Sophie Michel

Sophie Michel, AKA Valerie de Valparnasse and countless rejected drafts. The other half of the "third-rate comedy act from Marseilles", which she forms with her brother and fellow French Centurion Claude Michel. Where he is a crippled, paranoid insomniac, she is a light-headed, ditzy narcoleptic... though the extent to which her ditziness is genuine is debateable, and she has on a few occassions proven capable of setting the act aside for a few minutes (mostly when her brother is talking about what she agrees to be serious matters). In any case, they fight crime. Claude makes inventions and she uses them in the field, which works out very well indeed as his gadgets can do most of the work for her when she is too sleepy or lazy or goofy. Nonetheless, she is not without some native resourcefulness, and the sheer randomness and bizarrity of her behaviour can catch some very serious opponents seriously off balance.

Prior to the Great War, she and her brother combatted various criminals all over Western Europe, being among the first of the Centurions to encounter the rising Schwarzmeer cults in the spring of 1914. She also encountered Zack Zimmerman fairly early in his Paris adventure and was taken in by him, though not to the extent of Valentine Dulac and some others, much to her brother's quiet gratitude. With the beginning of the war, she was one of the few Centurions young or old to remain in Paris, and as one of the most physically able of those left, she approached fighting crime - and, increasingly, cultists - with something not entirely unlike seriousness. During one of those efforts, she encountered another new (but as it turned out likewise short-lived) arrival on the Paris scene, one Gregor Kovacs. Having once more taken something of a shine to this mysterious though rather bumbling and hapless stranger, she facilitated what would become a highly beneficial working relationship between him and her brother, while resuming her patrols. On the day of Gregor's most critical mission, she went to Montreuil to spy on the Manouches and somehow survived Maius' appearance there. To judge from her most recent letter to "Lord Gregorious XXV" (delivered with the help of Zack Zimmerman who finally managed to learn his latest whereabouts), she has remained largely unchanged in personality though slightly miffed at him for his sudden disappearance and irked at the return of the notorious Shadow Centurion Fantomas to terrorise Paris.

She actually does know how to sword-fight and quite well she'd have you know, though obviously it's easier with the Skeleton Sword duh.

Together with her brother, a nominal pupil of Edgard Vidocq, who sometimes slips out of trance to give them incomprehensible and seemingly useless advice. The two of them hold him in high regard nevertheless.