Cassie Douglas



Early life

I grew up in a highly wooded area with both of my parents. My dad was a foreman for one of the largest lumber companies in the area, and his job was the reason for us living in the woods. He was in charge of making sure nobody was coming onto the land and cutting down trees that belonged to the company. Mom was a researcher tasked with making sure the company did not deforest any areas that provided habitats for endangered animals. Due to their busy lives, I spent a lot of my time alone. However, I was able to discover a lot about the animals in the area and even grew a close bond with some of them. One of the animals I grew close to was a Clarusian Pillbug (Armadillidiidae clarus). I named him O, because during my childhood I loved when he would curl into a ball. Later I learned that this was actually a water conservation behavior, but it was adorable nonetheless.

 

Adult life

When I was old enough, I left home to travel to Stenna to study animals under the guidance of the woman who mentored my mother when she first started out, Lenora. Stenna is a very small village located a few miles west of Citusa in the Poltes Province. She taught me the common and scientific names of many of the animals native to Clarusia, as well as their behaviors. The most important lesson she taught me was how to be patient, you can’t force animals to love you, you have to wait for them to trust you and even then they may never fully accept you as a friend. When she had taught me all that she knew, I was ready to go off and find a life of my own. I’ve been traveling and collecting information on the wildlife ever since then, surviving on what money I could make doing odd jobs along the way.

 

When I joined the Caelum Navis (Modern day)

When I was 23, in 1897, I had begun my study on the Maned Fraye. The research proved to be lengthy with little results. Things changed during the summer season when a notorious poacher started hunting in the Elderwoods. I witnessed his mistreatment of animals and left the woods to alert the authorities. For some reason I’ll never know, a foreigner by the name of Leo Swift was assigned to hunt down the poacher, and the authorities of that region asked me to guide him to the poacher’s last location. While I had always felt free in the woods, this Leo guy had a different air of freedom about him that sparked my curiosity, though his cockiness quickly ruined any desire I had to study his behavior further. The stranger and I spent three days making our way through the forest and eventually into the den of the poacher. Both Leo and I helped bring the man down. What we did that day, saving all of those wild animals and returning them to their natural habitats, is what keeps me going and fuels my desire to continue studying these creatures and helping them in any way that I can. Unexpectedly, and rather unfortunately for me, a captured Maned Fraye had bonded with Leo Swift, a thing that happens so rarely that biologists had yet to do a study on it. Not taking no for an answer I joined Leo and his crew to study the Maned Fraye and all the other animals I’d discover on our journey around the world. To this day I travel around the world on the Caelum Navis with my trusty rolly polly O, and document any new discoveries while gathering information on the relationship between Leo and his fraye.