Episode 5.1.a
>Caecilius's Villa, Pompeii, Italy, 79 CE<
The atrium is wrong before you can say why.
Everything is where it should be. The pool in the floor, the household shrine, the painted walls you have crossed a dozen times. Nothing has been moved. But you stand in the doorway and the room refuses to settle, and when you finally find the reason, it is the corners. The walls do not quite meet. The angles are wrong by a few degrees, and the longer you stare at any one of them the less it behaves like a corner at all.
Caecilius does not walk into the room so much as appear in it. Then he is at the door welcoming a guest, and his eyes pass straight over you.
"Welcome!" he says, and ushers the man in.
The man is nitidus. A faint light comes off his skin, the glow the TSTT gives only to people who matter. You have seen it once before, on Sextus, and Sextus was the only one. This man is not Sextus.
That is when the feeling arrives, the drop in the pit of your stomach, the long sick sense of something falling.
The nitidus man finds you and smiles. Only now does Caecilius seem to register that you are in the room at all. "My new friend," he says, pleased with himself. "May I present Publius Horatius Sinistrus."
The smile is the problem. You cannot say what is wrong with it. You only know it has already decided something about you.
"Greetings," Sinistrus says. "And how are you keeping?" He turns to Caecilius, light and conversational. "But surely I know these young people. Didn't I see them at Troy?"
Caecilius laughs out loud and takes it for a joke he is glad to be in on. He leans toward you afterward, lowering his voice, and explains that his friend is from the city of Rome, and that men from the city talk in riddles half the time, and you mustn't mind it.
Sinistrus is still watching you. "They are Recentii, aren't they," he says. It is not really a question. "There is a Gaius Recentius in Rome. I wonder if they know him."
Prompt: Find out what Sinistrus knows, if anything, about this man who shares your name, and what, if anything, Gaius might have to do with the situation in Rome or with the Lapis.
