Winston Churchill

Winston Churchill is Winston Churchill.

A First Lord of the Admiralty in the Asquith government in 1911-1915, Churchil was also unofficially the minister in charge of relations with the Century Club, owing to his own globetrotting and adventurous credentials and inclinations, as well as previous good relations with some of the senior Centurions, such as Armando Estebán Corroto, whom the "young titan" first encountered while working as a correspondent in Cuba during the Spanish-American War. Accordingly, when the April 1st attacks occured in 1914, he was the man in the British government who William Holmgrove turned to for assistance. Although the military response he mobilised came too late to do much in the way of actual fighting, the threat of such a coordinated response helped intimidate the Shadow Federation into leaving the city following the siege of the Wapping warehouse and the young Centurions' counterattack, allowing the latter to leave London as well without any further attacks.

Churchill went on to coordinate the British government's response to the Saint Haven Incident by staging an all-out military assault on the poor, uncannily forgettable town, mobilising local army units to blockade it and moving in with the Royal Navy to bombard it into oblivion, on the theory that there is no kill like overkill. In the second stage of the operation, Churchill sent in the Royal Marines to actually occupy the place, but could not resist the temptation to take a closer look at the action, as was his wont in the past. He and his pilot, an unfortunate member of the Royal Flying Corps named Lieutenant Nicholas Grosvenor, flew in a plane across Saint Haven prior to crashing through a wall of the Saint Haven Citadel. Due to a contrived series of events, Viktor Vaughn had unwittingly saved Churchill's life, though it is unlikely that either of them would ever realise this in the future.

As of then, Churchill quickly rallied and teamed up with Else Rommel to fight their way back towards the inner sanctum, where the confrontation with Masque had already begun. The First Lord of the Admiralty contributed to the fight there, prior to taking over the pacification efforts for Saint Haven. Due to its supernatural properties, the slightly overzealous massacre he carried out had no effect on his subsequent career.

During the Great War Churchill had committed to the effort with gusto, partly encouraged by his new paranormal expert, a deeply mysterious and Jewish, yet nevertheless entirely legit, individual known as Doctor Isaac Solomon. Among other things, he came up with the idea of organising patriotic British (and British enough) Centurions of the newer generation into the Century Club Junior Squad (on the theory that those kids were going to do some over the top violence anyway and may as well do it for Britain and with some basic control and oversight). The name was misleading as it actually consisted of three four-man units: Unit 1 consisted of Lin Tsao (Wales!), Abigail Kirkbride (Ireland! But mostly Ulster), Robert Elliott (Scotland!) and team leader Simon Laffey (England!). The Junior Squad and Unit 1 in particular took part in a variety of top secret operations, mostly dealing with the usual Centurion-class threats that also happened to interfere with the war effort, though over time this evolved into an ever closer involvement with the war itself. The most important if also most bittersweet operation of Unit 1 was in Gallipoli, where Lin managed to assassinate Mustafa Kemal, pointed out by Dr. Solomon as an individual of extreme fated importance whose death would doubtless greatly alter the future in Britain's favour, but could not turn the tide of the broader Dardanelles operation, ultimately leading to the political fall from grace of Winston Churchill as that ill-fated campaign's most prominent advocate. Nonetheless his initiative has survived (sort of) and his sometimes-ally David Lloyd George seems likely to return him into government in some capacity eventually.