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Ryouko Kuriba is the deuteragonist of the Dream Ranker Arc in the anime and manga series A Certain Scientific Railgun, a spin-off of the A Certain Magical Index franchise.
She is a genius scientist and pioneer in the field of cyborg research, as well as the creator of the Indian Poker cards. She took part in a grisly experiment whereby her body and brain were split up and rearranged into two copies of herself, with cyborg parts replacing the missing limbs and organs of each.
She is voiced by Atsumi Tanezaki in Japanese and Suzie Yeung in English.
Appearance[]
Ryouko is a teenage girl who has vertically striped hair, alternating between light and dark from a black stripe at the middle of her frontal fringe. She has golden eyes and a dark patch across the right side of her face which is a result of her being split apart.
She's mostly seen wearing a lab coat over a school uniform, both primarily black and white. She also wears swirly glasses while working alone in her room.
Personality[]
Ryouko is a pragmatic individual who tends to accept sacrifice as a necessary resort when acheiving her goals, as she distributed the Indian Poker to solve the doppelganger situation despite knowing the chaos it would cause. However, she's hesitant to involve other people in her affairs and is reluctant to ask others for help. She cares about her mother and is devoted to curing her illness, even volunteering herself to being split in two as part of the cyborg experiment to gather data.
Moreover, Ryouko isn't without morals, as she tried to warn her fellow scientists that putting her discarded cyborg parts back together in order to study whether they now had a soul was a bad idea. In addition to her sacrificial tendencies, Ryouko shows no regard for her own life and is even quite suicidal, as she states that saving her mother was her only goal in life and is willing to sacrifice her own life or body to appease her doppelganger so she would stop terrorizing Academy City. After being saved by the Doppelganger, Ryouko gains a new perspective on life.
Biography[]
In her childhood, Kuriba was caught in a collapsing building and was nearly killed. She only survived due to a lung transplant provided by her mother. However, this caused her mother to weaken and fall ill. This drove Ryouko to dabble in cybernetic research to save her mother.
At some point in time, she developed the Indian Poker cards, which are based on the Testament machine. She took part in the Total Human Cyborg Replacement Project, which would split her body in two and the missing parts replaced with machinery to create two separate cyborgs. Ryouko suffered no physical or psychological detriments from being separated and subsequently recombined, aside from the need to take medication to deal with the natural aftereffects of the recombination. Her doppelganger though would fall into despair.
Powers and Abilities[]
Abilities[]
- Genius-Level Intellect: Ryouko has a very high level of intellect. Prior to coming to Academy City, she was already a genius at a young age, specializing in the field of animal development, primarily the effects of changing body structure on intelligence, and made notable achievements in the study of owl parrots and gentoo penguins while in elementary school. She also studied the evolution of intelligence in apes and has used the knowledge gained by this for medical purposes. After being invited to Academy City, Ryouko became a savant in the field of cybernetics despite being only fourteen years old, having written multiple papers on the subject such as on the creation and usage of artificial muscles. She also created the Indian Poker, which allows one to view the dreams of another.
- Cyborg Technology: Due to her knowledge of cybernetics, Ryouko has created several cyborg technologies. She also carries around a device that can counter cyborg technology, knowing the Doppelganger might try to attack her.
