Curate, connect, and discover
Velma is a conspiracy theorist and cryptid obsessed, fascinated by all myths, legends and folklore and even the mention of magic of any kind. Sure she’s a scientist, but that just means she wants to figure out how and why the magic works, it doesn’t make her a sceptic.
None of the gang are sceptics, they can’t be, not when they go around with a talking dog familiar and his lanky warlock companion.
Shaggy’s the only one who actually has any magical ability but it’s Velma who’s figuring out how he can use it. He found Scooby when he was seven, playing in the woods behind his house when suddenly there’s this little brown puppy smiling at him and talking to him. Shaggy didn’t think anything of it, Velma became obsessed with figuring out what he was, Fred went into denial about if for a solid year and Daphne just shrugged and said that the talking dog was weird but cool and moved on.
Daphne has always been good at accepting things that most people would be stopped in their tracks on, Shaggy too, of course, Velma and Fred are the ones who need the explanations, though Velma will accept a magical one while Fred would prefer an actual scientific one. He’s a mechanic and an engineer kind of person, strictly in the confines of the hard sciences even though the life he lives means he can’t deny the fact that science isn’t actually the end all be all.
It was Velma’s idea to start the road trip the summer after they finished high school, she was determined to find an explanation for Shaggy and Scooby. There were rumors and stories about the supernatural all over the place and it gave the gang some vague goals for the trip. Daphne, always looking for a reason to get out of her too big too quiet mansion of a home, was all for it and Shaggy has always been willing to go along with Velma’s schemes. Fred was the one who took the most convincing, but he came around eventually, like always.
The road trip became a tradition, any time they had a long enough break between their classes at university, or cooking school in Shaggy’s case, they hopped into Fred’s van and headed out to see what kind of adventure they’d get into this time. Sometimes they stumbled onto real magic and sometimes they didn’t, but an adventure was an adventure either way.
Velma became incredibly skilled at detective work, Fred grew increasingly able with trap building, Shaggy practiced his magic and Daphne had all sorts of chances to use her many eclectic skills.
(Growing up the surprise child of a rich couple with five already grown daughters led to a wide range of lessons from sewing and music to fencing and martial arts to literally anything she wanted to try out ever.)
Mostly the gang just lived their lives, it just so happened those lives included jetsetting around the world and dealing with an absurd amount of insane mishaps.