[center][img]https://external-preview.redd.it/has-science-gone-too-far-pic-v0-lK7gHV2Su5WYBuT5_UfzxQZCwTnMw-NL3R3HZwz1fBA.jpeg?auto=webp&s=c40c3e614e9e34a4e3d917e7093b313ccfb167fb[/img][/center][hider=Ryoka Shikimi][center][img]https://i.imgur.com/wNTyk4L.png[/img]
[hider=Theme][youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h_HgZMlvVpI[/youtube][/hider]
[color=#35FDF3]"The question should never be, 'has science gone too far?' What you should be asking is, 'was it worth it?' Because I assure you, the answer is yes."[/color][/center]
[color=#35FDF3]Full Name:[/color] Ryoka Shikimi

[color=#35FDF3]Age:[/color] 23

[color=#35FDF3]Year at the Institute:[/color] Second

[color=#35FDF3]Dialogue Color: Cyan-Turquoise #35FDF3[/color]

[color=#35FDF3]Thesis Subject:[/color] Pokémon Fusion: The Viability and Utility of Pokémon Gene-Splicing and Its Applications Within the Field of Pokémon Epigenetics

[color=#35FDF3]Appearance:[/color] Ryoka is a perfectionist, and it shows in her composed outward demeanor and immaculate attire. She's not one for dresses or jewelery, though she is known to wear red-rimmed glasses and the occasional colorful accessory. She tends to appear more unapproachable than she actually is, and when there are "more important matters", the last thing she'll care about is how she looks.

[color=#35FDF3]Personality:[/color] Ryoka is a bit intense in a lot of different ways. She isn't very good at small talk and her best customer service face just makes her look annoyed, so if you register as a distraction to her, she's likely to come off as cold and dismissive. On the other hand, if she comes to see you as a person she can bounce ideas off of, she's rather casual, uses a lot of deadpan snark, and can talk your ear off for hours about obscure pokémon biology and its highly specific niches in nature, battle, and commercial industries.

Outside of her interests, which are rather dense in content, she tends to cut straight to the heart of matters and is offputtingly forthright. Her words are sometimes as sharp as a blade, and it is very easy to end up cutting yourself on her metaphorical edges, only for her to be blissfully unaware.

She is driven, goal-oriented, and chafes at being told what she can and can't do. For her, almost every problem has a solution, and she is simultaneously humble enough to seek help and arrogant enough to keep looking when she doesn't immediately find an answer. She can be difficult to get along with, but her preferred solution to conflict resolution is to simply battle about it until it stops being a problem.

[color=#35FDF3]Bio:[/color] Ryoka was born and raised in Tōno City, which is North of Kanto, South of Sinnoh, and east of Sinjoh and Kitakami. It's a relatively quiet place with a lot of history, and Ryoka has always regarded it as kinda boring. Her father works at a Brewery, while her mother used to be a trainer of some renown before her Ace Typhlosion suffered an unfortunate career-ending injury. She is still a trainer, but not a particularly competitive one, and she mostly works at a local hotspring since her pokémon are good at temperature control. Ryoka decided she needed to get out of Tōno as soon as she could, and so when she was old enough and got her first pokémon, she did just that.

Although pokémon journeys were comparatively less popular in Tōno on account of the lack of local pokémon league, she had no trouble convincing her parents to let her go on one, and her goal wasn't to complete a gym circuit anyway. She mostly just wanted to see the world outside of her city full of old temples. She had already loosely planned to become a pokémon professor with a focus on epigenetics on account of the many tricks of her mother's aging Typhlosion, but it was only after going on a journey with the peculiarity of a Solosis with an atypical ability that she really began to dig into the possibilities. She learned how to battle, evolved Solosis, and even won a few gym badges, but as her plans for the future began to solidify, she began to reprioritize. She didn't need pokéballs, but she did need the money for an expensive second party member and their evolution requirements. After much toil, a Porygon was acquired, though as she got to know them, her plans for the future shifted further. Eventually, she settled on the path she is on today, and in what she would call a stroke of genius, she decided her team needed at least one more party member.

The rest is less history and more an insane hyper-fixation with world-shaking socio-political ramifications. Not that most of those ramifications are her problem anyway, at least for a while. In any case, after returning home and producing her first partial success at gene splicing and publishing the results, she made headlines, and was recommended to apply to the Laventon Institute, which offered some very attractive facilities and resources. She was accepted, and has since been slowly producing more results in her research without paying much mind to the growing controversy surrounding her work taking place behind closed doors. She was always good at arguing her way through unfair teachers anyway.

Come her second year, she realized she had missed Pokémon Ecology 101 since she had been excited about the other options in her first year, and it would only be useful to her in the latest stages of her research. Since it was a graduation requirement, she figured she might as well get it over with, and it would likely become useful eventually, if releasing Chimeras into the wild ever becomes a desirable outcome.

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Anthroparion the Reuniclus (Peri for short)
[img]https://ifd-spaces.sfo2.cdn.digitaloceanspaces.com/custom/359d.png[/img]
Ability: Trace
Ryoka's first pokémon and the one that arguably set her on her path aiming to become a pokémon professor specialized in genetics. Peri's father was a Gardevoir, and whether through chance or environmental factors, he inherited his father's Trace ability, which makes him an anomaly among Reuniclus. Although unnoticed at first and arguably a detriment in battle compared to standard Reuniclus abilities, Ryoka came to appreciate the uniqueness of Trace. This eventually extended to her research as Peri's partially transparent body and ability to mimic pokémon abilities provided a unique opportunity to study pokémon biology. Nowadays, Peri's ability to mimic aspects of other biologies combined with its permeablility and psychic power makes it perfect for keeping DNA samples alive and stored away within its body, ready for artificial cellular reproduction if more samples are needed and modification via Dox's instructions when Ryoka is ready to conduct a new or revisit an old experiment.

[hr]Archidoxis the Porygon-Z (Doxis or Dox for short, Archie when Ryoka wants to annoy them)
[img]https://ifd-spaces.sfo2.cdn.digitaloceanspaces.com/custom/275f.png[/img]
Ability: Download
Although Ryoka initially sought out a Porygon for a Trace user to compare with Peri's Trace, with the added benefit of being able to look into Porygon's code during the process, Porygon are hard to come by, and certainly not cheap. It took long hours in jobs Ryoka would rather not talk about to be able to afford one, but in the end she simply adopted one (albeit for a non-negligible fee) after a crackdown on poachers in Sinnoh after a certain "reputable" pokémon delivery service used by a certain rich eccentric was revealed to be less than reputable. By the time she realized Doxis didn't have the Trace ability, she was already knee-deep in being able to study a fully artificial pokémon, with all of the potential genetic modularity inherent to that. The Download ability simply came as a welcome surprise, and caused her to pivot her plans for Doxis yet again. It allowed Doxis to ascertain relatively detailed information on a pokémon not unlike a pokédex, and when they evolved into a Porygon2, they were able to meaningfully contribute to pokémon gene sequencing efforts. She doesn't regret evolving Doxis into a Porygon-Z. She knew the risks of doing so, but make no mistake, Porygon-Z are much more powerful, and she needed that kind of processing power for her purposes. A touch of madness here and there wasn't so bad anyway. In any case, Doxis came to be the digital side of her DNA database, helping Peri index his catalogue and serving as the main vehicle through which she plans gene edits. In conjunction with Peri's psychic abilities, it is enough to modify DNA, simulate the outcome, and prep the samples for use in conjunction with her third party member.

[hr]Alkahest the Ditto (Alk for short)
[img]https://ifd-spaces.sfo2.cdn.digitaloceanspaces.com/custom/132k.png[/img]
Ability: Limber, changes with transformations
The star of Ryoka's research, Alk's transformative capabilities allowed her to do safe experiments and ultimately skip to the practical applications of her research. With help from Reuniclus' DNA database, Alk can transform into any pokémon Ryoka has taken a sample from. With help from Dox's gene editing software, variations can be made, and with enough work on Alk's part with Ryoka, Dox, and Peri's help, Alk can transform into a chimera: a stable fusion of two separate pokémon, with a mix of their strengths and weaknesses. Currently, Alk has mastered shapeshifting into various Ditto-based forms, mainly those with the face of a Ditto and the body of other pokémon.
[hider=Ditto forms of varying stability][img]https://ifd-spaces.sfo2.cdn.digitaloceanspaces.com/custom/132.400.png[/img][img]https://ifd-spaces.sfo2.cdn.digitaloceanspaces.com/custom/132.294b.png[/img][img]https://ifd-spaces.sfo2.cdn.digitaloceanspaces.com/custom/132.388a.png[/img][/hider]
Alk is able to do this with decent consistency even with new pokémon and minimal assistance from Ryoka, Peri and Dox. Some species, according to Alk, are too unstable when combined with Ditto, though being able to meaningfully battle with an untransformed pseudo-Ditto at all is a major breakthrough. Whether Alk's limitations are personal or generalized, Ryoka has not yet confirmed. However, the hard part comes from trying to maintain the face of other pokémon and the body of a Ditto. Alk has had some success with such forms, but cannot reproduce them consistently. Ryoka hopes to use these Ditto-based fusions as a stepping stone towards combining the genes of two different non-ditto pokémon via Dox and providing it to Alk to enable fully realized pokémon fusions. Once a perfect end result is achieved, Ryoka believes that she can extrapolate the method in reverse to create stable pokémon chimeras from scratch.
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[color=#35FDF3]Quirks:[/color]
[list][*]Has an inexplicable obsession with Azumarill ears, among other specific pokémon body parts. She Insists Azumarill ears are supreme in terms of capability, versatility, and aesthetics. She moves the goal posts away from capability when Audino is brought up.
[*]Ryoka is the type of person to binge bulbapedia articles at 3 am.
[*]Despite knowing how to synthesize the exact chemicals used to light up Chinchou's bioluminescent lamps, she has a lot of inexplicable blind spots about a number of common pokémon. She could tell you the number of bones in a Pidgey (120-130ish based on age and region) but couldn't tell you the difference between a male and female Starly.[/list][/hider]