Benjir Davis

Benjir's original world is one where the Industrial Revolution went off a little too well. In the cities, you can't see the sky; the air is too thick with smog. Rain is toxic and can cause acidic burns and disease. The slums of cities are built cramped, close-together, and right next to the factories that most gainfully employed individuals work at for little pay in even worse conditions.
The wealthy live above the smog and above the clouds in the cities, and many of them have manors out in the country, surrounded by farmland. They live lives of unparalleled luxury; what few tasks automata aren't capable of are performed by human and elven servants. These human and elven servants are often members of the middle class, although as servants they don't actually make enough to fully support themselves or their families; other people they live with function as the primary breadwinners.
Benjir was born as one of the lower class. Both his parents worked at the same factory, which is where they met. They fell in love, got married, and had children. Technically, Benjir has one older sibling, but they were a stillbirth.
His mother had a lot of stillbirths and miscarriages, actually. Besides Benjir, only three other living children were born. Two of those died before their third year; one to a wasting disease and another due to an inability to breathe. This was not an uncommon story. In the lower class, birth rates were high - but it seemed that death rates were doing their best to keep up.
After every pregnancy, his mother grew more and more withdrawn. She became weaker, paler, overall wasting away as her heart was continually broken by the loss of her children. And every single child had been born with defects - Benjir's weren't antithetical to life, like the baby that was born without a brain, but none of the babies were truly, fully, healthy.
When Benjir was fourteen, his mother gave birth one last time. Arielle was the only child who would survive toddlerhood - but that would not be enough to save their mother. While Arielle was still a toddler, her mother died.
Officially, she died of a wasting disease. Unofficially, Benjir felt that she had died of a broken heart.

Benjir was born in the city called Valiance, part of a country called Ragiri. Ragiri was a country where elves were top nobility, usually, humans only on the periphery of power. Elves, after all, had much longer lifespans and more of a likelihood of being able to use magic. And magic was such a rare and beneficial skill, the thing that powered airships and allowed for metals to be duplicated without having to mine for them, that anyone with magic was immediately catapulted into power.
He was the son of poor factory workers, a magicless human in a line of magicless humans, down at the very bottom dregs of society. Merchants and artists managed to live in the middle of the city, not quite in the sun but in better and safer locations with less toxic air and water; factory workers were the lowest of the low, and pretty much exclusively human.
Benjir picked up pick-pocketing as a matter of survival. His parents taught him not to steal, something they emphasized very thoroughly, and Benjir was careful to always steal from people who could survive the theft, but - well. Starvation was unpleasant, and he was watching his mother deal with miscarriages and what few living siblings he had were dying.
More food and better quality water could at least help with that.

Magic wasn't unheard of, where Benjir came from, but it was quite rare. Oh, a street magician was a dime a dozen - but that wasn't magic; it was all optical illusion.
Still, though; skyships needed magical cores to fly, and occasionally people were born who could do the impossible. It was rare, and Benjir figured he'd never see hide nor hair of magic, but then he found himself in the middle of what happened when a magical core broke.
See, a wealthy noble had hired him to make prosthetics for a child with birth defects, hidden away in the country. That same noble brought Benjir up above the clouds, where the sun was so bright it hurt his eyes. He was going to ride on a sky ship.
But the sky ship was defective. Its core had a crack in it, leaking magic. And as it started to fly - that crack turned into a break, and the core shattered entirely.
The storm of magic transformed him until he was no longer human. He was an anthropomorphic raccoon. He still fit in his suit, mostly, although the new tail he had made a tear in it. His prosthetic fit just fine. But his body, his shapes - they were different. He had a muzzle now.
(He was still, regrettably to him, deformed, but oh well; that was nothing new, and he could live with it.)
It did more than transform him, however. It brought him to an entirely different world.
Most importantly: in this new world, he could see the sky.
His one great goal is to bring Arielle to this world. It's better than where they came from, and he can't rest until he knows she's happy and safe here.