Justine
Cousin Justine, formerly named Justine McManus (AUDIO: Movers), was a member of Faction Paradox who gained prominence during the Sontaran invasion of the Eleven-Day Empire by inheriting the shadow of Grandfather Paradox.
Biography
Early life
Much knowledge of Justine's early life is derived from the writings of Godfather Morlock and flashback hallucinations she had while imprisoned on the prison planet of the Great Houses.
According to these sources, she was born Justine McManus. She first encountered the Faction in 1899, when she was sixteen years old, 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. Justine and her cousin, Emma James, caught Morlock's eye, and he bet Sabbath that if Sabbath failed in his hunt, Morlock would be allowed to induct one of the girls into the Faction. As Morlock was well aware, Sabbath's quarry — Emma's Aunt Fiora Venn — was already pregnant with Sabbath's grandfather (whom Sabbath had already killed), and 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 (surprisingly enough) she agreed to join Faction Paradox. (AUDIO: Movers, A Labyrinth of Histories)
After her initiation, Cousin Justine chose a sword as a shadow-weapon and broke with Faction tradition by declining to change her name. (AUDIO: The Eleven Day Empire) She was present during the Faction's activities on Dronid fifty years after the first battle in the War, and she helped perform the ritual that sent the Relic into the Time Vortex. Her 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 should be treated as that person — Lolita was able to declare Justine the Grandfather, declare the Faction in breach of the treaty, and have the Sontarans enforce martial law. Using the stolen biodata, Lolita used the stolen biodata to commune with the Empire's spirits, and then consumed the Empire into her interior dimensions. Morlock bundled Cousin Justin 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 because of the Gregorian Compact they would be accepted as diplomats. She and Eliza initially took sanctuary with the Order of Saint Francis in Medmenham, but after the Order was attacked by the Secret Service, she decided that as a foreign dignitary it would be for her 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 won. Once she had returned to Medmenham, the Earl of 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 (no relation), acting as their agent, transformed it into a courtroom cut off from Earth, in which she was put 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 seeing 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 she used the Grandfather's shadow to obtain the type of weapon which would let her out of the casket's time frame. Immediately she found herself confronted by someone else who claimed to be the last scion of Faction Paradox, and bearer of the shadow of Grandfather Paradox himself: Kresta Ve Coglana Shuncucker. (AUDIO: Movers)
Each insisting that they were the last true saviour of the Faction, the two Cousins were initially at odds. Demetra Kine, a posthuman from Siloportem, had a feud with the Faction and had had herself imprisoned so she could kill Shuncucker when the prison inevitably failed. However, the Cousins soon reached an accord and 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
Justine eventually led an attack on Lolita, who became War Queen of the Homeworld, managing to break her control of the planet. (AUDIO: The Judgment of Sutekh)
Appearance
Justine was white, with red hair, green eyes, and far less harsh of a face than you'd expect from someone who went around wearing a skull mask. (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.
