Valentine Dulac

**Valentine Dulac** (silent e at the end of Valentine) is a Centurion of ostensibly British (or at least half-English) origins who nonetheless has grown up and spent most of her life in France. While mostly distinguished as an artist (primarily a painter), she is in fact also a competent swordswoman and has in her the beginnings of a hero, perhaps more so than most of her fellow Paris Centurions; or at least had them, before everything went wrong.

Having started out her heroic career with what was typical for her circles - painting duels, sinister crossword puzzles and a troupe of evil clowns - Valentine was not prepared for the challenges of the Great War, and in any case her mentor, Genevieve Lerouge, though usually *extremely* hands-off, was not about to let her go and fight like some other Centurions did. To stave off boredom and satisfy her urge to be useful to France, Valentine decided to step up her investigation of a nefarious cult that first drew her attention with its suspiciously hasty ascent in the months before the war (that and the subliminal crossword stuff). With stealth, competence and viciousness that surprised her more than anyone except perhaps for her opposition, Valentine tracked down some of the Black Sun cultists and learned that they had taken an American Centurion named Zack Zimmerman captive and meant to interrogate him about what she presumed were some Century Club secrets. She intervened, freed him and together they took on the cult, undeterred even by some of its members turning into monsters to protect it. They ransacked its headquarters, killed its leader and chased away most of the followers they couldn't kill. It was then that Valentine bit off more than she could chew, by stealing the greatest of the cult's relics: a magical sphere containing a shard of Schwarzmeer's essence.

She touched it. Her curiosity could not be contained, and anyway, how else was she to learn more about them? Everything else seemed like a dead end. The first time almost broke her mind, but she survived. Subsequent touches wore away at her more, as did its continued presence. She could not put it away, for the simple reason that it was the heroic deed required of her, to learn more about the enemy. And she did learn, although she could not fully process it at first. When reason failed, she resorted to art. Her visions, her nightmares, she did her best to relay all that, and succeeded beyond measure, glimpsing countless things of undeniable value.

And in the meantime she grew sullen and withdrawn and, for lack of a better word, insane. Before she was eccentric. Now it was something else. The visions and the paintings and the black sphere consumed her, and the rest of the world became unimportant, not worth bothering with.

Sophie and Claude Michel, her old friends in the French branch of the Century Club, offered her support and steadily diminishing understanding (Claude, who had a not terribly well-hidden crush on her, tried particularly hard). Zack, rather more assertive than Claude, did his best to maintain a relationship, but also offered her drugs: specifically king bee's pollen, that was to help drown out those visions. For a time Valentine attempted to use it to hang on to sanity, but ultimately it became clear to her that it was just holding her back. She needed to go deeper...

She was finally shocked out of this stupor by Gregor Kovacs, another new arrival on the Paris scene. He was very interested in her paintings at first, realising that some of them mapped disturbingly well to certain things and people he had encountered. This curiosity only lasted until she let him touch the sphere, like she and, very briefly, Zack did before him. Direct contact with the enemy left Gregor a lot less well-inclined towards both Valentine's pursuits and Valentine herself. Somewhat dumbfounded and annoyed by his reaction, she nonetheless found a renewed interest - and urgency - in acting on what she had learned, and perhaps also corroborating it with information from other sources. As the events in Paris continued to escalate, with the successor-cults and other Schwarzmeer groups increasingly active, it was clear to her that needed to do something drastic.

As it happened, what she did was drastic, effective and, if described, utterly ridiculous.

She made herself a supernaturally scary (as subconsciously disturbing to look at as her paintings), flashy dragon-monster costume and began to wear it as a costumed vigilante, stalking cultists and other Schwarzmeer agents. She kidnapped and interrogated them to learn more about their current plans and then brutally murdered them with the costume's spiky claws, becoming two urban legends at once: the Paris Spike Murderer and the Dragon of Isle de France. Sometimes, incraesingly often, she skipped straight to the spike murder.

Her heroic rampage reached its culmination when she saw Gregor being moved into the secret stronghold of the Black Moon cult she had been staking out. So she broke in through a window and began to kill every cultist in sight in a mad frenzy. Between her, Gregor and the newly-arrived Zack and his Chinese allies, the cult was doomed. Although Valentine was somewhat put off by Gregor seeing through her ingenious disguise, she still proved lucid enough to collaborate with the other Centurions... for a few minutes, before retreating into the shadows without warning and then ambushing Maius, one of Schwarzmeer's most trusted and most dangerous lieutenants, to help the others escape.

Amazingly, she somehow survived all that just fine, but according to later reports (made by Sophie) became "eternally heartbroken and even nuttier than before". "But fine." At any rate she was apparently sane and fine enough to help Claude and Zack narrow down Schwarzmeer's main base to somewhere in Russia, no doubt contributing a certain landscape from one of her vision-paintings...

Probably not related to Lancelot du Lac.