Valentijne Rietveld

"*There she stands, sharing more in common with the paintings on the walls or the statues in the corners than the people carousing on the dancefloor and drinking at the bar. She's here most nights, more often even than the staff, the only sculpture in the building that moves. Marblesque features scarcely change apart from longing eyes, so much farther away than the rest of her.*"
―Unknown
**Valentijne Rietveld** is a Toreador neonate and recurring character in the Spectre chronicle.

## Appearance

Valentijne is a slender woman of an above-average height. She has pale blonde hair that stops just short of her shoulders and a deep blue pair of eyes. When the coterie first met her at Penumbra she was wearing a tight-fitting dress, as she often does when she's in places such as night clubs. However when she is dressing more casually Valentijne usually wears baggy jackets or coats over thin tops.

## Personality

Valentijne carries around with her an aura of pensive sadness. Despite immersing herself in hedonism at every available opportunity, her outlook towards others and herself never seems to waver away from apathetic at the best of times. Immortality effects everyone in different ways and to Val it seems that she is constantly trying to justify her own unlife by engaging in the pursuits of pleasure -- partying, drugs, alcohol, sex -- even though such activities are increasingly rarely means to the end of fulfilment.

As Toreadors are often drawn to the admiration of beauty -- however the individual defines such beauty -- she finds herself enraptured not by a magnificent landscape bathed in moonlight or by the sculpturesque physique of a naturally desirable human, but rather by genuine affection and attraction between two other people. Valentijne often visits nightclubs as a way to watch interactions between humans, though she knows that truly beautiful relationships are not found in places such as these.

She misses being human and sees herself now as something other. She believes that as a creature of death she no longer has the right to true happiness and must settle for observing it, living vicariously through those whose chests rise and fall with every word, whose hearts swell in anticipation of reciprocated emotion.

While she does exist in her sadness a lot of the time, she does have transient moments of joy. The emotion humans display during feeding, however artificial, resembles passion and she enjoys that brief connection shared in the moment. Although she does not feed excessively, the act of it does please her (something that she might have moral questions about, deep down), and she feeds almost exclusively during intercourse with humans picked up from places like nightclubs or bars.

## Biography

(i will add this at some point though it will be short as to not spoil aspects of her character)

## Trivia

* Val likes watching humans and cityscapes at night. She dislikes affection being shown towards her.
* Before being embraced, she overdosed on party drugs.
* Her favourite drink while she was alive was strong coffee. She still drinks it from time to time when she's feeling down enough to not care about having to throw it up again later.
* She is good friends with fellow Toreador and manager of the Long Beach strip club/brothel, 'Decadence Den', Nicholas Cohen.