Valerie Atwood is a licensed counselor and therapist, but does not hold a doctorate like David Conrads. She is in her early 30s, blonde, blue-eyed, a tad on the thin side, and pretty much looks exactly as you might expect "Valerie Atwood" to look. People who first meet her often think of her as being vapid or ditsy, but to some students, there is something unsettling about her doe eyed smile.She shares the workload with David Conrads to counsel the students of Saint Joe's. Normally, both of them see three students in the morning of each day for their scheduled psychological evaluation, and between one and three sessions in the afternoon for students genuinely in need of extended counseling.
Valerie, as she prefers to be called, is a bit "new age" in her philosophies and mannerisms. She wears a crystal pendant, has an ornate pewter figurine of a unicorn on her desk, and keeps a couple of beanbag chairs in her office for herself and her students to use for their sessions. She tries very hard to be "cool," but it's a kind of cool from a couple decades ago, and so it never quite leaves the right impression. Valerie is regarded as a bit comical by those students who do not have her as their counselor. She is regarded as a bit spooky by those who do. In fact, more than one SJS student has been shaken to their core by Valerie, not because she is blunt or unsympathetic, but because she can often expose a student's secrets, feelings or motives without ever realizing it. That is her gift.
Valerie is a psychic. She has the capacity to pick up on "spiritual vibrations" that people give off all the time. The exact nature of her powers is unknown, though their effects are very clear. Ms Atwood, when she sits in session, does not take conventional notes in a little spiral notebook. She keeps notes on a much larger, unlined pad of drawing paper. As she writes, she unconsciously draws and doodles, a sort of "automatic writing" in artistic form. Her drawings allow her to glean insight into her students, but are sometimes open to interpretation.Her drawings often have nothing to do with the issue at hand, but instead reveal something about the student in sometimes startling ways. For instance, last year a student was being stalked by an internet predator without her own knowledge (the student just thought she had made a new chatroom friend). The student went to see Ms Atwood on an unrelated matter, and during their session, Valerie drew a pair of leering eyes looking through an open window. Even she did not at first know the meaning of the picture until she discovered that in the midst of her notes, she had inserted the word "tumblebee", the predator's chat handle. Luckily, this stalker was uncovered because of Ms Atwood's insights.
