I LOVE SPARKLEDOG SHIFTERS YESSS

HECK YEAH WOLFY THAT MAKES ME HAPPY TO HEAR!! A ROUND OF SPARKLEDOG SHIFTERS FOR EVERYONE PLEASE, YOU GET A SPARKLEDOG SHIFTER, AND YOU GET A SPARKLEDOG SHIFTER, AND Y-

I LOVE SHIFTERS IN GENERAL. is there a place I can read more about Jawz?

SAME I LOVE SHIFTERS SO MUCH!! ALSO WOLFY YOU JUST MADE MY WHOLE ENTIRE NIGHT ASKING THAT, YES YOU CAN!! I, gosh okay she's been around since the early 2000s (I definitely didn't yoink my earliest usernames from her) and everything is Very scattered across 20+ years of dA and here, but let me see if I can write a summary! (Her oldest ref I have uploaded is here in 2008 though some things (like her age) are inaccurate now, but I have art of her from well before that!)

So, Jawz is a young adult shifter, friendly, curious, and prone to getting into a bit of trouble- she's very fond of Mars bars and retro arcades, and can often be found in them. She's what's known as a 'complex' shifter in this world- it means rather than just one form she has several she can turn into! (She can't turn into Just anything though- her forms are all animals, mostly mammals, and not random- they've all had a bit of practice and it's uncommon for her to get any new ones. She never did figure out feathers.) She's a bit unusual among shifters in that she's also quite adept at hybridizing forms though, so many of hers (and her main shift) are actually combinations of existing ones she has!

Jawz came to the city of Central when she was quite young (maybe about 13-15?) and after getting separated from her parents- it's a long story, full of miscommunications and disasters, and she was scared and alone until finding Kaerith, who kind of wound up becoming her unofficial dogmom. Unrelatedly, 'Jawz' definitely doesn't sound like the kind of name a 13 year old gives themselves when they figure they have to start a whole new life, anyway. She did what she had to to get by, which largely consisted of 'I can turn into a dog and maybe yoink a sandwich or two because I have no money', which is Great until you catch the eye of one of the larger lab (and slightly animal control-adjacent) organizations in the city, Spectrum, which both studies shifters (among many other things!) and is usually the group of people called when a shifter is causing problems to safely handle it, because they have the resources. This gets a bit complicated, because in Jawz's mind these people are bothering her and chasing after her for absolutely no reason, and her response to this is to get good at parkour and cause mischief and problems back- meanwhile in Spectrum's mind, they want to make sure this shifter isn't going feral, hey kid where are your parents, oh cool now you're causing a bit of property damage and making a mess trying to get away from us we just want to talk- sigh. (The truth lays somewhere in the middle, with neither party innocent- Spectrum did want to make sure she was okay, but when you occasionally treat somebody a bit like a dog because they Are a dog and are biting at you that person is going to be a bit wary of you. Doesn't help that Jawz does have some unique shifter genetics that piqued the interest of some higher up, so they were probably tailing after her and 'checking in' more than they usually would as time went by, which is also a long story.) Along the way she met Matt (very sweet guy! a geneticist who works there, who is happy to 'lend' her his keycard on the rare occasion she finds herself stuck there. she's given his toddler daughter piggyback rides in her dog form) and Julian (less nice antagonist, who did Not appreciate being run into at mach fuck down a hallway, told to watch where He was going, and when he asked 'Do you know who I am?' got a snippy little 'Poppy the Friendly Clown?' in response. He works with shift inhibitors (genuinely useful for safety reasons when you need to reduce the risk of any shifter going on a fun little rampage indoors and knocking things around. also useful for Not safety reasons when you want to be mean and temporarily hinder somebody's cool trick) and she's scared of him, and tries to avoid when she can). There's a few of the people on the security team she knows too, to varying levels of chagrin- she's not above snagging a rookie's equipment out in the city in shift form and putting it up a tree, but despite their differences, some have come to her aid, too. Her run ins with Spectrum are less frequent as she gets older, but it's always in the back of her mind- and she's learned the navigate the city with ease and prowess, just in case she ever needs to run.

Early on in her life in Central, she had found an abandoned treehouse a ways outside the city that she lived in, dragging a generator and supplies up there, but that later switched to her and Kaerith finding an unoccupied office building that still had the lights on to hole up in as a hideout- as she gets less worried about being chased down, I think she eventually moves in with Kaerith. That same instability is why she's worked a bunch of odd jobs throughout the city- everything from movie theaters to courier jobs, which she eventually settled more into, because she likes to move and this city is hers now, and it gives her a chance to put that parkour to good use. When she's not doing That, she's usually hanging out with Kaerith and Alex (another shifter), who have formed a totally secret club called Team Awesometastic, which gets up to very not secret things such as grabbing milkshakes, loitering, heckling Julian from rooftops, sneaking into places they shouldn't, and tailing anybody they think is interesting or suspicious. And also the arcade! She loves Pacman, and is really good at all those old games.

Oh! Her updated main shift form is here, and is a hybrid of several others (some of these are forms she 'got' from her mom and her dad, things they turned into that she picked up on young)- but one cool thing about it is that those back markings are based on gel electrophoresis patterns, something she saw often enough in the labs that she picked up on and thought looked cool, so she added it! Some other older art of her is here and here and this has her hybrid dragon form on it!

Thank you for asking and thank you for reading my ramblings Wolfy! You make me want to put together a page of character bios sometime- all of these characters have been with me for eons, and I'd love to pull things together in a more centralized place sometime!!

Oooo, yeah, some character bio pages would be really cool!

(sorry it took me so long to get back to this)

Oh man thanks for sharing about them!! I ALSO LOVE SHIFTERS AAAAAAAA I love how the shifters in your world can imprint on things and incorporate that into their shifts. XD Jawz scampering around the city antagonizing scientists gives me SUCH Aladdin vibes in all the BEST ways. they sound like a lovable scamp! I love that picture of Jawz and their shift form hanging out side by side. I wanna try something like that sometime, would you be okay with it?

(You're way good Wolfy, thank you again for asking, and for reading!! I. Might have gotten a bit excited and rambled XD It means a lot that you asked!)

SHIFTERS ARE WAY COOL!! And thank you, I'm not sure how common that is specifically (Jawz seems to have a Bit more control over some nuanced aspects of her shifting than most, and I could Ramble about shifter genetics and types here) but it makes me happy you think it's cool too!! She's ABSOLUTELY a lovable scamp, and I love the Aladdin analogy here because I now realize she so gives that, scampering around rooftops and causing a bit of mischief here and there. And also AAAA thank you Wolfy, that means a lot!! ABSOLUTELY PLEASE GO FOR IT, I LOVE seeing art of shifters with their shift forms beside them, and I'm definitely not the only person I've seen do it- I would love to see what and who you do there and I'm cheering for it!!