Something Strange... [Missions C]

Spoiler:

Janus had spent two days being really confused, from delivering food for a ramen shop to needy spirits, it was like nothing seemed to be going right. She was pretty sure that she had gone insane for a day and all of it was some hallucination she couldn't explain. She had then gone home to the hotel and worked a double shift before passing out for a day.

Now, she had woken up, felt better, and it was Yuki's turn to work anyway. There were no customers for the moment, the whole end of the world and such. Or at least, that's how Janus saw it. Janus was like that, look on the every side of every side. She didn't really know how or what she wanted to deal with. Her divination made everything worse no matter how much people thought seeing the future would help them. She clicked on the TV and sat back for a few moments as Yuki walked in.

Yuki and Janus started with their usual banter about how both of them happened to be useless for whatever reason. Then something caught the eye of Janus, on the television, she saw the same charliton that had told her to find a spirit two days ago and it had ended badly for obvious reasons because of it. She told Yuki to shush and turned the volume up. The man on the television was saying something about having the ability to prove that spirits were real. That and he was going to do so on this show in a half an hour. Though first he was going to give his life story.

That Janus knew from her power, but she was more concerned with the fact that the man was going to prove spirits were real. Spirits, weren't real. Ghosts were real, trans-dimensional beings were real, but spirits? That was a little bit out of the purview of things that went bump in the night. She told Yuki to watch the place and she decided to hightail it towards the station. That way if it was true, she would be there and if it wasn't she could call him an idiot.

Janus made her way via a full on sprint, which confused her cause she was moving a lot faster than she used to. She even hit a wall once or twice due to the inability to control her movements correctly, which was really cool but odd at the same time. She pushed that to the back of her head as she got closer to the television station, and realized she had become winded. Probably because she had moved literally seventy times faster than she ever had before.

The young woman now stood in front of the television station. She breathed heavily and wandered inside towards the main desk with the information person sitting behind in one chair and the security guard in the other. They gave Janus directions to third floor studio and she nodded heading up. She had gotten through by claiming she was bringing a prop, only because she had divined that they didn't seem to mind when people said things like that. Janus also always liked the concept of being a delivery person or some outside auditor, both worked just as well usually.

Inside the studio, the charliton and the television staff were looking towards certain places and getting ready to come off what was probably a break. The were a few minutes ahead, as television was rarely entirely live. Even most situational delays would happen. The man, was larger than Janus, and bulky, he wore clothes that belonged at a Ted Nugent concert, not anywhere in public. Yet there he was looking like a weirdo and making Janus work overtime on something she didn't seem to care about.

The man, was looking around and Janus noticed something unusual about the person hosting the show. It wasn't human, at all, in fact it was more a human puppet connected to a masked monster. Janus grunted, like an annoyed child. That was just the start of all of the problems. The moment the hollow noticed Janus it lashed out, and half of the set came crashing down as Janus bolted across the room to save a pair of interns from being hit by an electrical cable. She managed to slow herself enough to not get hit and power flared through her as the masked monster simply vanished. Apparently if it couldn't kill people then it didn't want to deal with Janus immediately. Which scared her because that showed both intelligence and strategy.

The woman grunted and walked over to kick the charleton, but decided that he wasn't worth it as she left the half-destroyed set and left the building in a huff.

Spoiler:

Janus made her way out of the television building, she had the beginnings of a headache. She figured it was due to her divination seeing potential combat and it fizzling out. Which was good but it meant her body was working in the wrong way. That was the biggest problem with times like this. The diviner decided to try and calm down by flexing the muscle rather than brushing it off and she calmed down and simply started walking into the future. It was leading to the wrong place and it was the wrong time.

She found her future self moving in a number of different directions and she ended up running into another masked monster. She snapped back to her current point and blinked. Janus wasn't used to this much interdimensional being confrontation. Maybe something was wrong, maybe the masked monsters were being drawn to something? That made the most sense, didn't it? She couldn't think of anything, humans were boring so they should just go back to their world to make it easy. So, she walked a few blocks towards where she had divined the hollow.

She ended up finding the masked monster a few minutes later, it was on the outskirts of a small area leading towards the aqueduct and pond just outside Naruki's main drag. Which was odd, the little thing seemed like it wanted to go somewhere, and it wasn't to Janus. She looked at the small rabbit and it shuffled into a shell, making her shudder. That was a freakish looking thing to see. She had seen it via Divination but it still made her go blah.

Janus wondered what the little thing was focused on, so against her better judgement, she waited for it to exit it's shell. She tried to divine when that was and it wasn't anytime soon. The weird part was unlike animals who were entirely nature, this thing seemed to have changing will, which meant it was forward thinking and possibly very dangerous. So she stared at it, thinking maybe that would make it change it's mind.

Janus spent a good twenty minutes staring at the shell, and then decided to poke at it a few times with a stick. That did less than nothing and the hollow came out and bit the stick. It then tossed the stick and Janus looked wide eyed at the little masked monster. The shell was throwing her off, that and it was tiny. Was this thing really a danger to anyone? She decided that it wasn't and it was simply wandering around. Maybe other dimensions had their own form of essentially varmints like this guy here.

Janus decided to stop pissing the little guy off and she divined a future where it attacked her. She fell to her knees and grabbed her skull as thousands of futures flooded her mind in an instant like forced images and information jammed into a small pipe that had no way to correctly disseminate the information. She screamed again and it took her the better part of ten minutes to come back to reality, or back to the present depending on how you looked at it.

She saw images of futures far beyond that of anything she understood, of dimensions and wonders that damaged her mind again and again.

Janus finally got back up and the small creature looked blankly from behind it's mask at her. A single future showed her a black robe swinging a weird looking sword at it. No, the black robe was on her? Wait, that wasn't possible, she wasn't from another world and she didn't have power. She just saw the future, that was it. In the future, the black robed Janus, with a much better haircut, she thought struck out at the small animal and it disappeared a second later. That, definitely wasn't possible.

Janus then screamed as she felt something in her chest try to split away, and it did, a second later the being she saw in the divination stepped out of her body, rushed the small masked monster, and simply cleaved it in twine, then as mysteriously as it had appeared, it vanished. The world was quiet again, and Janus held her head which was splitting for some odd reason. The interdimensional contamination must have really been getting to her as far as she could tell. She managed to stand up and brush off, her coat angry with her for it as a small young ghost appeared. Janus, was not amused.

Spoiler:

Janus, was a hero in her own book and unfortunately, no matter how confused and down ridden she felt.  She had to help.  Heroics, usually got things killed, and while Janus knew that it was probably her death, she didn't seem to care much.   She looked at the young ghost that was now in front of her balling about his goldfish that needed him to get back to it and she wanted to punch something cute and cuddly.  Though she knew it wouldn't have done much good so she simply sighed and looked at the young thing and accepted his request to get him back to his goldfish.

The young ghost was elated, which probably meant this was going to get Janus into trouble. She started thinking about all the odd things that had been happening to her and realized that it was probably bad. It had to be because it seemed like everything was converging into a paradox that required her input to escape. Though, divination couldn't cause paradoxes no matter if she thought she about them. It just wasn't directly probable.

Janus and the young ghost talked, he was very chatty. She asked him how he had heard about her and why ask her for help. The young spirit told her that someone was giving out her spiritual pressure if they had problems, but he didn't know who the person was. He just knew that he was told to follow the w1bbly wobbly timey wimey feeling being and ask them for help. Janus, simply began to think that the plot was thickening just a little too much for her, as if someone had been pulling her strings simply because she could divine stuff. If so, why? Or was she actually that insane and this was mostly a figment of her imagination. Had she never left the asylum? Was this her meds not being taken or something? No, it couldn't have been, it was too weird for that. Black robed Janus, a snake oil salesman that seemed to bonkers for his own good. She had to try to make up stuff like this which meant, she most likely wasn't crazy.

Her divination picked up the fish like most aware humans felt reiatsu. It was a big block of something out in the distance. She knew the feeling as the little boy seemed elated that he could hear the fish calling to him. Which, did not sound like a good thing to the Diviner in the slightest. Janus should probably have been expecting things to go bad from the moment she had heard him say that the fish was calling to her.

That wasn't even the big part about it. Janus was beginning to think that she was definitely being manipulated by something, and she had no idea what or why. She felt the 'fish' spike again as they got closer and the young ghost decided to run towards it and Janus just knew everything was about to go from bad to worse, without even having to use her divination. Which, just to make matters worse, was now screaming that there was combat in her near future. The two-faced goddess of changes simply grunted, and rushed to get ahead of the young ghost as fast as she could.

Janus grabbed the little ghost in time to toss him to the side as something slammed against her side. Sadly, there was no way to avoid it without the ghost not getting hurt so Janus decided it was better that she took the damage than it. She didn't know what happened to ghosts that got beaten up by extra-dimensional beings. The 'fish' had a set of fins that was put up like punching gloves and had swung a set of quick jabs towards the ghost. Probably, Janus thought to herself, to tenderize and eat him or something. She grunted but realized quickly, there was much less pain than she thought there would be. In fact, it was such a shock, she looked at her side, and then got clocked across the face, spinning down the the ground from a haymaker from the attacking masked monster fish.

Futures flashed, most were bad for Janus. Impaled, gutted, killed. Death in surround sound plus stereo made her dry heave as the fish approached her to finish the job. Then, like before, Janus saw one future where she didn't get hurt again. A Janus, as monstrous as the masked fish lashed out with a giant claw, slashing the fish to ribbons, but that wasn't probable either. That's what Janus thought, as the form of monstrous Janus rushed out of her back and struck a decisive blow along the mask of the monster.

Her head throbbed in pain again, and she stayed on the ground, she heard screaming, not realizing it to be her own. At least, until she stopped and realized, there was no one around her, and the only evidence of the encounter, were the superficial wounds she had gotten.

Spoiler:

Janus was sitting down looking at the nearby mountains. She had been for the better part of half an hour as she tried to wrap her head around some things. She wondered if anything was real anymore and if she really was crazy. She wondered if she actually killed not one, but two masked monsters. Then she took the time to get up slowly, and wonder if she was actually being manipulated as well as she thought she was.

The young woman pinched the bridge of her nose and shook her head, she wanted an aspirin, but they played tricks on her divination so she avoided them. She looked up towards the rocky cliff-side over the pond and saw a few people in climber gear going up. Janus remembered that it was a local rock climbing area called the Demon, no Devil's, something or other.

Janus stood up and brushed her coat off, which complained to her that she hadn't fed it recently. That was just something it seemed to do at times. From there, Janus watched a few of the climbers move up and around the mountain and she got a very bad feeling. Her divination blared futures in her head hard and fast and most of them were bad. There was something moving towards the climbers, ANOTHER masked monster. Janus was getting the feeling that something was making an awful lot of fun of her for some reason and it was really really obnoxious. She only had seconds to act and there was no real good choice.

This was because, the climbers were in two groups, and the monster could attack either of them, it hadn't made up it's mind yet and she had no idea why. She stopped and tried to think, what was it waiting for?

Janus quickly pulled up the closest future where the masked creature attacked and tried to figure out why it was being so secretive. She couldn't figure it out and no idea why. Janus decided that the best option was to choose all the options, she began pathwalking. It was a little trick she picked up to look around for something or check multiple choices. The problem was the two climbers, their free will was messing with her and making too many branches. The most she got out of it was that each time she picked a direction, the masked monster picked the other one.

Janus thought about that quickly, and realized, the masked monster was attempting to avoid her. That left Janus with a very bad realization, there was no right answer. She couldn't directly hurt the thing from what she knew, and no matter which climber she saved, it killed the other. Janus always knew this would happen eventually, and it really sucked.

Janus hated herself as she started bolting up the cliff towards the younger climber. She knew that this wasn't going to go her way but she had to try. The second Janus moved, she viewed the futures as the monster flashed forward and struck at the other climber with it's forked tongue, screaming in the odd monstrous language and the climber began to plummet. Janus grabbed the other climber and kept pulling them up. She got to the top and looked down as the masked monster crawled up the cliff towards her and she cursed the thing. If she had done nothing, both of them would be dead, it was a zero-sum game. She wanted to kill the thing, badly. She wanted to simply, jump out at it and shoot it full of lead. That made her wonder if bullets could hurt masked trans-dimensional beings. As Janus thought, another flicker of agony as something rushed out again, jumping off the cliff and with a small firearm looking weapon began shooting towards the masked monster which vanished after being hit once, crossing dimensions away from the diviner as she fell to her knees, winded. Something very strange was happening to her.

Spoiler:

Janus stood on top of the cliff for a long while. The cops had come by earlier about the climber who had feel and the general consensus was a generic accident. That wasn't the truth but no one was going to know about it. Which was getting to be the problem, Janus felt like she was being manipulated and she had no idea why. It was almost as if she was being dragged along by an invisible program or something that someone had laid out for her. She didn't like it, at all.

From the top of the cliff, if Janus continued north she would eventually reach her hotel, after she went past the campground. Which was fine for the moment, she needed to take a break, really bad. So she started walking back towards the hotel and springs.

Janus kept walking back, with her divination in front of her. She made her way down the road and there was little to no traffic, there usually wasn't until people got off work and even then it was slow at this time of year. There were a few lights starting to illuminate the trees from the campground as she passed by the small store just on the top of the hill going up into the mountains further. There was a group of people coming out with various items that didn't really interest Janus much and her divination didn't have anything life threatening on it for the moment.

Janus sighed to herself as she kept walking, wanting to get away before deciding that she was hungry as her stomach and coat made annoyed sounds. Janus turned to head into the small store and went to the back of the place where the small onigiri and bentos were placed. She grabbed a pair of salmon onigiri and a tea and took them towards the front counter. The campers were in front of her, mocking her in Japanese...

Janus, had known Japanese for a lot of her life. Which made listening to their contrived insults rather boring. She chimed in with a comment about how people are always listening and they both fell silent. They didn't even apologize, they simply paid for their stuff and headed out. She quietly went to the front and talked to the clerk, who laughed about the actual tourists with her for a while as she asked for the latest Jump and got a copy with her food.

Janus liked the store, it was quaint, and the owner, a man named Koh, made really good small boxes and onigiri. She was more into fusion flavors than doing something basic very well. She appreciated his gift and wandered out into the night as she unwrapped the first onigiri and began to much it as she wandered back along the side of the road. She still had to pass the campground and then get to her place.

As she neared the campground, a group of people was getting ready to pull their camper in and Janus pinged something in the future.  To make a long story short, it wasn't good and she saw a bad line of futures where the group in question met a very angry masked monster.  Even though they had been kind of mean and obnoxious to her, Janus couldn't just let it end that way and she walked up to the camper.  

The two that had mocked her at the store weren't driving, she guessed they were in the back.  She ushered for the driver to roll down the window, which the man did and she decided to try something a little different.  Janus was sure that something bad was going to happen to them, and the feeling of gloom that masked monsters put off was coming from futher into the forest up the mountain, passed the campground.

So, Janus looked to the futures again and decided to talk about the climber that had been killed.  She noted to the people that the cops would most likely look around the place, because there was a chance the climber was staying at the campground and it could ruin their outing.  Though, if they were willing to drive a few more miles into the hills, they wouldn't have to deal with anything like that.

After a bit of debate, the group took off down the road, and Janus was left to walk home alone, the lurking feeling of manipulation and being dragged along, still in the back of her mind.

Spoiler:

Janus woke up the following morning with a splitting headache. She had taken the later shift from Yuki and proceeded to take the first shift today, with it being the off-seasons and the world not travelling much made it relatively easy to stay open with just the two others she had. She simply waited through the day, using her computer to look up recipes, which she tested by cooking for herself at lunch.

Her other employee was an american plagued by polydactlism named Jacob. He wore odd clothing but he was polite in all the right ways and if you weren't directly paying attention to him, he seemed to vanish. Janus was never quite sure why that was but it was.

The day went by quickly, and after swapping with Jacob, Janus took off again towards the city. The sun was going down and the fact that she kept feeling manipulated was getting to her. She kept mulling over things in her mind as she looked through the futures and the feeling of dread and gloom seemed to cling to her divination. She didn't understand why, before there weren't any monsters, not this many. There were always a few but not like this, and not focused on her.

She remembered something she had read online about children going missing and she wondered why that would go with her now. Janus was pretty sure something was planting stuff into her head, she just had no way to actively prove it. Janus wasn't sure that was a good thing to have in her head, and she wanted it to stop. Though, Janus was starting to think the most things that were happening were definitely someone's design and she wondered how. She could divine, too bad she couldn't see that far ahead, if she could.

Janus decided that maybe following would be a way to get her more information, plus if there really was something harming children. She wanted to be the one to save them from whatever was actually lurking under the bed. Though, the amount of connotations that coincided with that theory were terrifying. Janus understood that and had decided that discression and valor had been tossed out the window. So, she took a new approach, she decided to look for the futures with the most gloom and dread. If these monsters with masks really were aiming for her or she was being manipulated towards them it should be easier to follow them by following the actual power.

The two-faced woman took stock as well, she had seen four and only managed to hurt two. Though she still wasn't entirely sure if she had actually hurt them or if that had been a figment of her imagination as well. Her divination pinged a second later and Janus ran at full blast to a nearby apartment. The building was old, and she recognized it from when she had delivered ramen a few days ago. In fact, the feeling was going to come from the same place and Janus scrambled up the stairs as her senses flared. Janus body checked the masked monster that was about to slide through the wall, add another power to trans-dimensional beasts.

The masked monster screamed, some unholy sound as it and Janus went tumbling down to the first floor. It caught Janus with something sharp in her leg and she screamed in agony. These things seemed to be really good at hurting her, the wound wasn't that directly harmful, the problem was it had left a laceration down Janus' leg. The warm feeling of something wet and the smell of iron filled her nostrils. Janus had messed up and she knew it.

The woman tried to kick the monster with her good foot and move away, but it didn't seem to care. Janus screamed as the monster swung at her again, its gangly frame striking as she just rolled out of the way. Janus was running out of ideas when once again, her spirit flared. She saw visions of other Janus again and they lurched out of her chest, moving to different positions and striking at the monster. The monster dissipated as Janus grabbed her leg and she looked around before tearing off part of her shirt to make a tourniquet. She then sank down, and passed out.

Spoiler:

Janus woke up in the hospital, staring at the familiar cream nothingness of the hospital ceiling. It was not a sight she knew well but never had enjoyed. She looked around and realized she was in her own room. So, she wasn't a ghost, yet, that was a good sign. Her head didn't pound anymore and she guessed her medical history had been read which meant she needed a way out of the place and fast.

Janus pushed herself up and looked around for a bottle of aspirin or something and was lucky to find one. She popped the pair of them and simply swallowed before grabbing her very underfed coat and heading to the restroom to change quickly. Janus kind of wished it was a phone booth, but not everyone could be superman, and that was kind of old school.