Hi folks! I'm sick and useless right now so digging out things I can finish up with minimal effort is the name of the game.

Valerie... oh man, did I have plans for Valerie. As my favorite female character on the show and one that was tragically under-used, I absolutely had to include her in the vast scope of SoaD. That said, I got a bit carried away...to the tune of some 15,00 words sketching out a beast of a story arc that was eventually slashed to the much more reasonable support role she plays in the final version. A good choice, but there were some really fun bits I had to yank as a consequence.

I'll comment on each of these individually as some of them are pretty out-there.

Deleted Scenes 3 - Valerie

This was one of the final cuts to Valerie's list of scenes - because at ten chapters the "prologue" was already dragging and her POV wasn't necessary. The description and worldbuilding is fun, but the basic information (Valerie is actively hunting ghosts) hardly needed to be exposited on.

Valerie gunned the thrusters of her jet sled and rose high in the air, up above the rooftops, beyond the telephone poles and cheesy, always too-cheerful billboards, up beyond even the wispy white clouds that scudded across the hot, pale blue August sky.

Valerie sat cross-legged on her hoverboard and settled her hands into her lap, loosely cupped. She closed her eyes, blocking out the bright sun and the spreading vista, and breathed. Slowly, meditatively, like the sensei at the dojo had taught but she'd never paid much attention to. She'd always preferred the active side of martial arts. The doing. The movement and energy of a well-executed attack. She liked the feeling of grace and power it gave her.

This was a different kind of power.

As she breathed, her mind quieted, and that soft, electronic tone that had become a constant in her existence slowly came to the fore. It might be silly, but she felt like her suit talked to her. Almost. Something between a signal and a feeling, some connection that she couldn't describe but somehow understood.

She let the almost-musical tone fill her mind, focusing on it above everything else. Then she reached out and touched it. The tone twanged, vibrating and warping the sound like a plucked guitar string. She prodded it again, harder, with more purpose, and it sprang away and outside of her, sending its noise all over town. She was vaguely aware of interrupted TV signals and radios, of bursts of static that had voices and colors that were no concern of hers. No. She was looking for the cold, for the assonance, for the prickling feeling of something foreign to this dimension.

She was looking for the ghosts.

First one, then another, then dozens popped up on the "screen" of her mind's eye, scattered out like dots of rice on an empty red plate. The barest touch, down by the docks; a half dozen rat ghosts were scurrying about; and closer by, just below her, a few similarly sized feelings. There never seemed to be a shortage of small undead vermin. They were harmless...mostly. Not her concern for the moment, anyway.

Another tier of ghosts, louder and brighter, hummed just a few bars above the animal-types. Angry little spirits. Troublemakers. Val made a mental note of their general locations, planning to round them up this evening if she could slip away after supper without Dad noticing.

Finally, nearly an octave higher, vibrating with dissonance against her own note like a violin string being violently sawed, the big ones. The full humanoid ghosts; the ones she would have to be late to her shift for and that might even give her some trouble in a fight. There were three - four? No, that one wasn't strong enough to matter. One at the Nasty Burger. One under the lake. And a third in the park.

She frowned, undecided. Which one was more threatening? She didn't have the time to fight all three. Even if she did, she'd have to pick which one to go after first. She pressed again, this time focusing just on the more powerful ghosts. The one in the lake was still, even...dormant, she would say. A flat, unchanging note that was strong but stagnant. The one at the Nasty Burger was more vibrant, alive, and seemed to be...happy? In an evil sort of way. But not aggressive, somehow...it was only watching. Then Valerie remembered that strange ghost that looked like an old woman in a hair net that had taken to ogling the patrons as they stuffed themselves on highly processed beef. Creepy? Yes. Dangerous...not yet. And she could always keep an eye on that one while she worked.

Valerie opened her eyes, shook the ringing out of her ears, and stood up, locking her feet back onto the hover board. Number three it was, then. She took a moment squinting down through the clouds to get her bearings, then dove for the sprawling patch of green that marked Amity Park's largest park and garden. Valerie grinned as she swooped in over the trees, pulling a blaster from the holster at her hip and flicking off the safety, enjoying the familiar whine of the weapon charging up. Her battle suit hummed with energy, red light tinting her face shield. The hunt was about to begin.

I may actually recycle the following bit into rewriting an old abandoned Valerie fic someday... maybe. The gist of the leadup here is that Valerie fights Technus, Tucker jumps in at the opportune moment and uses the thermos, a beautiful friendship ensues.

In SoaD, I ended up re-routing their alliance through Tucker's arc (the fight with Dash and Val breaking it up as the inciting incident) because his 'time to cut the bullcrap and get things done' arc was more important to SoaD thematically than the more practical explanation of 'who's fighting all the ghosts now.' Technus made a comeback in the rewrite - but in a scene with broader strokes, to demonstrate how Sam, Tuck and Valerie were trying to work together to handle the ghost attacks.

Valerie sat on her butt on the floor where she had fallen and stared up in shock. It was like the ghost had just been sucked right out of existence. It was pitch black inside the store, the windows starkly marked by the dull yellow glow of the street lamps outside. The strange blue-white beam was still seared into her vision as an afterimage, the technological ghost's warped and stretched features a weird black pattern inside the rings of white energy.

"Wow," Tucker's voice commented from somewhere nearby. "That was dramatic."

Something in the store clicked and some small white emergency lights flickered on in the floor along the walkways. In the cool artificial twilight Valerie could see the silhouette of the other teenager, who was straightening up from his crouch in the middle of the floor where Technus had been. He must have run out underneath the ghost while they had been fighting. Valerie wasn't sure whether to be furious with him or impressed that he'd had the guts.

"Hang on a sec, I think I can get some of the lights back on."

"You can hack that too?"

"Sure," Tucker sounded amused as he moved away from her. Broken glass crunched beneath his feet. "Through the highly advanced technical maneuver known as 'groping around for a light switch.'"

She rolled her eyes. "I almost forgot you had actual hands, technogeek."

"Yeah, yeah. Don't move until I find it, okay? There's a lot of sharp stuff lying around."

Valerie decided not to point out the hypocrisy of that statement and instead began gingerly feeling out her injuries, taking stock. The worst of it seemed to be the welts on her forearms. They were luckily more friction than burn, since her suit had shielded her from the worst of the electricity. Valerie sighed; that still meant at least a week of long sleeves as she waited for the marks to fade. Val was beginning to hate summertime with a passion.

"There" Tuck said in satisfaction, his voice coming from the far end of the room. After a moment half the long, bright fluorescent lights suspended from the ceiling flashed on. Valerie squinted till her eyes adjusted, then surveyed the damage to the computer store. It was impressive, even by her standards. Only two or three of the dozens of shelves were left standing. Circuit boards and tangles of wires, miscellaneous computer guts and the hard silver casing of the computer goods lay scattered in pieces across the floor like high tech shrapnel. The white tiled linoleum, which still gleamed in a few spots from a recent coat of wax, was broken up and scorched; in some places the tiles had been scorched away right down to the concrete.

"Oh man," Valerie groaned, sitting down on a stray chunk of shelf. "This place is trashed." If she got caught she could kiss college goodbye for good; it would take every penny she earned for the next decade to pay off all this stuff.

"You two really know how to throw a party," Tuck cracked. For a technogeek he seemed amazingly unconcerned by the state of the hardware surrounding him. He'd whipped out his laptop again and was typing in some program that seemed to be mostly incomprehensible walls of code. He talked as he typed, fingers not slowing down a fraction. "The silent alarm should have been tripped, but lucky for us Technus disabled it before we ever got here. And before you freak out about the damage..."

"Too late."

"Well, don't worry. These guys were insured against ghost attacks. There's probably enough ecto-residue here from all the blasting you two did to make the claim easy. I'm erasing the surveillance footage from here and the traffic cam outside."

"Won't that look a little weird?"

"They'll probably blame it on the ghost tech interfering with the tapes. Ectosignatures can make cameras go all wonky thanks to the electromagnetic pulses they emit. Haven't you seen any of those ghostbusting reality TV shows?"

"I thought that was just to cover up how fake the whole thing was."

"And you call yourself a ghost hunter."

Here's where things get a little strange and tangent-y.

While Valerie struggles to handle the post-Phantom power vacuum and the ensuing escalation of ghost attacks (in this early draft Sam and Tucker were not helping her out), random mid-level ghosts keep appearing and trying to deliver a message.

"Special delivery," it wheezed in a barely-there wisp of an old man's voice. "Message for Valerie Gr—" it broke off at the sound of the ectoblast and looked at the letter in its hand, now with a smoking hole right through its center. As if on cue, the remainder of it disintegrated into dust and fell out of his gnarled blue fingers.

"Sorry gramps," Valerie said, letting the ectogun dissolve back into the shoulder of her suit as she capped the thermos and clipped it to her belt. "I don't take fan mail."

The ghost snapped its fingers and the letter reappeared.

"Crazy old guy," Valerie muttered. She flipped backwards on her jet sled and shouted back at him. "What's it going to take for you to give up?"

"Neither rain nor wind nor snow nor sleet nor hail-"

"How about a laser blast to the face?!"

Valerie kicked her sneakers to the side of the toilet and peeled off her stale, sweat-soaked shirt. She dropped it on the cheap vinyl linoleum of the bathroom floor. The rest of her clothes quickly followed, taking up the tiny floor space in a matter of seconds. Valerie glanced in the mirror and winced at the new patterns of bruises. Blue and green marks flowered across her shoulder and left forearm. The giant lizard ghost had gotten in a good smack with its tail before she could take it down. She'd have to wear long sleeves for a while. Good thing it was getting colder.

She decided that making her shower long and hot was more important than washing her hair; her long, thick black curls took a good fifteen minutes just by themselves, and their apartment's rickety old water heater only provided really hot water for twenty minutes. She coiled her hair up on the top of her head and pinned it tightly. She twisted the squeaking knobs, first cold, then hot. If she settled for almost-comfortably-warm, she could make it twenty-five minutes.

Valerie leaned against the wall of the shower and let the thrumming water slowly soak away the knots in her shoulders. It had been a long day. She'd failed another quiz in history, and missed PE altogether. She was going to fail high school's easiest class just like Danny had. Danny who was Phantom who was Danny. Who had probably been too busy fighting ghosts to keep his grades up and too tired to care, just like her.

A weird prickling sensation crawled across the back of her neck, making her hair stand on end. Valerie had discovered over the past few weeks that her suit never really turned "off". Whenever there was a ghost within a few blocks of her, it reacted, like some kind of electronic sixth sense. She could even sort of gauge the threat level according to the intensity. The more worked up and angry the ghost, the stronger the feeling.

Valerie ignored it. It was barely there. Whoever-it-was wasn't causing any trouble. And with just five hours of sleep and a school day ahead of her, she couldn't bring herself to care.

That was another weird thing that had become true now that Phantom...now that Danny wasn't around. She simply couldn't care about every ghost. It just wasn't possible. There were too many. Back before the summer, back when Phantom was active every day, she'd ferret out every trace, even the little rat ghosts that scurried around back alleys and whose most dangerous quality was scaring the homeless away from the ventilation grates.

But now that there were many more dangerous ghosts-ones that went after humans, ones that wandered in traffic and caused wrecks, ones that destroyed things and harassed people that Valerie had to deal with. These new ghosts that weren't really new, that Phantom, that Danny was no longer protecting them-her-from. She'd had to focus on what was important. She'd had to learn to classify.

It was hard to admit and even harder to put into practice, but the fact was that some ghosts were just minding their own business and could be left to carry out their odd afterlives without being obliterated just on principle. Not that she wouldn't take a potshot if one crossed her path. Something Phantom-Danny had always objected to.

Valerie rested her forehead against the wall and sighed. Danny. She felt so stupid. Of course it was him. Now that she thought about it, the face, the way he talked, everything was so familiar. It at least explained why she had been so oddly attracted to her worst enemy.

But the other half of her was furious; why hadn't he told her? Why had he let her shoot at him? Almost kill him dozens of times? As much as she liked Danny, he'd still pulled some unbelievable jerk moves. Revealing her to her father for one thing. And that one scene she couldn't shake from her mind; Phantom taking aim directly at the heart of her stolen suit and firing. He'd mutilated it, blasted it into oblivion. A chill went down her spine just remembering, and now that she knew who Danny-Phantom-was, it was tinged with a much darker doubt. She reached for the body wash and uncapped it, squeezing it between her hands. Had he just gotten sick of her attacking him? Or had he really not known it was her?

"I don't claim to know much about human cleansing rituals, but I believe pouring the soap straight out into the drain misses the objective."

Valerie started and realized that she'd let the body wash tip sideways. "Crud!" She quickly tipped it upright and snapped the lid back on, but the bottle was already more than half gone. "What a waste," she muttered.

Then it hit her. The voice. The echoing, ghostly voice that had spoken to her with dry amusement just seconds before. Right here in the shower. That crawling feeling was still there, but it hadn't been from wondering about Danny's motives. It had been her ghost sensor intensifying. With an almost eerie calm Valerie turned her hand and locked eyes with the mechanical ghost that had poked its head through her shower wall.

"Greetings, hunter whelp," Skulker said, inclining his wall-decapitated head slightly."I have a message for you. The Obs-"

Valerie very carefully and conscientiously set down her body wash. Then she screamed bloody murder. This ghost was so dead.

Ten seconds later, Dad pounded on her door. "Everything okay in there, sweetheart? I heard an ectoblast!"

She clutched the shower curtain to her chest and tried to calm her thudding heart. "It was a spider, Daddy. A really big, creepy spider." She glared at the smoking spot on the wall. "With no sense of personal space!"

"Don't you think using firepower is overkill?"

"No!"

What did these random ghosts want? Well. That's a whole thing.

I always liked the parallels between Danny and Valerie; both ghost hunters, both hiding from their parents, both high school kids trying to make it through the day, but with very different core motivations and philosophies about ghosts. Pre-s3 of canon also seemed to be implying there was some significance to Danny's unique position. With Phantom out of the picture, who would fulfill this destiny?

The only other (non-evil and stable) person who had both human and ectoplasmic traits, of course.

Long story short, in my SoaD freewrites I ended up taking Valerie on a random epic Quest of Cosmic Destiny. Which really, really did not belong smack in the middle of SoaD. It was definitely the right decision to cut the whole arc. Focusing on her relationship with her dad and coming to terms with her own unique inhumanity was much more on-theme and concise.

As for this whole mess? It deserves to be a story of its own, it really does. If I ever get to the point where I can put more time into fanfiction, I'd love to try. For now? Here's a brief look.

The Ghost Zone always creeped Valerie out. It was so big and dark, but with that eerie green-white glow that seemed to be everywhere at once. There were never shadows. Or if there were, they didn't match up with the people they followed. Wisps of dark green free-floating ectoplasm spiraled out like strands of seaweed into a dark and endless sea. There was a chill in the air, sharp enough that it had bitten through the sturdy fabric of her first suit. Now solidly encased in the psuedo-metal of her battle suit, the chill was just a barely-there, pleasant coolness. She could still taste that weird coppery tang in her mouth from breathing the air. for some reason it reminded her of blood. She didn't like it.

The scary part was that in most of the Ghost Zone, there was no ground. None at all. If you looked up, there was endless space and darkness with whorls of purple and green mist. If you looked down, way, way, down, there was the same. There were places to stand, but they were odd little broken-up islands dotted here and there in the gloom, dwarfed by the infinite space. Other odd objects floated here and there; socks, strange blinking, decrepit-looking satellites, stray chunks of the violet-blue rock that seemed to make up the main "land masses" of this place. Nothing was anchored, nothing was connected, it just all floated around in the void like space flotsam.

Valerie was usually fearless on her jet sled, but oddly the fact that there *wouldn't* be any kind of ground to break her fall (or her bones) was somehow scarier. she kept her eyes fixed steadily on floating islands in the distance to keep from getting vertigo.

A shimmering line of green streaked across the sky. The hairs prickled up on the back of her arms and something like a static shock ran over her skin. She shivered and tapped her foot on the hover board, urging it a little closer to the ghost princess.

Dora glanced at her, but said nothing. Valerie guessed it went against some kind of lady code to tease somebody for being nervous. Youngblood on the other hand, had no such reservations.

The ghost boy flipped himself around deftly on his bony mount, which was currently in the form of some sort of sea beast with a long neck and powerful flippered tail. "What's the matter, Val-pal? The great big huntress afraid of the dark?"

Valerie scowled. She knew it. "The only thing I'm afraid of is my dinner getting cold, pipsqueak. Could your whatever-it-is fly any slower?"

"He's an anti-pitticus," Youngblood retorted indignantly.

"Anthropithicus," the beast corrected lazily, turning its head to regard Valerie with a saucer-sized, half-lidded red eye. "And I see no reason to be in a hurry, thank you very much."

"You afraid you'll die of old age before we get there, old lady?"

"I'm sixteen, you brat."

"Granny."

"Snotface."

"Hag."

"Master Youngblood," Dora interjected sternly. "Please do not antagonize the huntress. She is our guest."

"Aww, spoil my fun," Youngblood huffed, putting his chin in his hands and puffing out blue-white, freckled cheeks.

"Where exactly are we going, anyway?" Valerie asked. "I've never been this deep in the ghost zone before." She neglected to mention that she'd never actually been there at all of her own will.

"To the Councilroom. You can already see it in the distance, behold!" The princess ghost raised a graceful blue hand and pointed at one of the larger chunks of rock off in the distance. She could just make out the outline of a building perched at the edge of the island. Valerie squinted, but her suit was already activating a zoom feature on the face shield, magnifying it until she could see clearly the tall, black building surrounded by free-standing columns.

"Finally," she said. Part of her had started to wonder if these ghosts were just taking her out to lose her in the void forever.

A sonorous voice boomed along the corridor. "Enter, Valerie Gray, mortal ghost hunter. Come speak with the Council of the Eyes."

"Feeling right at home already," Val muttered. She deactivated her jet sled, landing on the black flagstones with a light tap. She walked toward the light. The two ghosts that had brought her to this place followed close behind her. That was strangely comforting; not because she was friends with them or anything and wanted their moral support. No...she just knew it was that much less likely to be a trap. That's all.

As she approached she realized the green glow came from a gathering of ghosts. At least seventy of the ghosts hovered in a half-circle over the seats of an auditorium of sorts, a steep row of seats that towered several stories in the air. At the bottom was a small raised platform. It looked like the stage for a play...or maybe the judgment stand for a trial.

The ghosts themselves were some of the strangest Valerie had seen, and one of the weirder things was that they looked all alike. Darkly dressed, humanoid bodies. Gaudy purple cloaks with high, gold-edged collars, clasped across the collarbone below what should have been the throat with a heavy gold chain. There was no sign of a neck. Sprouting directly out of the shoulders were large, gelatinous, glaring mint green eyeballs.

She was determined not to show just how creeped out-and yes, intimidated-this official-looking group of ghosts made her feel. She strode up to the platform and stepped onto it, gazing up into the sea of cloaks and those freaky eyes and matched them stare for stare.

"So I'm here," she said. "Care to tell me why you went through so much trouble to drag a ghost hunter out into the middle of the Ghost Zone?"

"Greetings, Valerie Gray. Some introductions first, if you don't mind." She couldn't tell which of the ghosts had spoken. They didn't have any visible mouths, so it wasn't like she could spot the lips moving. It didn't seem to matter much anyway; they were all the same.

One of the ghosts floated forward a little from his seat, encompassing all his fellows with a sweeping gesture of one arm. "We are the Observants. We are the watchers of this dual world. We see all there is to be seen of the movements of civilization, the shifts of cultures and powers on a global scale. We gaze into the future and back into the depths of time.

"Through the ages the contact between our worlds has been mitigated by the temporary quality of natural portals. They come and go, too fleeting and unstable to support any prolonged conflict. Nonetheless, the worlds are connected and on the most fundamental level. Your memories are our reality. Our power is your life. One without the other would fall, the universe itself listing off course like a ship weighted on only one side."

"You mean the universe would go in circles?"

"It would sink."

"Into what?"

The eye looked irritated. "You're overlooking the significance of the metaphor here, human child. Stop with these inane questions and listen."

"The point is that it is unquestionable that the two worlds are linked. One cannot survive without the other. And if one side of the veil ever overpowered the other, the balance would be lost and all would be in peril. Thus it fell to us, the Observants, to observe and ensure neither side threatened the continued existence of the other. We have prevented disasters of a large scale time and again for humans and for ghosts. But things have changed, for the first time in millennia. The balance can no longer be watched from afar."

"With the establishment of a permanent portal that offers regular travel between worlds, clashes between humans and ectoplasmic beings has become much more frequent. We can no longer watch from a distance. The disturbances of the Fright Knight, Pariah Dark, and their ilk are just foretastes of the tribulations that will visit your entire planet if something is not done. And the threat of large-scale human invasion or even destruction of the Ghost Zone itself is not outside the realm of possibility. No, we must counteract these things before they come to pass. We must...get involved and create some form of bond with the humans.

"Okay, that sounds important... but why are you talking to me? I'm a ghost hunter, not a ghost helper."

"If things had gone as intended, we would have approached Danny Phantom when he came of age with this same proposition. But the timeline has again shifted without our prior knowledge."

All eyes turned to an entrance on the far side of the room, where a new ghost emerged - tall, carrying a staff, with a deep purple cloak and red eyes that glowed from under a shadowing hood. As Valerie watched, he seemed to shift, back bending, a white beard springing from his chin.

The newcomer frowned. "The time "line", as you call it, is not so rigid as you like to believe. It doesn't take my interference for the flow to shift."

"So you say." The great eye blinked at the cloaked ghost coldly. "Yet the ghost boy is the altering factor. And he, if you remember, is your responsibility, Clockwork."

"My responsibility, not my puppet," he retorted. "A lesson that would be useful for you Observants to learn. Perhaps you should cease with your meddling and allow me to pursue my own tasks in my own time."

"In your time, not ours, Clockwork," snapped another Observant. "We are getting away from the issue at hand."

All eyes turned to her. All big, creepy, faceless eyes.

"Yes." The cloaked ghost, Clockwork, shifted again, this time to a young man who was broad-shouldered and powerful. He turned his cool red gaze on her, and that was somehow more intimidating than the hundreds of eyeballs. Valerie felt her hackles rise, and resisted the urge to fall back into a defensive stance. He looked at her as if he was examining her soul, and had found her lacking. She didn't like being judged; especially not by some ghost. But she wasn't going to let him intimidate her, either.

She tossed her dark hair back and looked him squarely in the eye. "You creeps still haven't told me why I'm here."

Clockwork looked completely unruffled by her defiance. "Answer me this, human. Are you dedicated to protecting your world?"

"Of course I am."

"To defending those who need it, both living and dead?"

Both? Valerie hesitated, her gaze falling on Youngblood and Dora, hovering at the back of the room. "If they deserve it," she acknowledged grudgingly.

"Hmm. I think she is ready."

"Very well. Then the trials begin."

"I didn't bring you here to explain the quantum complexities of temporal manipulation to you, Valerie. I'm giving you a test. Now watch." The ghost reached out his staff and dipped it into the stream, drawing out a strand of whirling light, this one more transparent than the main stream, and tinged ever so faintly green. Clockwork raised the staff delicately until the wisp broke away from the rest, then swept out his staff in an arc, throwing the light out into the darkness.

Out of the gloom materialized a door. It had a mask embedded in the wood, blue with gleaming vampiric teeth parted in a sly smile. It looked somehow familiar, though she couldn't quite place it.

"So the test is...to just go through this door?"

"You will see scenes from the time stream," the ghost said, shifting again to a child, his voice flowing into high prepubescent tones. "Some past, some future. Some real, some from a reality that has been averted. Some you are to observe, and some you must face head on. There are five doors, five tests, five requirements. If you pass them all, you will be accepted by the Observants," The ghost paused. "And by me."

Valerie scowled and crossed her arms. "Why do I need to impress you?"

He smiled at her with that superior, mysterious look that was quickly becoming irritating. "Let's see if you can first, hmm?"

"You can't make me go through that door."

"No, I can't," he said agreeably. "But I can wait until you do. I have all the time in the world."

He had a point, Valerie realized. She looked around, wondering if she could just walk away from all this stupidity. But they didn't seem to be in a "place" at all. The ground under her feet was black and perfectly smooth. The sky above was black and perfectly empty. It wasn't the ghost zone. She didn't even know if it was possible to get back without this time ghost's assistance.

Valerie reached for the doorknob, then hesitated. "Is it dangerous?"

He watched her, red eyes inscrutable. "Are you afraid?"

"No! It's just...my weapons are still offline. I want to be prepared."

"You won't need your weapons."

The knob was cold, with just the slightest bit of frost coating it, making it slick under her fingertips. The whole door seemed to vibrate with a weird energy; she could almost hear it, like a muted guitar string.

"Doesn't look like I'll have much of a choice, will I?"

She set her shoulders, gripped the handle, and pulled the door open. Inside was a softly glowing white mist. Valerie took a deep breath, then stepped inside.

That's pretty much it for Valerie's deleted scenes/arcs!

Thanks for the reviews, guys - I'm glad you find these snippets entertaining and/or insightful. It's fun to look back and see how much the story changed over the writing of it. I think I have a bit more? Maybe a Shannon chapter, possibly some Lancer if I actually wrote any of that out.

Till next time,

-Hj