Sidney Shepard

I am only an aimless soul
Heading into a pure, black void
So what if I'm living out past the edge?
So what if I never come back again?

An ex-drifter who's recently settled among the Mistyoak area, Sid has quickly earned a reputation for being the strong, silent type. Or a gloomy, stand-offish- well, you can likely guess where it goes from there. Sidney doesn't care much one way or the other about these impressions, so long as she's got her home and her work, she's content enough- but she's had this nagging feeling all her life, and that feeling is, 'what the hell am I trying to find?'

She still hasn't figured it out, but at least has other things to occupy her mind nowadays. She's taken over managing the dogs of the Mistyoak property, transforming it from a few loosely trained herding dogs to a thriving kennel and rescue- a number of unscrupulous sorts try to use the forest as a dumping ground for unwanted animals, and it helps ensure a safe place for any dogs seized from poachers (a fairly rare situation, but it has come up). The dogs are trained in a number of disciplines, and most work either helping manage various herds around the farms, or accompanying Sid on her rangings for tracking and rescue assistance. She is quite dedicated to preserving the ancient stretches of forest and historical sites within, focusing mostly on gauging the animal life and dealing with any signs of unwanted activity. 

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(Note: anything below is iffy as of now, heavy reworks coming eventually)

Found among the bogs and fens of Annovus' southeastern coast, Sidney's earliest memories are... green, in her own words. The green of noon light filtering through the trees, the moss under her feet, the algae and floaty plants in the water. She doesn't know how long she lived there, or exactly how a five year old even wound up living feral among a colony of crocodiles in the first place- just that the creatures there seemed to be peaceable enough, and in retrospect it's kind of amazing she lived long enough to be found at all. Her life after that was... relatively uneventful, all things considered, the strongest thread through it all being a constant sense of not fitting in, something not helped by frequent moves throughout her childhood and adolescence. Her parent was kind and all, it was just that their work meant it was rare to spend more than a couple years at a time in a given location- so, Sid figured, why go through the trouble to force building connections she didn't want to in the first place? 

So the years passed, with Sidney making perhaps a few acquaintances but nearly no real friends, doing decently enough in school but never excelling at much- the years just seemed to drift by and she went with the flow, hoping with each move that maybe she'd find... something. What thing? She had no idea, just that she was definitely looking for something, and she'd know it when she found it. Probably. After spending around four years hitching across the region,  though, Sid was increasingly convinced that... maybe she was just meant to be dissatisfied and bored, and it was time to accept that and settle in. She spent a little under a year in a dreary sort of city, working the night shift at a storage facility and spending the rest of her time either asleep or reading, and likely would have whiled away a number of years this way, if she hadn't been offered one of the abandoned units. She took the offer, and among a disintegrating box of trashy science-fiction novels, Sidney came across a peculiar key... and found what could be best described as a fox-shaped piece of space itself hovering over her kitchen counter at home. 

As it turns out, it's kind of hard staying in a stupor when you've got a very curious companion in the back of your head at all times. At the least, Noir's presence encouraged Sidney to go on the move again,