Requested by Gorseclaw99

Mother: Leafstrike, a pale brown tabby with green eyes and short fur.

Father: Rockfall, a brown and ginger torbie with amber eyes and short fur

Snakestar's original appearance: A brown and ginger caliby tuxedo she-cat with amber eyes (reference sheet linked in comments)

Genetically accurate appearance: A light brown (cinnamon) and ginger torbie she-cat with amber eyes.

(I chose not to include the base fill of what Snakestar looks like, read the edit on the rules page for more details)

Explanation:

So, Leafstrike is a pale brown tabby she-cat, but when talking about cat genetics, pale brown is pretty much equivalent to the color fawn, which is just a diluted version of another color called cinnamon.

Rockfall is a brown and ginger torbie, and YES I know that tortoiseshell toms that aren't infertile are incredibly rare, but they ARE possible. But that's besides the point. Brown is the equivalent of chocolate, so in technical terms, Rockfall would be a chocolate and ginger torbie.

Now, an important thing to note is that fur color (excluding white, since white is technically not a base color) is a sex-linked trait. This means that each gene is found in a cat's X chromosome(s). Females usually have two X chromosomes, while males usually have one X and one Y chromosome. Most tortoiseshell cats are female because they need one X chromosome for each of the two colors on their pelts. However, a genetic mutation can be caused where a tom has two X chromosomes and one Y chromosome, allowing it to be a tortoiseshell! This mutation USUALLY causes infertility, but in this case, it doesn't.

In order for Snakestar to be a chocolate tortoiseshell, she needs the genotype X^b1/X^O, which doesn't exist in this punnett square, and the closest thing there is to it is a cinnamon and ginger tortoiseshell.

Now as for the torbie part, I'm still unsure on the genetics behind torbies. I used to think that they were just tortoiseshells with the agouti (tabby) gene, but I read somewhere that torbies are rare, so I don't think that's that's the case. I think it's just a random mutation, so we'll leave Snakestar as a torbie.

And LASTLY, the white spotting. Snakestar can't be a caliby due to neither of her parents having any white on them. The white spotting gene is not sex-linked, so both she-cats and toms each get two genes. The capital W stands for white-spotting, and it is dominant to the lowercase w, which stands for no white-spotting. Since Rockfall and Leafstrike both have no white on them, they both have the genotypes ww. At least one of them needs to have the white-spotting gene in order for Snakestar to have it, and since neither of them do, Snakestar can't have any white on her.

So that just about wraps things up! Thank you for requesting!