Professor Cassia

PERSONALITY

Cassia is an outwardly optimistic, happy-go-lucky sort. He appears as a slow-to-anger people pleaser with a great deal of faith in everything and everyone. 
Behind closed doors, however, he will often take on a tired, stressed out, and scathingly sarcastic demeanor; a side of him that only his closest friends and family have had the priviledge of experiencing. 
He requires at least two hours alone with his books every day, and when he is denied this vital time to recharge, the cracks quickly begin to show through his cheery and accomodating persona. 

BACK STORY

The professor was born in Alola, but spent very little of his childhood there. After all, his father was a Galarian diplomat who's job relocated the whole family to a new location around the globe every two to three years. As such, Cassia's life growing up was never without it's fair share of adventure. He was never forced to experience the pent-up wonderlust and stir-craziness that drove so many of his friends into pursuing a lives as pokemon trainers. Instead, Cassia's fascination laid firmly within the natural world and the study of pokemon in their native environments. 

He was homeschooled by his mother for much of his life and this provided him the leisure he needed to truly pursue his passion for the natural sciences. He enjoyed a great deal of support from his family, and by mid-adolescence, Cassia had determined that his goal was to become an esteemed pokemon professor. His father agreed to help him pay for his education on the condition that he attend a very particular post-secondary institution in Kalos. And so it came to be that the young professor-to-be enrolled into a well accredited university in Lumiose City at the age of eighteen. 

It was here that he met another passionate young mind by the name of Augustine Sycamore--and sharing similar eccentricities, the two became fast friends. Though their academic paths crossed less and less as the school years progressed, they maintained their friendship over similar childhood experiences, terrible puns, and a genuine love of pokemon with no lack of respect for their trainers.
When it came time to find internships, it was Cassia who pulled some strings (with the help of his travelled father) to land Sycamore a coveted position under Professor Rowan in Sinnoh. Cassia, on the other hand, found himself ropped in as an understudy for Professor Cedric Juniper in Unova. While that marked the last time the two young researchers would see eachother, they never lost contact with one another and corrisponded frequently. 

After learning all he could from the elder Professor Juniper, Cassia returned home once and for all--to Alola. He had long forgotten that his extended family here carried a great deal of wealth and prestiege by the island's standards--and he was immediately struck by their immense love and support. This embued him with a desire to do well by them, and--without tapping into his family's wealth, as well as attempting (in vain) to avoid taking advantage of their influencial name--Cassia opened up his own humble research facility. His focus employed his knowledge of pokemon distribution and natural behaviors, and aimed it's research towards wild pokemon and their ethical, beneficial uses in agricalture.

His chosen topic of research was a strategic one. With the focus on local agriculture, Cassia's Laboratory was able to garner funding from Alola's Chamber of Commerce. The focus on ethics allowed him to court the Aether foundation for additional funds... And the attractiveness of agricultural land that housed a bounty of rare, wild pokemon made his facilities an attractive little gem for the tourism board to promote as well.  And so, without asking his family for money, the young Professor has found himself capable of running his research lab for three good years and counting.

What a comfortable position to be in!

ONGOING STORY

If he were to be perfectly honest though, Cassia would admit that relying on a perilous trifecta of tourism, the Chamber of Commerce, and The Aether Foundation had continued to be more than a little nail-biting at times... Especially when the Chamber's demands were almost always in direct opposition to the requests and focus of The Aether Foundation. On top of this, the research facility was still far, far away from being self-sufficiant. Even with the external funding, the numbers ran pretty tight most months. 

Cassia would have enjoyed giving Kukui a run for his money as a professor who could employ trainers and make use of their finds and footwork. But the matter of the fact was--he couldn't afford it.
And so, when he recieved a letter from his old colleage and friend, Professor Sycamore, explaining that he was 'donating' a promising young trainer to Cassia Laboratories, Professor Cassia suffered a mild fit.

This was in part because 'donated' or not, he still couldn't afford to board a trainer... but mostly it was because the trainer had arrived a good week before the message was received. Sycamore had expressed in his letter that this was his effort to "return the favor" of his internship, describing the trainer as "the ray of sunshine that the neatly lined fields of Cassia Labs may benefit from".
To add insult to injury, the "trainer" as it turned out--hadn't yet been registered as such, and it was her hope that he'd beable to do so for her.

Nothing about this felt like a favor.