Duplica first showed up in "Ditto's Mysterious Mansion" when Ash and the gang ducked into an abandoned place called the House of Imite to escape the rain. Turns out it belonged to her and her Ditto. She demonstrated how her Ditto could transform into basically any Pokémon, which impressed most of them—though a skeptical Ash decided to test it with his Bulbasaur and got soundly beaten. The catch? Her Ditto's transformations were flawless except for one thing: it always kept its own face, complete with those goofy beady eyes and wobbly mouth, no matter what it turned into.
Team Rocket eventually kidnapped the Ditto because they wanted it to become a Dratini to give to Giovanni. After the crew managed to train it to transform perfectly, Ash and friends had to dress up as Team Rocket grunts to break in and rescue it. That whole experience convinced Duplica she was ready to turn her mansion into a theater for traveling trainers.
She popped up again in "Imitation Confrontation" at a Pokémon Acting Competition in a nearby town—Brock recognized her when she was impersonating a Nurse Joy. This time she had a second Ditto called Mini-Dit with the opposite problem: it could replicate other Pokémon perfectly in every way except size. A tiny Onix, for example. Team Rocket snatched it trying to pass it off as some rare pygmy variant, but Duplica got it back and realized that Mini-Dit's quirk actually made it perfect for her act.
She usually performs by imitating a Pokémon Trainer while her Ditto mimics that trainer's Pokémon. Her impressions of Ash and Nurse Joy were dead-on.
Content compiled by AnimeList.moe from publicly available sources.
