The Fox (a.k.a. Hattie O'Grady) has been, at various times, a master thief, a criminal mastermind, a resistance fighter, a smuggler, as well as a folk hero and the main character in a best-selling series of penny-dreadful adventure novels. (The novels are listed on the Department of the Restriction and Manipulation of Art and Recreation's "black" list, a warrant having being issued for the arrest and decapitation of the author. Thankfully, the given name appears to have been a pseudonym, and new chapters in the adventure are published irregularly. Occasionally unauthorized "supplementary" adventures are published, though most of these lack the writing quality of the original works, and often contain certain errors of continuity. The official publications always contain the infamous seal in the shape of a fox's head at the bottom of the title page.)
O'Grady was born in 1857 in Dublin, Ireland. Her mother was a prostitute, and died in child birth. Her father never returned to claim her. For the first six years of her life she lived in a clandestine orphanage run by undercover Catholic nuns, but this was later shut down when the religious affiliation was discovered by the government. O'Grady, along with most of the other children, was sent to one of the government's experimental Steam-Powered Orphanotronic Humanitarian Residential Factory Facilities. Many speculate that it was her experiences at this facility that would begin to forge her deep hatred of all things related to the European Enlightenment and its government. In any event, she escaped at age eleven and began her new life as a pick-pocket and as lookout for a local gang of ruffians. Within five years, by her sixteenth birthday, O'Grady had taken over as the gang's leader and had earned her nickname as The Fox, due to the shocking redness of her hair. The gang, now known as The Fox's Pack, flourished under her leadership and was soon the bane of social elites everywhere in the city, though especially those wandering home drunk late at night. She led the gang for two more years, until in 1875 the Dublin Rebellion began and the Fox's Pack joined the ranks of the freedom fighters. Alas, the ill-fated resistance eventually drew the full wrath of the Enlightenment upon the city, and in early 1876 the city was bombarded from the air in an assault terrible to behold, causing many thousands of civilian casualties and leaving the area little more than a pile of rubble where a city had once stood. Most of the rebel leaders were forced to surrender, and were summarily executed without even the pretense of a trial. O'Grady fled to the main continent, eventually finding her way (via a series of underground resistance cells) to the former state of Russia. There she would stay for the next 15 years, honing her criminal skills and supplying aid to the resistance movement whenever possible.
In 1892, just before the infamous Battle of Milan broke out, the Fox returned to the partially rebuilt city of Dublin, to both aid in the restoration and to facilitate the re-emergence of anti-government conspirators.