Just a thought. Helena had to make up Vlaentine at one point or another, right?
Helena chewed on the end of her ballpoint pen. Something was hovering around her brain but refused to be pinned down.
She almost gave it up and started to doodle another sphinx creature--indeed, she sketched a few angular lines to start one--but something made her stop. She scratched a ridge of peaks on a whim, a sort of row of letter "M"s. Mountains or spikes or... something. A box beneath. A few of the sphinx lines seemed to form an rounded upside-down triangle...
...Like a face, she suddenly realized. Two dots on the box and suddenly he was looking up at her almost expectantly, seeming to say, "Well? Are you going to get on with it or what?"
She smiled to herself. The thing in her head was coming out in a rare way, the kind of inexplicable drawing that once completed can never quite be explained or replicated.
She added a nose and mouth and ears to make a proper face for him (it never occurred to her that he could be anything other than a he), but it lacked something...
Too plain. She added more spikes on the chin, giving him a rakish flair. It suited him. He seemed to be a cocky sort of fellow.
Cocky, and not quite so... white. But quite dark, either. Something harder to define. She shaded in a thick stripe down the middle of his face, from just above the eyes down to the chin. It tied it together.
A set of shoulders hastily doodled in and he was complete. Almost. She scratched the barest hint of a devious grin into his lips. Perfect.
She flipped the paper over and signed her name, then looked to her calendar for the date. February...
"Bloody... It's Valentine's Day already?"
Valentine...
You know, it kind of worked.
And, indeed, that's the same way Neil and Dave decided on his name, as well.
