MORTAL_LIFE Born in London, 1829, her father was a soldier and died shortly before she was born. Her mother was deep in debt and chronically ill, so when Val was eight, they both packed up and moved to a workhouse for Val to be looked after. Soon after their arrival, her mother succumbed to her illness. Val applied to leave the workhouse in order to find employment elsewhere. She began mudlarking, finding and selling lost objects on the muddy banks of the Thames. But being so close to the docks, it wouldn’t be too difficult to “find” objects from the shipments being loaded and unloaded. She was an inexperienced thief, however, and was inevitably caught and sent to prison.

In prison, she fell in with a crowd of boys who invited her to join their “flash-house” once they got out. Seeing little alternative, and enjoying the boys’ company, she accepted their offer and joined them in Saffron Hill once she had served her time. The children and teenagers in the gang stole goods through any means necessary, and the owner fenced them. Val felt more at home there than she ever had before. By the time she was 13 years old, she had been to prison 9 times already. It wasn’t enough to dissuade her.

As she and her gang grew older, violence became an option. But her friends (thieving aside) were generally quiet and not given to physical aggression. The same was not true of Val. To her, stealing and intimidation was work — and work was good; begging and subsisting off parochial handouts was embarrassing and so was idleness. Not to mention, it made people mess with them less, which was always a bonus. She also occasionally fought in amateur boxing matches, which helped her support herself too. These were good days.

THE_EMBRACE During a botched burglary, six of her gang’s members were arrested and jailed, weakening the gang. They eventually disbanded, leaving Val to fend for herself once again at the age of 19. She refused to seek help at the workhouse again, knowing that if she did she’d be doomed to a lifetime of picking oakum, so she resorted to the humiliation of petty theft and mudlarking once again. Soon she was sick, cold, and exhausted. Very late one night in 1837, she collapsed in an alleyway and fell asleep in the open, as she had become accustomed to of late. A passing Nosferatu was hungry and eager to get back to their haven before the sun rose, so they jumped at the opportunity to feed, but Val was already too weak to survive the blood loss. They panicked and fed her some of their vitae. However, embracing without explicit permission in London, especially as a Mithraeist, carries a penalty of Final Death. Her sire realised they had made a terrible mistake and fled, leaving Val to her fate. She began wasting away as soon as she woke up, her hair falling out in clumps. She believed she was just sick, starving but unable to keep food down, until her bones began to stretch and her skin blistered in the sun. Eventually, she crawled her way back down into the sewers to finish her metamorphosis, since she knew them well enough. She found a young girl there, mudlarking like she used to as a child, and the Hunger was too strong to resist.

FLEDGLING_NIGHTS For a time, Val was a slave to her Hunger and her Beast, hunting across London for prey and attempting to snatch people from dark alleys to varying degrees of success. Her failed attempts at hunting across the city have since become part of local legend. Thankfully a brood of Nosferatu in the sewers eventually took her into their fold before she ended up causing a serious masquerade breach, with whom she slowly became accustomed to undeath and learned to control her Beast. For a time, she worked as an intermediary and agent in Whitechapel for Ragged Jenny‘s criminal network. With her mortal experience, she was perfectly suited to the role – combined with the ability to Obfuscate, she felt right at home. When Jenny’s influence in London began to wane, she moved on to other jobs, but always in a similar line of work. Whether it was burglary, larceny, fencing, smuggling, gambling, Val eventually sampled them all — though always from behind the scenes and never as the one actually in charge.

PRESENT_ACTIVITY In the early 2010s, Operation Antigen and the ECTU increased their activity in England under the guise of an anti-terrorist crackdown. Eventually, it was every Cainite for himself. When the dark web market Val did business on was infiltrated and taken down by law enforcement in 2013, the ECTU got their hands on her seller information. They used it to identify her as a blankbody and set her haven on fire to smoke her out. The blaze very nearly killed her but she escaped, though was presumed to have met her final death. Using the last of her remaining resources and influence, she soon smuggled herself to the USA via shipping container. She lost almost everything when she moved to the States, and it left her unable to repay all the debts she had acquired while trying to survive London. Mainly, she's kind hoping her debtors got bumped off by the Inquisition so she doesn't have to worry about it any longer, but she can't be sure. It’s entirely possible some of them fled to the USA or Australia too, and they might want to collect those debts. Since arriving in Indianapolis, Val has been slowly rebuilding her unlife. She now has a part-time role as Mass Ave Baron Augustin Clary’s security consultant.