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    fabula draconis

    finally got off my lazy butt and decided to post the backstory for my alt/hibernating rp character(s). there's a lot more to the story, except I'm still busy procrasti uh, writing that bit so it'll have to wait.

    this story's actually like a year old, it's just (mostly) incomplete because I only actively work on it like once every three months. Yes, my bizarre obsession with ancient Rome has been going on for way longer than tla has been. Regardless, if you've spent much time in that thread I guess you now know why a lot of the stuff I wrote there seemed completely off the wall.

    Also I can safely conclude that breaking all of the rules that you were supposed to follow in school is way more fun than complying with them. You heard it here first.

    pre script: the letter "j" is the consonant form of the letter "i," so Julius is pronounced more like yool-yus rather than jewl-yus. and also yes, I misspelled a few things on purpose.

    edit the years are "auc," not "ad/bc." pretty sure our friend Gaius was long gone by 709 AD.



    Spring 708

    It's a windy day high up in the Apennine mountain range. Below, thousands of miles of roads connecting innumerable towns and other important locations of the Roman Republic snake their way through the landscape of the Italian peninsula. Only a few weeks ago, Gaius Julius Caesar had won his final battle in a civil war five years in the making. A year from now, his assassination, immortalized by writers for the rest of human history, would play out just thirty miles away.

    You don't know any of this, though. To you, Rome and its inhabitants are just background noises against the weather, the birds and the occasional gurgling of Mons Vesuvius and Aetna down south.

    But what else was there? Your scaly, winged companions spent the last hundred thirty million years flitting from mountain peak to mountain peak. They merely watched as the dinosaurs vanished. They merely watched as the Himalayan mountain range erupted from nowhere. They merely watched as temperatures plummeted and ice showed up in places it wouldn't even think about showing up today. But all of this is observed from the sky, or at least a cliff very high in the air, never from sea level. What exactly was going on in that stone bump that had suddenly sprung up on the river, or the similar ones that could be found here and there throughout the world?

    So finally one morning you finally work up the nerve to leap off your perch and glide down to the low, flatter lands where the people of Rome spent their time. You glide around for a while, riding the air currents, passing over the merchants and armies who make use of the labyrinthine road system, but nobody seems to notice you. Finally, you spot a smaller band of people making their way north. You swoop past, parallel to the stone path they're walking on. The smallest one looks up at you. She's a little girl with brown hair and a brown tunic so large she's almost tripping over it. This is the first time a Roman has acknowledged your existence, and it's oddly satisfying. Curious, you land in one of the trees up ahead and observe.

    The tallest one notices you now, too. He stops walking, halting the party, and looks at you without breaking eye contact. The little girl is now doing the same. Human facial expressions are completely foreign to you, but you can tell these two are very different from each other. And yet the older woman and the taller boy don't appear to notice you at all.

    The stare-off lasts about thirty seconds, in which a few words in that sharp yet singsong language of theirs are exchanged. Then, without warning, a stone comes flying in your direction and bounces off your shoulder. It doesn't particularly hurt, but the move feels more like a move of aggression than a greeting. There's some conversation down below, none of which has any meaning to you.

    The taller one reaches back and flings another rock at you. You try to take off to move yourself out of his range, but this one snips through the webbing of your left wing and you tumble down onto the stone road. Instead of slamming directly into the ground, you land on one of the people, which screams as it falls over underneath you. Once you can scramble away and look up you can see the tall man charging at you, now wielding something long and metallic. The little girl is still there too, sitting on the ground; maybe you knocked her over while thrashing around a few seconds ago.

    You start running backwards. Not looking where you're going you collide with something else, knocking it over, rolling over it awkwardly as you try to escape into the brush just outside the drainage ditch. He's shouting all kinds of sharp, angry-sounding things at you, but doesn't pursue you. Maybe he has no idea what you are and isn't entirely convinced that you're not part of his imagination, or maybe he just really wants to get to his destination.

    You can still see the man and the girl though the lower branches of a bush, but the other two were lying on the ground where you blundered into them earlier, immobile. What had happened to them? Anyhow, the two who remain exchange some words before they continue north up the road.

    Your first meeting with Romans was less than successful, but your curiosity has gotten the better of you. Others have told you that human civilization was really nothing to get excited about, but you have to find out for yourself. Your wing is still sore from having a hole punched through it earlier; it doesn't feel like the damage should be permanent, but flying around might be painful for a little while. Keeping as far back as possible this time, you crawl through the grass after them. The tall one looks back a few times, but can't seem to see you.

    Late the next day, you arrive at the great walled city. You can't see either the little girl or the tall man in the mass of people. You don't even know whether or not they're in here anymore, but the activity inside the city interests you so you might as well stick around.

    You spend the next few years wandering around. Rome changes. There's a commotion when Caesar vanishes, then there's a commotion when Other Caesar succeeds Caesar, and another commotion when Other Caesar scratches his nose on the floor of the Senate. It seems that nobody else here is aware of your presence, and the two you'd met on the road were nowhere to be found. This is all very baffling. Either Romans are so accustomed to large green animals flying over the city that they don't think anything of it, or they simply can't see you at all. You're not sure which answer would be harder to explain. You have to spend more time here.

    Summer 711

    Eventually you do find them, though. A few years later you wander up the grand river just outside the city after sunset, watching the world go by. As luck would have it, up ahead is that little girl from earlier. You can hear her before you can actually see her, chucking rocks into the river and shouting things as they land in the water with a very satisfying splash. You're not sure if you want to reveal yourself this time, as a repeat of three years ago is not something you really want to go through, but it doesn't matter because she heard you in the bushes anyway. She cautiously steps over and stands in front of you, sizing you up, taking in the wings on your shoulders and the dull green scales which cover most of your body. The girl's bigger now, at least a foot taller than before (probably almost as tall as you on your hind legs), no longer swimming in clothes that were clearly intended for a full-grown adult.

    "Ave? Esne lacerta avis, aut esne avis lacerta?"

    This has no meaning to you, but the tone is much less harsh than the Latin you heard the first time and the Latin you can hear on the city streets during the day. Maybe this was a more formal greeting, or something. You try to repeat the words, but your voice box wants nothing to do with Latin and makes noises like a frog being stepped on instead.

    She doesn't seem to mind, though. She sits down in front of you. After gazing up at you for a few more minutes, she starts talking again, faster, probably assuming every animal on the planet speaks the same language. She could be recanting the events of the Punic wars or telling you how to make focaccia, and you wouldn't know the difference.

    She does this for a while. Certain words like "pater" and "est" jump out at you over and over, but this isn't enough to figure out what she's saying. Eventually, after the sun completely sets and the only light you can see is the moon and the dim glow of barracks around the city, she springs up and moves back towards the river, motioning for you to follow. You untangle yourself from the leaves and branches and trot over. She stops by the river and picks up a rock, waving it around and shouting "petra!" before spinning and flinging it in a long arc into the Tiber. Then she picks up another one and offers it to you. "Petra?"

    Maybe she finally realizes you didn’t speak her language, and is trying to tell you that this rock is a "petra." Or maybe she's referring to the activity of throwing something, or maybe the river itself. You pick up a few similar stones off the ground and hold them out, naming them in your language. She nods eagerly, taking one - "petra!" - and another - "petrae!" before flinging them both into the river - "jacto!" - and indicating that you should do the same - "jactas!"

    Words start flying around like the stones now. The river is a Tiberis, the moon is a luna, the amulet she's wearing around her neck is a lunula. This goes on for hours. Most people would be asleep at this time of day, but she's still side awake, scampering around and shouting the names of various objects. She seems impossibly excited. This is a completely fascinating experience for you, too, although the scaly armor covering most of your head doesn't let you express it very well.

    Well after midnight, the fun ends abruptly when the other man you met three years ago storms onto the scene. He's glaring at you and talking down angrily on the little girl, who starts arguing back but quickly falls silent. Then the rocks you were chucking at the water a few minutes ago come flying at you instead. You fold back your wings defensively and spring off the ground before any other catastrophe can happen. Why does your appearance result in completely opposite responses?

    Summer 714

    You're getting to see your friend more and more often at night, which is nice. She's getting better at sneaking in and out of the city without anyone noticing. You can understand Latin now, but still can't speak it. Likewise, she can understand most of the clicks and growls and chirps you communicate with, even if she can't mimic them herself. She doesn't get along with other Romans very well, and does all of her talking outside with you instead.

    As it turns out, she knows astoundingly little about the natural world. She thinks you're telling a creation myth when you describe the behemoths who ruled the world a hundred million years ago. She can't even comprehend that sort of time scale, or the fact that there existed any animal that could use the Coliseum as a nest. She asks if the one with the gargantuan teeth was the king of the living or the king of the underworld. Clouds are made of the same stuff as fog? If you fly high enough into the sky, the air disappears? Ridiculous. You have to wonder if Romans are ever going to figure these things out, or if some things will be mysteries forever.

    At the same time, you've come to learn that human society was somewhat more complicated than you'd previously thought. The depth of the language was quite surprising, and the stories people crafted with it were both absurd and fascinating. You didn't expect that all of the infinite number of roads commanded by Rome were build to the same specification, and almost all of them followed the rules exactly. You also didn't expect that they'd already discovered the earth was a ball, despite being rooted firmly to the ground. Human curiosity is much more active and pervasive than that of your brothers and sisters and cousins, and you love it. Maybe you can relate to these bipedal mammals than you originally thought.

    The concept of names is a bit more confusing. You already know a few names. The one in charge of the city is a Caesar, but you previously thought the name was tied to the role and not the Roman. The purpose of having an identifier for every person in the Republic seems to defeat itself a little when your name could the same as someone else's name (and they often were), but this is a system that seems to work pretty well so you suppose it just takes a bit of time to get used to. Your friend doesn't want to tell you her name for some reason, though. Every time you ask, no matter how you try to phrase the question, she just shakes her head and changes the subject. Maybe she doesn't actually have a name.

    Harder still to grasp was their concept of religion. You just accept the world as it was. The sun rises every day because that's what the sun does, Pangea fractured into continents because that's what Pangea does, and meteors rock the entire planet because that's what meteors do. But Romans have a much different interpretation of things. The sun rises every day because Apollo reminds it to, and thunderstorms break out because Jupiter and Neptune get into fights over what Vulcan should do with his beard. The whole thing is very silly, but obviously rather important to these people and you like it because it makes a good story anyway.

    But the part you have the most trouble understanding is the concept of death. When you were eight or nine thousand years old you just settled on a rock and returned to the earth. The iron in your blood and phosphorus in your scales go back into the ground for someone else to use; your consciousness and experiences diffuse into the almighty biosphere. It's not all that different from hatching out of an egg and it's about as fundamental as having bones, you thought everyone knew that. This was how it had worked for a hundred million years.

    But Romans are different. They only last forty, fifty, sixty years, which really doesn’t seem that long to you. At all. And so death is something you're supposed to fear more than pretty much anything else. Somehow, despite this, they're constantly assassinating each other on the floor of the Senate and sending out their army of thousands to massacre rival Romes. But when a Roman does die it ought to be on the battlefield, by the hand of someone else. This doesn't make sense. You don't last a hundred million years by annihilating your neighbors because their toenails were cleaner than your toenails. For cooperative animals, Romans are remarkably bad at cooperation. Even your friend agrees with that bit.

    You have this conversation fairly regularly, but it always ends with the same undrawn conclusions. Your friend seems to have a difficult time grasping this concept, too. Death gets even more bizarre when you inject religion into it, so of course that means Romans inject religion into death all the time. Supposedly you're not really gone when you die, you just drop out of this universe and into Pluto's. But somehow that doesn't seem to make the prospect any less terrifying to her. It turns out that her mother and brother died that day four years ago when you fell on top of them, and her father has been an irritable piece of work ever since. This is why he's always a little negative towards you. This link helps make the death concept a bit easier to understand, but you still don't see what the fuss is about. You want to ask why he can't just go and live with them in Pluto's universe, or at least visit once in a while, but she's always visually upset by this point and you figure it'll make more sense when you think about it more later on anyway.

    Spring 715

    Seven years is only a blink of the eye or maybe a few flaps of the wings to you, but in human terms it's a decently long time. Your friend's almost full-grown now. She's now half a foot taller than you and her torso's filled in a bit, making her look more like the other adult female Romans. Apparently this is supposed to be a big deal, but you can't quite pin down why that is. She's learned a bunch of new Latin words herself, mostly from the graffiti on the walls, but apparently you're not supposed to say them in conversation. The idea of having words you weren't supposed to use seems rather oxymoronic, but then again these were the Romans. Leave it to them to invent words so bad that even they don't want to use. To make matters worse, some of these words have no exact translation in your language. You use one word to define [reproduction]; the Romans use about five hundred. Regardless, this doesn't matter to you, since you can't pronounce Latin anyway.

    Your friend has a name now, too. She still won't tell you the name given by her parents, but you can call her "Atena." At-hay-nah. "Atena" was supposed to be the same as the god "Minerva," except this was a name given to her by some other Romans really far away. She was quite proud of this name. Her father probably wouldn't have thought so, but that was part of what she liked about it. You don't have a name, but she gives you one. She calls you "lacerta," which is supposed to refer to your reptilian cousins that waddle around on the ground which she apparently mistook you for the first time you met. Eventually this becomes "Lacertus," because you're decidedly a boy and that needs to be stated with your name.

    You tell her about your recent trip back up the mountains to see your old acquaintances. You tried telling them about Rome and your friend and what things were like down on the ground, but none of them seemed very interested. They told you that you were wasting your time. You learn that your ancestors deliberately turned themselves invisible to humans thousands of years before you came along because they were tired of being shouted and prodded with spears. Atena can't see you, you're informed, there's just something wrong with your brain so try not to pass on your genes, ever. You tried telling them about how people had learned that the world was round from down on the ground, but at this point they could hear you about as well as Caesar could see you, so you just leave. They were right, you decided. Except they had it backwards. Being up in the mountains was a considerably bigger waste of time than being on the ground.

    As you tell Atena this, you think again about how you have more in common with Romans than you do with your own species now. You try making sense of the bit about death again. It still doesn't click in your head, but then it occurs to you that both Atena and her father would probably be dead within the next thirty years themselves. You now know you'll probably never meet another Roman who can see you. This makes you sad. Even the company of a person who wants to turn you into a piece of flying lizard bacon is still better than none at all. You might as well go back up the mountain, but even if the others weren't still busy ostracizing you to oblivion it wouldn't be the same. It would be like some kind of invisible wall divides you and everything else, which would make the prospect of existing for another eight thousand years feel incredibly pointless.

    Maybe that's what Pluto was supposed to be like. Maybe you're actually already dead and haven't realized it yet. You ask Atena about this. She's pretty sure you're still alive right now, but has no answer for what you're going to do in fifty years. Instead she gives you a hug, which is a symbol of affection, and doesn't let go for a long time. You're okay with this. The future can wait.

    Summer 715

    You're suddenly seeing a lot more of Atena now. You're delighted by this, but she doesn't seem to be. Her shaky relationship with everyone else on the planet has gotten worse. Her peers don't like her because she's taller and lighter colored than they are. Her stepmother and brothers and sisters don't like her because she was born from a different mother.

    Her father's another story entirely. If only Roman society was structured so that you could live on your own, if you wanted to. The two tolerated each other out of necessity for a while, but the occasional little spats between them were getting less occasional and less little. Most of them, as it happens, involve you. She would tell him that the lacerta magna isn't dangerous and nicer to her than actual Romans were, but he'd always come back reminding her that the lacerta magna is the reason she doesn't have a biological mother or brother or anyone else. First he would just talk about chasing you away, but recently this has escalated to talking about killing you. There's that "death" subject again. You tell Atena that you can't die for another eight thousand years, but that doesn't comfort her. At all.

    You try changing the subject to astronomy. Did you know that both of you think Venus is the most beautiful object in the sky? Except she thinks Venus is another one of those god things. You're not completely sure what it is, but you're pretty sure it's not a Roman. Anyway, instead of running back home when it gets late she falls asleep next to you, using your scaly foot as a pillow.

    Summer 715

    Atena has had enough. To top everything else off, her father wants her to get married now. She's supposed to find a boy around her age and go off and live and have kids with him, he said. But she doesn't like boys, living with other people or kids, she explained. Her father did not quite approve of this point of view. The rest of the family sided with him. They yelled at each other for a little while. She tried out a few of those words you're not supposed to use. It turns out that they didn't really approve of that, either, so she turned around and stormed out of the house, running up and down streets and hiding for a while in an empty building in case any of them were following her. And here she is now at sunset in a cluster of trees by the Tiberis, frantically pacing around and wiping away tears.

    She clings to your arm and asks if you can fly to some place far away. "Iam! Vademus! Iam!" she repeats over and over as she tries pulling you across the ground. But you're not sure about this. Romans are supposed to live together. You know there are other towns kind of like this one scattered around, but you don't know how well a little girl would be received if she just wandered in. She continues to yank on your arm, trying to get you to move with little success, insisting that she's not a little girl anymore, she's fully grown. You're still not sure, but before you could argue something bounces off one of your wings.

    "PRIMA!"

    A voice shatters the air like thunder. You turn around and there he is. Pater suus comes striding up the side of the river towards you, wielding that sword he had during your first meeting. Atena yelps and hides behind you. The two of them exchange some more words. Atena makes liberal use of the ones you're not supposed to say, but other than that they're talking too fast for you to understand. And then he turns and slams his sword into your side, only to see it bounce backwards off your scales. He almost falls over from the recoil; you take a swipe at him, knocking the equipment out of his grip. Atena leaps onto your back and you spring off into the air.

    But flying is suddenly not easy. She's a lot heavier than you were expecting her to be. It's like trying to fly with a small elephant stuck to you. You cross the river, occasionally slapping the water with your wings when you flap, hoping at least to get far enough, and -

    But you don't. Along comes one of those rocks. It rips a hole through the webbing of your left wing, only a couple inches from the scar that's still there from the last time this happened. This one hurts a lot more than it did the last time. You let out a roar that can probably be heard about halfway to the moon as another one bounces off your body and a few more go whizzing by overhead. Atena would probably be screaming too, except she can't, because you did a quarter of a barrel roll before crashing sideways into the river and she wasn't able to let go. You know this because her arms are still hugging your neck as you try to regain your balance through the pain in your wing. The grip loosens but she's still hanging on, and then you remember that Romans can't breathe underwater for very long. You fold some of your wings back with some difficulty and use your legs and tail to propel yourself back up to the surface as quickly as possible, trying to hold on to her arms so she doesn't fall back down to the bottom.

    You surface quite a distance downstream from where you went under. The walled city is a lot smaller and your attacker is nowhere to be seen. You struggle over to the reedy bank on the opposite side of the river and let go. At least you were able to get away, you try to explain. There's no way you can fly right now, with or without passengers, but you can still swim away down the river and go somewhere from there.

    Well, you were able to get away, anyway. There's something wrong with Atena. She doesn't seem to be moving. She looks like she's sleeping, actually, except this is a really bad time to be sleeping. You try and shake her awake, but nothing happens, and then you notice she doesn't seem to be breathing. Or have a heartbeat, or anything else. At all. It looks suspiciously like the way she was describing being dead earlier, and you start to worry as you realize she probably is dead and it might be your fault. Probably from being underwater too long, or when you hit all those hard rocks at the bottom. Or both. This would be a good time for some of those special words, if you could actually say words at all.

    Death makes a bit more sense now. You figured out the never-going-to-see-you-again bit, that's the easy part. It never occurred to you that it would sting this much, though. Not the way your wing was hurting now, you could ignore that for a while, but now you weren't ever going to have any more of those talks about birds or weather or rock skipping contests again, ever, because Atena was dead and not getting up. It wouldn't be as bad if her body just dissipated like you thought you were supposed to, but now it's just lying blankly in the mud right in front of you. For an inanimate object, it did a remarkable job of reminding you what had just happened. You never realized you had tear ducts before, but you do now because you start to cry.

    "Mortuus sum. Et tu, lacerta magna?"

    You snap your head up. In addition to being dead on the ground, Atena is also now floating up over the river. She's now completely colorless and partially transparent and moves through the reeds and twigs and whatnot as if they're not there. And she had just explained that she was dead, and asked if you were, too. You certainly are not, but just when you thought you'd figured out death it goes back to making your head spin.

    She's a ghost, she explains. Apparently, ghosts are what happens when Romans die but don't make it to the afterlife. She doesn't know why. Pluto must have forgotten to unlock the front door or something. Either way, you're happy she's back. You try to give her one of those hugs, but apparently ghosts don't respond too well to your arms and you fall forward into the river. She laughs at you, and you start to feel a little better. You ask why Pluto didn't let her in, and suggests maybe he didn't want to hear those words she wasn't supposed to say. She laughs at you again.

    You want to talk more, but at this point the pain in your wing is gnawing away at that entire limb and you really need some rest. A lot of it. You curl up by some large stones in the grass and get some much needed sleep.
    Last edited by 。・゚・◝( ◕ ヮ ◕)◜・゚・。 ; 12-13-2015 at 08:51 AM. Reason: it is way too late at night to be using words

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