Episode 4.3.a
>Sextus's Villa, Pompeii, Italy, 79 CE<
Sextus is in his study when you return, bent over his desk with the focused energy of a man who has found exactly what he was looking for and cannot quite believe his luck.
"Here," he says, before you have fully crossed the threshold. "Come and look at this."
He holds up a wax tablet, older than the others, the surface worked and reworked until the wax has a grey, layered quality to it. He is reading it with the particular attention he reserves for things that genuinely surprise him.
"I don't know this story," he says. "I thought I knew all of them. Apparently not." He looks up at you, and there is something in his expression that is not quite his usual dry composure: something closer to actual uncertainty. "Let's find out what it is."
The walls of the study go soft, and then they are gone.
>In the TSTT, Troy, Bronze Age<
Troy is burning.
The fire has taken the upper city and is working its way down, and the smoke is so thick it has its own weight, pressing against you from above. The noise is everywhere: the crack of timber, the crash of something large giving way, voices calling out in the dark from directions that keep changing. The streets are full of people moving fast with whatever they could carry, and the shadows thrown by the flames are long and jump in ways that make it hard to trust what you are seeing.
In a courtyard ahead of you, a man stands still in the middle of all of it. He is well-built and carries himself like a soldier, though his sword is sheathed, and he is not looking at the fire or the fleeing crowds. He is looking at something that is not entirely there: a shape in the smoke, the outline of a man, present enough to see and absent enough to walk through.
The shape is a warrior, or was. He is tall and broad across the shoulders, and he was clearly powerful in life, but his body carries the marks of how he died: wounds that should have been tended and were not, the kind of damage that speaks to a long day's fighting and a harder end. His bearing is still a commander's bearing, straight and deliberate, and the man in the courtyard is looking at him the way you look at someone whose loss has not yet finished arriving.
The shape speaks, and its voice is low and urgent. "You are the strongest left. But Troy is finished. Priam is dead. The Greeks have the citadel." A pause. "Take the stone. Go west. Fate is calling you toward Italy, and you must answer it. A new Troy will rise from what you carry out of this one."
The man in the courtyard does not move. His jaw is set and his eyes are fixed on the shape, and everything in his posture says that he has heard this and does not want it to be true.
Then he sees you.
His hand goes to his sword, and he does not draw it, but his eyes are sharp and wary. "You," he says. "Who are you? What are you doing here?"
Prompt: Convince Aeneas that he should listen to Hector's advice and flee from the city with the Lapis. Use what you know of Roman history to make your argument; multiple LP bonuses are available for use of your Recentius's worldview.
