#* janus.

APPEARANCE / ARCHITECTURE / BASIC OUTLINE

The Library is essentially an Eldritch location, and not bound to any basic human-world laws regarding how it looks or how it works.  Bizarrchitecture is a given, and the place is constantly rearranging itself when you’re not looking. There’s a catch, though – depending on your proximity to the Lobby, the looks and the feel of the library might be more or less conventional. The architecture also varies following that principle. Within the inner rings you may expect rows of shelves and book-lined hallways, lounging areas, and familiar organization. Go to a different room or floor, though, and the set up will change: it may turn maze-like, or nonsensical, or take to following geometric patterns such as a grid of smaller, hexagonal rooms. Move farther away – in any direction – and directions may stop having any meaning. 

Janus prefers to think of the Library of an ever growing sphere, with the Lobby dead in the middle. Because of this, the Library will take to organizing itself in this fashion when it comes to its levels of familiarity, but being a dimension, it really doesn’t have a shape. There’s no “exterior” to the sphere. In other words: Janus only cares to show other people a bubble-shaped fraction of the Library.

A better way to look at this is to consider the celestial spheres. Instead of the sun sitting at the center as the smallest sphere, you have the lobby. And every other sphere will represent a “ring”, or more precisely a bigger sphere.

LOBBY: if you ever visit the Library, this is likely where you’ll start off. It feels most like a conventional library, with a sitting area preceding shelves of books that line the walls and create several parallel hallways. It is a massive place. The books you find here will always vary, but their rarity will be medium to low. Other floors and rooms will mirror the layouts of famous libraries, not just from earth but from other worlds. A book of your life’s stats (a book that contains everything from how many hours you’ve slept to how many people have thought about you) is somewhere in here.

INNER RINGS: found when delving farther from the lobby, they still strike as familiar.  Things begin to get more maze-like. Surrealist architecture starts to show up. The necronomicon is here.

OUTER RINGS: Space stops following conventional structure, and alien geometries become the norm. Stuff gets messy. At this point, the average human is pretty much not equipped to handle all that is going on. Finding things is also harder than ever (not that it is easy at the lobby, mind you.)

NULL SPACE: this is the space that is either still not developed/yet to expand, or the forbidden corners of the library (places only Janus can visit) and it represents everything beyond the outer rings. At this point the landscape is in fact aggressive toward invaders (in comparison to the outer rings, which are unsafe/hostile, but not aggressive). Weird beings inhabit this area guarding it (without mention the sentient surroundings themselves) and there’s no incentive to ever reach this point. The risk of losing your sanity or dying is just too high.

BABEL TROPES

Great Big Library of Everything: well, that’s a given.

Great Big Book of Everything: it’s around there somewhere.

Big Book of War: a whole room of them, in the lobby.

Reality-Writing Book: several of them, in the outer rings.

Portal Book: somewhere between the lobby and the inner rings. Sometimes they are the only way into unique dimensions.

Tomes of Eldritch Lore: in the lobby.

Chronoscopes: in the lobby.

Spell Books: many in the lobby, with rarer ones on the rings.

Ancient Artifacts: a bunch. Depending on their rarity and danger, they will be anywhere from the lobby to null space.

MacGuffins: a given.

Tomes of Prophecy and Fate: found in the inner rings.

Akashic Records: all that is inside the library.

Magical Library: the library is alive, though not the way you consider things to be alive. It can feel, and do things on purpose, but mostly it behaves in a random fashion. See: Genius Loci. 

Bizarrchitecture: found in small degree in the lobby and inner rings, and in greater degree in the outer rings and null space.

Eldritch Location: that’s what it is!

Year Inside Hour Outside: time… doesn’t work here, period. Years inside this library may sometimes represent seconds outside. Sometimes it may be the other way around. It depends on where you are exactly.

STATUS IN THE MULTIVERSE

There’s no other Babel. Only one accounts for the entire Multiverse, making it so it can’t split into multiple timelines. Because of this, it’s well protected by Janus in first instance and other gods and old beings that agree with Janus’ laborious task.

CONTENTS

Everything is in the library, or so Janus claims. The truth is that most average things will show up on their own, but those that don’t, he has to actively look for and acquire. 

You will find: books, scrolls, runestones, paintings, sculptures, ancient technology, futuristic technology, computers (of all kinds), clothing, musical instruments, and more. Everything considered worth storing will eventually find its way into the library.

Because of this, sometimes he will employ the assistance of some followers, or hired bounty hunters called Finders. He’s done this for millennia. But if the object in question requires special treatment (or he’s bored), he will look for them himself.

HOW TO VISIT BABEL

*To get to Babel without Janus’ assistance is virtually impossible and it was designed this way. You can only visit Babel with his blessing and getting it is the difficult part. It cannot be forced out of him, and he must give it willingly – so he’s extra careful over who he allows inside. He can “close his doors” to you if you merit punishment, but this is something he doesn’t like to do. He’d rather be extra sure that you’re worthy. It may take thousands upon thousands of years for Janus to reach that conclusion (then again it may take less).

You can reach Babel by accident, in that you may be able to find one of the portal manuscripts or artifacts capable of taking you to Babel that he’s left at random locations, usually ruins, usually after a series of tests and puzzles. It is quite rare, but a god finds ways to entertain himself.

THE LIBRARY OF ALEXANDRIA

There’s a myth that is well known in many timelines and non-existent in others: Janus was responsible for the definitive burning of the famous library. Julius Caesar’s idiot soldiers had accidentally started the fire that ate a part of the library, no doubt, but this was just the beginning of the mess. Such negligence and disregard (there were also many other little attacks and offenses afterwards that just added fuel to the whole thing, so to speak) for the knowledge stored in those books made janus consider humans unfit to care for them. He couldn’t bear the sight of such destruction, all done because of religious differences and political greed, so a couple of years afterwards (after Ceasar but before Aurelian) there was a second fire that did burn most of the library and left very little of it left. He took the Library of Celsus (back in Anatolia) in a similar fashion too, with a fire during an invasion, and transported them whole into Babel. 

SPACETIME TELEPORTATION

Janus’s most distinctive power inherited from his primordial father is his ability to travel across the multiverse, hopping between dimensions as often as he voyages from one side of the continuum to the opposite into completely different or even bizarre dominions or planes of existence. Unless a greater force blocks passage into a particular dimension, Janus’ power has no limits and all axis of reality and unreality are available for him to engage.

He’s met multiple versions of the same person, even at different life stages, for he can go back and forth across the spectrum of time as well. Minor parallel dimensions are constantly sprouting in order to sort out all these incidences.

The ability to reconcile with the concept of infinitude and boundlessness is both a mental and physical job, often called The Consciousness. It happens both inside Babel (on a small cosmic scale) and with the multiverse itself; it’s an ability your average human does not have, just like your average human is not equipped to deal with the true forms of many other primordial beings and cosmic entities.

The mechanism of teleportation is gate or fire based. Janus can create portals into other dimensions, though their properties make it so only he can cross them safely – unless, of course, he’s explicitly projecting his ability so he can take people with him. They can be made out of thin air (“raw”) or they can take the form of gates or doors native to the world he’s in (“designed”). An example of the latter would be crossing an arbitrary entrance (walking into a building by the front door for example) only to wind up at a different universe. His fire-based teleportation is used primarily when taking objects into Babel, burning them with his touch until they become ashes, but he can burn himself or others to teleport too.

FIRE CREATION AND MANIPULATION

Janus has an intimate relationship with fire and energy. He’s immune to its damage, and he can manipulate its shape and size as well as give it a direction in an offensive attack, or he can extinguish it too. The fire he creates is special, for it can thrive in realms without the chemical properties necessary to sustain proper fire, as it is merely his energy given a familiar shape and temperament. It can act like normal fire, or it can be harmless to the touch, in which case it will be used for teleportation purposes and in lesser cases as a healing agent for biological tissues.

SHAPESHIFTING  

1. humanoid form: it’s the shape he uses most often to interact with the world at large, mostly out of custom, as it was the shape he was born in. it greatly emulates a human being on the outside, though he works at a different wavelength than one – his blood is denser and heavier, colored like liquid gold, and his internal organs are all fully functioning, but they are not vital. he’s stronger and faster than it’s normal for a human and physically, he takes after his mortal mother. he’s tall (6′4 / 194 cm) and heavier than he seems (270 lbs / 122 kg).

2. animalistic form: it resembles a great feline, specifically a golden tiger. he developed this form roughly around the same time he began to be associated with the deity of caishen. much like in the case of his humanoid form, it’s bigger and heavier than the normal animal, but it can also get even bigger than his basic size. his energy is more free-flowing in this shape, exuding aura-like out of his body, something he has to will in his human form. it can either look just a bit unusual or extremely abnormal.

3. primordial form: it takes after his father, which is to say, it has no definite shape, for its ruled by the viewer’s perception. it’s his energy given free reign. though he can tap into it anytime, he seldom uses it, for it has a tendency to disturb the general surroundings of the places he’s in (with the exception of babel) and has a correlation with the creation of space/time rifts that “disrupt the peace” of your otherwise slice of life universe if he’s not careful. in other words, he can inadvertently cause probability meltdowns or strange phenomena that otherwise does not occur (like perfect circles and other geometric impossibilities), on top of the customary effects on lesser living forms (insanity for humans, primal fright responses in animals).

BENEDICTION

Janus can bless people by having them drink a drop of his blood. Such blessing may grant the subject with a variety of gifts, usually depending on Janus’ intention – a predilection towards wealth and prosperity, an ease towards acquiring great knowledge, a special access to him and ability to summon him, healing from a certain illness and even a limited biological de-aging, in other words the chance to look and feel younger than you might really be.

Any attempts to use/steal/take Janus’ blood by force due to its desirable properties usually winds up being deadly for the assailant due to the toxicity his blood has otherwise.

CALLING

Janus can telepathically communicate with followers (easily) and non-followers (if he tries very hard)! He can be summoned via prayer as well as some sacrifices, and he’ll more often than not heed your call if you do it properly.

GOLDEN TOUCH + GOLD MANIPULATION

1. The ability to turn things (living or not) to solid gold by manner of physical contact. He seldom uses this power offensively. Instead, he uses it for when he needs money for whatever reason in worlds where precious metals are used as currency or have a high price value (like Earth), or to build things. He can revert the change.

2. By necessity that also means he can control gold and to a lesser degree other metals, although he can’t create them outright the way he can gold (he can create less pure versions of gold and alloys, which by necessity will have other metals added to it, like copper in the case of rose gold). Mostly, he can reshape and mold gold almost effortlessly.

babel-based

Inside Babel (which is, more or less, a habitable extension of Janus’ primordial energy – ergo, an Eldritch location, as well as a liminal space) Janus’ abilities are greatly amplified. This is his home realm, and he has a total control of what happens in it.

OMNISCIENCE

Nobody knows exactly how Babel works except Janus, and nobody knows exactly where everything is except for Janus. He’s the “Man of the Book”, so to speak, and without him Babel is about as easy to explore as a foreign country when you have absolute zero knowledge of the language or the culture.  Finding something in such a vast, infinite, and uncooperative place can only be done with Janus’ aid, who has empathic familiarity of the library and every one of the books in it.

It is limited to Babel, and outside the library, he knows a lot, but he doesn’t know everything.

OMNIPOTENCE

“you used to be alive, now you’re almost mythic.” (2)

this was a partially conscious, partially unconscious decision. it all started as a light disregard that, over the span of centuries, amplified into full blown contempt toward mankind. it was no doubts connected to deeply-rooted feelings of social isolation (that existed well before he even became aware of his divine background) and the growing distance he felt toward mortals due to their (as he perceived it) willing ignorance. in other words, as janus grew more secure in his otherness, he began to hate the arrogance of humans, their bloodlust, and the sheer self-absorption that pushed them into killing in general, but in particular that made them kill enlightenment, and how information itself was weaponized or even completely discarded in favor of deliberate lies. 

it was around this time that janus found himself shaped into the harshest version of himself, yet, a punitive being that set fire to whole libraries (alongside with their invaders) in response to unmeasured conflict (as it happened in alexandria), and a callous deity who pushed humanity back hundreds of years more than once as means of retribution. when he didn’t manage to do this before humans got to it (like it happened with the siege of Baghdad), he took to unleashing calamities upon them. being already the god of knowledge and patron of artists and scientists, janus became also the protector of rebels, of rogues, and agitators and intellectual revolutionaries. he became the thief god, that would destine you to a life of (economic and intellectual) ruin if you did something he disapproved of. if he didn’t outright kill you or drive you mad, that is. 

he was also less patient in his artifact finding efforts in other worlds. though he still preferred to outwit other gods and monsters, he was also quicker to kill them if he found them to be too uncooperative. 

i am a drop of gold–i am molten matter returned from the core of the earth to tell you interior things— (3)

as a god, he set out to demand blood. if you aspired to a higher understanding of the world and the things in it, you had to give up parts of yourself. like odin gouging out his own eye, janus demanded fingers, tongues, and even whole limbs and yes, eyes, and when he wasn’t satisfied enough with carnal sacrifices, he demanded bits of people’s minds, too. similar exchanges happened over wealth. making pacts with him was not unlike making deals with the “devil” or fae, because they came at a great cost. he became known as a god of truth, an ironic thing since he wasn’t able to discern lies/truth outright, and instead happened to often know more than his adversaries (be it mortals or other gods and monsters), which helped him detect attempts at deceiving him. eventually, since he was rumored to be able to know when you lied to him (even though he couldn’t), the fear of lying to him made people be overly honest with him, which retroactively (for a “brief” period of time) gave him the ability to discern the truth from the lie, all thanks to Belief. if it’s twisty and confusing, that’s because it is.*

also interesting to note that he very rarely used his human shape during this period. as a way to further elevate himself, and set himself apart, he took to his animal shape and it’s why many people that believe in him from this period only see him as a in an animalistic, tiger-like shape (a shape which is associated with deities that initially began as interpretations of him, like caishen and huye, and that later retroactively became their own independent myths).

“i was born in a forest. / i don’t know my name. / i was born on a mountain but changed / my mind. i was born / in the desert.” (1)

“who defined me? my culture, a culture of mercy, a living codex. i am a unique culture of one, from everywhere -- i am everyone in the story; I am the story.” (4)

another thing janus did to separate himself from his human background was burying it. no one knows janus’ human name. no one knows exactly when or where he was born, though they can guess it to be somewhere before the birth of christ, in the territory of current taiwan. no one knows what came to be of his mother, though it is true that despite everything he loved her far more than he could ever feel anything toward his father (whom he’s never met, to this day). he took the name of janus, a forgotten roman god, as his go-to identification, but he actually possesses many, many other names that come up depending on the time period or even the universe he inhabits, and it has earned him the title of thousand-named god. he’s operated under the names of other deities, like hermes/mercury, caerus, and apollo, and he’s earned names in other realms of existence, like zhaogd'endir (which is the closest thing to his real cosmic name), iuxuixurh, and l'iach. he still answers to each, and every one of these names, though he’s taken to going by janus unless he needs to further identify himself. 

ultimately, despite everything he’s done to set himself apart from mortals and the earth itself, he remains a god defined by his very human origin, and his very human motivations. his desire to build the library of babel, for one, was an escalation from his desire for keeping his mother’s artworks, which were threatened to be destroyed during a regime change/hostile takeover of the city they lived in. this desire, with time, expanded into becoming the main purpose of his existence. with time, he came to understand that he couldn’t actually stop humans (and other lesser beings, for that matter) from doing the things they did (and the times he has experimented with doing, so have backfired), but he can save these items, and he can keep them in a place where they can’t ever be destroyed or misused. from this simple, personal wish, came a cosmic-scale effort that continues on to this day. 

indeed, as he grew older, he became much more patient and understanding, and thus less cruel. it took a couple of epiphanies, but the more he ruminated on the things he truly appreciated about humans, the more he deemed his past actions as juvenile acting out. his experiences turned him wise, and he developed a more blithesome and whimsical temperament as a result. he’s warmer now; softer and more open towards things like forgiveness. 

it’s important to note he’s still not exactly wholesome: although in hindsight he dislikes how he used to be, he doesn’t regret any of the more questionable things he’s done and bodies he’s burned, and while he will go for more pacifist problem-solving techniques, he can and he will resort for more drastic MO’s if necessary. 

tldr: janus used to be a real dick when he was a younger god. and he’s still a dick but not as much.