Justine Day
| Name | Justine Day |
| Race | Human |
| Type | Casus Fortuitus |
| Faction | Free Willed |
| Premiere | Slugs and Bugs: Invasion |
| Relative(s) | Eliza Day |
Contents
Justine Day
"It will take more than some slugs and bugs to stop me!"
Biography
Slugs and Bugs: Invasion
As seen in the novel, Slugs and Bugs: Invasion, Justine was a financier working with Erebus Financial Services. Justine Day was born in the Midwest in St. Louis, Missouri. She grew up with a normal life, and thought about going into education at one point, yet she ended up changing her major in college, and decided on finance. Even though driving in big cities scared her, with her degree in hand, she moved to New York City, and planned to make a new life, though she is her mother’s girl, and she called her mom almost every day. She interviewed at the Erebus Building and Dagan Erebus, himself, interviewed her. Though his motives for hiring her were sexist, she had scarcely began work when he was arrested. Justine could not believe her boss could have done the strange, dark things the television claimed he had, but the tales of cult worshippers and sexual assault aroused her.
She had always fantasized about mind control, and sometimes she was the slave and sometimes she was the mistress, but Justine got off on the idea of control, real control, not just physical bondage, but truly being owned. For some time after his arrest, she would see Dagan on the news and masturbate, imagining him enthralling her for some dark purpose. She sometimes would masturbate to known evils, like S.I.N. supervillains such as The Giggler, Queen Sting, Terrorbyte, Madame Bimbeau, or Toxsicka. Justine dreamt or fantasized about other dark things that exist in the world, but that she had no direct knowledge thereof, like Ophion, Nergal, Aka Manah, Nightbred, and even Cereborgs. She did not know it, but her soul's very frequency mixed with her biology had come together in a rare way to create someone vastly psionically psychic- yet completely latent.
However, she would uncover these powers, as by divine hand or by dumb luck, Justine Day stood against swarms of Infectulons. The infectulons originated billions of years ago, as a virus. On some distant, ancient world, the virus developed a sort of collective consciousness, albeit rudimentary, that saw these virii act with purpose like swarms of bees. Once this evolutionary adaptation occurred, the virus spread throughout the animal populations of its planet. Over a billion years, it kept evolving, not killing hosts, but mixing with their own DNA. In time, the infectulon virus became a hivemind, communicating through a psionic link. While a very primitive consciousness, this meant a virus in an animal on one side of the planet was equally aware of a virus in another host on the far side of the world. At this point in its evolution, the infectulon virus had essentially become one entity with trillions of microscopic bodies. And in another billion years, it evolved and grew as it encountered obstacles, learning how to adapt through its own volition, like an anti-immune system. The virus grew to become something resembling a retrovirus, an RNA virus, and a nanovirus all-in-one. Soon, it could change to infect not only any and every type of animal on its world- it infected every last organism down to even the simplest barely alive protein strands. Manipulating the cells organisms could never die.
This planet stayed in an almost evolutionary pause for two billion years the virus having thought that this was all life, until spacefaring humanoids came to this planet. Not seeing anything they would consider sapient, they had little fear. However, the virus could control the behaviors of the animals by causing their brains and glands to produce hormones, and soon the life of the planet had infected the explorers. Now the virus traveled with them to their homeworld, and infected all life. These infected creatures then spread to other worlds since they had space travel technology. And again, a billion years passed. As the virus grew more intelligent, it could begin to compelled infected creatures by the will of the virus itself, rather than the simplistic chemicals of the host bodies. And now, it reached a new level of ability and understanding.
It compelled the infected humanoids to use their technology to strengthen and alter the virus further and further, shaving untold billions of years off the amount of time it would naturally take to reach such levels. At this point, the infected humanoids own minds were added to the viral hivemind, and all the other minds of all the other myriads of organisms on all the other hundreds of worlds it had infected. This is when it became what would be its plateau for millions of years. The hivemind continued to spread, and once it could evolve and incorporate biology beyond the technology of the humanoids, then only biologics were used for everything from weapons to travel. Now, all these creatures were like viruses themselves, and even a single infected creature on a world could infect all other life.
The virus could use a mechanisms like recombination and endocytosis to infect, but on most worlds this was unnecessary because
the actual shape and material of the infectulon virus was so alien, that most immune systems of organisms could not even sense there were issues with the virus. And so, when the invasion of Earth commenced, this was the case. The virus has such a completely alien genetic code, using different nucleotides, amino acids, or even a different type of molecule to store and express its genetic information, that the virus is invisible or unrecognizable to the immune systems of all life on Earth, which is designed to detect and respond to specific patterns of DNA or RNA. It also alters the host’s major histocompatibility complex function. In short, a lifeform on Earth infected by any given strain of infectulonian virus, will mutate and become one with the hivemind in minutes or less.
Humans, however, are unlike any other organism ever encountered in billions of years. Humans are erotic, sexual animals. They have the capacity for lying, violence, and often can work against anything that benefits them almost like an entire species suffering insanity. They are also the only creatures to have developed the ideas of gods, especially in the sense of omnipotent and omniscient ones. So, as the first human minds were subsumed into the infectulons within just the first few minutes of the invasion, humanity's own inherent darkness infected the hivemind like a virus of its own. Suddenly, a hivemind several billion years old that had always been a shared viral mind, grew an ego. It saw itself as a god, it suddenly understood concepts like deceit, and it became a sexual deviant. This gave rise to a sort of new entity awakening from a dream billions of years in the making, calling itself the Over-Master.
The Over-Master could recall all it ever was or knew and how it had mindlessly conquered innumerable worlds. Aware of every small virus and seeing through every infected organism, it is like an alien god of the Physical World. Justine's entire life, other than a feeling of déjà vu, or occasionally knowing the phone would ring before it did, she never considered herself to be ‘psychic’. Perhaps all humans have some abilities to foresee what shall be or feel things their eyes cannot perceive, but fate created an odd happenstance during the Infectulon Invasion. A Minder had crawled up the side of the Erebus Building, and, following its nature; it saw Justine and tried to bond with her. However, thick glass separated the pair, and it could not ‘join’ (the term used when a minder and host become one) with her. This caused an interesting situation. With Justine having a higher than normal, but unknown, psychic power, and with the minder attached to her mind, she and it began to feel not only intense need and love for each other, but also a desolate loneliness at their separation.
The Over-Master had a choice to make as it observed this strange event. It could destroy the minder and feed its destruction down their mental link, killing Justine with a brain aneurism, or, it could study the event as an experiment. Interested to see what would happen with Justine, the Over-Master decided to follow her progress through the mental bond. The Over-Master tested Justine’s resolve many times as she moved from the sewers to the top floor of the Erebus Building. When it first observed her, it tried to get her to give in to the most basic and prolific of its vectors, the slugs and the sporers. However, when Justine Day managed to find ways to move past these creatures, it grew more interested, even as it watched billions of humans falling, Justine had its attention.
Justine eventually reached floors housing things like brain bugs and arachnodians. Justine grew more fierce now, using a fire axe as a weapon. It wondered if she might make a new, powerful addition to the swarm. However, her Minder was growing deeper in love with her, its concept of love being a concept of domination and obedience, and longed to see her climb floor by floor and give herself to it, so they could be joined in a dark bond forever with it as her superior mind. The Over-Master found this ‘emotion’ strange. Other organisms on worlds did not have emotions in the human sense of the word. Justine was ‘corrupting’ the Minder itself, from the Over-Master’s perspective. It found that very fascinating. Then, as she battled the bugs, something new occurred- Justine managed to slow the flow of time around her, thus making her appear to move at inhuman speed. As the Over-Mastered studied the phenomenon, it realized she was using minder energy for her own. She would draw from her own Minder, and then warp the power using some kind of inner ability. Now, the Over-Master grew very concerned. If she could do this within only two days of her attempted minding, then what might Justine Day do with even more time and energy?
Again, it contemplated annihilating her, yet she was testing the Invaders, and some of the strongest creatures inhabiting the Erebus Building had been destroyed by this tiny, puny mammal. If the Over-Master could have her become one of its minions, and use her as a blueprint, the entire swarm could grow exponentially stronger. But, more than that, the Over-Master now desired its own body, an avatar of its own rather than the trillions of puppets it controlled across the stars. If Justine proved to have as powerful a psionic ability as she appeared to wield- then perhaps she could be inseminated and birth its perfect form into reality. It set a trap to test her resolve and power, so that when she reached her office. It had the minder await her in the office and reveal itself and the Over-Master waited in agonizing anticipation to see if she would finally join the Invaders. Instead, she shockingly managed to overpower her own Minder with her psionics. The Over-Master quickly began studying how she accomplished the feat. It realized that for humans, their emotions had a direct and intrinsic impact on their psychic power. When Justine grew too angry or too scared, the power amplified. In a word, it deemed her chaotic, and it determined to have her subjugated and her power shackled to its gargantuan will. Then she would give it a form from her own womb, combining all her immense psionics with the perfect biological adaptations of the infectulons.
It simply ordered all the Minded to seek and enthrall Justine. However, Justine overcame these, the most powerful infectulonian units, all the time growing stronger. Finally, she reached one of the Over-Master’s hive nodes, a place in every have where it could personally watch and interact with its minions. Usually, a single glance into one of its giant eyes could crush the will of a lesser being, yet Justine appeared to have an endless appetite for its dominating mind-bending psionic stare. The more of its will it tried to corrupt and crush Justine's with, the more she consumed and grew empowered. Never had any organism been capable of anything remotely similar and now it knew that it must have Justine as both its Queen and its own mother. Finally, there was a teetering moment, when the Over-Master was certain that Justine would choose to join it willingly, and if she had, it would have created a biological goddess from her, Queen Justine. Something with terrible psychic powers beyond reckoning- yet leashed to the Over-Master’s direct will for eternity. However, even with the monomaniacal focus of the Over-Master pouring torrents of its psionic mental dominating will into her mind, coursing through her soul, Justine not only managed to resist- she did the unthinkable, causing even the hive node of the Over-Master to pause, trapped in a temporal stasis field. Justine then escaped to the roof, and Minded Marlena Kress regaled her with a tale implicating Justine in a type of victim blaming, to break Justine's resolve.
Marlena divulged how the Over-Master first saw Justine as a curious little creature and thus had her friend, Katelyn Addams, slugged. Kate then was purposedly placed in Justine's path to see if Justine would dare harm her friend. As it incorporated more minds within the Erebus Building, it discovered that Anne Griffin was one of Justine's closest friends and part of her 'breakfast club' with Jennifer Castillo. As such, after converting Anne into a Arachnodite, a spider soldier. Anne then confronted Justine to break her psychologically, and Jen would have joined them, if only Marlena had found her first.
Realizing that so much of the mental and emotional torture she had endured came directly from Marlena’s interference, Justine’s anger, regret, and power crescendoed to unheard of heights. The attempt the Over-Master had made at corrupting and indoctrinating Justine failed, but it did give her an immense energetic pool from which to draw psychic power. Marlena's tale caused Justine anger and immense guilt, Justine blaming herself for all that happened to her friends. Suddenly, Justine’s emotions manifested as energy and she became a being of pure psionics, her body replaced with energy- a ‘psychic-storm’ of fury and retribution. Justine annihilated Kress where she stood, and when the Over-Master's hive node attempted to grab Justine to absorb her into itself, she managed to grab Jen and fly to the ground. At that point, the unimaginable exhaustion and exertion finally brought her down. Jen took Justine’s unconscious body, loading them into Erica Petersen's old 1969 Charger. Again, luck or fate smiled upon them, because the Invaders enveloped the Earth with an electromagnetic shield, rendering virtually all technology inept. The car, however, predated on board computers, and it started right up. On a full tank of gas, Jen sped away, and sources say that the pair has gone to the Midwest, to find Justine’s family.
Factions: Crystals of Control
In the non-canonical Unity Match Three game, Factions: Crystals of Control, Justine can be played as an Infectulon. She was a Demo Playable Character.
Slugs and Bugs: Conversion
In the non-canonical Trainer style game, Slugs and Bugs: Conversion, Justine will be present as a trainable character.
Appearance
Justine is a 32 year old red-head. She has a playful demeanor, polite and respectful while growing up in the Midwest.
Abilities
Psychic Storm
Equipment
Psionic Energy
Notes and Trivia
Justine Day is the reincarnation of Eliza Day from the novel The Anax: Call of the Cursed One
