Lolita
Lolita was a sentient humanoid timeship and the sole member of House Lolita. During the War in Heaven, she became not only the Homeworld's War Queen but also (as Charlotte) queen of the United Kingdom and (as Lola Denison) President of the United States. She appeared in Michael Brookhaven's film Mujun: The Ghost Kingdom as Lady Wakai, to Richard Francis Burton as Lady of the Last Night, and to Count Dracula as Lilith.
Biography
Before the War
Lolita was a hybrid (AUDIO: Body Politic) like her twin sister. (PROSE: Toy Story) Reading her mind, Sutekh once observed that the Great Houses did not realise "what [she] truly [was]", although they had eventually been forced to realise she was not an ordinary timeship. (AUDIO: Body Politic) One of the images viewed by Chris Cwej when he interfered with the filming of Mujun: The Ghost Kingdom revealed that "Lady Wakai" had an "almost vampiric" face. (PROSE: The Book of the War)
When Lolita was only hours old, she understood the truth about what war against the vampires "actually meant", garnering praise from her mother. She was also the one who eventually "finally concluded the war","although "not in a way that the pilots would have noticed".
Lolita had a twin sister. When they picked pilots on their first day at the Academy, Lolita chose "the dangerous-looking one", while her sister chose one Lolita described as "the cuckoo". Lolita didn't stay attached to her original pilot; after she used him to make modifications to herself, which ultimately enabled her to take humanoid form, she let him move on to other timeships. However, she implied other timeships could achieve humanoid form if they were willing to do so. (PROSE: Toy Story) Indeed, Maris once heard rumours that some Type 45s could take on human form; (PROSE: Celestial Intervention - A Gallifreyan Noir) the Master's first TARDIS was, by some accounts, a Type 45. (PROSE: The Dark Path)
Lolita visited her sister on a lush green planet shortly before the War in Heaven. They were both aware of the Enemy's identity. Lolita tried to convince her to join her in becoming humanoid and "put[ting] Mother's plans into effect, after all these years"; when the sister refused the offer, Lolita told her that she wouldn't survive the War. (PROSE: Toy Story) "Lady Wakai", a thinly-veiled depiction of Lolita, appeared as the villain of Michael Brookhaven's GCI processor-generated film Mujun: The Ghost Kingdom. The events of the story were driven by her centuries-long plan to secure the throne for herself and her children. In the script, Wakai was said to have murdered her sister, the "most renowned and benevolent sorceress ever known in Shogunate society". (PROSE: The Book of the War)
Building up her strength on the Homeworld
The War King brought his "modified" timeship with him when he returned to the Homeworld. As told in Mujun: The Ghost Kingdom, while she resided in his Court, "Lady Wakai" attempted to curry favour with the aging King to little avail. (PROSE: The Book of the War) However, she was still recognised as a full member of the Homeworld's society, to the point of founding a Newblood House. It was called House Lolita, and she was initially its only member. All future places in the House were reserved for her own progeny. (AUDIO: In the Year of the Cat)
Mujun: The Ghost Kingdom related that, even then, "Lady Wakai" was building an army of Mal'akh with which she attempted to overrun "a peaceful village". She was stopped by "Baron Amatsumara" with the help of "Awaremi". Coming to regard his kind as a threat, Wakai resolved to destroy Amatsumara's home and people with a goblin horde. (PROSE: The Book of the War)
Upon being inducted into Faction Paradox during a mission for the Star Chamber to rescue a book from the Mal'akh, Richard Francis Burton was told that the Woman of the Last Night could answer his questions about the Mal'akh, though she was cold and evil and often lured men to their doom by giving them exactly what they wished for. Regardless, Burton went out into the Arabian desert with only a loincloth, found a specific tall plant, and stayed in its shadow for three days, keeping himself awake and sustaining himself only by drinking the juice of the plant's succulent leaves. At dawn on the third day, the fabric of spacetime tore and opened to the vortex with the sound of a thousand screaming animals, revealing the Lady, wearing a black gown and headdress and carrying a book and a sleeping baby.
The book was The Thousand and Second Night, which she gave to Burton, telling him that it contained the secrets of the world and its future. She also said that she had dealt with the Mal'akh and that they would no longer bother the British Empire or the Eleven-Day Empire. When Burton challenged the idea of fortune telling, the Lady threatened to feed him to her baby.
Years after translating The Thousand and Second Night and defecting to the Eleven-Day Empire, Burton identified the story as pure propaganda, designed to sway the reader in the War in Heaven, and he regretted translating it into English. He suspected that the Dark Lady's aims were not aligned with the Faction, the Great Houses, or the Enemy, and he feared that they were inimical to all life, since she was not alive in the way that humans were. (PROSE: Head of State)
Moving against Faction Paradox
Aki once dreamt that a witch "whose stomach breeds grubs bigger than men" would one day try to devour the sunless lands of Faction Paradox. According to the dream, Aki would stand against the witch by becoming the Grandfather's hand. However, due to a complex combination of factors, Aki was never recruited into Faction Paradox. (PROSE: Newtons Sleep)
Lolita allied her House with House Tracolix, (PROSE: The Book of the War) and she and Lord Ruthven travelled to the Eleven-Day Empire to reconcile House Paradox with the "proper" Houses on the Homeworld. Her real plan, however, was to destroy the Faction, starting with its Eleven-Day Empire. To that end, she turned on Ruthven and the Seventy-Ninth Sontaran Assault Corps, destroying both; after reaching an accommodation with the Empire's loa, she then "swallowed" the Eleven-Day Empire into her internal dimensions.
Cousins Justine and Eliza believed they were the only Faction members to have escaped, (AUDIO: The Eleven Day Empire, The Shadow Play) although according to Mujun: The Ghost Kingdom, a third man, "Baron Nichiyobi", also survived, (PROSE: The Book of the War) and several Faction members who had not been present in the Empire at the time of its destruction likewise escaped Lolita's holocaust, with some finding sanctuary at the Shadow Spire. (PROSE: Going Once, Going Twice)
The loa shivered, its celestial skin etched with Empire falling, shadowland pulled in, torn down, crumbling into the event horizon of a cruel, lipsticked sneer.
When Chris Cwej began to interfere with the filming of Mujun as part of his investigation into Michael Brookhaven, his new character upset the balance between the others, causing anomalous scenes to begin appearing in the filming. Several of these pertained to "Lady Wakai"; one of them had Wakai insisting that her prisoners "have their legs broken and [be] impaled on spikes", a line which was ultimately cut for threatening the film's PG rating. (PROSE: The Book of the War)
Infiltrating history
Lolita's aim was to "become a [new] History". In pursuit of that end, she began weaving herself at key points across History, replacing historical rulers with avatars of herself, though the people around her were blind to the change if she wished them to be. Among the victims of Lolita's impersonations was Queen Charlotte, wife of King George III of England. In the guise of Charlotte, Lolita caught up to [ McManus|Justine]] and Eliza, the two surviving Faction members, in 1762 London. With the ambivalent help of the Sieur d'Éon, as well as guidance from a "relative" of Lolita's possessing the body of Mary Culver, the two hindered Lolita's schemes in the 18th century, which had involved transferring an army of the Peking Homunculi to that time-zone. (AUDIO: In the Year of the Cat, Sabbath Dei)
Under the name of "Lola Denison", Lolita was also elected by the State of Arizona into the United States Congress as a Republican, but, after being criticised for her many centrist-libertarian positions, she dropped her party affiliation and was reelected as an Independent, backed by the Libertarian Party.
Democrat-turned-Radical Party Presidential candidate Matt Nelson picked Denison to be his Vice Presidential running mate. Though she admitted they had some political differences, she said they shared far more political similarities, including a focus on removing laws and government regulations that restricted people from trying to live their lives as they wished. Policies that were "personally important" to her included geothermal energy and childcare, but she had no position on abortion, since it didn't affect her own life. She refused to call herself a feminist, though Dave Larsen thought she was a "feminazi". During the campaign, she attracted tabloid attention for her "glacial beauty" and her public breastfeeding of her infant daughter.
An agent of a major Wartime power was turned into a Shift after trying to interfere with the campaign. It brought Dave Larsen's attention to a string of murders of young girls in their twenties, all of whom were associated with the Nelson campaign and had been found with their bodies drained of blood. The victims included Louise Perry, Joanne Nyman, and Janine Hanning. Based on apparent similarities between the Nelson campaign and The Thousand and Second Night, Bill Hunter and Dave Larsen concluded that Nelson was a vampire and responsible for the murders, but the Shift was adamant that Nelson was not the Mal'akh. Rachel Edwards wondered if the murderer might have been Tom Benson, but she concluded he would never do such a thing.
At Nelson's inauguration, Denison took the Vice Presidential oath of office with a smirk on her face. In the shock and confusion after Nelson was assassinated, Denison gave an appeal for calm and took the Presidential oath of office. In the following speech, she immediately placed restrictions on the media to suppress dissent, promising any challengers to her rule that "we have seen history shift today. Pray that you do not find yourself shifted along with it." She asked not to be addressed as "Madame President" but instead as Lolita.
During the speech, she also announced Project Caldera, the "Manhattan Project of geothermal energy", as a way for the United States to achieve energy independence by drilling into Earth's crust. The Shift feared this was an attempt to tap into Earth's caldera. (PROSE: Head of State)
Ascendancy and demise
Lolita attempted to use the Osirian Sutekh to get rid of the last of the Faction. (AUDIO: Body Politic) First, he destroyed their reproductive equipment in Pompeii. (AUDIO: Coming to Dust) When Anubis and the Faction tried to recreate Osiris as Horus in a remembrance tank from Cousin Eliza and Osiris's scavenged biodata, Lolita alerted Sutekh and advised him to use the information to get the Osirian Court on his side. Then, while the Faction was distracted by their confrontation with Sutekh and the Court, Lolita slit her own wrist with a fingernail and dripped some of her own blood into the remembrance tank. (AUDIO: Body Politic) Lolita was able to channel her own weapons systems through the nascent Horus, allowing him to cripple Sutekh at their next fight. Lolita actually intended for Horus to gain the throne so that she could use him as a puppet.
When the War King tried to sabotage Lolita's plans with his own ambassador, Lolita consumed him and assumed the title of War Queen of the Great Houses. However, she had forgotten that the War King had given Cousin Justine a safe channel to the Homeworld, and Justine sent a group of Sutekh's Mal'akh to attack the War Council chambers. The attack was meant as a warning, rather than a serious attempt at takeover; (AUDIO: Words from Nine Divinities) the real attack came when Horus and his seven hundred Osirians, whom history recorded as fighting Sutekh, traveled to the Homeworld to deal with Lolita. When asked how the battle had gone, Horus simply told Justine that Lolita "would not be a problem again". (AUDIO: The Judgment of Sutekh)
Appearance
Richard Francis Burton described the Lady of the Last Night as about thirty years old, with an "aristocratic aspect". She wore a large headdress and a black gown of strange material. Her skin was supernaturally pale, but her hair, lips, eyes, and garb were all pitch black.
Lola Denison was described by many American tabloids as a "glacial beauty". (PROSE: Head of State) One of the scenes which added themselves to Mujun: The Ghost Kingdom due to Chris Cwej's interference saw Wakai appearing before the witch horde as the mother of all monsters, dressed in a silk butterfly-robe and wearing a white porcelain mask; another had Wakai removing her mask while consuming the Ghost Kingdom, revealing a diseased, agonised, and "almost vampiric face". (PROSE: The Book of the War)
Behind the scenes
- The likeness of Caroline Burns-Cook as Lolita appears on the covers of two The Faction Paradox Protocols audio stories, The Eleven Day Empire and Sabbath Dei. These constitute, to date, the only official visual depictions of the character.
- In Lawrence Miles' character notes for Lolita in The Eleven Day Empire, he described her as
Aristocratic, but with no respect for tradition. Dangerous. Utterly amoral. Apparently in her thirties (though she's not human, so her actual age is open to debate). Political. Manipulative. Believes herself to be superior to most other life in the universe — as it turns out, there's a good reason for this - and regards everybody else with quiet amusement. Hard to imagine her taking anything seriously: everything she does is pre-planned, and therefore there's never any reason for concern. Gives the impression of being "untrustworthy" rather than "slimy". Doesn't really care one way or another.
- In A Bloody (And Public) Domaine Lolita is called "Lady Waki", despite being called "Lady Wakai" in The Book of the War, in reference to a name for the antagonist in Noh theater.
The Master's TARDIS?
In accordance with the strong implications that the War King used to be the Master, Lolita is suggested to be the Master's TARDIS — or, at least, the first of them. In Toy Story, Lolita recalls how she "picked the dangerous-looking one" of two potential pilots (the other one being "the cuckoo one") when she and her sister "the Ship" ran away from the Homeworld; this suggests that if Lolita was one of the Master's TARDISes, she was the one with which the Master originally left the planet.
"The Ship" in Toy Story is identified as the Doctor's TARDIS by the context of Interference, thus officially establishing Lolita and the Doctor's TARDIS to be sisters. While no story licensed to use both Lolita and the Master has yet explicitly identified Lolita with the Master's TARDIS, it is worth noting that in 2021, Big Finish Productions' official Twitter account "liked" a Tweet citing the fact that the Doctor and the Master's TARDISes were siblings. Although not in any sense narrative and thus not valid on this Wiki, this act has been interpreted by some as "official confirmation" from a BBC-licensed source that Lolita was indeed the Master's TARDIS.[1]
Pursuing another logical angle, the Doctor Who short story Celestial Intervention - A Gallifreyan Noir mentioned rumours that Type 45 TARDISes "could take human form". The Dark Path had previously established that the Master's TARDIS was a Type 45.
Footnotes
External links
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