Lindsey likes shapechanging under her own power. It's validating and she gets a bit of a psychological boost from it!

And its just fun!

Some of that. While it's gotten much better as she's gotten older and gotten some wins under her belt, Lindsey used to stutter a fair bit in her human form, but not when shapechanged.

Lindsey Kelsey "Metamorph" Stelzer is my "metahuman" shapeshifter character. Her main world is based largely around comic book style "metahumans", with a bit of a more realistic bent. (At the time I created the character in 2012, the term "superhero" and associated were ostensibly under a joint trademark by Marvel and DC comics. They've since lost that, but also, people being called "Superheroes" and "Supervillains" and such IRL seems silly, so for these reasons I used the more generic "metahuman")

Lindsey herself became a metahuman at about 16 years old in an accident at an animal shelter she was working overnight at, being shocked by lightning through a computer she was working at. Her dad was an electric based metahuman and that offered additional resistance and protection. (The further details of the event have never been defined precisely, as they're largely unimportant. To borrow a line from the late, great, Douglas Adams, "The precise details of the incident are unimportant, as nobody has ever managed to replicate them, though many people have ended up looking very silly, or dead, or more usually both, in the attempt.")

Lindsey awakened as an Extrahuman class metahuman, developing shapeshifting powers. While originally Lindsey was built as a 'vehicle' for her powerset to roleplay on Kaerwyn, and ended up a girl on pretty much the flip of a coin, over time she's become one of my most rewarding characters to play. I'm still working on her overall setting, termed "META", for the Metahuman Evaluation and Tracking Administration, which is a governmental (or possibly intergovernmental!) group in her world that handles metahuman related issues. They're a mix of SHIELD, Project Cadmus, Damage Control, and some elements of the Sokovia Accords and Metahuman Registration Act.

Broadly, META deals with keeping tabs on the metahumans and their activities, running interference for them to keep their cover, coordinating responses to any metahuman that goes rogue, evaluating power levels, and some of the behind-the-scenes work.

Lindsey herself as a character is trying to be a "superhero for animals", in the sense that she assists places like zoos, farms, and such with various ways to make animals more comfortable and less abused in bad situations. She's studying to become an animal behavioralist, and an 'animal welfare consultant'. There's a massive, obvious communication barrier with finding out how to enrich the lives of captive animals, and one of the things animal behaviorists study is to study those things, and figure out how to make the animals feel better being out of their natural surroundings.

Lindsey can cheat, by shapeshifting into the animal in question and checking out of the new enclosure, or method of transport, or what not, a once over, and give her opinions. Is it big enough? Is it hard to move around in. Is it too hot, or too obviously fake to the animal in question? Then she can give this in a report to the person hiring her.

She's also an estreen, to borrow a term from Animorphs, which means she's skilled at her shapeshifting and making it look good and having good control.

There is also an alternate version of Lindsey with a somewhat different character history in a cyberpunk setting I'm working on with Lunarkeys. She has a lot of the same values about animals and the vigilante streak, but here she's working from a different position of being the survivor of a purge of a shifter program by the Mythica corporation, and being driven not only by helping animals, but in wanting to get even with the corp that took away her childhood and all her friends.

Hope this helps!

Glad you like!

That description for Lindsey went super long, lol. I didn't actually mean for it to get that detailed but it just kept going...I might have to use it elsewhere now.