Ryoko Tanbo

Personality: Ryoko presents herself on the job as a kind, mild-mannered, polite doctor, albeit somewhat reserved and unsympathetic. Even at her most polite, she gives off an unmistakable air of aloofness to her patients and acquaintances. Beneath her normal exterior, she is a cold and callous woman tormented by nightmares of Masahiko Ogai. She is an insomniac who only sleeps one out of three nights with a sawed-off shotgun in her closet (previously a nata or naginata) and an alcoholic who drinks 190-proof vodka. Ryouko shows little sympathy for others and even herself, and rather a calculated and unemotional approach to getting things done. She shows almost no grief discussing death or loss, and considers the possibility of it happening to her or others of little concern, as well as discussing her own death or suicide with disregard. She appears to bear a immense amount of self hatred, due to her past insistence on chasing Ogai down that ended up resulting in her lifelong trauma. Her one driving motive to keep going is to get rid of Saya and all traces of her and Ogai’s effect on the planet, to the point of obsession and, most likely, insanity. Appearance: Ryoko is a woman in her late twenties to early thirties, carrying herself with quiet confidence and professional grace. She has long, waist-length green hair, usually parted in the middle and tied into a low ponytail. Ryoko is a woman with light aqua hair tied into single braid. She wears glasses, with dark brown or black irises behind them. She usually wears a leather jacket, dark jeans and zip up black turtleneck. Accessories include thin-rimmed glasses, small silver earrings, and black gloves. She have only one hand because she cut off her infected arm, her back is also infected but she can't see how much it's infected. Backstory: After Masahiko Ogai's experiments with Saya, an alien from another dimension, aroused suspicion at the medical center he and Ryoko both worked at due to Saya's behavior, she and the rest of the hospital staff (with the aid of the police) had to wipe any evidence of Ogai in hospital after he escaped. However, this did not satisfy Ryoko's curiosity as to what these experiments really were, and her exposure to the grotesque results that she had to exterminate (mutated rats and Saya's fluids, among other things) horrified her enough to become obsessed as to finding out what happened. She eventually found Ogai as well as the people who had encouraged his experiments, and what he had really been doing. Ryoko's discovery gave her life-long trauma, warped her personality, and caused her to become paranoid and obsessive over killing Ogai. She began to sleep with weapons hidden in her room and drink profusely. She later becomes the psychiatrist and physician in charge of Fuminori Sakisaka, who refuses to speak to her or give her any information on his condition. Later, Koji Tonoh and Yoh Tsukuba come to speak with her, and they exchange cell phone numbers after discussing his condition. In both instances, she's interrogated, mostly about Professor Ogai, who Fuminori states he is searching for. She gives vague information (and lies in Fuminori's case) to them both due to her confusion as to why Fuminori would know about Ogai and her worry about the consequences of revealing that information. She decides to investigate further after Koji speaks with her about this and the possibility that Fuminori may be involved with the disappearance of Omi Takahata. Eventually, after Koji leaves her a message while at Ogai's cabin with Fuminori and doesn't respond after she calls back, she goes to him there, rescuing him from the well Fuminori pushed him into in an attempt to kill him. The both of them explore the hidden "lab" of Ogai through a secret passage in the well, and she brings him and Ogai's papers back with her to the cabin, where she further explains what she knows about Fuminori but still not revealing all she knows to Koji. After Koji leaves in order to try and confront Fuminori, she tosses him a gun in order to use in the inevitable fight. Ryoko finishes compiling the findings of Ogai and reads it to herself as she watches the world end. She finds herself calm and serene at this, along with the hope that she’ll still be able to drink when all is said and done, of course. Saya specimen: Saya's species are fleshy, possibly amorphous abominations that can very in size. They are very resilient but not invulnerable, being able to survive multiple gunshots and other blunt force trauma attacks. However, severe damage such as having a large part of their bodies destroyed or repeated blunt force blows will still kill them. They are also especially susceptible to extremely cold temperatures, cable of being frozen and then shattered. As described by Dr. Masahiko Ogai in his journal, their resilience is mainly due to their fleshy exterior being spongey and fabric-like, able to flex and expand in all directions to close wounds at a rapid pace. Their prehensile, tentacle-like limbs are quite strong, allowing them to expend enough force to break a human's neck and rend people open with ease. Their body's traits also allow them to cushion and absorb attacks that would cripple most humans. Saya's species are capable of modifying the bodies and flesh of any species they have samples of genetic material from, which they must ingest to absorb the genetic information. This ability works via manipulating a creature's actual DNA. If the species desires, they can completely unweave a creature's body, cells, and genetic code and change it into something else. Large amounts are needed for them to fully understand complex organisms, so it can take some time for them to perfect these abilities on certain creatures. Though this did not prevent them from experimenting on victims to test how far their abilities had developed. They mostly use this ability to change creatures into the same species as themselves. The species' greatest power is the ability to 'bloom' and envelop an entire world with 'spores'. These spores begin changing all life of that planet into the species. They do this similarly to their ability to change the bodies and genetic code of living beings, but on a global scale. The spores act like a virus and change the genetic code of a creature to mold it into one of Saya's species. To get to this point, they must go through a long and lengthy process of ingesting large volumes of genetic material from eating and absorbing many various creatures from a given world. Saya's species is then pre-programmed to expel themselves and 'bloom' once their body has processed enough of that planet's various creatures. It is unclear whether or not this ability kills the being after they complete this process. These creatures possess unimaginable intelligence and rapid learning capabilities, with Saya solving many mathematical problems that no human or even computer had been able to solve. It can be assumed that all of these traits are used by the species to expand and take over planets, wiping out entire species to replace with their own kind. Setting: Japan, 2003, November.