Vicki's History

Born in France to a French artist Elspeth Alliere and Chef Louis James Vale, Victoria Ilene was the couple's second child.  Her older brother, James, was born in Belgium three years before her.  A year after her birth, her parents had a second daughter, Eleanor, who was with her mother and fell into the Seille River when she was two and drown.  Louis who at that time adored his daughters took the death hard and separated from Elspeth.  She took James and Victoria and settled in a beach house in Santa Barbara, California.  Louis' sister, Camille, lived in the city and often saw her niece and nephew.  Louis sent gifts but rarely visited.  He eventually married and settled in Seattle, Washington.

Both James and Victoria excelled academically and both were excellent swimmers.  Elspeth encouraged her children's love of the outdoors and a sense of self-reliance.  She spent hours at the beach, painting and also traveled to Russia, Belarus, Spain, Portugal, back to France and Italy with her children.  Both Victoria and James speak several languages fluently and Victoria can read French and Russian.  Several of the books in the Santa Barbara house are literary classics translated to Russian.  Elspeth only twice painted her children's portraits.  One of them together that she hung over her fireplace, and then a separate one of each.  James as a toddler, sitting on the steps of a church and Vicki at age nine standing behind the gate of a cemetery at twilight in Belarus.  The two individual portraits are in the dining room at the Santa Barbara house

When Victoria was eleven and James was fourteen, their mother disappeared.  Victoria's memories of the night are hazy and James told the police that he and Victoria had slept through the night.  The house showed signs of a struggle and both Victoria and James had sand on their pajamas and slippers.  Four items were also missing from the house, a rosary with purple glass beads, a silver vase from Italy, a photograph album, and a rose quartz heart. They went to stay with their aunt Camille until their father arrived three days later.  Louis Vale was unconcerned about Elspeth's disappearance.  He refused to let his children stay and attend a neighborhood vigil for their mother.  He separated them, sending Victoria to boarding school in Switzerland and James to a boarding school in London.  The siblings were cut off from each other.  Victoria ended up in New York and then at Cornell University.  James attended Harvard and Oxford and ended up practicing law in Seattle.  

Victoria moved to Chicago and worked at the Sun-Times for three years. It was there she started using the shortened form of her name, Vicki, for her work. While living there, she rented the spare room in her apartment to Payne Queen.  Queen became one of her closest friends and she remained in contact with him even as she moved from place to place. Payne was the first person outside of her family whom she told about her mother's disappearance.  She also told him about the trust that included her mother's paintings and her house in Santa Barbara. She even invited him to visit her from time to time.  From there she was hired by National Geographic to cover the increasing problem of poaching in Kenya.  After that, she freelanced for National Geographic, Newsweek, Time, the Washington Post and several other nationally sold newspapers.  She moved around quite a bit during this time never residing in one place for longer than a year.  She maintains an official mailing address in Santa Barbara and uses the address of the house on her driver's license and other official documents.  She has stayed in Chicago, Tampa, Memphis, Gotham, New York, Tacoma, and Denver.  

In Gotham, Victoria began investigating organized crime and Batman.  She stayed with her friend Payne.   The two were still close and she was grateful for his closeness.  She wrote a serious of articles praising Batman as a true hero.  She also began to date Bruce Wayne.  She attracted the attention of several criminals, including the Joker.  Joker grew obsessed with her after seeing her picture in the Globe.  Despite her troubles, she and Bruce grew closer, despite her reserve.  When Joker kidnapped her, she was rescued by Batman.  Along the way, she learned a secret about Bruce that made her rethink the relationship.  In time, she simply walked away from the relationship and left Gotham.

Less than six months later she was in Denver and dating Max Power.  She was investigating political corruption there involving the governor and a few of the judges.  During her time there, someone placed a bomb in her car.  The close call was enough to get her to contact her old friend Payne.  She sent her old friend two notarized documents.  One was a power of attorney in case she was rendered incapacitated or killed.  The other notified him that he was listed as the executor of her will and given control of the trust she oversaw in the event of her death.  She was eventually able to gather enough evidence against the governor.  Unfortunately, she discovered that Max was involved as well.  Max tried to kill her and then fled.  Vicki left the city shortly after Max, leaving behind everything he'd given her.  She found out that Max had fled to Brazil.

Once she started spending more time in Africa, she decided to simply stay in Santa Barbara if she was back in the states for more than two weeks.  Victoria occasionally returns to Gotham.  Vicki spends more and more time in Africa, and there are rumors that she was connected with the killing of fifty national guard members in the Republic of the Congo after the guard wiped out a village of four hundred.  Vicki has avoids Bruce Wayne when she returns to Gotham.  She does, however, make a point to spend time with her old friend Payne.  


Trivia;

1) Vicki is a descendant of Marcel "The Hammer" du Valliere, a French soldier and one of the few who challenged Ra's al Ghul and his warriors centuries before Batman.  Her grandfather altered the family name from du Valliere to Alliere before her mother was born.

2) While living in Tacoma, Vicki interview Lex Luthor.  Lex sent Vicki a bracelet with a silver Swan on it that she keeps and wears from time to time.  Inscribed on the inside are the initials LL and VV, though there is no connection between them except the interview.

3) Vicki has two letters in her briefcase that are written in Russian and signed Vlad P. followed by the Russian governmental seal.

4) All the gravestones in the Cemetery Portrait of young Victoria have her initials VIV and list the year her sister drown.  James once speculated that it was almost as if their mother was suggesting that Victoria was supposed to be the one to go into the river.

5) The Alliere Trust is worth about $30,000,000.00 and is mainly used to fund the museum for Elspeth Alliere in Metz, France and the upkeep of her former home in Santa Barbara.  Vicki has access to the funds, but rarely uses any of them otherwise.  She has used about $75,000.00 to create scholarships in Santa Barbara for art students.

6) The glass bead rosary that vanished with her mother reappeared five years later.  It was left on a table at the museum in Metz.  Vicki has had it returned to the house in Santa Barbara, and it is in a box frame in the kitchen of the house.  

7) Vicki has the phrase There Will Be Truth tattooed on her left ankle in Russian.  It looks like this, Там будет Истина.