(http://elliquiy.com/elluiki/images/e/ea/Rocker.jpg)<br/><br/>Valerie (Storm) Delacroix<br/><br/>Keyboard/synthesizer player and backup vocalist<br/><br/>5'1" (usually wears 3" heels)<br/><br/>Black hair, greenish hazel eyes. Curvy and hates it, would rather be tall and slim.<br/><br/><br/>Valerie discovered rebellion when her parents moved from Quebec to San Francisco. She didn't care that her Dad got a great job with a tech company, not when their house was smaller, and it seemed money was tighter than before they'd moved. The kids at school made fun of her because she didn't speak English all that well, except for the boys who thought the French accent meant she was easy. She had to resort to extreme measures on a couple of them, and one had tried to claim she'd attacked him for no reason. Thankfully, a teacher had seen the way he'd grabbed her first, but it was still enough to get her grounded for a month. While she'd been moping about that, a kid she'd only thought of as having a bunch of piercings told her it was cool the way she'd handled the boy she'd punched, and that led to a friendship she kept carefully hidden from her parents. Beth introduced her to modern music, and they hit some raves when they were supposed to be studying at Beth's house.<br/><br/>She got high with Beth at one of them when she was seventeen, then lost her virginity to the guitar player of the band that had been playing that night. That started more sneaking around, first just for sex and drugs, then Ricky found out she could play the piano, like really play, Mozart and Beethoven and Rachmaninoff. It wasn't hard to learn to play rock, and then he'd bought her a used Kurzweil, and she'd discovered how much she could make an electronic keyboard do. Her grades dropped, and the kind of clothes she wore changed from prim to tight, flashy and revealing. The fight when her Mom saw the navel piercing had about blown the roof off the house, ending when her Mom slapped her. In the ringing silence that followed, Valerie had stared at her Mom, then turned and walked out of the house.<br/><br/>That was six years ago. She floated from group to group for a while, as a playtoy at first, then as a band member when she'd proven herself on a few gigs. None of them had seemed like they were going anywhere, though, so when she saw an ad in the newspaper, she did that Gallic 'what-the-fuck' sort of shrug and called the number. Murmur answered. That was when life started turning around. It stayed small gigs at first, but Dionysian Tendencies was going places. A PI contacted her not long after the first album to hit wide release came out, said he was from her parents and they missed her and all that shit. She's had their phone number ever since, took it out sometimes, but hadn't ever called. That just wasn't her life anymore. She was Storm now, not Valerie, and she loved what she did. It doesn't matter now if she's arrogant, or sounds funny, or doesn't get a joke. She can sneer and somebody else does the apologizing. It's rare for anybody to see her out of 'rock star' persona, just the band, mostly, their business manager and the long-term roadies.