Azarin Jinan. Known affectionately as "Doc Blossom" among her colleagues and students, she is a well-known researcher in the fields both of evolutionary botany and paleobotany. A striking beauty of Iranian descent (she claims ancestry among the retainers of Cyrus the Great), she has luckily avoided most of her ancestral home's recent... "excesses", having been born a second-generation immigrant to Germany. She maintains a few Islamic traditions (in public she'll usually wear a hijab, for example, unless she feels the situation calls for otherwise) but refers to herself as Islamic in spirit rather than dogma.
As far as her skill, few deny a woman who reached the tenure track as quickly as Azarin did. She is passionate in her research, investigating deeply and questioning even the most well-entrenched beliefs until satisfied herself of their stability. She also maintains a small greenhouse a mile's drive from the campus where she is a professor, with numerous sealed compartments allowing her to control the environment within, even to bizarre configurations not seen since the Mesozoic Era, or perhaps earlier.
As one might guess, this particular piece of property is for her dearest area of study: the reconstruction and controlled evolution of extinct plant life. Most sections of the greenhouse are stuffed with exotic rare plants or outright restorations of things like gigantic Jurassic-era ferns. After all, how better to test out a paleobotanist's theories?
It helps that the land underneath happens to have formerly been an underground cavern. Nowadays it looks more like the picture at left. Never underestimate Persian-born passion.
So why the cavern, and why the multiple security locks blocking the way from her greenhouse proper to the caverns below? Well... the answer lies within those pods. Giant ferns weren't the only thing to exist in the ancient days... when she dug deep enough, Azarin discovered something few in the scientific community were aware of.
Plantgirls. Literally hundreds of various species, ranging from the Cambrian Explosion to the beginnings of the Cenozoic. And, well... what else would a botanist like her do?
(The "fossil restoration" angle can be dropped if setting calls for flexibility; instead she'll be a specialist in endangered/extinct species of plantgirls.)
As far as timing, flexibility is wide open. It might be early into her career, after her first couple or even in the early days of her very first, after she's become more confident, or even later on when her caverns teem with giggling plantgirls all referring to their botanist creator as "Mama"... it all deppends on the setting and timing we want to work with! But no matter what, these beauties grown under the care of Jinan Labs have needs~
The girls:
In the center, Stella. Bred from the aster plant, she has developed a curious form of symbiosis, first using food and sunlight to generate a broth of nutrients that are easily absorbed through the skin, then winding her "prey" in vines and surrounding them in the broth to transform them into a sort of "seedbed", extracting energy from their body even as their spongey prison sustains them for days at a time. She also has been known to extract gametes this way for use in reproduction.
To the left, Sepideh, her first successful, sapient blossom. Somewhat primitive and prone to acting instinctively. As one might guess, a pitcher girl, based on the common daisy. However, her pitcher serves several other functions beyond simple consumption of prey; a particular favorite recently is to snag "visitors" and confine them inside harmlessly, ironically storing them in the only safe place when her pod is filled.
To the right, Juna, her first foray into non-flowering plantgirls. This one happens to be a particularly large-leaved strain of ivy. Prey and mates soon discover the full extent to which she can extend her long vines and hold them in a tight full-body hug...
Noel
As a bonus, after she gets a bit more confidence in her work, this cutie might be found roaming the greenhouse proper, perhaps in an extra section built just for her. Her name is Noel, Azarin's first foray into fashioning a new species... an adorable poinsettia girl, hopelessly naive but seemingly content to be the very first of her kind~
