Episode 5.3.a
>The Forum of Herculaneum, Italy, 79 CE<
Sextus reads the inscription over your shoulder, twice, and goes quiet. "I don't understand it," he murmurs, more to himself than to you. "Roads, letters, slaves who serve Rome. There is a shape to it I can almost..."
Steel scrapes behind you.
Sinistrus is in the forum. He has a drawn sword in his hand and two men at his back, and all three of them are nitidus, glowing faintly against the bright stone.
"I warned you!" he shouts. There is real fury in it now, none of the silk left. "What are you doing here? There is nothing for you in this place, nothing!" His eyes go to Sextus. "You are walking these children straight into their graves!"
[TSTT SYSTEM MESSAGE: TRANSIENT ERROR-STATE 1298B... RESOLVING]
Sextus steps in front of you. He is looking hard at the men across the square, his jaw set, ready. "Two of them," he says. "All right. Two I can manage." His gaze sweeps once across the empty space where Sinistrus is standing and finds nothing there to fix on. "There's no one else. Just the two."
He does not look at the third man. He cannot. You watch him not see the figure with the sword, and the wrongness of it crawls up your spine.
"Go," Sextus says, low and fast, not turning around. "Run. Out of the town and back to Caecilius's villa, and do not stop for anything. Keep yourselves alive, that is all I ask of you."
The feeling comes again, the floor dropping out from under you, that long sick sense of something falling.
Prompt: Flee from Herculaneum. You will need to lose the two thugs in the streets before you can safely leave the town. Use your charta and the surrounding buildings to your advantage.
