Grand Champion Iris
Basic Info
- Full Name:Iris
- Titles: (Formal) "Grand Champion Iris", (Poetic) "The Girl with the Heart of a Dragon", (True Name) "Dragon Heart"
- Sex: Female
- Species: Ruulan
- Age: ≈14
- Height: 5'3'' (160 cm)
- Weight: 120 pounds (54 kg)
- Occupation: Grand Champion of the United Pokemon League
Personality
Iris is known as the girl who knows the hearts of dragons, or the girl with the heart of a dragon depending on who you ask. She is proud of her power, loves to battle, and can become quite feral when she surrenders her mind to it, seemingly adopting traits from the dragons she trains. Far from the pampered princess her Champion's Regalia might make her out to be, Iris is actually a wild child with an affinity for physical activity and a ferocious competitive spirit. She's a very hands-on type of girl, and if it weren't socially taboo, she would probably partake of the fighting herself at every opportunity she got. One might assume she was a tomboy if this was all they knew of her, but Iris is actually rather dissonant in her presentation of herself. She adores her princess regalia and is just as happy fawning over cute pokemon or watching a good movie as she is battling. Albeit, her idea of "cute" is slightly different from the norm... She has trouble sleeping alone, and usually rests with her pokemon by her side as a result. Iris is very open and expressive about her thoughts and feelings, exercising only a modicum of restraint with her words and having a penchant for action. She believes in creating a world of individualists who, like herself, rise to the call of heroinism in search of kinship with their monsters and self-improvement.
Backstory
Iris hails from the Village of Dragons, better known as Blackthorn City. She was adopted and brought to Unova by Drayden, the gym leader of Opelucid City Gym, though she prefers to refer to him as her grandfather. Iris' incredible natural talent turned her into one of the only female dragon masters in the world, as well as the youngest dragon master in known history. She was also the youngest grand champion in known history, setting records left and right. Her Champion's Regalia was a gift from Drayden to commemorate her becoming the Unova Champion, an outfit she has chosen to wear ever since.
Do you believe in maaagic?
In a young girl's heart!
How does someone who could fairly be described as a little girl become the champion of an entire nation anyway? Not by asking nicely, that's for sure. Iris has a number of things going for her that the average trainer could only dream of. For starters, she is obsessively dedicated to her craft to an extent one might consider inhuman. Constantly seeking ways to push her own limits, Iris frequently pushes herself in ways that would put enough strain on the average trainer to put them in a hospital, or worse, and then anomalously walks out with only minor consequences. Her idea of training is less finding some strong pokemon to bully for some meager experience and more wandering off into the wastelands with no food or water and then attempting to beat wrestle a cacturne for sustenance. It takes more than determination and a bit of masochism to endure Iris' training regiments.
Which raises the question of how she does it. Few can claim to fully understand how Iris works. She is basically an anomaly in the pokemon world, a strange and sometimes surreal champion of those who dream the impossible. The key to Iris' strength lays in her very soul. She has achieved almost perfect resonance with her pokemon, a state of being basically unheard of for a variety of practical reasons. To achieve near-perfect resonance with one pokemon is rare enough, requiring either an enormous amount of kinship and empathy or lottery winning luck. Achieving the same resonance with an entire party of pokemon essentially requires a level of empathy that most would consider supernatural. Simply put, imagine trying to know a person so well that you can essentially hypnotize yourself into thinking you're them. This is what perfect resonance is. Now imagine trying to do that with several people at once. It sounds unreasonable, right?
Far from a quaint quirk, resonance is extremely powerful. Most trainers experience a lesser form of it when they bond with their pokemon. This is why trainer owned pokemon tend to be at least a bit stronger than their wild counterparts. The closer your resonance with a pokemon becomes to being perfect, the effects exponentially increase. A good example of low resonance would be EVs. Medium resonance would be a super high friendship level and all the battle advantages such as surviving otherwise lethal hits that come with it. High resonance would be unlocking Mega Evolution. Even higher would be the Bond Phenomenon that created Ash-Greninja. Iris' resonance with her pokemon is above that, nearing perfect resonance, where the distinction between trainer and pokemon becomes blurred to an extreme.
For example, at just near-perfect resonance Iris and her pokemon share an intuitive understanding of each other's thoughts, negating the need for verbal commands in battle and essentially establishing a kything connection between them. They can see through each other's eyes. Iris feels the pain whenever he pokemon take a hit. The lines between them can already get pretty blurry. There is also a scaling power boost that comes with resonance that increases in greater quantities the closer one gets to perfect resonance. This power increase applies to both Iris and her pokemon, sometimes manifesting as supernatural abilities in a pinch. When the going gets tough and Iris manages to find brief moments of perfect resonance, her pokemon's power can sharply jump even further than it already has, resulting in sudden bursts of terrifying and surreal might.
Is that a monster in your pocket, or..?
Hydreigon is a hydra/dragon type monster with a heart of darkness. Left to her own devices, she would consume everything in her wake from rocks to people. Her eyes are vestigal and unseeing, having been blinded at a young age by her own anger and tendency to hurt herself in a violent frenzy. Instead, she sees the world through aura-sight, pseudo-psychic sixth sense that operates via hearing, feeling, and mentally visualizing the spiritual and life energies of every living creature within a certain radius of herself. It can also be used to fire off blasts of energy as attacks. To a very limited extent, it can even allow one to read minds, usually in simplest sense of reading emotions or predicting someone's actions slightly in advance. When Iris resonates with Hydreigon, she adopts this aura sight, as well as Hydreigon's ferocious and somewhat undiscerning appetite. However, fully resonating with Hydreigon is very dangerous because of the extreme dissociation and violent urges that come that comes with playing the role.
Haxorus is an apex predator, a description that really fails to capture what makes her terrifying without stressing the 'apex' part. It would be accurate to describe her as a ruthless duelist whose exceptional skill as a hunter grants her a fighting style that lends itself to sudden and lethal blows, often waiting for the opportunity to strike before targeting an opponent's weak spots for incredible damage. From a game mechanic perspective, this would be represented by a very high critical hit chance. Haxorus is also exceptionally bulky and perseverent, able to keep fighting much longer than your average member of the species. She is often restless, is not happy unless she is allowed to hunt for her own food. Resonating with Haxorus is much like a less dangerous and exreme version of Hydreigon without the aura sight.
When it comes to sheer scale of power on Iris' team, Dragonite is second to none. Able to manipulate the weather at will to the extent that she can summon natural disasters if she really wants to, Dragonite is a force of nature and an absolute unit to be able to weather her own storms as easily as she does. Able to call down lightning and use aura sight much in the same way that Hydreigon can. You would be forgiven for thinking Dragonite is strictly a magical powerhouse, but she is in fact incredibly strong in the physical sense as well. Watching her fight with her own physical strength looks a lot like that scene from the avengers where the hulk swings Loki around and repeatedly slams him into things. She is about twice the size of the dragonites featured in the pokedex, and like any dragonite is adept at underwater travel. Resonating with Dragonite grants Iris the ability to breathe under water, as well as aura sight.
The immovable object to Dragonite's unstoppable force. Aggron is one ton of armor and deafeningly silent rage. She may not be Iris' fastest pokemon by any stretch of the imagination, but she'll walk straight through a volcano and across the ocean floor to get to you if you make the mistake of wronging her. She approaches her foes with cold and calculating movements, often waiting for them to make a move once confronted before promptly punishing them for the costly mistake of not fleeing while they had the chance. She relies more on slow and methodical counter attacks to pulverize her foes rather than an overwhelming offense because of her lack of speed, and since she's an absolute titan among pokemon, it is extremely difficult to attack her without opening oneself up for a counter attack. She has no fear of being hit, no need for cover, no care for pain. Apparently she sleeps standing up. Though not technically a dragon pokemon, Iris seems to have awoken a draconic spirit within this particular aggron. Resonating with Aggron grants Iris the biggest boost to her frail human defenses out of any of Iris' pokemon, but has no unique features.
Salamence is very much the underdog of Iris' team, lacking many of the most alarming supernatural qualities of her peers. Instead, she is simply somewhat big for her species and sets herself apart from the others by weaponizing her determination. This ferocious pokemon embodies Iris' unrelenting desires and limitless potential, relentlessly trying to accomplish whatever they set out to do and refusing to give up until she falls or succeeds. With each attack that doesn't end a foe or each blow received, she becomes inspired to try harder. Each successive attack in turn hits harder than the last. Her secret power is that if you give her enough time and support, like any shonen protagonist she'll rise to the challenge and crush it, even if it initially seemed implausible for her. When Iris resonates with Salamence, she gains the ability to tap into various pokemon moves a dragon might use, though she may initially struggle with them each time she uses them or experience self-injury or exhaustion from doing so if she isn't careful.
Perhaps the most disparate member of Iris' team, Altaria is a childhood friend of Iris' from back when she was an even littler girl. Beautiful and regal in her posture, she sings a beautiful yet terrible song of victory that compels her foes to their knees. Those who hear her song have their minds assaulted and must attempt to resist its call, falling into an impaired or drunken-esque state of mind as it wears upon them. Those that fail fall under Altaria's control, either passing unconscious or falling to mind control and acting as a servant, attacking their former allies in a hypnotic trance. Those that cannot hear her song face a double edged sword. It's not technically hearing the music that enthralls one, but rather the power contained in the soundwaves themselves, which have no problem passing through a deaf person regardless of whether they can hear it. Though they might find it slightly easier to resist, they also won't know it is coming and might find it incidentally even harder to resist if it starts and they don't even realize they're at risk. Altaria is more than just a pretty voice of course. Her voice can just as easily tear things apart as it can enthrall them. Resonating with Altaria grants Iris' voice power and instills in her a sense of ethereal grace.