Episode 7.1.b
>Countryside Southwest of Londinium, Britannia, September 81 CE<
The moment you answer him, the fear goes out of the man by degrees, and he comes down out of the tree. It turns out he has been wanting to talk for a long while.
"Petulans," he says. "That is me. A slave, and a bad one, and I have no intention of improving. My master is Salvius. I am not staying with Salvius. I am going to the woods, where nobody can find me and nobody wants to. There is another estate near here, a big one, all worked by slaves, and the man who owns it is a foreigner. Sinistrus, they call him. I would not go near him for anything."
The name arrives with the drop in your stomach, the long sick sense of something falling.
Then a voice behind you, flat and unhurried.
"There you are, Petulans. You have made a great deal of trouble for a great many people. And you have brought company. Slaves are worth money, and here is a whole crop of them. Though Salvius may want them killed instead, which would be a waste."
A big man is standing behind you with a staff in one hand and no patience in his face. Petulans stops talking and stands like a stone, and every scrap of the humour goes out of him. This is Adrogans, Salvius's vilicus, the slave set over the other slaves, and he takes Petulans by the arm without hurrying about it. "Home with you, runaway."
Then he turns his head toward you. "And you. Slaves too, I take it."
Prompt: Using your knowledge of Rome, prove to Adrogans that you are not slaves. (Remember what marks a Roman citizen: the tria nomina, the protection of lex, a testis of standing who can vouch for you.)
