An Army of Janus

Janus remembered a time when she couldn't surf on air. Now that she thought about it, it sucked. She was standing on the ground looking up, her coat billowed in the morning wind and she was thinking about where she had been, and where she was going. They were simple thoughts, all leading back to the one that always made her the most worried, what if she hadn't become a Destroyer that claimed to be a hero? What if she had been killed before she had power? What if Janus was from another dimension and not Earth? The were all questions that most people wouldn't ever consider but she did so just to note that it was probably something only Diviner's did. It was like having regrets, but being ignorant to the fact that regretting them would waste time.

Janus had started routine training ever since she had learned how to manipulate reishi. She was using her small twin arm-bows, so she didn't do too much damage to the surrounding area and was dissipating arrows as fast as she could release them from her bow. Recently, she had been trying more and more to incorporate her divination projections into her fighting style, having both a bow and a variation of attacks, especially when her best seemed to have always been human torpedo, meant she was looking for a little variety that didn't potentially crack her skull. It was a well known fact that Janus was pretty stupid for all her knowledge of the future and wisdom that ended at the end of an arrow.

While Janus had many bad ideas in her time, using her own projections to train made for a pretty good one. She would pull one randomly from a future and attack herself with it. It made for a decent training partner, that did exactly what she told it too. Aside from learning to dodge, it really didn't help much. Another brilliant plan that probably was implemented completely incorrectly. It wasn't a good plan but it was a plan.

The woman needed something more powerful, more dangerous more wondrous. She needed something like the brilliant sparks of light that white robes and black robes had. They had releases of energy that flattened her, she needed something along those lines. Though she hoped she could come up with something a little better looking.

Janus decided it was time to use her trick to learning stuff. She sat down and started looking for a future where she could come up with something like a release. It was a dumb trick, and it failed her. The moment she gave up, leaning back and staring at the sky the god dammed idiot patrol just had to show up. She didn't move or think about it she simply rolled to her other side of where the figured had appeared.

"If I believed you didn't exist, would you go away?" Janus asked the woman in the faceless armor. The figure just looked down at her before laughing like she had come up with a stupid answer to a more dumb question.

Janus sighed and waited for the woman to speak.  She had been manipulated the entire time anyway so she might as well get manipulated again.  Usually when she couldn't come up with answers this idiot had to show up and give her hints.  Which, technically made Janus the idiot but she wasn't going to budge on this because she also knew she was being manipulated.  "Just because you see the future, doesn't mean you can change it."  The diviner said out loud before the faceless mask tilted slightly.

"Debatable, but that would require an intellect greater than your own."  The figure stated before continuing.  "Power comes from the future does it not?  Is there a reason you, Oracle, only believe in one future?"  It asked and Janus thought that was a weird thing to ask.  When she rolled back over the statuette was gone, and she was left staring into the forest.

5/15

The diviner sat up and went home to work, she had quite a bit to think about. Which was what she spent the next week doing between random training, and her job at the hotel and hot springs. She found herself staring at the clouds again after a week, what if she wasn't limited to the projections. Better yet, what if she could program the projections for longer or something? That would take an IMMENSE amount of reishi to do however. Like, a lot of it. She thought about that and decided that she had to go collect a LOT of reishi.

The diviner spent the better part of the next two weeks collecting reishi in ginto tubes for her experiment. She wasn't really sure if it could be called an experiment, it was more just a theory at this point. She sat out in her little spot in the forest and counted her ginto tubes, she had twenty one of them. Realistically speaking, that might give her two shots at this if she was lucky.

The idea was sound, she was going to summon a few projections, and her hirenkyaku, then infuse them all with enough reishi to keep them active for a longer period. Changing what they were doing was another part of that, so she planned to use Ransotengai to pump reishi into them and keep them moving. It was all coming out to sound like a really dumb puppet show.

Janus started by having one of her projections rush away from her and then stop directly in front of her. She popped open a ginto tube and wrapped a set of threads around the projection, power pushed into the reiatsu construct as she tried to reform it with reishi instead. It took a bit of time, but it was holding together. This one was the black robed Janus with a generic katana. It was rather boring. Janus then used hirenkyaku to move near it and poke it. It could be poked. That was progress to be sure. Sadly, she stopped thinking that hard about the construct the moment she began to believe she had made progress and the thing simply evaporated. She sighed, she had forgotten to try and move the thing.

There was another problem that presented itself, this was a lot of thinking for Janus while she had to sift through futures. It was basically overloading.

Janus sighed and opened another tube to try again. Though, this time she was bent on actually trying to get the thing to move. Which was the overall goal, she thought. The projection this time was the evil looking clawed Janus and the diviner wrapped her threads and poured reishi into the outlines of the reiatsu projection. She was back where she was last time, she manipulated just enough of the reishi in the threads to make the leg move and it did so. What she didn't notice was the fact that she wasn't paying attention to the future anymore. Which meant that she couldn't use her divination. It was also too quiet in her head and that was when she noticed, which lead to the entire thing unraveling. Within seconds her divination was back in full force bashing on her head, and her ability to manipulate reishi had gone right out the window.

Janus spent another half week trying to get multiple projections to become reishi, and while she made it work the problem was still that she couldn't control them.  She needed her divination and her power to get things done.  They didn't work well together, and she needed to combine them.  She needed them to work together instead of trying to compete for her time.  Which was the only way this was going to work.  It didn't give her direct ideas, but Janus did piece stuff together to come up with the concept that if her divination could be the thing controlling it instead of the her now.  It might give enough leeway that she could make it actually do things.

10/15

Janus spent her next training sessions trying to do the same thing, a different way. She was also taking the time to fully fill ginto tubes so there was always reishi she could use. Now, she was trying to do the reverse thing again, find a future where she was controlling a projection, and follow it back to know what to do. Really she was trying to do it by muscle memory instead of thinking about it. It wasn't easy and she had reishi literally go pop in her face quite a few times.

The process was slow and arjuous, taking day after day of simple repetition and memorization of not directly controlling her divination to do. Which was a completely different way for Janus to think, she had to do something similar to figure out when she was when her powers first manifested. Took her months and when she had gotten out of it she had been in an asylum for months.

Eventually, her reptition bore fruit. To a certain extent. Though not in the way Janus had thought it would. Janus was convinced she was going to control a puppet army that would do what she told them to do. It was a logical thought. However, this time Janus summoned the reishi projection, reishi began to coalesce around it, and around Janus, a set of much more brightly glowing threads extended to the projection of the black robed Janus and instead of moving on it's projected path the thing turned and looked at her. Janus shriek, it was the scariest thing she had ever seen in her life. Monsters weren't that creepy!

"Quit screaming." Janus heard herself say and the projection began walking around her as if sizing her up.

Janus, did not and seconds later, the projection slapped her across the face. "Seriously, shut up." She said to herself, if that was a thing. Janus stopped screaming because her face now hurt and she realized that she had once again gone completely insane. A second later another projection lurched out of her soul chain, connected by the threads leading back to Janus' back again and this time it was the masked monster Janus. It looked at, Janus then at the black robed version of herself and shrugged.

"That's a thing." Janus said with a hunt of the grungy voice of masked monsters. Janus Prime tried to make it all stop and realized that the two projections seemed be just as confused as she was.

Other Janus began to appear out of Janus' soul chain and Janus Prime was halfway to fainting before one of the other Janus stepped in. "This seems, confusing as all hell." Janus said as the Janus all went around looking at each other and sizing each other up. Their outfits and weapons seemed to be different but in the end they were all Janus. Different hair styles on one or two of them too, they weren't flattering. A massive blue ring halo and crown appeared above the head of Janus Prime, which lead the other Janus into a laughing fit.

"Good lord that looks so stupid." The black robed Janus giggled at the monster Janus cackled. "Worst princess ever." It laughed mockingly. Janus Prime thought about what this was before trying to make the everything stop, she stopped controlling reishi and focused on her divination again.

The projections were pulled back into Janus Prime the second she stopped thinking about controlling Reishi and each time they slammed back into her body, she grew another wing where the strings had been attached to them. She looked around once they were all gone and then reached up to touch the halo. It felt cool in her hand and she tried to pull it away but it didn't budge. She wasn't even thinking and tried to jump to get closer to it, and her wings took her into the sky. Janus screamed again, before realizing she was full on flying, not just surfing Reishi as the six wings flapped before a very bad point hit. Janus felt drained and the wings and halo began to evaporate, and as they did, the diviner suddenly began to feel like she was falling through the air.

As the ground neared, Janus finally managed to think long enough to form a hirenkyaku below her feet, but it didn't hold well because her concentration was on the fact that she had literally just summoned her own possible future. She bounced, then hit a branch or two on her way down, hurting but slowing herself before slamming into the ground.

Janus really had to stop going back to the human torpedo thing every few minutes, it was unbecoming.

"Not... cool." She stated as she realized how much pain she was once again in.

15/15