Dr. Lotor Ishka, Ph.D.

Expertise
Research Statement
Optimizing the power yield of deuterium-tritium reactions in a heavily pressurized environment.
Publications
h-index of 53, ~13,000 citations, 82 publications
Positions
Department Head of Physics and Astronomy, Academy of Art and Science, Mo'ordavor City, Mo'ordavor
Chief Scientist, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Los Alamos, NM
Professor of Physics, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL

@RadiantCobalt

Basic Information.Diagnosed toward the end of the war with a degenerative genetic condition, Lotor’s life is governed in the end by his mortality. Between losing his leg, the extensive genetic therapy he has undergone, and the expected progression of his illness, over the last decade and a half, his body has undergone no small number of changes. Nonetheless, he has managed in that time to carve out the life for himself he had strived for for as long as he could remember. Becoming a father, getting married, finishing his PhD; he has crammed enough of a life into the last several years of it that he has no trouble, most days, pretending that the end of the war is when his life began.He is a very candid man, yet a man with a past full of secrets he has no intention of divulging. What he shares, he shares enthusiastically, but what he hides he keeps buried. He is direct, gentle, and diligent in his work, to a degree of dysfunction.To be kind is a tenant he holds of utmost importance. He lives, after all, in opposition to the values his father upheld and the expectations that crushed him in his youth. He is an active and positive part of his children’s lives, he is a researcher with an interest in work that he truly believes is useful, he is a loving husband. His values were sculpted in what he wasn’t allowed to be and in the pain of never being able to be enough. If he could never be the man his father wanted him to be, why bother trying?

Backstory
Pending Update
If you live long enough, it’s hard not to have a story – or several – to tell. Inevitably, many of them will be less than joyous of memories, happy endings few and far between, if present at all. Someone always dies, the bad guy always wins, and every silver lining is so mottled with tarnish it’s hard to believe it ever shined at all.Lotor was created by parents who wanted him desperately, who would go to any length to have a child. Decades of fertility treatments and attempts at extensive genetic modification eventually came to fruition, but by the time he was born, there was very little left of the parents that had fought so hard to have him. From the day of his birth, his father resented him. His mother was still there, fragments of her at least, and for the first several years of Lotor’s life, the two of them were close. Good things, though, cannot last; the Altean child of Zarkon watched helplessly as his mother slipped away from him, from herself. By the time he was seven, nothing of the woman he loved remained.He was a blemish, a living reminder to his father of the fact that he, the Great Emperor, wasn’t the perfect Galra. Lotor was the halfbreed, the child too Altean to be Galra, to be wanted. Despite all of his efforts, the tireless attempts to impress, to be like his father wished he could be, Lotor wasn’t a Galra prince – he was hardly even Galra.The first of his kind, and brilliant from day one, but too thin, too short, a head of Altean hair bleached by radiation, and worst of all the spitting image of his mother. All he got from his father were scales, a skin tone he’d never be able to hide, and eyes he’d have stolen from him.All he ever wanted was to simply not be hated, but that was too much to ask. Zarkon wouldn’t have loved him no matter what he did; Lotor was a disgrace for having the gall to exist, a shame and a blemish on the Great Emperor’s otherwise perfect record – assuming you discount the parts of his past he erased.No matter how much his father detested him, though, Lotor was protected by his status as prince. He’d be beaten, yes, but then dragged back to life in the infirmary, a luxury he’s not sure he’s thankful for. All it ever meant was more torture – 24 years of that, in fact – to be followed by exile the moment he stood up for himself. An exile that lasted nearly all of his adult life, carrying him from one world to the next, occasionally settling down – once even marrying – but every time always ending up again in the same situation: on the run from the ever-expanding empire, he was a fugitive within the boundaries of, the empire that had destroyed a home of his yet again.Nine thousand nine hundred and sixty-seven years of this.A man on the run from an empire expanding at an exponential rate can only make it away for so long, can only drift in stasis through empty space so far, and eventually, the name Lotor ended up again at the face of his father, this time with the intention to dispose of him permanently. Indefinite condemnation to the arena was a death sentence, even for a man with the combat capabilities of the bygone prince.But then the emperor falls ill, and the only person who can replace him is the Altean serving a life sentence in the arena. He’d only just gotten there, hardly had half a fight, and he now had his chance to stand up and proclaim that he was not worthless, that for once his way would be heard.He did everything he could to be the best man he could be. Extending every kindness, not because he wanted something, but because he was determined to simply be better than the man who had hurt him. An assassination attempt took his leg, the twisted contortion of spacetime took him to a child he’d call his son. He worked nearly every hour of the day: he perfected his skills in the kitchen to give his son the best nutrition he could scrounge together in such a barren environment. He made sure the boy had an education, he fought in a war, and he held together the single largest empire the universe had ever known for the sake of preventing the fallout of an explosive collapse.War, accusations, imprisonment. A girlfriend who hated him. No, the word of one woman citing secondhand information from someone hardly in any place to be considered a reliable witness was greater that a testimony that was never allowed to happen. As if they’d believe the nuances of reality could ever be more complicated than attributing genocide out of prejudice. It’s easier that way, though, isn’t it? To blame the one that you don’t trust because of his parentage. Yes, they knew he was the only thing holding the balance of power together, they knew that there were factions vying for the throne he would leave unoccupied if they left him for dead, but there is one man they could blame – even if casting it would throw the universe into war yet again, an unprecedentedly violent conflict.A war that would end up with him captured. Those were not pleasant times, spent being regularly humiliated and abused under the command of Sendak. The man who welcomed him home, who helped him back to his life, was the same man who’d cared for his son in his absence. The man he’d one day marry, who would support him through carrying a full-time job while finishing his Ph.D.But there was still a war to fight, and Lotor wasn’t in a position to be able to hide until it was over. No, he had to resume his duties, no matter how miserable they made him. He had to fight a dirty war. Lies, sacrifices – all guilt he has to live with. It wasn’t a war he liked, but it was one that had to be won at any cost, and if that meant blood on his hands, then blood it was. Sendak had his moment of power, and in that time, he’d undone nearly everything Lotor had fought so hard for.Everything he’d done to undermine the empire, to stand over the rubble of a system he’d fight until his last breath to see collapse, brushed away as easily as if it’d been nothing more than a thin layer of dust.He was hated for it. He understands; he presided over the deaths of millions of soldiers, he’d given the orders to abandon civilians, and he knows that in anyone else’s place he would be just as angry, but what choice did he have? He was thrust into power, and it ruined his life. He can live with it, yes, but only barely. And more often than not, he finds thoughts creeping into his mind: it should have been you who died out there.After the war, he pulled together a home on the blossoming world of Mo’ordavor. Ancient Altean for “land of shattered dreams.” A city, small at the time, but that rapidly grew into a metropolis of refugees from a bygone empire. Sure, his job was miserable, but he was out of public eye, and no emperor would – or ever could – take his place. He’d been dating Takashi, raising his son, recovering from incredible trauma with a set of bionic eyes and a shining new prosthetic leg.In what world, though, would Lotor fucking Ishka be allowed a happy ending? He’d known for a very long time that his genome was a ticking time bomb. He was twenty-nine when he learned he was sterile because of it, and he could only imagine what other latent issues would arise. The defect in his heart made it the first victim of the decay, and all that could be done was to watch as his condition would eat away at his body.It wasn’t hard to tell he was dying. It took this long, but Galra and Altean genomes are simply too divergent from one another, and it was finally catching up with him. He weakened, he lost seventeen centimeters of height and thirty kilograms, and the Academy kindly forced him to take a medical leave of absence.Every treatment they tried was an attempt to delay the inevitable. There was no cure, there was only the prolonging of this, but he had to fight. He had to offer up himself because it was a seeming certainty that his son would succumb to the same syndrome, and there was no world in which Lotor would accept that his son must suffer as he had. Extensive gene editing could only get him so far, and it had a rather pronounced effect on his body. His bones were significantly frailer, and a different collection of pigments in his skin started to show up. He fights every day, and he struggles incredibly, but he is not willing to go easy. To survive for his family, for his daughter, for his son.No villain, and certainly no hero, either.

@RadiantCobalt

Written by Cubic. He/him. English/French.

@RadiantCobalt