Episode 7.2.a
>Villa of Septimus Aemilianus, West of Londinium, Britannia, September 81 CE<
You sit with Septimus in his tablinum. He looks so much like his brother that the resemblance is almost uncomfortable, and he is much harder to read. The same stillness is in his face, set harder. Septimus does not hand out his trust on short acquaintance.
He says nothing for a while. Then he looks at you and begins.
"The Demiurge saved you. He pulled you off that mountain while the fire and the ash were taking everything else. Pompeii is gone. You cannot go back there. If you go back, you put the world itself in danger, because there cannot be two of the same world at once. Do you understand that?"
Your Recentius nods.
"There is a great deal I want to tell you before I send you anywhere. I will not send you out ignorant." He turns a wax tablet over in his hands as he speaks. "The captains of the Milites believe there is a tear in our world down at Stabiae, and that the tear may be a road to the Lapis. Before that, you cross an exemplum."
He lifts the tablet. Nothing happens. He holds it again, and waits, and still nothing happens.
Septimus sets the tablet down. His face does not change much. "My brother was better at this than I am," he says. "I do not do it often." He is not angry, though a little of the composure has gone out of him. He rises, goes through into the back room, and returns with some small pills in his palm. "Take these. There is nothing to fear in them."
You take them. The room begins to shake, gently at first: the walls, the table, Septimus himself, all of it moving like water. The light changes colour. Then everything thins out and is gone.
>Mythical founding of Rome, the Capitoline Hill, 753 BCE<
You are standing on a hill under an open sky, early in the morning, and the air smells of smoke and turned earth. Below the hill a marshy stream works its way slowly through the low ground. There are no paved roads anywhere, no temples, no great houses: small huts, and empty fields, and a lot of sky.
Two young men are standing near you, so alike they could be twins, arguing about the ground they are standing on. One of them is shifting earth and building a wall, and doing it happily. The other stands and does not work and watches the sky, and there is no happiness in his face at all. The words going between them are hard ones.
Not far off there is a crowd. The people in it are shivering and look worn out. It seems they have just now dragged the Lapis up onto the hill on a great wagon, and the wagon is still standing where they left it.
Prompt: Find a way to eavesdrop on the conversation. Figure out what is happening, and use your knowledge of Roman culture to decide whether, and how, to make yourselves known.
