Valence Bond

By captainborgue

• January 13, 2016




Age: 33

Gender: Female

Species: Unicorn

Appearance: Valence has a creamy white coat, which tends to gleam. Her eyes are a deep royal purple, though she needs glasses to see clearly (and in her line of work, seeing clearly is absolutely mandatory). Her mane is a bright pink, with a slightly darker pink tone running through it in streaks. she usually wears it up, so as to be out of her face as she is working in the lab.

Cutie Mark: https://i.imgur.com/1YaXtWe.png it's a stylized atom, with orbiting electrons

Personality: Valence is, for lack of a better term, eccentric. she is definitely intelligent, but she doesn't really understand how to interact with other ponies- not that it stops her from trying. She likes other ponies, but she just doesn't really get how to talk to them. She tends to be quiet and reserved most of the time, though when she gets talking about something she actually knows about, she won't shut up. <br /><br />Or at least, that's how she was- before her husband's disappearance a year after their daughter, Super Nova, was born. Since then, Valence has felt more and more isolated, as her difficulty talking to ponies seems more and more insurmountable. <br /><br />She has taken to pouring herself into her work and trying very hard to be as involved and attentive to Nova (now age 6) as she can, though things like meeting her teachers are still a little scary.

Backstory: Valence has always been a highly curious pony, and from the time she was a foal, she has tried to understand how things work. Mechanical things, however, tend to irreparably break when she gets her hooves on them, and social graces have always seemed insurmountably complicated to her. However, in science, she found something she could take apart AND put back together, and she dove wholeheartedly into the study of chemistry and biology. One fateful day, her class was dissecting frogs, and Valence found that she lacked the heart to go through with it, even though the frogs were already dead. Biology, she determined, was something she could not continue studying, as the implications of making a mistake were more than she felt she could live with. chemistry became her passion- but, as usual, her tendency to accidentally break things led, more than once, to her accidentally destroying some pricey piece of equipment. Her parents tried their best to be supportive, but it's difficult when your daughter ruins a very expensive mass spectrometer. Devastated, Valence decided to just study textbooks, and leave the experimentation to others- but it seemed unfair that she needed big, expensive machines, beakers, burners, and lots of other things just to rearrange electrons.<br /><br />As she was levitating a glass of water to have a drink, the reflection of a light bulb shone through the glass. Valence marveled that water could extinguish flames, but its components were highly flammable- and if she could just run a current through it, the water would be flammable (and oddly, once ignited, would revert to water vapor). She was so busy pondering how to change the chemical bond between the hydrogen and oxygen in the water, that her magic- unbeknownst to her- did just that, causing the glass to pop in a bluish flash... and her cutie mark to appear. It was an atomic nucleus, with little orbiting electrons- an atom.<br /><br />Her college years were spent almost exclusively on her studies- pouring over research notes, endless hours with her exasperated professors, and so much time in the lab that she practically lived there. This tendency followed her after graduation, and at her first job as a research assistant, Valence literally slept in the decontamination shower for almost two weeks before anypony found out.<br /><br />It was during one of her stints in the lab that she met the pony that would become her husband, a stallion named Detective Noir. He was the strong silent type, a private investigator who dabbled in pulp fiction, he came by the lab to get her expertise on various chemicals and their effects- both for his novels and his day job. Valence was smitten almost immediately- a stallion who listened to her and hung on her every word, the experience was so new and exciting.<br /><br />valence and Noir got married just after her 27th birthday, and within a week found out they were going to have a baby. One of Noir's novels became successful enough that they bought a little house on the outskirts of Manehattan, and everything seemed to be picture perfect for their little family. <br /><br />Then, about a year after Nova was born, Noir didn't come home. Valence didn't think much of it at first, he had the same kind of work ethic she did- very driven, very focused, easily lost track of time. But then a day became three, and Valence started to worry. His publisher and agent hadn't heard anything, and he had stopped doing private investigations when the book took off, so there weren't any other coworkers or anything. Valence began to panic, even going as far as to hire a private investigator, but try as she might, nopony had anything. The great irony, that a private investigator goes missing, leaving the best pony to find him being the one that vanished.<br /><br />Five long years have passed since then. The novel money dried up long ago, forcing Valence to sell her little house and move in with her parents so that they could watch Nova while she worked. She still tries to keep a positive outlook on life, but sometimes it can be very hard.