The Directorate of Valkalan is a gargantuan, orderly nation, ruled by Director Vikko with an iron fist, and remarkable for its deadly medical pandemics, unlimited-speed roads, and vat-grown people. The hard-nosed, hard-working, cynical, humorless population of 35.452 billion Valks are rabid consumers, partly through choice and partly because the government tells them to and dissenters tend to vanish from their homes at night.

The tiny, corrupt, pro-business government juggles the competing demands of Education, Defense, and Industry. It meets to discuss matters of state in the capital city of Ravingard. Income tax is unheard of.

The frighteningly efficient Valk economy, worth an astonishing 28,241 trillion Syns a year, is driven almost entirely by the private sector, which is broadly diversified and led by the Information Technology industry, with significant contributions from Retail, Arms Manufacturing, and Uranium Mining. Average income is a breathtaking 796,626 Syns, but there is an enormous disparity between incomes, with the richest 10% of citizens earning 4,382,755 per year while the poor average 73,453, a ratio of 59.7 to 1.

It's not just poseurs who wear oversized sound-cancelling headphones as they walk the city streets, search and rescue forces now accept cheques and all major credit cards, RPG fans reminisce fondly about when people thought they were evil and dangerous rather than geeky and socially inept, and the rich tend their gardens inside gated urban farming communities. Crime is totally unknown. Valkalan's national animal is the Orca, which teeters on the brink of extinction due to heavy metals seepage into national waterways.

Valkalan is ranked 235,503^rd in the world and 1^st in Zarathustra for Most Politically Free, scoring 32 on the Diebold Election Inking Scale.