Justine

Justine
Main aliases:	Justine il-Isis, Justine McManus
Species:	Human
Affiliated with:	Faction Paradox
Born:	1883
Father:	Jake McManus
First appearance:	Alien Bodies [+]Loading...["Alien Bodies (novel)"]
Appearances:	see list
Main voice actor:	Suzanne Proctor
Other voice actors:	Wanda Opalinska

Cousin Justine, formerly named Justine McManus (AUDIO: Movers) and later called Justine il-Isis, (AUDIO: The Judgment of Sutekh) was a member of Faction Paradox during the War in Heaven who gained prominence during the Sontaran invasion of the Eleven-Day Empire by inheriting the shadow of Grandfather Paradox. (AUDIO: The Shadow Play) She later became an ambassador to the Osirian Court and briefly sat on the War Council of the Great Houses. (AUDIO: Words from Nine Divinities)

Biography

Early life

She was born Justine McManus. In 1899, when she was sixteen years old, she first encountered the Faction in the form of Godfathers Morlock and Sabbath. The Godfathers were conducting Sabbath's initiation rite, in which Sabbath was to hunt down and kill his ancestors, alternating genders in reverse chronological order.

Shortly afterwards, Justine saw a fifty-six-second-long temporal dysfunction in the sky above her. It took the form of a beautiful woman who called her skinny, told her she was important, and told her to get "out". This caught Morlock's attention, and he identified that Justine and Emma were the apparent target of the dysfunction, perhaps due to his own actions at that moment. (AUDIO: Movers) He therefore bet Sabbath that if Sabbath failed in his hunt, Morlock would be allowed to induct one of the girls into the Faction. As Morlock knew, Sabbath's quarry — Emma's Aunt Fiora Venn — was already pregnant with Sabbath's grandfather, whom Sabbath had already killed and who was therefore off-limits. Sabbath was forced to settle for killing his great-grandmother's closest available relative, Emma.

Although Emma had been Morlock's first choice of initiate, he recognised a determination in Justine that made him just as happy to accept her, and she agreed to join Faction Paradox (AUDIO: A Labyrinth of Histories) and renounce her humanity. (PROSE: Alien Bodies) She broke with Faction tradition by declining to change her name. (AUDIO: The Eleven Day Empire)

Living on Dronid

When she was seventeen-years-old, she spent her apprenticeship as Little Sister (PROSE: The Book of the War, Alien Bodies) at the Mission on Dronid, where she worked under Sanjira. She lived in Smithmanstown and often wore a black velvet dress she brought from Earth.

Sanjira instructed her to dematerialise the Relic, not realising its importance. (PROSE: Alien Bodies)

Auction for the Relic

She was then returned to the Eleven-Day Empire as a protege of the Godfathers, (PROSE: The Book of the War) where she was initiated as Cousin and chose a sword as her shadow-weapon. (AUDIO: The Eleven Day Empire)

Justine's first mission as a Cousin was to go with Little Brother Manjuele to buy back the Relic at Mr Qixotl's auction; she failed by no fault of her own when the Eighth Doctor arrived and captured it. (PROSE: Alien Bodies)

Fall of the Empire

Fifty-two years after the War started, a troop of Sontarans (secretly working for the Great Houses) invaded the Eleven-Day Empire. They planted a fusion bomb and (unbeknownst to the Faction) stole the Faction's biodata samples. Justine stopped the bomb by dropping her shadow-weapon and (at Godfather Morlock's behest) using her shadow to pick it up. When it detonated, it destroyed her shadow, but left no physical damage. Because of her lack of shadow, Morlock could graft on a replacement: specifically, the shadow of Grandfather Paradox, still attached to the blood on the knife with which he famously performed the Act of Severance. (AUDIO: The Eleven Day Empire)

Lolita and representatives of House Tracolix signed a treaty with the Faction which purported to again recognise Paradox as a House, but included a clause on the extradition of Faction members who had broken Homeworld law. Using an obscure, archaic Faction rule, which stated that the bearer of another person's shadow was that person, Lolita was able to identify Justine as the Grandfather, declare the Faction to be in breach of the treaty, and have the Sontarans enforce martial law. Lolita used the stolen biodata to commune with the Empire's spirits, then consumed the Empire into her interior dimensions. Morlock bundled Cousin Justine and Cousin Eliza into a timeship. He told them to go to the Homeworld, saying that Paradox was now officially a House, and that the laws Lolita used didn't apply outside of Faction territory. (AUDIO: The Shadow Play)

However, instead of going to the Homeworld, Justine piloted the timeship to 1762, hoping that they would be accepted as diplomats because of the Gregorian Compact. She and Eliza initially took sanctuary with the Order of Saint Francis in Medmenham, but after the Order was attacked by the Service, she decided that as a foreign dignitary it would be proper to introduce herself to the Royal Court. His Majesty the King George III gave her the dubious honour of a duel with one of his Peking Homunculi, which she handily defeated using the Grandfather's shadow. Once she had returned to Medmenham, Lord Sandwich introduced her to the real head of the Order: Compassion, in the body of Mary Culver. Compassion explained that Lolita was trying to conquer 1762 by way of Britain, and Justine and Compassion formed a tenuous alliance to stop her. (AUDIO: Sabbath Dei)

The Great Houses finally caught up with Justine in St James's Square. The Serviceman Sabbath, acting as their agent, transformed it into a courtroom cut off from Earth to put her on trial for the Grandfather's crimes. Aware that she had no chance of winning her case, Justine made only a token effort to defend herself, instead summoning Lolita as a witness and questioning her about her intentions on Earth. Justine-as-Grandfather-Paradox was found guilty and sent off to the Houses' prison planet. (AUDIO: In the Year of the Cat)

Frozen in the Houses' prison, Justine dreamt of her childhood. She remembered when she first encountered the Faction and saw a beautiful face in the sky — except that the latter was happening in her present, as Cousin Shuncucker looked in on her in her casket. It was enough to trigger some self-awareness, and Justine used the Grandfather's shadow to obtain the type of weapon which would let her escape the casket's time frame.

Immediately she found herself confronted by Shuncucker, who also claimed to be the last scion of Faction Paradox and bearer of Grandfather Paradox's shadow. (AUDIO: Movers) Each insisting that they were the last true saviour of the Faction, the two Cousins were initially at odds, but they soon reached an accord when it became obvious that they had a common enemy in Demetra Kine, a posthuman from Siloportem, who had a feud with the Faction and had herself imprisoned so she could kill Shuncucker when the prison immediately failed. Working together, Justine and Shuncucker killed Kine and her agents. Justine discovered that Compassion had orchestrated the entire breakout over the past six months just to rescue her. Compassion sent Justine her timeship, and Justine returned to Earth in 1763. (AUDIO: A Labyrinth of Histories)

The Osirian Court

In 1763, members of the Society of Sigismondo di Rimini summoned Justine to help them deal with Great Ape in Posto di Ferragio, which they suspected to be a Mal'akh. Justine was initially reluctant, but Corwyn Marne told her that he knew the location of race banks and biodata codices that the Faction left on Earth after the Gregorian Compact in 1752. These technologies would be very helpful for Justine in rebuilding the Faction, and in exchange for her help, Marne promised to lead her to them.

Eliza was already investigating the Ape, and together, the two Cousins attacked Merytra Ellainya's Mal'akh army just as she performing a ritual to activate a sarcophagus that Justine recognised as the lodestone to a time tunnel. After ruining Merytra's sacrifice, Justine demanded the information from Marne, who led her to the ruins of Civita. There, they found the Faction shrine destroyed, with its remembrance tanks smashed and grown into the monstrous Tree of Filth; Sutekh had won it in a treaty with the Houses, and he chose to destroy Faction Paradox's heritage. Maddened, Justine allowed Merytra to open the corridor and jumped through into the Ship of a Billion Years. (AUDIO: Coming to Dust)

As a diplomat in the Osirian Court, Justine planned to thwart Sutekh's claim to the throne by resurrecting Osiris. To this end, she contacted Anubis, the Court's best biologist, and sent Eliza to collect Osiris' biodata from Italy. However, she became lost in the Delta on the way to Anubis' laboratory, and she was only rescued by Mortega's timeship. When Lolita told Sutekh about Justine's plan, and he threatened the laboratory with the Ship of a Billion Years, Justine used Mortega's timeship as a distraction, and the War King arrived with the 59th Time Fleet to rescue them. (AUDIO: Body Politic)

After helping oversee Eliza's transformation into Horus, Justine was brought to the War King's Homeworld, where the War King tried to give her House Paradox's old seat on the War Council. He said that House Paradox had adopted her and given her biological advantages, so she was a member of the Great Houses just as much as those on the Homeworld. However, Lolita argued violently against this idea, claiming to be directly targeted and challenging the War King's judgement. After Justine fled the Homeworld to return to the Court, Lolita killed the King and became War Queen. (AUDIO: Words from Nine Divinities)

When Sutekh declared a time war against Horus for the Osirian throne, (AUDIO: Ozymandias) Justine and Horus sent psychic messages to Abelard Finton and Corwyn Marne on Earth; Anubis then built a bio-screen for Justine to mask her memories and the Grandfather's shadow from both outsider observers and herself. Justine believed herself to be a simulacrum of the real Justine, who was in hiding.

Immediately after the tribunal, Justine told a future version of Geb to check south of the pyramid for Sutekh's body. She and Finton then took her timeship to the Homeworld, where Horus had just defeated Lolita with over seven hundred fellow warriors. Horus shut down his biodata to make himself mortal, and Justine had a short conversation with Eliza before mortally wounding her with the Grandfather's shadow. She gave Horus her timeship to go to Egypt, then took Horus' barge to go with Finton to just after the war's end. There, they watched Geb burying Sutekh in a pyramid; they also saw Corwyn Marne and an earlier version of Lolita watching the funeral.

Then Justine and Finton left to the Ship of a Billion Years. There, they met Nephthys, who was transporting Horus' body and told Justine to be afraid. In the throne room of the Ship, Justine and Finton met an earlier version of Sutekh, who believed he had won the battle by killing Horus. He could control Justine's body but not her mind, so he launched a full psychic attack on her. However, Finton began to recite his poetry, inspired by the dreams sent by Horus, and this broke down Justine's bio-screen just as Sutekh created a direct channel between their minds. She lashed out with her shadow-weapon, penetrated Sutekh's natural defences through the channel, and severed his neural connections. She deposited his crippled body on Mars for Geb to find, then dropped Finton off in Italy with clear instructions to say that Justine was returning to the Osirian Court. Justine left Horus' barge under the Mediterranean for him to use to travel to the Homeworld, and departed in the timeship Horus had sent Nephthys to leave on Earth. (AUDIO: The Judgment of Sutekh)

After Eliza

This section's awfully stubby.

Missing information from Spinning Jenny.

A loa showed a Faction Mother and Father a vision of Justine shushing the Grandfather's shadow as she spoke to her "cavernous home and companion". (PROSE: The Story So Far...)

Appearance

Justine was white, with red hair, green eyes, pale skin, and far less harsh of a face than you'd expect from someone who went around wearing a skull mask. At the Mission on Dronid, she wore her black velvet dress from Earth every day. (PROSE: Alien Bodies) When she was imprisoned on the prison planet of the Great Houses, she was given the customary convict tattoo. (PROSE: A Labyrinth of Histories)

Behind the scenes

Character notes by Lawrence Miles

Faction Paradox recruit. Young, probably early twenties. Recruited from nineteenth-century England, and it shows. Polite. Demure. Tends to be overly formal, and therefore an unusual candidate for a time-travelling voodoo cult. Probably quite uncertain about her new role in life. Nineteenth-century upbringing means that she's ashamed and embarrassed by the fact that she comes from a family of witches, even though it's the reason the Faction's interested in her. Actually capable of being quite aggressive, but only when she's sure of what she's doing. At the moment, she isn't.

However, Justine's changed quite noticeably since someone ate her home and most of her family. By the time we rejoin her she's adjusted to her new role in such a way that she's far colder, far more aloof and far more self-aware than anyone might have expected. Whereas the old Justine was uncertain about just about everything, by now she's become utterly pragmatic, to the point where she can actually be a bit alarming. While she's still formal enough to frequently refer to people as "sir" or by their full titles, there's absolutely no deference there now.

External links

• Justine at the Faction Paradox wiki