The easiest way to explain Valerie's ability is to call it telepathic projection. She projects her consciousness outside of her body and is capable of doing many things in this state. The projection needs to be anchored. Either it anchors off of herself and is projected into her general area, or it is projected off the mind of someone she is familiar with in a 50-mile radius of herself. When she anchors off of someone else, she is not inside their mind or privy to their thoughts, they are just a tether that she projects herself off of. The projection must remain within 100 yards of either her body or the body of the person she's projecting to.
Projections are intangible illusions and share a joint consciousness with her, but only the projection is able to be conscious. Her body goes unconscious and will be pulled into a trance when she projects herself. This is an out of body experience, which allows her to exist outside her body and see and hear what's happening somewhere else. When she anchors to another mind, she must be very familiar with them. Someone she knows pretty well, and someone within the long range of her ability. If she tries to project to a specific location, she must jump from mind to mind until she gets to the right place. Only through a visual line of sight of the projection can she anchor herself to a mind she's unfamiliar with.
The illusion can vary slightly, but she's got major limits on what all it can look like. She looks like herself, but she can change her clothes and basic appearance at will. She has default clothes that she switches to automatically, but she can change that.
Her form is always visible to living, conscious minds that are not immune to abilities, despite the fact that it is an illusion. She has not mastered the ability to turn it invisible or have it visible only to one person, but it can flicker. Since she requires an anchor, she will never be able to project to a place with no one physically in range.
Projections do not reflect off mirrors or even windows in the light. Projections do not show up on cameras or recording devises (they are meant for a human mind only). They do not trigger motion sensors or break laser alarms. The same is true for the sound she makes. It can only be heard by a conscious human being. Someone who is immune to abilities will not see or hear her, but she may still be there, as long as she's projected off of someone else unless they have a blanket form of negation.
Her projected form is usually invulnerable to physical attacks, including energy, but she also can not attack people in any way either. The most she could do is give them the finger or yell at them (which she'd never do, really). However, her senses make her vulnerable. Loud noises (alarms going off, or even honking horns too close to her) can cause her form to begin to break apart as if she'd been projecting for two hours, and the same applies to bright flashes of light (like strobe lights). Her form can also get assaulted by telepaths and abilities that attack the mind as if she were physically standing in front of them. Empathy can also sense her.
(New Things)
In the past, Valerie was capable of making her projection defy the laws of physics. Her spinal damage has actually made that more difficult for her. She can not just have her projection float and fly around, or disappear and reappear as if she were teleporting. Instead, she often looks as if she's walking now, even if some things in the outside environment fail to affect her. Her hair still doesn't move right, she doesn't cast the right shadows. That will give people clues that she's a projection, even if she's unable to do crazy feats that she used to be able to do, with the exception that she can still move through walls and objects, due to not actually having a physical form.
In exchange, she has learned to ground her projection, allowing her to actually gain some sensation mimicking the person she's tethered off of. If they feel the ground they are walking on, so can she. This doesn't let her feel everything they do, but it allows her to pull off their feelings of the environment they interact with a little.
She has also learned how to affect people's feeling of touch, sometimes, making them feel like she's touching them. This is limited mostly to handshakes, but she could make someone feel like she slapped them, or maybe even kicked them in the soft bits. Unfortunately, when she's concentrating on doing this, it can backlash on her. If she's trying to make someone feel her, she, in turn, feels them. Which means when she does this, for a few seconds, her projection is actually vulnerable to physical harm. Any harm her projection takes is put directly back into her body.
In the past, she was limited to about two hours for projecting because it would put a strain on her nervous system, causing neurological damage. Now she can project for up to four hours before she starts straining her nervous system, perhaps because her nervous system actually does less than it should be doing these days thanks to her spinal damage. If her spinal damage were ever healed or repaired, her ability would lose most of these new advantages.
