PERSONAL

Gender: Female

Kit: Eldritch

Location: North Hollywood

AFFILIATION

Alignment: Hero

Team: Solo Hero

VITAL STATS

Strength: standard (rank 1)

Agility: superior (rank 2)

Mind: superior (rank 2)

Body: standard (rank 1)

Spirit: (rank )

Charisma: (rank )

RECORD

Fame Points: 0

Personal Wins: 1

Personal Losses: 6

Team Wins: 0

Team Losses: 0

Tourney Wins: 0

Tourney Losses: 0

STATUS

Status: Active

michalecs

Janus North never liked doing things the usual way. She always saw bizarre combinations, strange synergies. Why could no one else see how everything was connected? Were they blind? To Janus, that's exactly what they were. Once she graduated from San Dimas High School, and shortly after that, out of her overly mundane parents lives, Janus began to do what she called "unfurling the world".

Charts, graphs, diagrams. On every available surface in her little cottage in Glendale. It was a secondary house, behind a much larger first house. The "mother-in-law" house, some liked to call them. But, in no small part due to her parents, who were overly wealthy in addition to being overly mundane, she owned the house free and clear. Who gives their kid a house for their 18th birthday? Apparently Holly and Greg North do.

A pile of papers tumbles to the floor unnoticed as Janus finishes her last drawing. This would work. The reactions would be perfect. Any chemist worth his salt would say that all looked like a formula a pre-teen Harry Potter fan would dream up and that all it would do was put out some acrid (and possibly mildly toxic) fumes.

However, this was not chemistry. It was alchemy. And it worked, at least for her.

At first, Janus didn't know what to do with her new found gift. There were so many so-called heroes out there - did the world really need another one? And yet, day by day, as she ran her little curiosity shop for Wiccans and tourists and those who claimed to be able to do "real" magic, she saw more injustice slipping through the cracks. Unnoticed by the "real" heroes, the cops, and even by most people witnessing it. It was unnerving.

Finally, when she saw one of the regular prostitutes that plied her wares regularly a block or two from her shop get pulled into an alleyway, most likely by a john who wanted a freebie, something snapped inside Janus. She fished about in her purse and felt the cool glass of her potion bottles in there, sliding against the thin velvet she carefully wrapped each bottle in. Janus knew by shape which bottle was which. She could just put them to sleep and sort it out later.

She could, but her anger flared. That wouldn't be enough. She wanted to put the fear of God Himself into this prick. So, she plucked out the one she had labelled "Delusion de Luce" and rounded the corner. Sure enough, bozo was there, trying to force the woman down onto a beat up sleeping bag that looked like it had been drug several miles down the road by a garbage truck. Loser.

Janus decided on the illusion right there and then. She had Hollywood and its obscene obsession with vampires to thank for the ease with which she would put fear into a man who thought with his prick. She pictured it in her mind, the woman transforming into a beautiful and terrible vampire that would make Selene from Underworld look like a teenager with an overbite.

Janus tossed the potion, spoke a single syllable in a language she was never taught but somehow knew, and it exploded noiselessly, a nebulous haze enveloping the struggling hooker. Suddenly, the man recoiled from the prostitute. Confused, because she didn't see what he saw, she thought that the man had just gotten cold feet at his attempted rape. The woman put on a tough face and started trash talking the man, who backed up against the wall crossing his arms across his face and screaming at the top of his lungs.

"Musta been some baaad dope you got mista." The hooker chided, but the man heard something entirely different. Not even Janus knew what the man heard or saw, it being entirely in his mind. The man slumped to the ground, his head rolling to one side. The hooker, none too scrupulous herself, went down to look for the man's wallet before she noticed Janus' presence.

"Hey, magic lady. Were you gonna wait until after he raped me to call 911?" She spat.

"I tried. Phone's dead. Was looking in my purse for my pepper spray." Janus tried to look as useless as possible.

"Yeah, yeah. Well, this fucker was gonna rape me then who knows what else because of whatever he's messed up on-" the woman stopped speaking. She'd turned to face the man, whose eyes were open now.

And totally unblinking.

"Fuuuck. I think this fuckers dead! Well I ain't stickin' around here, and if you know what's good for you, you'll forget you even came by here today." The hooker walked callously by her, quickly.

Janus stared, pale and uncomprehending, for a moment. He'd died of a heart attack or stroke. She'd literally scared him to death. But Janus wasn't stupid either. She moved on, and pretended like she had never stopped in that alleyway that day.

She should have stuck with the sleeping potion.

That day, Janus did a lot of soul searching. She also did a lot of research. Apparently it was her intense anger at the man in the alley that did him in. Her concoctions apparently didn't effect her, so the only way she could find out what the effects were was to try them out on other people.

A bit unethical, but if someone started seeing things while in a so-called magic shop after squirting themselves with what she labeled "A Midsummer Night's Dream - Magical Fragrance, Use With Care", then that was disclosure enough as far as Janus was concerned.

Of course, nothing ever happened if someone squirted themselves without Janus noticing they were going to do it beforehand. It was Janus' intention that sparked the concoctions to life. The last ingredient.

After sufficient experimentation, Janus tried a few more outings into the world of the vigilante, becoming a bit more successful, and confident in herself every time. She was of middling height, pretty but not especially eye-catching. In other words, she blended right in to almost any crowd. Thoroughly average. This meant to Janus that she would not have to use a costume or assumed name. She'd just be Janus, doing her good deeds where she could.

A few months into her foray into crime fighting, she was walking from her shop back to her car. Janus was digging in her purse looking for her keys, and when she looked up, there was someone trying to steal her car! She tried creeping up to within potion tossing range but he noticed her first. Instantly the man knew (because of the car keys in her hand, duh) that she was the owner of the car and instead of running away, he swung at her with the thin metal bar he was trying to use to jimmy open the hard roof of her Miata. Already she could tell he'd damaged both the windshield and the convertible's roof, she noticed even as that metal bar missed her but caught her purse by the strap and scattered both tool and bag to the asphalt nearby.

There went her potions. Janus tried to maneuver closer to the bag but the man was on her in an instant. He was choking her! Hands closed tight around her throat, bruising and seeking to take her life. Over what? A car?

That same anger washed through her again and she was starting to see stars, her eyes glazing over from what Janus thought was lack of oxygen. She batted feebly at him for a moment and then, on some bizarre impulse, twisted her hands into an odd configuration, ring and index fingers of both hands crooked downward as the others were extended.

Then, she swept her hands upward, and as she did, her eyes filled with light as bright as if a police car had turned its spotlight directly on her.

The man was gone. Janus looked around, blinking as the brightness faded away. There, crumpled on the ground on the OTHER side of her Miata, was her attacker. Sprawled out like a cat taking a nap in those unusual contortions one often saw in pictures on the internet. That can't be comfortable, she thought, then looked down at her hands.

The looked sunburnt, and they were dripping with blood. Panicking, she wiped them off on her jeans, but found no cuts.

Oh. My. God.

Rushing to the fallen attacker, it looked like he'd been hit by lightning, or a downed power line. He was literally smoking. Janus didn't want this man to die too. She needed to call help, but didn't want to do it from her cell phone. She cast about and located her would-be attacker's phone. Janus didn't want her fingerprints on it either, so she slipped off one sandal, and literally dialed 911 with her big toe, walked away, got into her car and drove home.

She waited. One week, then two. No police came around asking questions. Nothing regarding this man showed up on any news, anywhere, and Janus checked all of it. Her curiosity was piqued, even though she nearly killed a man, and after some experimentation over several evenings in Griffith Park, far from where people (even the homeless) usually hung out, she mastered her "Soulfire Blast" as she'd named it.

So, she'd crossed over into being something supernatural, and Janus was not entirely comfortable with that. But she wouldn't change it.

Not for the world.

A Trick of the Light

     Illusion Control: standard (rank 1)

• Area Affect

Janus has developed a potion activated by her force of will and refined by her target's own subconscious. Her feelings at the time give a general direction, but the "look and feel" of the illusions are entirely in the minds of those effected. Generally she carries smaller potions which target only one person, but if she were to use something like a perfume atomizer or even a squirt gun, she could target multiple targets. The targets usually end up seeing entirely different things, because the credibility of her illusions are brought from the targets own mind.

A Quick Good Night

     Induced Sleep: standard (rank 1)

• Ranged Attack
• Multi-Attack

This potion induces an unnaturally deep sleep. Short of physically shaking or slapping a target of this potion repeatedly, they'll remain asleep for several hours through all sorts of noise disturbances. Janus carries this potion in a small squirt gun that she keeps on her most all of the time. She's gotten good at hitting multiple targets, but they all have to be fairly close to her, no more than a dozen paces, for enough of the potion to strike the targets to be effective.

Soulfire Blast

     Eldritch Energy: standard (rank 1)

• Ranged Attack

Janus' most destructive and least used power, the Soulfire Blast is a surge of bio-electric energy. Once Janus had decided it was electrical, she has tried to measure it using various voltmeters, but all she's been able to do is fry them entirely. She is loathe to use this power because she knows it can be quite lethal, but in times of extreme duress sometimes a Soulfire Blast will just "slip out", either originating from her hands or as an omni-directional "push" in all directions.

Her curiosity has also caused her to find out the upper limits of her range, and that seems to be about 100 yards, but since intensity of emotion triggers the blast, that may be well below the actual range of the Soulfire Blast.