Eliza
Cousin Eliza, originally named Christine Summerfield, was a human clone from a bottle universe who joined Faction Paradox and aided Cousin Justine in her quest to save the universe from Lolita. She ultimately sacrificed herself to allow Osiris to be reborn as Horus and to help defeat Sutekh.
Biography
Blonde girl
A blonde girl was born on 15 August 1948 on the Earth of the bottle universe. She lost her virginity at the age of 15 with Cal, and had an interest in serial killers like Jack the Ripper and Charles Manson. She was also fascinated with the supernatural, often visiting the seer Lady Diamond. She lived in an architecturally-unsound apartment she shared with Cal and Dorian. In 1970, when Chris Cwej arrived in the bottle, he met and seduced the girl at Lady Diamond's and extracted copies of her memories while she was distracted. He left her otherwise unharmed, leaving her to continue her life even after one of the duplicates into whom he had inserted her memories gained independent life as Christine Summerfield; the two's lives overlapped for a little while, until the "end of the world" when the Great Houses invaded the bottle Earth. Christine never bothered to investigate what happened to the blonde girl who shared everything but her name during these events, claiming in her autobiography that she "felt no sympathy for her at all". (PROSE: Dead Romance)
Christine Summerfield
Chris Cwej was sent by his employers to prepare a bottle universe for their colonisation of its Earth. To open the bottle and allow for the invasion, Chris needed to ritually murder three people at specific times and places within the bottle London. However, he could not bring himself to kill the bottle's intelligent inhabitants, so he planned to create three clones with a cloning tank, provide them with full memory patterns from the blonde girl, and sacrifice them before they became fully aware. When questioned by Christine, he later stated that he was unsure where the stock DNA stored in the machine's databanks; (PROSE: Dead Romance) in fact, she was a female form of the Cwejen, (PROSE: The Five Christinas) duplicates of Chris himself created by the Great Houses in the context of the War in Heaven who had his biodata but not his memories, and came in various variations. (PROSE: The Book of the War, etc.) As the ritual required a name, he named each of these clones "Christine Summerfield" after himself as his friend Bernice Summerfield. While he was able to kill the first two according to plan, the third Christine escaped and became fully aware before he could kill her.
She was found babbling and screaming in an abandoned building site just before midnight on 27 September 1970. After being taken to the local police station, she met Cwej and started sleeping with him before discovering the truth about her universe and her creation. Eventually, Cwej created and sacrificed a fourth Christine, opening the way for the Great Houses' invasion of the bottle universe.
Christine escaped the bottle and entered the main universe; after being dropped off on Ordifica, she visited colony worlds including Shristostophon, Gardener's World, Hai Dow Seven, Lubellin, Shatner's Climax and Ultra Caprisis. Christine eventually visited the ruins of the Homeworld, where she wrote most of her autobiography before heading towards Dellah. At the time, she was 23 years old. (PROSE: Dead Romance) Christine later sent a letter to Bernice Summerfield, where she said that she took a post at a university on the planet Vremnya. (PROSE: Twilight of the Gods)
When still in the bottle universe, Christine had recurring nightmares about being trapped in an old house, filled with shadow, which was populated and maintained by a family of dusty skeletons. Though she always tried to escape at the start, she would consistently become lost in the shadows, and by the end of the dream she would have forgotten why she wanted to leave, having become one of the family herself. She always woke up with her fingers in her mouth, checking if she still had lips. (PROSE: Dead Romance)
As Cousin Eliza
Joining the Faction
At some point, she joined Faction Paradox and took on the name Eliza. Little Sister Eliza was in the Eleven-Day Empire when Little Brother Porsena joined, and she explained to him that it was only blackened by soot because the original London was. (PROSE: Of the City of the Saved...)
Eliza had attained the rank of Cousin by the time that The Book of the War was published, around the War's fiftieth year. (PROSE: Faction Paradox)
Eliza once attended a meeting organized by Tina in which they, along with three other imprints of themselves, arranged to break into CERN to retrieve a sample of their biodata which had been collected. (PROSE: The Five Christinas)
Adventures with Justine
Information from the middle chunk of The Faction Paradox Protocols and the first stories of The True History of Faction Paradox needs to be added.
Eliza and Justine fought the Sontarans during their invasion of the Eleven-Day Empire. Later, when the Great Houses arrived to offer reconciliation with House Paradox, Eliza greeted Lord Ruthven on behalf of Godfather Morlock. (AUDIO: The Eleven Day Empire) Eliza and Justine survived the destruction of the Eleven-Day Empire, and they planned to save the surviving members of the Faction from Lolita. (AUDIO: The Shadow Play) Eliza broke Justine out of the Great Houses' prison planet with the help of criminals and newly freed members of Faction Paradox. (AUDIO: A Labyrinth of Histories)
Horus and death
- Main article: Horus
To prevent Sutekh from gaining control of the Osirian Court, and for lack of a better option, Eliza offered herself up to Anubis to become a vessel for the salvaged biodata of the dead Osiris. Lolita added a drop of her own biodata to the mixture, (AUDIO: Ozymandias) hoping to take over the resurrected Osiris from the inside and control him, intending to use him as a puppet ruler. (AUDIO: Words from Nine Divinities) The process of Osiris taking over Eliza was gradual, with them being stuck in a merged identity with a gradually shifting balance — first Eliza gaining access to Osiris's knowledge and feelings, then becoming an entity who thought of himself as Osiris but still had remnants of Eliza's demeanour and opinions. Recognising that this new being was not quite their former king, the Osirians named the merged entity Horus, a name which, in their tongue, signified the idea of being "between two spheres". (AUDIO: Words from Nine Divinities, The Judgment of Sutekh)
Eventually Sutekh proposed a fight to the death with Horus to settle the claim to the throne. Osiris allowed Sutekh to kill him, setting up a time travel trap that ended with both Sutekh and Lolita defeated. To achieve this, Osiris released his hold from "Horus", allowing Eliza to once more be herself in her final moments, and therefore mortal. After saying goodbye to Justine, Eliza walked to her death at the Temple of Geb, posing as Horus and goading Sutekh into permanently killing her; she knew that this was unavoidable, having already witnessed the consequences of this event. (AUDIO: The Judgment of Sutekh)
Legacy
When inducting his earlier self into Faction Paradox, Richard Francis Burton made himself swear by "Horus, the reborn child from whose sacrifice our Faction owes its own rebirth". (PROSE: Head of State) Eliza was represented by the character Kishijoten in Faction Hollywood's film Mujun: The Ghost Kingdom. (PROSE: The Book of the War)
Physical appearance
The girl whose memories were imprinted in Christine had blonde hair.
However, the cloned, "definitive" Christine Summerfield had dark eyes and hair, and was slightly shorter than the blonde girl. When she saw her reflection shortly after being created, she had "bad skin" and cheeks that looked "much too narrow" for her head. She described herself as "skinny" and "badly dressed". When she saw her reflection in the following days, she noted that she was pale and had acne. (PROSE: Dead Romance)
External links
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