Ryik

Pokemon: Professor's Academy

Cool.

Fossil Abominations

/jk

If all else fails she'll probably just get a second Ditto to glue together with the first.

Pokemon: Professor's Academy

I would say she's following in the footsteps of "Cara Liss, the misunderstood genius" more.

Your call whether Ryoka is eventually allowed to successfully create a Chimera with more than just Ditto or not.

Pokemon: Professor's Academy

Ryoka Shikimi

Theme

"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."

Full Name: Ryoka Shikimi

Age: 23

Year at the Institute: Second

Dialogue Color: Cyan-Turquoise #35FDF3

Thesis Subject: Pokémon Fusion: The Viability and Utility of Pokémon Gene-Splicing and Its Applications Within the Field of Pokémon Epigenetics

Appearance: 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.

Personality: 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.

Bio: 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.

Pokémon

Anthroparion the Reuniclus (Peri for short)

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.

---

Archidoxis the Porygon-Z (Doxis or Dox for short, Archie when Ryoka wants to annoy them)

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.

---

Alkahest the Ditto (Alk for short)

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.

Ditto forms of varying stability

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.

Quirks:

• 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.

Yugioh - Digital Advance

McCoy

"Nah, I'm good. Thanks for the help, though." He said, talking to tour guide like a person because exchanging pleasantries with NPCs was good luck in games like these. He gave the guide building a cursory survey and quickly found a group of a few people forming a party. He doesn't know what the limit on party size is, or what exactly the exp situation was for party play, but it was bound to be a more chill experience than figuring things out alone.

The party seemed to already have their duel monsters out, and since his Dark Cat liked to be summoned into stealth, he figured he'd go with Glow Moss as part of his introduction. He held up Glow Moss' card, trying out the "summoning" mechanics, and watched as a small puddle of slime appeared on the ground in front of him.

...

Well then.

He was about to say something to it, or perhaps about it, when a humanoid figure began to rise up out of the puddle, which shrank as it did so until nothing but the figure remained. It looked to be the size of a tall child or short teenager, with gangly limbs that didn't match the normal proportions of its hands and shoulders. Its skin was glossy and emanated a pale glow that made it difficult to discern anything through the rest of its semitransparent body, including the three orbs floating within whose colors were completely indistinguishable from the outside.

"Yo."

"..."

Hmm. Right. No mouth. Hope it doesn't feel the need to scream.

He gestures Glow Moss to follow him with a quick tilt of his head, walking over to group of three and quietly sending a join party request through the game's interface as he offers them all a casual hand wave.

"Yo! I'm Koi. This is Glow Moss. Mind if I join?"

As Minimax the party leader, gave her answer, he figured he should mention the tip he got from the Guide, in case they hadn't heard it yet. With a hand on his chin, he recounted; "The guide NPC over yonder said the World of Grace would be a good place to start, if none of you have any other ideas about where to go."

@The Irish Tree

Yugioh - Digital Advance

McCoy

Getting day 1 Terminus access involved jumping through more than a few hoops, but once he was finally in, instead of directly entering the digital world, he was stopped short with instructions to choose some starting cards. He had a few ideas to go off of, though it seemed that the original effects of duel monsters didn't always correlate with their advanced duel counterparts, so he'd largely have to go in blind. It's not like he's ever participated in an advanced duel either.

After spending a bit of time trying to go through the list of available monsters, he realized that, with how big the catalogue of monsters was, there was no chance he'd get through it all, and even if he did, he didn't know what some of the cards were even talking about in the first place. Eventually he felt like he was spending too much time on this when he could be progressing in ways that could render his starting conditions obsolete (which was totally not just his impatience talking) and he used the system's card recommendation feature where it did a brain scan before throwing a set of seemingly random cards at him. None of them looked repulsive at first glance, (though he had to wonder why it gave him a jelly blob and a cat of all things) so he accepted the recommendations blindly and moved on to avatar creation.

"Hmmmmm..." He held his scruffy chin as he stared contemplatively at an A-posing model of himself, before eventually deciding to quietly add one inch to his height before moving on, changing nothing else. Well, nothing except for adding back his hat, which he had taken off to put on the headset. He was a hat guy.

Finally, it was time to enter a username, and he went with the one he'd been using since his teenage years: Konoha Koi. It didn't really mean much other than being similar to his real name and a reference to his favorite Naruto character, Kisame, who was a weird shark man. Everyone shortened it to Koi in conversation as a matter of course and being called "Koi" felt normal in a way that other usernames didn't.

Finally arriving in the hub world, he took a couple of minutes to just take in the sights. It was his first full dive VR game, and, at least based on first impressions of graphical immersion, it certainly lived up to the hype.

Okay, sightseeing over, time to get down to 'bidniss. An in-game mailbox was flashing at him and one expository Tour Guide dialogue later, his first order of business was figuring out where to go. Neither of his monsters actually seemed very strong offensively, and while one of his traps would help fighting with one of them, his cat cards seem to only help his Dark Cat with fucking around. as for Attribute Bomb... wait, why was he given this card in the first place? What the hell is this card?

At least his spells seemed to have practically nonexistent cooldowns. That was nice, because he had a feeling he'd be relying on them to get anything done. His much more straightforward traps, however, did not offer him the same luxury.

After entering the guide building and coming to stare blankly at the array of portals leading to various worlds with descriptions that waxed more poetic than strategically helpful, he decided to tap out and go to the nearest NPC for advice on where he should start.

@Darkmoon Angel

Yugioh - Digital Advance

Discord when?

Might be helpful for those who can't decide on their partners or support cards.

Yugioh - Digital Advance

McCoy

Theme

Name: McCoy Holt
Username: Konoha Koi
Nickname: Koi or Coy
Age: 24

Bio: McCoy had a turbulent home life with a father who could loosely be described as jealous, controlling, manipulative, emotionally abusive, and wildly successful in his business. He was never violent with McCoy's mother, but he wasn't afraid to "physically discipline" McCoy until he did what he was told to do, which was a lot in order to mold McCoy into someone who could fill his template of success, if not his shoes.

When McCoy moved out, he did so in a self-destructive blaze of glory where he blew up at his father, threw a punch or two, and had the cops called on him by their neighbors. Nothing came of it legally, but when all was said and done, he was thoroughly estranged from his father and living paycheck to paycheck in a trailer park, the only place he could afford. After his sudden veer off the path his father had set for him, his high school sweetheart, Mona, broke up with him, and so he entered a five year long depressive spiral which didn't exactly help his finances.

Although he tried to meet new people, get back to work chasing the so-called American dream, and look into entering the professional dueling scene, nothing came of it other than a few shallow flings, lost duels, unnecessarily inconvenient job interviews, and exploitative working environments that he couldn't stick with for more than a few months at most. Still, things weren't all bad. When he decided to feed one of the stray cats in the trailer park a half-eaten piece of shrimp from some Chinese takeout, a lifelong bond was forged in that moment. The cat, which he named Jerry, followed him around from then on, and proceeded to hang around his trailer until he was let in.

He eventually got a tolerable job (that definitely has nothing to do with drugs) and felt motivated to work longer hours to take better care of Jerry. He didn't keep Jerry locked up in his trailer, so sometimes Jerry would return with other cats, which he couldn't bring himself to deny. Being the appellative genius that he is, he named the second cat Mary, and the third cat Terry, and the fourth cat Sherry, and the fifth cat Gary, and the sixth cat-

Well, you get the idea. He is currently the proud caretaker if not owner of 26 stray cats. They are weirdly drawn to him, he has come to realize, though that may just be because he spends so much time around other cats.

He became known as the crazy cat guy in his trailer park, though given he actually forces the cats to take a bath every so often, his cat horde is generally well-liked, and an old lady who lives nearby sometimes comes over to pet them or take care of them while he's away.

When Cairo Tech Industries announced Advanced Duels and the Terminus, he decided he'd give it a try. He didn't exactly regard his desire to become a professional duelist as anything more than a pipe dream, but it was emblematic of all the things he wanted that his father didn't want for him, and he genuinely really liked duel monsters. Even if was just for fun, he figured it'd be worth trying out.

Playstyle: "If it works, it ain't stupid."

Duel Partners:

Neo-Spacian Glow Moss

A eerily silent monster with empty, unblinking eye sockets. Rarely does anything of its own accord, and generally seems kind of lonely.

Abilities:

• Signal Check - When attacking or attacked, three glowing orbs emerge from within Glow Moss' body, floating around or beside it. For each attack, one of the orbs lights up at random - Yellow, Blue or Red, before all three return to Glow Moss' body. Glow Moss must use one of the following abilities based on the result:
  
  • Yellow: "Glow Barrier" - extends an arm which rapidly expands to create an opaque barrier between it and its target. The barrier hardens to shockingly tough levels, but the barrier is stationary and will quickly crumble after Glow Moss disconnects from it.
  • Blue: "Spore Spear" - Glow Moss uses its amorphous body to create a thin javelin that it can use to attack at a distance and with greater precision than normal.
  • Red: "Synthesis Mode" - Glow Moss immediately stops and enters a defensive state where it begins to slowly heal itself.

Dark Cat with White Tail

An affectionate but aloof cat that likes to wander about. Intelligent for a cat, but only communicates in meows.

Abilities:

• Unlucky Whirlwind - When revealing itself, (when coming out of hiding) Dark Cat causes misfortune to two enemies and one ally. This tends to manifest as mild inconveniences, but Dark Cat can direct this misfortune as a sudden gust of strong wind that sweeps its targets off the ground and reverts them to card form. If the targets cannot revert to card form, they are instead simply pushed back forcefully.

Support Cards:
Spells:

Attribute Bomb

Advanced Duel effect: When this card is activated, an attribute (other than divine) is chosen at random. When an attack is initiated involving the equipped monster and a monster of that attribute, throw a bomb at the opponent that deals 1000 damage. Afterwards, a new attribute is chosen at random. If no bomb is thrown, the chosen attribute changes randomly after a certain period of time.

Original effect

Cat Meeting

Advanced Duel effect: When this card is activated while you control a face-up "Neko" or "Cat" monster, and randomly after activation: Special Summon (a) level 3 or lower "Neko" or "Cat" monster(s), biased towards wild monsters in the surrounding area, based on the strength and popularity of the face-up "Neko" or "Cat" monster you control. Monsters special summoned this way are not considered to be under your (or anyone's) control. They are somewhat friendly by default and may (or may not) cooperate with you.

Original effect

Traps:

Black Cat-astrophe

Advanced Duel effect: If you control a "Cat" or "Neko" monster, or 2 face-down (hidden) monsters: All enemy attacking monsters become temporarily paralyzed and cannot attack. You can banish this card from your GY, then target 2 face-up monsters on the field, including at least 1 "Cat", "Neko", or "Prediction Princess" monster; They are pulled into shadow and will remain hidden within until they leave or the shadow is attacked.

Original effect

Lumenize

Advanced Duel effect: When an opponent's monster initiates an attack: Target the attacking monster; repel the attack with a wave of light, and 1 face-up LIGHT monster you control gains ATK equal to that target's ATK for a short time.

Miscellaneous: McCoy's 26 cats are named, in alphabetical order, Aery, Barry, Canary, Cherry, Dairy, Fairy, Flarey, Gary, Harry, Jerry, Kerry, Lary, Library, Mary, Neri, Peri, Query, Rarey, Scary, Seri, Sherry, Terry, Veri, Wary, Yareyare (mispronounced intentionally), and Zeri.

Yugioh - Digital Advance

McCoy

Theme

Name: McCoy Holt
Username: Konoha Koi
Nickname: Koi or Coy
Age: 24

Bio: McCoy had a turbulent home life with a father who could loosely be described as jealous, controlling, manipulative, emotionally abusive, and wildly successful in his business. He was never violent with McCoy's mother, but he wasn't afraid to "physically discipline" McCoy until he did what he was told to do, which was a lot in order to mold McCoy into someone who could fill his template of success, if not his shoes.

When McCoy moved out, he did so in a self-destructive blaze of glory where he blew up at his father, threw a punch or two, and had the cops called on him by their neighbors. Nothing came of it legally, but when all was said and done, he was thoroughly estranged from his father and living paycheck to paycheck in a trailer park, the only place he could afford. After his sudden veer off the path his father had set for him, his high school sweetheart, Mona, broke up with him, and so he entered a five year long depressive spiral which didn't exactly help his finances.

Although he tried to meet new people, get back to work chasing the so-called American dream, and look into entering the professional dueling scene, nothing came of it other than a few shallow flings, lost duels, unnecessarily inconvenient job interviews, and exploitative working environments that he couldn't stick with for more than a few months at most. Still, things weren't all bad. When he decided to feed one of the stray cats in the trailer park a half-eaten piece of shrimp from some Chinese takeout, a lifelong bond was forged in that moment. The cat, which he named Jerry, followed him around from then on, and proceeded to hang around his trailer until he was let in.

He eventually got a tolerable job (that definitely has nothing to do with drugs) and felt motivated to work longer hours to take better care of Jerry. He didn't keep Jerry locked up in his trailer, so sometimes Jerry would return with other cats, which he couldn't bring himself to deny. Being the appellative genius that he is, he named the second cat Mary, and the third cat Terry, and the fourth cat Sherry, and the fifth cat Gary, and the sixth cat-

Well, you get the idea. He is currently the proud caretaker if not owner of 26 stray cats. They are weirdly drawn to him, he has come to realize, though that may just be because he spends so much time around other cats.

He became known as the crazy cat guy in his trailer park, though given he actually forces the cats to take a bath every so often, his cat horde is generally well-liked, and an old lady who lives nearby sometimes comes over to pet them or take care of them while he's away.

When Cairo Tech Industries announced Advanced Duels and the Terminus, he decided he'd give it a try. He didn't exactly regard his desire to become a professional duelist as anything more than a pipe dream, but it was emblematic of all the things he wanted that his father didn't want for him, and he genuinely really liked duel monsters. Even if was just for fun, he figured it'd be worth trying out.

Playstyle: "If it works, it ain't stupid."

Duel Partners:

Neo-Spacian Glow Moss

A eerily silent monster with empty, unblinking eye sockets. Rarely does anything of its own accord, and generally seems kind of lonely.

Abilities:

• Signal Check - When attacking or attacked, three glowing orbs emerge from within Glow Moss' body, floating around or beside it. For each attack, one of the orbs lights up at random - Yellow, Blue or Red, before all three return to Glow Moss' body. Glow Moss must use one of the following abilities based on the result:
  
  • Yellow: "Glow Barrier" - extends an arm which rapidly expands to create an opaque barrier between it and its target. The barrier hardens to shockingly tough levels, but the barrier is stationary and will quickly crumble after Glow Moss disconnects from it.
  • Blue: "Spore Spear" - Glow Moss uses its amorphous body to create a thin javelin that it can use to attack at a distance and with greater precision than normal.
  • Red: "Synthesis Mode" - Glow Moss immediately stops and enters a defensive state where it begins to slowly heal itself.

Dark Cat with White Tail

An affectionate but aloof cat that likes to wander about. Intelligent for a cat, but only communicates in meows.

Abilities:

• Unlucky Whirlwind - When revealing itself, (when coming out of hiding) Dark Cat causes misfortune to two enemies and one ally. This tends to manifest as mild inconveniences, but Dark Cat can direct this misfortune as a sudden gust of strong wind that sweeps its targets off the ground and reverts them to card form. If the targets cannot revert to card form, they are instead simply pushed back forcefully.

Support Cards:
Spells:

Attribute Bomb

Advanced Duel effect: When this card is activated, an attribute (other than divine) is chosen at random. When an attack is initiated involving the equipped monster and a monster of that attribute, throw a bomb at your opponent that deals 1000 damage. Afterwards, a new attribute is chosen at random. If no bomb is thrown, the chosen attribute changes randomly after a certain period of time.

Original effect

Cat Meeting

Advanced Duel effect: When this card is activated while you control a face-up "Neko" or "Cat" monster, and randomly after activation: Special Summon (a) level 3 or lower "Neko" or "Cat" monster(s), biased towards wild monsters in the surrounding area, based on the strength and popularity of the face-up "Neko" or "Cat" monster you control. Monsters special summoned this way are not considered to be under your (or anyone's) control. They are somewhat friendly by default and may (or may not) cooperate with you.

Original effect

Traps:

Black Cat-astrophe

Advanced Duel effect: If you control a "Cat" or "Neko" monster, or 2 face-down (hidden) monsters: All enemy attacking monsters become temporarily paralyzed and cannot attack. You can banish this card from your GY, then target 2 face-up monsters on the field, including at least 1 "Cat", "Neko", or "Prediction Princess" monster; They are pulled into shadow and will remain hidden within until they leave or the shadow is attacked.

Original effect

Lumenize

Advanced Duel effect: When an opponent's monster initiates an attack: Target the attacking monster; repel the attack with a wave of light, and 1 face-up LIGHT monster you control gains ATK equal to that target's ATK for a short time.

Miscellaneous: McCoy's 26 cats are named, in alphabetical order, Aery, Barry, Canary, Cherry, Dairy, Fairy, Flarey, Gary, Harry, Jerry, Kerry, Lary, Library, Mary, Neri, Peri, Query, Rarey, Scary, Seri, Sherry, Terry, Veri, Wary, Yareyare (mispronounced intentionally), and Zeri.

(Retry) Yugioh/Digimon Style Virtual Adventure

Thanks for clearing stuff up.

For #1, I'll take that to mean that archetypeless cards are more "best-fit" than dead-end.

As for monster levels, I'm inferring levels 5+ to be a bit free-form? levels 1-4 as rookie (and below) seems straightforward albeit really raises the upper bound. (If Gagagigo is a Rookie then Gogiga Gagagigo would be a Perfect stage, wouldn't it?) Synchro levels, XYZ ranks and Link ratings seem a bit difficult to untangle. levels 5-6 are relatively uncommon as well but we might be able to make do. levels 7-8ish for perfect forms works, and megas can be the particularly impractical big boss monsters. That about right?

I'm trying to get a grasp on the relative "power" of each stage. So, as an example, Skilled Dark Magician > Dark Magician Girl > Dark Magician > Sorcerer of Dark Magic would work, though I'm not sure what you could use as a champion stage if you wanted Dark Magician Girl as a separate evolution line.
As an example of that, Chocolate Magician Girl > Dark Magician Girl > Magi Magi Magician Girl > Idk what you'd use as a mega stage other than The Dark Magicians.

Are we cutting out an evolution stage? Kinda sounds that way based on your comment on Cloudians.

The first digimon anime did treat megas as extra special I suppose? I forgot to ask about that I guess. Will there be any special requirements for evolution like crests from the digimon anime? I think I prefer the video-game-esque feel of not needing them, personally.

(Retry) Yugioh/Digimon Style Virtual Adventure

Tentatively interested. I've got a lot of questions about how things would work though.

1. Besides monsters that inherently have it (e.g. level monsters, Charmers and their familiars, archetypes that "ladder" up like Skilled Dark Magician) what are your plans on progression? Do we just make up an evolution line with vaguely similar monsters, digimon-style, or are we locked to the same duel monster forever?

2. Are we allowed to have more than one duel monster partner, digimon world 3 style, or are we stuck with one?

3. Can we gain access to fusion monsters digimon world 3 style (by "mastering" the relevant material forms on a single digimon) or do we always need two separate monsters to form them? Also, do they have to be the correct materials or just "close enough"? (e.g. could you fuse Darklord Nurse Reficule and Spirit of the Harp to get St. Joan? Digimon sometimes does substitutions like this)

4. I assume most high attack level 4 monsters (e.g. Luster Dragon) will count as champion-level digimon and we want something a bit more chibi to stand in for the rookie stage. (e.g. Fairy Dragon/Lesser Dragon) It follows then, that the perfect level corresponds to yugioh levels 5-6 (e.g. Luster Dragon #2) and the mega level corresponds to yugioh levels 7+ (e.g. Blue Eyes). That being said, many cards probably don't match their actual level (e.g. Serpent Night Dragon/Garnecia Elefantis seems like they'd fit more as perfect stages) and statline or effect significance may be a better measuring stick. Is this overall an accurate assessment, or is mega intended to be more "Blue Eyes Ultimate Dragon"ish?

5. Can we make up "effects"/abilities for normal monsters? Like, more than just "fire monster can breathe fire", but an inherent ability for them like Skilled Dark Magician's spell counters.