Episode 5.1.b
>Caecilius's Villa, Pompeii, Italy, 79 CE<
Caecilius excuses himself from the trīclīnium and goes off toward his bedroom, still cheerful, still entirely at ease. The moment the doorway is empty, the smile drops off Sinistrus's face. What is underneath is cold and very awake.
"I know what you are doing," he says.
You don't answer.
"You work for Sextus." He gives the name no weight at all. "So what is it you want out of all this. A sword? A spear? Some hero's trophy to carry home?"
You hold your silence.
"No." The smile comes back, and it is worse than the cold, because there is nothing behind it. "It's the Lapis. Of course it's the Lapis." He lets out a short laugh, almost to himself.
"Then listen, since no one else will tell you. You are walking straight into something that will get you killed. Sextus Aemilianus stands in the way of the world that is coming, and so does that uncle of yours, and men who stand in the way of that world do not last. There are powerful people building it right now, stone by stone. You like the old laws, I can tell. They make fine reading in old books. But there is an emperor in Rome, and in the world as it actually is, the law is whatever he says it is. So tell me honestly. What do children like you imagine you can do against men like that?"
He steps closer. And when he speaks again his voice has changed, pitched somewhere past you, as though the room held someone else who was meant to hear it.
"This whole world is a story," he says. "Has it occurred to you to wonder who is writing it?"
Prompt: Use your knowledge of the mission and of Roman culture to answer Sinistrus.
