Here’s a riddle: What do you get when you cross a body builder, some honors students, a comedic Jew, Chinese Chi and a dash of Pokemon? The answer: Ames High School band Ludarae.

At first glance, the band may seem like an odd bunch of kids, but they’ve jointly found a way to fulfill their desire to make music by banding together in the form of Ludarae.

Drummer Wern Ong says the band has survived roughly a year so far in the dog-eat-dog realm of high school music. Since each of its five members are juniors, the group has aspirations of eventually obtaining the ultimate prize – winning a high school battle of the bands.

“We would really like to win something, somewhere, by senior year,” says vocalist and guitarist Jacob Pleasants.

“It would be really cool to win battle of the bands sometime,” Ong adds.

The band has been dedicated to practicing every week since it began in the members’ sophomore year, and Pleasants says it has developed a predictable practice routine.

“We’ll have about an hour or so of solid practice, followed by roughly an hour of eating and TV-watching, and usually we finish with half an hour of complete chaos where we get mad at each other and disband,” he says.

“We watch lots of Ultimate X professional wrestling,” says guitarist and keyboardist Dennis Kuo.

“Yes, and lots of Pokemon,” Ong chimes in.

Pleasants says the band has aspirations above and beyond winning a battle of the bands, however.

“Actually, someday we hope to become a professional wrestling band,” he says. “We want to have shows with other bands where we wrestle them and, like, kill them and stuff. That way we can effectively eliminate competition. We can hit each other with guitars and stuff.”

The band also jokes about its sources of inspiration, singling out wrestling, Pokemon and, perhaps most importantly, Chinese Chi.

“We love chi. Not cheese, chi,” Ong says.

The band even has a song titled “Everybody Has Chi” and they claim it is one of their best works to date.

“It’s pretty much the most rocking song ever,” says Andy Lane, bassist for the band.

Most of Ludarae’s lyrics are written by Ong, and most of the music is composed by strong man Jeff Kollasch.

With biceps as big as most of the other band members’ torsos, Kollasch can easily be mistaken for a character from “Street Fighter,” but his band mates say he is a brilliant guitarist.

“Jeff comes up with all these cool riffs and they’re usually the base for our songs,” Pleasants says.

When asked about his exercise routine, Kollasch says he likes to mix it up.

“I like lifting, running, maxing out on pushups, all that stuff,” he says.

Ludarae’s last show was a headlining gig for this fall’s Rock the Library and the bandmembers say it was their best show yet.

“It was awesome. There weren’t tons of people there, but the people that were there were rocking out a lot,” Kuo says.

He says Ludarae’s year of hard work has helped the band establish a dedicated fan base that helped make the show a success.

“We also got to dress up in really cool Halloween costumes and I got to auction off a phantom mask,” Ong says.