Description:

Aria Fox is a small, wiry young woman with brown hair and light brown eyes. She is surprisingly strong and nimble for a girl her size. She often wears a rattle hide duster as protection for her work in training animals, knowing that sometimes they bite. She has facial features that suggest some East Asian ancestry. While not unpleasant to look at, she smells like a combination of animal musk and dung even after judicious bathing.

She has a hard time in social situations when animals aren't involved and may try to treat people like her animals in an attempt to overcome it.


History:

Arianna Smith was a shy young woman with confidence issues. Her family owned a shop in a small town and while she tried to help out, her difficulties in interacting with people and lacklustre math skills limited her ability to help. Then her father was killed in a robbery, and her mother remarried to a savvy but manipulative businessman. Her step-father and step-siblings liked to pick on her for her inability to do more than physical work in the shop, her mother became withdrawn, and her older brother got out and worked on a train, which meant he travelled a lot and she couldn't keep in touch with him.

The primary source of comfort she had in those days was with the wild and feral animals out of town. Animals just seemed to like her. They'd approach her without hostility and she would groom and tend to them.

When the circus came to town, she was amazed by all the animal performances they had. She wanted nothing more than to join them, so she took the pseudonym Aria Fox and ran off with them.

Unfortunately, it was less romantic than she thought. Circuses were often not kind to their animals and this one was no different. While she did look after the animals as best she could, there was only so much her lack of 'proper' experience could do, feeding them, cleaning their cages, and trying her best to bond with them.

Then one day, the senior-most trainer started beating a dog for failing to do one of its tricks properly, at which point she snapped, punched the guy in the face and said "That's not how you treat animals you big jerk!" before comforting the dog. The man was furious and was going to teach Aria a lesson when the dog, and every other animal present glared at the man in an unsettling manner. Intimidated, he ran off to get the ringleader. The ringleader was going to discipline Aria but saw how much better the animals were reacting to her, decided to try things her way.

While she oversees all the animals in the Circus, Aria has formed particularly strong bonds with a pair of Hybrid English Mastiff/Cordoba Fighting Dog siblings, Scout and Ranger. Scout is the friendlier of the two (relatively speaking) and she helps Aria with the shows. Ranger does not like crowds, and so he serves as a guard dog even during performance time.