Shakti notices your gaze and finds a pose that she believes will meet with your approval. She is a slender fruit bat approximately 5 feet 8 inches tall, with a light frame and a well-toned body. You can see that she has spent quite a bit of her time and energy keeping fit and trim, and from the way she stands, you might guess that she's perhaps a little vain about it. Her face is covered in short, dappled-grey fur, fading to white at the tip of her elongated muzzle and becoming a bit longer at her cheeks. It continues down her front in the traditional pattern, bordered in medium grey. Her ears are quite large and rounded at the tips, also grey in color and tipped in black. Her large, blue-green eyes sparkle with vitality and a hint of mischief, and her short hair is dyed a deep, dark red that contrasts with the normal grey coloring of her fur.

Shakti's favorite outfit consists of a dark blue medium-length skirt, or a pair of blue-jean shorts, a pair of tennis shoes and white socks, and a light yellow T-shirt with a picture of a cute black-and-white kitten on it - ready to pounce something, it appears. Her body is moderately proportioned, with features that don't call too much attention to themselves and yet can make her quite attractive to the right furs. She tends to stand with her leathery wings folded across her body, as though to hide herself from your view. Like most bats, the smooth membranes of her wings are of a similar greyish-brown color as her fur.

Shakti at Conifur 2002, as drawn by Heather Bruton

I discovered in the last few years that in addition to skunks, kangaroos and dolphins, I also have a keen interest in bats. To explore this interest, I created an alternate form for Kiefer, my main character. This form was a flying fox based on one of Terrie Smith's pictures, but I decided after a short time that this wasn't a form I was comfortable with. Later on, I created Shisa, a Japanese fruit bat. She took off and, for a while, became an alternative alias for me to play online with. (Without going into detail, this did get me into trouble at one point, when I went a little too far with role-playing an alter-ego.)

After a little while, and partially in response to some feedback I'd gotten about Tatiana, I decided to create another bat, Shakti - Shisa's younger sister. To make this somewhat realistic, I decided to modernize Shisa a bit and make them two separate personalities, with Shakti being the playful, mischievious type and Shisa being of the den-mother variety. This combination worked, and the characters stuck. I consider Shakti a sort of "evolution" of Tatiana, with more distinct personality traits and stronger, more specific preferences.