Koyi and her family have led a hard life. Her parents were slaves to a crime lord Hutt that had them working on a space station in the Outer Rim; Escaping their fate only when a rival cartel attacked the space station. The pair snuck aboard one of the cartel vessels and hid in one of the escape pods. Once the cartel approached another planet, Koyi's parents activated the escape pod and found they had landed safely on the planet Jedha.

The two Twi'lek only met when they escaped together, but now had to rely on each other even more to survive in this new environment. Jedha had plenty of work for the pair even though mining wasn't similar to their expertise in entertainment. Over time they grew to love each other and decided to eke out a simple life on this desert moon. Once the pair made enough money mining Kyber crystals, they opened a small merchant stand in the marketplace and life was as good as they had ever known. The future looked bright when they conceived a child together. Koyi was born and raised for five years on Jedha before the Empire arrived on the planet. What used to be an honest living, mining Kyber crystals, turned into a dangerous day-to-day fight for survival. The Empire was not very tolerant of non-human species so Koyi's parents made sure to keep her out of sight as much as possible. Living inside during her younger years took a toll on the young girl.

A resistance movement on Jedha became the last straw for Koyi's parents. They used their old trick of stowing away to escape the planet and boarded a merchant vessel that was contracted to bring supplies to the Empire. The vessel the stowed away on was owned by WarrCo. This time, however, the twi'leks were discovered and captured. The captain was lenient on the family, though, and decided it was best to just drop them off at the vessel's next destination - Agsalia.

Koyi would spend the rest of her childhood on Agsalia. It was a planet untouched by the Empire and was being nurtured by an effort that started in the final days of the Republic. The peaceful Ithorians and Gran often liked to see Koyi play around the colony and would entertain her with stories and songs of more peaceful times and places. Sadly, the colony began to collapse without aid from the Republic. WarrCo purchased rights to the colony and promised the citizens that they would shield them from the Empire in exchange for what equated to contracted slavery. Most of the colonists agreed, seeing WarrCo as the lesser of two evils, and went to work transforming the colony into more of a factory and warehouse district than a livable area for sentients.

Corporate greed soon led to security being overlooked and faction of pirates set their sites on the planet. Fierce space battles took place in orbit and Koyi still remembers to this day watching them at night. The battles lasted for nearly a decade and finally the corporation fled and abandoned the planet after their losses became too great. Koyi was now a young woman and her parents were ill from being overworked and the lack of medical care; She needed to find a way to support them. The pirates would start to come down and raid the warehouses and corporate offices, leaving the colonists alone for the most part. Koyi would go on raiding parties as well, with other colonists, and search for supplies left over. The colonists would engage with the pirates once in a while, but mostly tried to avoid them if possible.

Several, tiresome months passed and when it looked like the pirates might decide to set up a base of operations on Agsalia, the Empire arrived. The Empire wasted no time in decimating the pirate forces and even went as far as sweeping the colony for all life forms. Anyone that was suspected to be a pirate was purged from the city. Koyi's parents, being too frail to put up a fight, were executed. Koyi survived with a handful of other colonists that she had been on raiding parties with, and only came back to discover the fate of her parents after the first Empire sweep was over with.

The survivors of Agsalia either submitted to the Empire or fled into the wilderness. Koyi chose to flee.