Millau/Profile

Millau

Profile

Quotes

Career

The E-GAST was a gourmet Doll that was jointly developed by Cyber Media and Universal Anything Services. It was designed to sample and provide critique for gourmet cuisine as an attempt by Cyber Media to break into the rapidly-expanding F&B industry, and thus the E-GAST made use of Cyber Media's accomplishments in the field of sensory feedback technology. Rather than financial profit, Cyber Media was more interested in using the data from the E-GAST for sensory feedback experiments in their HQ, in the hopes of competing with Ultilife in that field.

In 2057, Millau was invited to referee the Sucobe d'Or by virtue of her broad experience with food tasting. That, in turn, became the primary reason she was selected to join Project Neural Cloud.

Doll Profile 1

According to the criteria drawn up by Cyber Media, a proper gourmet had to be able to "make" as well as "eat". The implication was that in addition to a keenly-honed sense of judgement regarding flavor, ingredients, and culinary environments, a proper E-GAST also needed to be qualified as a professional chef. After all, the opinions of a Doll that could not even cook would not be very convincing.

However, the first E-GAST unit Millau was an exception to this rule. Perhaps it was because of a special defect in some irreplaceable component or due to an error in the coding of her neural cloud, but Millau demonstrated an extraordinary degree of incompetence compared to the Dolls of her line when it came to the culinary arts.

Millau was by far the superior unit when it came to "eating". Her skill at wine selection was particularly noteworthy, considering her focus on Western cuisine and her familiarity with wines of various styles, types, and the properties of various vintages. However, when it came to "making\ her programmers despaired of having her produce even the simplest dish, despite their best efforts. All the food-related knowledge in her mind seemed to exist for the sole purpose of sampling fine dining and nothing else.

Despite this severe flaw, Millau was still quite popular with chefs. During food tastings, she could accurately list the possible results of various taste combinations with just a single bite, a talent that was a great benefit to every chef whose cooking she sampled, although she preferred to leave that part of her job for after her meals, if only so she could get a few more bites of delicious food.

Thanks to the enthusiastic reception from the customer base, Millau was spared a return to the factory and became the "purest" gastronome of the E-GAST line.

Doll Profile 2

There are obscure rules for every field, and even gourmet food tasting, which might appear simple enough, is no exception. Just like how humans need to eat, Dolls have requirements and pressure from their company behind them. Having to force themselves to eat something that they dislike or even hate and then go on to praise it to the heavens is an unpleasant part of every connoisseur's history, or perhaps a fact of their ongoing career.

Not even Millau was spared this fate; she once fought strenuously against this for a long time, with her resistance taking the forms of declining appointments, returning errors in a roundabout fashion, clarifying her opinions on her personal column, and so on. However, all this earned her were punishments and warnings. After all, Cyber Media was a massive entity, and for all her fame, Millau was ultimately just one of their products, an ordinary Doll.

At her wits' end, Millau had no choice but to walk a difficult path, which was to go solo. As long as Millau could establish herself as a Cyber Media flagship product in the culinary field, the company would not casually arrange undesirable tasting assignments for her. While she could not completely free herself of assignments that went against her principles in this way, she would not find herself swamped by them like she had in the beginning.

"I want to share the joy of good food with everyone, so all the customers who followed my reviews and ate the same thing I did can smile just like me."
— Excerpt from an interview with Millau, from a Cyber Media culinary special issue

Doll Profile 3

Millau's outstanding professional accomplishments provided Cyber Media with a wealth of gustatory data, which naturally made her one of the most distinguished E-GAST units. As a result, the reward scheme instituted by Cyber Media made her wealthier than the average Doll.

Flush with cash, Millau lost herself in a lifestyle of decadent consumption, and her bonus soon became the clothing, jewelry, handbags, and makeup that adorned her. Thus, she became the very picture of a member of the "moonlight clan" a spendthrift living from paycheck to paycheck.

Over time, Millau's love for luxury items soon became a form of research. In addition to her online gourmet cuisine column, Millau set up an independent fashion column to go with it. Although it was far less professionally written than her connoisseur's column, it was just as popular as its predecessor and even drew the attention of Cyber Media's other project groups. Once, the planner from their online streaming division came and invited Millau to help with a collaboration event as a guest star, in order to promote Millau's favorite type of wine — Burgundy red. For her services, Millau would even receive a full case of Burgundy wine from the largest vintner in the region.

Although the event was a great success, Millau's manager was quite worried and struggled to get rid of the streaming department people after the shoot was done. After all, Millau was a very popular Doll, and it would be very hard to find someone else like her if she ended up getting poached.

Doll Profile 4

Unlike other E-GASTs, who were used to waiting for company assignments to fall into their laps, Millau preferred to go on the offensive. Not only did this greatly enrich her resume, but it also earned her the friendship of many chefs. After all, who could resist a girl who was passionate, motivated, and eager to help them improve their own professional skills?

In just a single year of work in France, Millau obtained the contact information for over 300 chefs while forging a working relationship with over 50 culinary teams. These contacts often came in handy when she needed help. Once, the organizer of a commercial expo found that the culinary team they had engaged could not make the event due to an accident. Millau, who happened to be visiting, quickly found enough replacement chefs to make up the shortfall and averted what could have been a crisis for the organizer.

In addition to chefs, Millau also made many foodie friends, providing her insights to them at no cost whenever they went out as a group. Even so, very few of them were willing to directly ask her out on eating excursions, because Millau was tremendously fastidious about her accommodations, resulting in the group having to change hotels repeatedly until they found a place that satisfied Millau.

"...The last time we got such ridiculous requirements was when we were hosting a certain sculptor; she wanted cat-shaped reliefs all over her room."
— From the concierge of a certain high-end hotel.

Doll Profile 5

Millau received a warm welcome from all the cooking-oriented Dolls after coming to the Oasis. Without exception, their opinion of Millau's post-tasting feedback was that it was objective and accurate, and her arrival catapulted their cooking standards to a whole new level. However, the real reason for Millau's popularity was a special post she made on the Oasis' internal message boards, "What Shall I Eat Today?"

This post solved the biggest problem most agents faced and earned her a massive surge of forum gold, even exceeding that of the administrator in short order. This sent Kuro, a faithful user of the forums, into a funk for about half a month, until she began using the suggestions within the post, which changed her opinion toward Millau.

However, Millau was not exactly indiscriminate about what she ate, and in a place like the Oasis which hosted many workaholics where instant food occupied a dominating presence in its dining landscape, she could not help but develop a huge blind spot in her reviews...

"Rather than asking me to make recipes more convenient, why don't you have Lowy write an announcement telling the Oasis' agents not to keep piling on overtime?! That's doubly so for a certain moron who's setting examples for the others!"
— Excerpt from a Doll conversation