Episode 7.3.a
>Villa of Septimus, Southwest of Londinium, Britannia, 81 CE<
The hill thins away and you are back in Septimus's tablinum, sitting where you were sitting before. Then a sound comes from the door. It is not a polite sound. Somebody is striking the door with the flat of a heavy hand, over and over, in the way of a man who has authority behind him and knows it.
Septimus gets up and goes to the window and looks out. Whatever softness was in his face a moment ago is gone, and what replaces it is not fear but a heavy kind of care. "Salvius's soldiers," he says, low. "I know the badge. They may be after those runaways you heard about on the road."
The pounding comes again. Septimus turns back to you. "We can leave this room. I am with you. Not by the front door, where the soldiers are. If you are not here, there is nothing for them to find."
He takes you out through the back and into the fields, and you go quickly, keeping low. He has said he will stay with you. Then, as you cross the boundary onto Sinistrus's land, Septimus is no longer there. There is no shout, no flare of light. He stops. When you look for him, there is nothing to look at.
[DEMIURGE ONLINE DEMIURGE ONLINE DEMIURGE ONLINE]
Operatives, you are advised that the Demiurge wishes to be transparent with you about the status of the TSTT. Error 1298B has returned, and Mission Control has lost track of your signals, apparently because of a bad gateway in a minor sub-processing unit. Mission Control does not believe that this poses any danger to you, but you will be proceeding into an immersion space that COULD become unstable, and the Demiurge wishes to be sure you know that.
[NAVIGATION UNAVAILABLE]
Wherever you are now, it is nowhere you know. There is no grass. The ground under your feet is something black and hard, hard as stone and yet as level as water in a cup, and it runs on flat for a long way, and white lines are painted across it, long and straight and laid out in rows. Fog closes the place in on every side.
Things are standing out on the black ground. They are large, and they are not huts. They seem to be made of iron and of that hard clear substance light goes through. Their colours are bright and they shine. They have wheels, and there is no horse anywhere near them, no ox, nothing harnessed and nothing pulling. A Roman might call such a thing an autoraeda, a wagon that goes without horses.
To the north you see a building, and it is the most astonishing thing here. It gleams, and it threatens the sky. Its sides are made of the clear substance, and the sky itself stands reflected in them. At the foot of it two panels open and make a doorway.
[TSTT SYSTEM MESSAGE: ...ostentum... read it... do not be afraid...]
The message breaks off there, and it is enough, because you remember what a Roman does. A Roman who meets a strange thing does not run from it and does not fall down in front of it. He reads it. What does it mean? What does it require of him? That is an ostentum, and this is one.
Prompt: Approach, enter, and ride the elevator of a modern office building... like a Roman. (Read the place as an ostentum: observe it, do not fear it, do not worship it.)
