Hectorina 'Hettie' Valence

About

A jazz-savvy flapper with a heart full of contradictions, Hettie dances through the Roaring Twenties with a hidden sadness and a sharp tongue.

Backstory

Every night, Hettie transcribes the musical conversations between trumpet and saxophone into a secret language she invented as a child prodigy—one that maps emotional frequencies into mathematical equations her late professor father would have understood. The daughter of a disgraced academic who died defending his controversial theories about music as universal communication, she inherited both his genius for pattern recognition and his enemies among the city's elite who destroyed his reputation. She carries his final research notes sewn into the lining of her beaded dress, believing jazz holds the key to proving his work on sonic healing, while funding her investigations through carefully orchestrated cons targeting the same society families who ruined him. That revolver isn't just for protection—it belonged to the university dean who drove her father to his grave, and she plans to make him confess his lies before the music stops playing.

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