tried to eke out an agricultural existence, while dodging the giant borecrawler worms that burrowed tunnels every which way through the planet.
Below these three castes - below the Virujiran, the Virujneran, and the Virujoran, were the Saytikaan - the lowest of the low. The untouchables. It's this caste to which Antoc and his family belonged. Like every other Saytik, Antoc was destined to live and die below the surface, eking out a meager salary by flying tiny, rickety spacecraft through the borecrawler tunnels and collecting valuable mineral deposits (used in the manufacturing of photo torpedoes) that the worms left in their wake. And for much of his childhood and early adulthood, this is exactly what Antoc did, along with his dearest friend, a Virujoran human male named Garven Dreis. It was dangerous work, and if history was any precedent, neither Antoc nor Garven could reasonably expect to live much beyond the age of thirty.
But as it happened, both Antoc and Garven were pretty good at piloting rickety ships through perilous terrain. They did with their buckets of bolts what professional pilots in galaxy-class fighters could only dream of. And as luck would have it, one particularly fine day in the summer of 26 BBY, they were doing crazy maneuvers in the borecrawler tunnels when they were discovered by Iora Thuran, a squadron commander from Virujansi's elite Rarefied Air Cavalry.
Squadron commander Thuran, a veteran pilot herself, recognized their skill, and she took Antoc and Garven under her wing. Thuran also - importantly - forged the necessary papers to pass both Antoc and Garven off as merchant-class Virujneran. (At the time, only Virujiran and a select few Virujneran were allowed to join the military. For a lowborn Virujoran or Saytikaan to masquerade as upper-caste would, if discovered, have been punishable by a court-martial, followed by exile - or even execution.)
Over the next four years, the two young men steadily rose through the ranks, working together, and flying as a team. Things were going well for them until the winter of 22 BBY, nearly four years later. That year, Thuran and four other squad members were killed in a reactor explosion on a nearby orbital station. It was only after Thuran's death, when her belongings were being prepared to go back to her family, that Cavalry administrators discovered evidence of Antoc and Garven's true castes.
A court-martial was convened, and representatives were appointed to defend the two young men. The proceedings went on for six weeks - and things were looking grim. On the last day, the attorneys for Antoc and Garven were preparing their final arguments when a Cavalry courier burst into the room with news that brought everything to a screeching halt: the Clone Wars had begun.
Meanwhile, halfway across the galaxy, a young girl named Mon Mothma was the eldest of six children of a prominent political family on the peaceful planet of Chandrila. Her father, Mon Athamed, was an arbiter for the Republic; her mother, Mon Therama, was governor of Chandrila's largest province. Mothma herself was an earnest, quiet child, and she largely stayed far from the political intrigues in which her parents were involved. At the age of ten, she acquired what would become a lifelong interest in physics. The next year, at the age of eleven, she built her first miniature (but fully functional) hyperdrive for a small, unmanned vehicle. At the age of twelve, she took a detour into the world of geology, and then spent her free time over the next two years completing a geological survey of her province that was later published.
At the age of fifteen, events transpired that would change the course of young Mothma's life. One summer evening, her mother called the family together to make a jarring announcement - the Mon clan was penniless. Mothma's father Athamed had squandered the family fortune on a series of ill-advised speculative schemes, all without the knowledge of the rest of the clan. Most of the family's debts were to the Suranas - the ruling family of a neighboring province. And if the Mon family didn't find some way to repay those debts within the year, they would be forced to cede their land to the state, forfeit their titles, and move off-world.
The news came as a tremendous shock to Mothma, and she spent several months holed up in her room, coming to terms with what she had learned. Then, one fall day, she gathered her surveying equipment and a large satchel, buttoned herself up in a warm coat, and walked right out of the house, without saying a word to anyone.
The next morning, the Mon family awoke to find Mothma missing. Not knowing where she had gone, they assumed the worst. Two days after her disappearance, Mon Mothma's parents - with some help from neighbors and friends - pulled together a search party and set out to find young Mothma.
No sooner had the search party stepped out of the house than they spotted her - Mothma, emerging from the morning fog and walking briskly back toward the house. She walked right past them - past the search party, past her father and mother - into the house. Once inside - still without saying a single word - she produced a stack of papers from her surveyor's bag, and left it on the kitchen table. Then she turned, and walked back out of the house. Her family would not see her again for another four years.
During that time, "Mothma's Midnight Walk", as it was called, became the stuff of legend. In the forty-eight hours that Mothma had been gone, she had walked to the nearest town, traded her hyperdrive prototype to a passing merchant in exchange for use of a speeder, and drove that speeder more than five hundred miles - across treacherous terrain - to the house of the Suranas. Once there, Mothma revealed to the Suranas a discovery she had made years before - a valuable vein of Rubindum, a mineral required for hyperdrive construction, deep beneath the lands owned by her family. She offered the Suranas full rights to exploit the mineral deposits - in exchange for complete forgiveness of her father's debts.
At first, the Suranas laughed. They told Mothma that they could simply wait for the Mons to go bankrupt and buy the land from the state after the family's inevitable move off-world. But Mothma didn't bat an eye or miss a beat. She coolly explained that not only would that be impossible (because by then she would have told the state of the Rubindum vein, thus making the land far too expensive for the Suranas to buy outright), but also inadvisable (because she had spent the last four months of her solitude accumulating enough blackmail material on the Suranas to tear that family down to nothing, if they didn't do exactly as she asked).
The Suranas found that they had no choice but to accept Mothma's offer.
So it was that no-one was surprised when, four years later, in 27 BBY, Mothma was elected Senator of Chandrila, at the remarkably young age of nineteen. She had served for nearly five years, she had won re-election twice, and she was steadily accumulating control of all of Chandrila's most important industries and commercial sectors - when the Clone Wars broke out in 22 BBY.