sixthiterationlogs | † monstra evenerunt mihi

WHO: Gaius Gracchus
WHERE: Outside the Inn
WHEN: During the aurora event, around Jan 6
OPEN TO: Anyone willing to try talking to the guy who knows barely any English
WARNINGS: Slightly squicky injury reference
STATUS: OPEN

The gods are speaking.

It is hard to look at the sky at night and not think that. Gaius has never been a man to let omens stand in the way, but twice now, he and his brother had continued their work under ill-favored birds, and it had ended badly for them. Tiberius, he's been told, had split his toe crossing the threshold as he set out for the forum on the day he'd been killed. And the omens in Junonia had been nothing but bad, wolves stealing the boundary markers, winds breaking the standards and scattering the sacrifices, and he's been wondering ever since his return to Rome if those omens weren't for the colony, but for him. Nothing had gone right for him since Junonia. He'd lost his support, he'd lost the elections (or had them rigged against him) and he'd found his enemy elected to the consulship.

And now here the skies are afire at night, blazing in greens and blues and colors he's never known the night sky could have. It can surely bode no good to this strange village he's found himself in that the gods have set their aethereal flame every night for more than a week now. It can bode no good, but that hasn't stopped Gaius from going out to stare up into the dancing light and wonder at it. Wonder, and marvel, too, for all his fear.

"O, Iuppiter," he murmurs, the start of some half-formed evocation to the sky god, king of the gods of Rome: tonight, the skies are brighter than ever.

He's wrapped up in his coat, but the Roman is standing in the middle of the path that runs past the inn and paying no attention to the weather, or to anyone who may approach: instead, he's entirely absorbed in the sky.

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Cougar's always liked the Northern Lights, having seen them in several countries when it was too cold to bear. He's dressed for the cold tonight and is out to see the colours painted in the sky. He's also outside to give the strange rings some more thought, which he hasn't stopped doing since they first turned up in a very small box from Jake, one that he hasn't told him about just yet.

He still needs to understand them, honestly. He's nearly home when he finds someone else out there, gaping upwards at the lights, but looking not half as warm as Cougar does. He hears the Latin, which is an old language, one he only knows vaguely because of mass, but enough to place it. "Beautiful lights, aren't they?" he asks in Spanish, though he knows it will likely go over the man's head.

Gaius is a man whose life has been built on his ability with words. Even those who hate him -- hated him, perhaps, as in this strange place he's not sure what held true in Rome still counts -- know that he is one of the most gifted orators in the city. Here, though, that gift for words counts for near nothing, because so few people can understand him.

He's stopped expecting people to know Latin, to speak to him in any words that he can begin to understand. This man, though ... it's not Latin, but it's familiar. He can recognize what he's talking about, well enough to guess that it's something about the lights being beautiful.

Gaius considers, then gives a slow nod.

"Beautiful," he replies in Latin, in the hope that the man might understand him a little, the way he understood the man. "But some would say dangerous. Some would say the gods are angered."

He hasn't been able to pray here, to make the sacrifices that would be part of every day in Rome. He's offered what he can, but that's so little. This, though, is surely something more than one man's failure of piety.

Cougar narrows his eyes at the words, puzzling through them. He's not completely lost, but it's not the same as understanding a different dialect of Spanish. This, he understands maybe a word here and there, and the rest he has to fill in the gaps. It's not so different than what he'd done for English for so long, though, so he can't help but smile a little, when he picks out a certain word.

"Why would God make something so beautiful, if he was angry?" Missing the plural is an easy mistake, given the completely different languages. He means it, though. He's not sure how such beauty could be the result of anger (a word he'd picked out).

Gaius is starting to learn that even when he can't understand the language, the tone can tell him a great deal. A question, after all, is as much a matter of inflection as of interrogatives. This is a question, and it has to do with the gods and with anger. And beauty. That much he can tell, and he's always been good with words, and with language, so he can guess at the man's approximate meaning, difficult as it is to understand the nuance.

Not all portents are bad, and Gaius takes another long moment staring at the dancing light to consider that. He's known many bad portents, but perhaps this beauty is a sign of something great, not something terrible.

He wants to ask the man what his interpretation is, but he's not sure how to say it in a way that would be understood. Still, he's going to try. He needs to make connections with the people here if he's to have any hope of getting by.

"What do you think they mean?" He asks it slowly, and he hopes the simple words he chooses are like enough to the man's own language that they can be understood.

Cougar shrugs at the question. He knows what they mean from a scientific perspective, can practically hear Jake in the back of his head rambling on about what causes a phenomenon like this. What it means here, in an enclosed space, with no technology and seemingly endless traps, that's the part he doesn't know. "Maybe a portent. Maybe a warning. Or maybe, all-clear," he says, rambling on because he could make out the 'what' part of what the man had been saying.

Maybe this is just a way of saying that whatever observation had been happening with the pod and creature is now over? Or a reminder that someone is still always watching.

Once more, Gaius wishes that he could understand these people better. There's enough there that he can grasp some of the words, enough to think that perhaps this man's thinking is not so very different from his own: signs, warnings, or who knows, what?

The tone, though, says that the man is no more sure in his statements than Gaius had been. And whatever Gaius may have done in the face of omens in Junonia, he remembers what Claudia and her servants say of the day his brother died, the portents that foretold the ill fate he'd find. Those portents had spoken true. And he's been haunted, since he arrived here, by the memory of the vision of his brother that appeared to him so many years ago, foretelling that he would meet the same fate, to die in the name of the Roman people.

What, then, could the green dancing in the sky mean?

"I am certain a priest could tell us."

Perhaps even Crassus Mucianus could have, his own father-in-law, were he still alive. The words, though, have a suggestion of sarcasm in them. He's not fool enough not to think a priest would make whatever he wanted of this sign from the ether.

Priest, he knows. He'd know priest in any language, mainly because he's sat attentively at enough masses in Latin to know the entire service in that language. Maybe he should have been using prayers to communicate earlier. "No priests," he says, because if there were, then Cougar would be able to indulge himself in confession.

He's woefully lacking in that ability, something he's never had to deal with before. Even in Bolivia, he'd been able to sneak off and have confession at least a few times a week. "Auroras," he clarifies. "They're called auroras." Why they're there, that's the question. It's too easy to think they're here naturally. Nothing around here seems to happen naturally.

† monstra evenerunt mihi

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