Sparky
Nicknames: God-Tiger, The Marshite Gift
Weight: 350-450 lbs female, 400-500 lbs male
Height: 44-47.5 inches female, 46-51.1 inches male
Coat: Black to brown-rusty coats, a whitish medial and ventral area, a white "fringe" that surrounds the face, and stripes
that vary from brown or gray to pure black. The form and density of stripes differs between exact location of generational breeding. Usually quite thin coat.
Abstract
The Marshite Sparky is the national animal of the Holy Marsh, and a fierce warrior breed that has served alongside the Marshite people for thousands of years. It is renown for its great size, enormous strength, incredible speed, intelligence, cunning, and intense loyalty. They are considered by many to be the deadliest warrior-animal sidekick in the world, and are considered to be the biggest as well.
History
The Sparky is an extremely distant relative of the Bengal and Siberian Tiger, but has adapted to the climate of the Hitlion mountains and the Pushanian jungle. In the eons before recorded history began, ancient peoples lived in awe and fear of the Sparky, who were not only individually intimidating and intelligent, but often worked in packs. The ancient culture of Treva'Push raised many Idols in the image of a Sparky, believing that they could somehow ward them off. The many skeletons found nearby tell another story entirely.
As the Marshite People grew in size and strength, they were able to adapt to the Sparky and overthe course of thousands of years, the various tribes managed to eventually subdue the Sparky. Instead of pushing them deeper into the jungles however, the outnumbered Marshite people saw use for these intelligent animals. They were soon tamed- as best as could be done, anyway. Hundreds of Sparkies were soon being used by the populace for hunting expeditions, where they were often used more as a defense against other Sparkies and the fierce Pushania predators, and war, where their expertise at jungle and mountain hunting combined with their increasing familiarity with human warfare and great physical size allowed them to become true terrors. This was 4,000 years ago.
From these initially small breeding groups, Marshites started selecting the fiercest, the smartest, the strongest, and the swiftest. Over the generations, Sparkies started getting not only physically more imposing, but started to show signs of adapting to humanity- and soon were becoming domesticated and closely intertwined with the Marshite people. By the time 1,000 years had passed from initial Marshite dominance, Sparkies had become loyal and terrifying guardians.
For the next 1,000 years, Marshites started developing Sparkies to be used in more conventional battles. While some disasters were recorded, tactics and strategies were developed alongside the Sparkies evolving to deal with their new realities and they became a small but terrifying part of the Marshite Military when it was formally established alongside the state.
During the Long War, Sparkies, who had at times started to fall more into the pet role, were soon transformed entirely into a warrior breed. Because Sparkies could serve a variety of needs- scouts, terror animals behind enemy lines, ambushers in the dark of the night, shock forces in battle, hunters, and guards- they became a breeding priority for the Marshite state. Sparkies continued to be used in such roles for the entirety of the Long War. As the late 20th Century came to pass, Marshite science came to the forefront of Sparky development.
In a sense, the Sparky of the modern day is already one that has been genetically engineered for more than 4,000 years, so geneticists who worked on the Advancement of the Sparky Species Initiative instead focused on removing harmful traits. At the same time, the Sparky found itself less useful in its role in open battle in massive numbers- indeed, of the tens of millions of Sparkies that are owned owned by the State, only a quarter million are required for current Marshite military concerns. This has allowed the Marshite people to only retain around one-percent of current war-time Sparkies. Work began on selecting the most intelligent, strongest, fastest, longest-living, and cunning for future breeding.The latest conflict in which the Sparky has been used, and the one in which the Grand Theocracy has come under intense fire from multitudes of organizations, is the undeclared Border War with Trevancore.
Ten thousand Sparkies were dropped in Trevancore, a jungle nation that borders Holy Marsh and has a small population of Sparkies itself. Working in small packs and using their generations of training, breeding, and affinity for jungle warfare, they worked their way back to their masters in Holy Marsh...and slaughtered their way through Trevancore in doing so. Exact casualties are unknown since Sparkies eat much of their prey, but Trevancore lists the losses as anywhere from 3,000-4,000 KIA, with a much larger number wounded. Many Sparkies have been killed, but a large percentage have either returned to their masters in Holy Marsh or, in a more worrying development for many organizations, have stayed in Trevancore.
Being advanced, developed predators, they have absolutely shattered the eco-system by destroying most predators in the area, including wiping out the local Sparky population. They are believed to be breeding while still causing havoc for Trevancore military forces- and most telling about the 4,000 years of Marshite-Sparky relationship and training together, several Sparky cubs have found their way back to Holy Marsh and have taken to the Marshite populace with minimal violence. Some have dubbed this ecosystem warfare.
Physical Stature And Life Cycle
Sparkies are a large breed of animal, averaging 350-450 pounds for the females to 400-500 pounds for the male, with the males averaging nearly 110 inches in length and fifty inches tall in larger specimens. They are packed with tight, coiled muscle and use their claws, which grow to four or five inches in length, and their sharp canines which average three inches in length to attack their prey. Their hind legs are larger than their front legs, enabling them to have enormous leaping ability- jumps of thirty feet are not uncommon. They are able to run in bursts between thirty five and forty miles an hour, though the known sustainable movement of a Sparky is twenty miles alone and fifteen miles in a pack an hour.
Sparkies tend to breed in litters of five to eight after a three month gestation cycle. The young are raised by the pack jointly for about a year. Sparkies whose 'smell' tells the elders that it is defective or otherwise a hindrance are normally killed at an early age. After this time period, the dominant male and female of the litter(sometimes, only one or the other) join what is known as the Pack Proper. They are then usually taken under the wing of the dominant members of the Pack and get future breeding rights and first dibs on kills. All other pups are relegated to the larger part of the pack, the Pack Secondary, which acts more or less as secondary citizens in the pack. Secondary Sparkies often challenge to be moved into the Pack Proper in duels that either end with the Secondary's victory and replacement of Pack Proper loser, or the death of the Secondary.
When they make 'camp', the Pack Secondaries often assume the role of guards and scouts as well as hunters for the Pack Proper. The Pack Proper only moves out and joins the hunt once the area is secured, and even then they often stay back to defend the young.
Female Sparkies of the Proper tend to give birth three or four times a year, their primary reason for joining Pack Proper being to mate with the strongest in the Pack. Secondary Sparky females tend to mate perhaps once a year, with Pack Proper often not allowing the 'inferior' secondary Sparkies to upset the balance of the Pack. The most common intra-Pack issue is the killing of 'unlawful' secondary Sparky children or the male mates.
When a Pack Proper reaches 10-15 males, issues arise as the fight for resources becomes vicious. This is often the stage in which the Pack splits and new off-shots are formed. There are 11,927 confirmed Sparky packs in the wild in Pushania, and studies show that they are all related to around twenty original packs.
The largest Sparky Pack ever recorded was 18 Sparky Males and 6 Sparky Females in the Pack Proper and 30 Sparky Male Secondaries and 29 Female Secondaries. This pack, 83 strong not counting the newborns, is fifteen animals larger than the next largest pack.
The area usually hunted by a Sparky Pack and claimed as its own is large- the Pack tends to move in small groups of two to five at some distance apart unless trouble is a brewing before they find a suitable location to settle for a few months. If threatened, Sparky packs are easily able to adapt to moving in either much larger packs, solo, constantly on the move or operating purely at night in order to remain hidden. In a famous example, a pack of sixteen Sparkies lived and operated less than three hundred yards from a Trevancore military base for four months before their attacks started and they were discovered.
They use body language as well as a varying number of growls, meows, hisses, roars and screeches to communicate. Their excellent sense of smell has been developed over the years to distinguish Pack Sparkies or other friendly forces/Sparkies over long distances, with subtle variations in pheromones often sending signals otherwise best left unsaid. Their hearing is better than that of a human's, but is even more improved at hearing ultra-high level frequencies. They see as well at night as humans do in the day and see as well in the day as can be expected from a tiger.
In military training camps, Sparkies are trained either individually or in packs. If packs, the Sparkies are removed at a young age from their packs of birth after showing themselves as being the dominant members of their litter and are placed under the care of a grouping of trainers. Effectively, they are now Pack Secondaries and consider the humans to be Pack Propers. One side effect of this is that the pack that lost its cubs tend to collapse in terms of structure and often become more of an organized, if peaceful, mob of secondaries. Without any breeding restrictions placed on them, these packs tend to reproduce at a much higher rate. This creates a situation wherein the military consistently gets new candidates and the pack outside of training gets larger, meaning more reproduction takes place.
Sparkies tend to live 12-16 years and are considered combat operable three years into their lives. They do have physical issues which continue to confound geneticists. A heart condition which can cut their lifespan by have is endemic in some infected bloodlines, though the military takes great care to ensure those lines do not further impact their military bloodlines. Because of their great size and pack nature, starvation is a common fate for some members of an uncommonly unsuccessful pack. An illness found in some Sparkies known as the Hatter's Gift causes a white discoloration at the top of the head that normally signifies a significantly heightened risk for psychopathic episodes. The massive structure that is the Sparky requires a dense and hard bone structure, yet ill-nutritioned female Sparkies can give birth to Sparkies who suffer from weak bones that can often kill the cub as it grows. This is known as the Mother's Death. All of these issues, save for the heart condition, can either be identified early with no harm done or otherwise solved and none, save for the heart condition, carry on in a blood line. There is also the possibility of deformed limbs, organs, or tissue that contribute to an early death.
Mental Abilities
Sparkies are highly intelligent creatures, owing more to their almost photographic memory than anything else. They can not only be trained to do almost any task, but once learned, almost never need to re-learn it and hardly ever make mistakes. They can be trained to complete a puzzle and three years later when shown the puzzle again can likely solve it as quickly as it ever could. Sparkies that are raised young are extremely loyal to the human trainers, often looking at them as mother, father, and Pack leader. More importantly, over the generations, this loyalty has transferred to being extremely friendly with Pushanian Marshites as a whole and even an ability to tell Marshites from others.
This trust has enabled training for a wide variety of tasks. Sparkies have been trained to ambush forces, stalk human prey, help sniff out bombs, take down single targets, crowd control, urban terror campaigns, and even as pack mules(their intense body structure allows them to carry a heavy load). Perhaps the most awesome aspect of a trained Sparky and his pack is that they can often operate independently of any human forces and still accomplish whatever simple task they had been sent to do.
In Trevancore, the Sparkies were trained to return north to Pushania and more specifically to a specialty camp that was emitting a high-frequency signal. They were also trained to kill any human that got in their way that did not have the smell
of a Pushanian Marshite. They did both of these things despite going for months without any friendly contact.
They can make good companions in good homes, but it is not really a good idea to do so- they are predators and vicious ones at that, and owners must take great strides in ensuring that their animals know that it isn't okay to leap out of the window to attack the mailman. If trained well, they can be kind and friendly animals. Their 4,000 years of dealing with Marshites has made it quite easy for them to deal with Marshite masters and customs, but their affinity does not translate to foreign cultures as easily.
Training
For military purposes, training begins after cubs have separated themselves from one another to form Pack Proper-caliber cubs and Pack Secondary cubs. The ones identified as Proper are taken away from the breeding pack and given to the Marshite trainers.
These new packs of Sparkies are effectively Pack Secondaries with the trainers being Pack Proper. In order to sustain this effective system, the trainers must be aggressive and dominant throughout training. After Pack Dominance is achieved, Sparkies tend to take to the training flawlessly, save for the occassional challenge to authority. Sparkies are excellent learners through audio and visual means, meaning the range of options available to teach them is suitably impressive. When combined with their problem solving abilities and impressive memory skills, training a Sparky to complete a task has more to do with how it is taught by the trainers and less to do with the animal itself. They can be trained to be friendly to certain people and violent against others, what noises, smells, and sights should provoke them to hide and prepare an ambush or hide, attack, run, or any range of trained tactical responses.
What a Sparky can or cannot do is only really limited by what the military wants them to do as well as by their intelligence- while very intelligent for an animal, they are still not capable of higher abstract thought or reasoning. They can use their training to piece together puzzles by themselves, such as being able to ascertain that a tank identified as not being friendly but not known as hostile in the terrain they have been trained in is likely a vehicle worth hiding from, but unless they have been trained to identify a tank, will not innately know it is something to be avoided.
In the end, training a Sparky is more about what tasks the Sparky must accomplish. Any tactic that works with other war animals is effective for a Sparky. The biggest difference is that with their pack nature, a clutch of Sparkies are often trained and operate together.
As for the Sparkies who are not chosen for full-on military training, they are often checked to make sure their genetics are in order. If so, they are allowed to breed while others are killed. Survivors breed and are often trained for guard, hunting, and sentry duties.
Beyond that, Sparkies can be trained with a wide range of electronics and devices to relay information and orders. However, due to the gargantuan variety of was that the Sparky can be used, there is really no standardization of training across nations for the Sparky. It is not considered vital due to the intelligence of the beast, as well as the capability to attach any number of electronics.
Cost and Export
Due to the nature of the Sparky, being the national animal of the Holy Marsh as well as a war-beast of frightening capability and utility, the Marshite government reserves the right to deny the purchase of any Sparky or Sparky Pack. They are sold through license via Lyran Arms.
The following options are available:
One(1) Sparky Male, Kitten- $20,000
One(1) Sparky Female, Kitten- $21,000
One(1) Mating Pair, Kitten- $35,000
One(1) Pack, Four(4) Males, Four(4) Females, Kittens- $120,000
One(1) Sparky Male, Adult- $25,000
One(1) Sparky Female, Adult- $28,000
One(1) Mating Pair, Adult- $50,000
One(1) Pack, Four(4) Males, Four(Females), Adults- $175,000
Pack, Numbers Negotiable- ???