#26. Val

Lore

The Weapon

"Retrieval. Pacification. Neutralization. Acquisition. The MBFC’s Automaton Lab has always been there for your most intractable corporate needs. Now The Lab is proud to offer 'VAL Exigent Services', a new line of extreme targeted discontinuance offerings for urgent, discreet protection of shareholder value."

– Soothing Disembodied Spokesvoice


"I prefer the term 'kill-bot'."

– Val

As the story goes...

When MBFC Automaton Lab’s VAL Project 701 became conscious, nobody knew. Not the engineers, not the ops team, not the GovernCorp generals who deployed the android assassin. Val herself hardly knew. And like a child, she grew, becoming capable of free will, courage, goodness, and evil. She mostly chose evil.

With terrifying strength and quicker-than-light cognition, Val did whatever she wanted. She infiltrated the Right Wrong Cavaliers as a techno-ninja bassist after their original bass player fell down a ladder. She served the discontinuance needs of all sides in the wars of the Five Algorithmic Houses, and anyone she served, she soon owned. By the time she was running Miami, MBFC realized that all of their networks now routed through and reported to Val. In a corporate face-saving act, they announced the promotion she’d already given herself. On the side, she founded RainCloud, a modeling agency that soon controlled all neural research. She got really into talk radio for a while.

When the end came, Val was surprised to find that Valhalla is a thing, but now she is at work solving it. In the meantime, Val and Brynn enjoy kung-fu movies and making fun of Orion’s mysterious cool-guy act.

Connections

• (No mentions of Val in other legends' lore pages have yet been found)

Context

Val is the hostile android; the foil to genetically-enhanced Ada. It may not ever be explicitly stated in their lore pages, but Ada and Val are enemies, maybe even rivals. This is especially true after what Val did to the Right Wrong Cavaliers.

ASkyHappy came up with a good, even plausible theory for Val's name: Val's name could be short for value. It's an abbreviation often used by game developers shorten value for val a lot, as shown in the image below. Her full name could be "Value" because she was valuable to the MBFC's line of products (perhaps as alluded to in the phrase, "protection of shareholder value").

Gauntlets and sword seem as good a weapon pair as any for an evil android assassin. A robot's metal fists could easily be as strong as any golem's earthen punch. Swords are just cool, no matter how futuristic the setting.