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The Sisters of Juliet were a group of around 1500 varyingly-accurate duplicates of Juliet-178, a Clockwork Cherub of the Crew of the Copper-Colored Cupids.
History
Creation
- See main article: Incident C179B
One day in 2019, Juliet-178 was keen to watch a new movie screened by the Department of Cinematography even though she had a full day's worth of work at the Department of Problem-Solving. Breaking a cardinal rule of the Crew, she created a duplicate of herself to do the work for her while she snuck off to watch the movie. The duplicate, however, being too accurate a copy, had the same idea, in a chain of recursion which only ended after the creation of 1079 Juliet duplicates in total.
Unable to keep this secret, Juliet was punished by the Department of Discipline in the form of a titanic assignment: she was exiled from the Homeworld to an inhospitable Prime-adjacent universe and tasked with romanticising a great number of living things before she would be allowed back. Juliet got around this by blocking off some of her duplicates' memories to make each of them believe she was the original Juliet and splitting the assignment between them, giving each Juliet only a hundred targets to romanticise. Once they were done, all the Juliets returned to the Homeworld, and Juliet sent out a wave of positronic radiation to restore their memories. However, she was surprised to find that half of the duplicates had taken apart their Fog Ships to create further duplicates to split the workload further.
She mulled that she would have to ask Peter-707 of the Department of Vehicles for a big favour in order to cover up the missing Fog Ship components, while the Sisters were left to contemplate where they would live and how to name themselves — what with numbers based on absolute chronological order of creation, which they'd started out using, proving hard to keep track of. (PROSE: The Labors of Juliet)
Subsequently, the “Sisters of Juliet” began causing mayhem in the Cupid Homeworld, most notably when they all tried to continue Juliet's charade of a “love affair” with Romeo-1020, stretching the poor lad's patience thin as they each insisted on watching the same movie with him, one after the other. Eventually, the Cupid Parliament exiled the Sisters to an asteroid in Dimension 1579 to cool off. Romeo-1020 was sent in with them, though they allowed the original Juliet to remain in the Homeworld due to her invaluable position at the Department of Problem-Solving. Sigmund-1028 was also sent to Dimension 1579 to serve as overseer for the impromptu colony. He used his experience there to found the Department of Psychology after returning home. (PROSE: Of Romeos and Juliets)
In exile
Over the following months, overseers were rotated rapidly as none had enough patience to deal with the shenanigans of over a thousand Juliets for extended periods of time. (PROSE: Of Romeos and Juliets) The whole sequence of events was documented as “Incident C179B” and also discussed in The Cupid Courier. (PROSE: The Resurrection of the Wellsians)
When the Copper-Colored Council of Elders instituted the Cupid Suggestion Box, the original Juliet-178, seeing how Pseudo-Pessimist had been “readily accepted” in the Homeworld, put in a request to bring the Sisters back to the Homeworld. However, it was denied, in part because the Elders had not meant to set such a far-reaching precedent when they allowed Pseudo-Pessimist to stay, and in part because it was clear from the wording of her note that Juliet intended to resume using the Sisters to get out of doing her chores if she got her wish. (PROSE: The Cupid Suggestion Box)