By the way... as for ideas, you could always have Verlassen (sorry I can't do the special e thing) be an immigrant from, I dunno, Russia, who found it hard to find work at first, but eventually found a job as a zookeeper... well, this, of course, could have happened only a few days before everything hit the fan, so to speak. She might have also been mistaken for an escaped animal by the other workers for a while, and may have just recently escaped from her cage using her ice and fire powers.