But I won’t go into the details concerning that. They’re still too painful to recall, but it ended in a return to the status quo. More or less. And only temporarily.
After the battle, things could not have seemed more perfect. While Wang, Bordeaux, and Vincent moved on to other endeavors away from Rome, Santino, Helena, and I stayed on as honorary bodyguards for Caligula. It was the cushiest job of my life. But it wouldn’t last.
When the three of us attended a dinner party thrown by Agrippina, still innocent in the eyes of Roman high-society, Caligula used the opportunity to announce his decision to name Nero as his successor. The boy had been at the party, and even though he was only a few months old, I could already see the monster he would become.
Again, I have no idea what you know about history but try and keep up.
No more than two minutes after the announcement, Caligula was assassinated by poisonous mushrooms.
Except only I knew who did it.
In my timeline, which by now you may have determined is far different from your own (Again, I have no way to predict either way), Agrippina was married to Claudius and many thought she later murdered her uncle-husband with poisoned mushrooms. The look she gave me as Caligula convulsed on the floor all but confirmed it, and I knew our lives were in danger as well. Santino, Helena and I fled Rome that night, and haven’t been back since.
That was three years, eight months and nineteen days ago.
At the time, I knew of only one man who could take on the job as emperor of Rome. Someone who could take it back from the clutches of someone like Agrippina and lead it back to prosperity. I knew he could do it because he had already done it in my history books.
Flavius Servius Vespasianus.
Vespasian.
So, armed with a vague outline of a plan and the idealistic fantasies of childlike optimism, the three of us set out to make sure the reign of Nero never arrived. It would be bad enough with Agrippina in charge, ruling in regency until her son was old enough to take over.
We’d gone north and waited, spending years helping those who couldn’t help themselves, every act of kindness leading us to the here and now. Please see my other journals for further information — a series of wonderfully fun and whimsical short stories — but, to be honest, if you’re reading this, you may already know more than I do about what happens than I do. Then again, you might not, but I’m glad if you do because the suspense is killing me. Hopefully, things turned out all right, but if they didn’t, at least this log will be a record of what happened.
Okay. Got to go. Things are about to start getting interesting.
Oh, by the way.
Before I go.
If this shit ever gets turned into a movie, I want my name on it. Jacob Hunter. And for crying out loud… have some respect for the source material.
Part One
I
I put my pen on the table, leaned back and shook some life into my cramping hand. I hadn’t written that much since college and the never ending stream of essay tests that was the fate of any history major. Since then, the only time I’d ever needed to put pen to paper was to sign my name. All of my correspondence and after action reports back home had been done electronically and I hadn’t written in my previous journals in months.
Kneading away the soreness between thumb and fingers, I leaned back in my chair and took in the strange surroundings I had somehow found myself in this time — just one of a hundred random towns visited over what seemed like a lifetime.
My companions and I had been on the move ever since we fled Rome all those years ago. We’d been to Illyria, an old Greek province on the East bank of the Adriatic Sea, East of the Rhine river in German country, made our way to the Iberian peninsula in modern day Spain and Portugal, spent some time in North Africa, and had toured extensively around Gaul before we wound up here, a small city on the East bank of the Rhone River, in what I remember as southern France.
After all that time in the ancient world, I’d gotten quite used to its idiosyncrasies. While I still missed my home in 2021, I felt at ease in the rustic backcountries and Romanized provinces that Europe was made up of during what was left of the Julio-Claudian dynasty’s reign of power, a time made even shorter by none other than me. The latest deaths in the family had been the emperor Gaius Julius Caesar Augustus Germanicus, better known as Caligula, and the should-have-been emperor, Claudius. Between the two of them, their rules should have lasted until 54 A.D., but things were no longer as they should be.
Claudius had been killed on the battlefield and Caligula the victim of poison; the culmination of both events leading to Caligula’s nephew, Nero, becoming the heir apparent. He was currently too young to rule, so Agrippina the Younger, his mother, had become the first and only sole empress of Rome.
Agrippina.
The woman was best described as a double edged sword, rather than a two sided coin. Her beauty, poise and allure were equally matched by her cunning, ambition and avarice, both of which she used equally well to achieve her innermost desires.
I shuddered as my heart raced at the thought of her. It was a testament to her demeanor and beauty that, as someone who had every right to hate her, I could feel such attraction to her. There was more to it than her physical appearance, of course, but it certainly helped. Memories of how she could so easily command a room flooded into my mind, how every head would turn to gape and stare as she strutted about. The way her large breasts shifted beneath her slinky outfits and her mane of yellow hair tumbled around her shoulders, swaying alluringly with every step she took. It wasn’t a rare occurance for a man to trip over himself in her presence.
Something I could testify to personally.
But it was ambition that drove her to poison her own brother, and the sole reason for my presence here and why I no longer had a home to speak of. She had been the tool through which Claudius arranged my capture and torture all those years ago, and after poisoning Caligula, had wasted no time labeling us as enemies of the Republic as well.
We were number one on her most wanted list, with bounties large enough to set someone up for life. My companions’ bounties were smaller but labeled as wanted either alive or dead, whereas Agrippina wanted me alive and unharmed. Word had spread quickly around the empire, and Wanted posters had become a common sight throughout its vast expanse of territory. There was even one here, posted right above my head on the wall behind me, and I knew that as I propped my chair against the wall, my face on the poster was in full display just above my real one.
Fully aware of how exposed I was, I placed my hands behind my neck and drank in my surroundings.
It was dirty, dark, musky, and… homely. Unlike the bars or clubs back home, this one was devoid of anything meant to actually draw in patrons; such as dollar drafts, bright lights, DJs, scandalously dressed women gyrating to loud, obnoxious techno music and the asshole frat boys who sought such women — and generally failed. This place wasn’t somewhere people went to have a good time on the weekends, but somewhere people felt obligated to go because there was simply nowhere else. It was filled with regulars and the occasional drifter like me, and while music was strummed lazily from a corner, the only thing needed to entertain these people were gossip, stories, good jokes, and companionship.