Description
Names: Lana, Jet and Celeste
Age: 7 â Lana is the oldest; Celeste is the middle; and Jet is the youngest of them.
Genders: Jet is male, while Lana and Celeste are both female.
Species: Snow leopard, Uncia uncia or Panthera uncia
Description: All three look very similar to each other â that is, like regular snow leopards. They're all stocky, have thick smoky fur with blackish spots, and are generally built to survive cold weather. However, they all have some differences that tell them apart well enough. Jet is the only one with green eyes, whereas Lana and Celeste's are grey. He's also about twice as heavy as his sisters. Celeste always sleeps with her long, thick tail over her face, and Lana is clearly the most vocal of the three. Celeste's spots are more spread out against her fur than her siblings', while Jet has more spots on his tail than Celeste or Lana. Lana has a spot with a striking resemblance to a flower just behind her neck as well, but there's nothing like that with the other two.
Personality: While normally solitary animals, the increased intelligence had given these siblings an eye for strategy. Sticking together with the people they trusted most â each other, of course â was a resulting motivation from the experiments. They are able to understand human speech as humans do, and are capable of responding in a kind of broken, yet functional and complex language mixed between the vocalizations of a normal snow leopard and the diversity of human English. One hiss or mew could simply say "I'm hungry," while even a slight change in just the vibrato can make it "Anybody hungry? I found food!" They can solve puzzles, change tactics and objectives on the fly, and (for all intents and purposes) do everything a regular human can do that doesn't require opposable thumbs; and even then they'll probably still find a way to do it.
Skills: Stalking, stealthing, and complex communication that only they can understand.
Weaknesses: They fight frequently due to their higher sentience, and their instincts have suffered to varying degrees because of the experiments and their upbringing.
History: These three were among the Wildlife Enhancement Project's first perfected experiments, which involved giving animals human-level intelligence. The Wildlife Enhancement Project, funded by the same group behind SAPH, took Jet, Lana and Celeste from their dens soon after they were only twelve weeks old. After they were brought in, each one was forced through various types of mind-enhancing experiments while they grew up. This ranged from physical stimulation of the regions around their brains to a series of serums and injections, and it continued until the leopards were about three years old.
Soon, the WEP started teaching them like they would have human children, and they learned. They learned how to read like children, and created their own scratch-writing to communicate with each other. (To this day, the Project still can't understand it very well.) Needless to say, they learned very quickly. Over the course of the next four years, then past their initial developmental stage, they used their leopard intuition and heightened intelligence to take on assignments that rivaled the hybrids of SAPH both literally and figuratively. With various animals now at a degree of sentience previously accessible only by humans, the WEP became rivals to SAPH despite having related goals. Many of their targets and assignments nowadays coincide with each other as a type of "friendly" contest to see whose creations are the better, and with growing improvements to the Wildlife Enhancement Project's funding and experimentation they're getting ever closer to an actual competition between the sister organizations.