<div class="floatleft">(http://fc07.deviantart.net/fs11/i/2006/223/f/6/Redhead_by_Chibiche.png)</div>It felt like winter was setting in. The harvest was collected, the festival wreaths were beginning to go brittle from the cold, and a long, quiet, cozy few months by the fire of an inn should have lay before her. The problem, as ever, was that Mischievous Three Tailed Fox Goads Devil had no money at all.<br/><br/>A fur-lined hood crowded close around her face, with the added warmth of long and silky crimson hair that crowded like a scarf around her throat and billowed out in the lonesome Snowguard breeze like the tattered flags that hung over its gates. An Empire outpost- the last Empire outpost before the edge of the world. Beside her as she walked was Lucky, prancing at her heels, bushy red fox-tail swishing through the snow. Lucky was excited because she smelled food. A fox did not understand the concepts of money and ownership. Missy herself only recognized them when it suited her.<br/><br/>There was a yelp out in the dark white of the snow-covered town that made Lucky's ears perk. Missy stopped and listened. It was like a monkey with a sore throat, a sound made with a tiny little sharp tongue through snarled and pointy teeth. Goblin, or knocker, or boggart maybe. There was a long, hoarse, aggravated bellow of an escaped cow. The ranger crouched nimbly down with her humble animal companion- little bigger than a small dog, and gone thin from hunger, and whispered for a black velvet ear that swiveled to hear her voice. "Heroes get all the food they want, Lucky. They take heroes in out of the cold and give them all the chicken they can gobble, and rub their tummies."<br/><br/>Slaying goblins, that was hero's work as an adventurer knew it. But Missy was a ranger of the people, and the wilds would never,<em>ever </em>run out of goblins. It was the cow that was truly valuable, and the cow they were going to save- together, the two of them, heroes. And if they couldn't save the cow, well, they would not go hungry tonight. Laughing, yipping, Missy and her fox went chasing after the sound of the escaped cow, two strangers in the town of Snowguard.<br/><br/>Later, it would come as a complete surprise when<em>she </em>was blamed for the bull's rampage.