Edward Crichton - To Crown a Caesar

But that could wait. For now, the elegant part.

When Agrippina forced me to inspect the orb earlier, I had seen something beneath the swirling white clouds that always seemed to indicate the orb was… active, for lack of a better term. I hadn’t understood it at the time, because I thought I had only seen a reflection of myself, but it had in fact been me. It had been me at the point in time and space when I first touched the orb in the treasure room. An hour later, when I came into contact with it as Helena held it in her dead hand, the orb finally worked the way it was supposed to.

Instead of haphazardly transporting everything in a room and replicating itself, it took its sole user on a ride back to its starting point. My rubber band theory actually made perfect sense. The ball was never supposed to be used by two different people. It was meant as a transportation device for one person to travel back to a prearranged point on the timeline, taking only the users’ consciousness with it, not the body. All the pain and wounds I’d received during the previous timeline were gone.

And hence, its true elegance.

Conventional time machines from the movies transported the entire entity of its user. Mind, body, spirit. All of it.

That never made much sense to me. A time traveler would still be susceptible to the effects of time. If I’d taken my DeLorean off joyriding through the timeline for twenty five years in total, when I finally decided to return to my original point on the timeline, I would be twenty five years older than when I’d left. The body still ages at the same rate. I couldn’t come back twenty five years later from the starting point, or else there’d be a twenty five year gap where I simply didn’t exist. Unless I wanted to go the whole “fake death” route.

But the orb only transported the consciousness of a person.

Their memories. Their experiences.

This thing would have been great to have back in college. Set this puppy a day before a test, go in to take it the next day, learn all the questions, sit through the damn thing, return to my dorm room, and proceed to warp myself back to the day before, all the knowledge of the test’s contents still in my head. And no physical aging to go along with it. I don’t even want to think about how well I could have done with the ladies. It wouldn’t even have been hard.

Simply elegant.

But how did I activate it to begin with?

I grunted. All that thinking made my head hurt even more, but I still managed to regain consciousness before the others. And just like last time, when I opened my eyes I confirmed that everything seemed the same and everyone was in their places, ready for the final scene.

Lights, camera, action.

“Agrippina,” I said, hoarsely. “How’s the ass? Oh, that’s right. It is quite perfect and I of all people should know that. By the way, your face looks a lot better than the last time I saw it.”

I almost shuddered at the memory of the faceless Agrippina, but thoughts of watching Helena die for a second time hardened me.

No, it would be the third time this time around.

Agrippina looked at me from her chair. She offered me a blink in recognition that she’d heard me but not much else. She directed a cool look in my direction, displaying her ever impressive poker face, but she shifted her toga over her bare legs at the same time, revealing even more skin.

Interesting.

I wasn’t much of a poker player myself, never was, but both Wang and Helena had showed considerable skill in it when we’d first arrived in Rome. I’d never been very good at counting cards, nor did I have a very good poker face, but I was good at reading people. Detecting subtle nuances that said someone was hiding something, or even outright lying, came pretty easy for me. I figured it must have come from trust issues with my father and past relationships, friends who I constantly schemed with or against as a kid, or maybe even from my work with the CIA.

Whatever the origin for my talent was, when Agrippina shifted her toga, a nuance, I definitely suspected. For such a seasoned poker player, as she surely must be, she’d just given away her tell. In fact, it was a pretty obvious one. It was a testament to her obvious sex appeal that I, or anyone else for that matter, had never picked up on it.

But her face was another matter. It remained impressively stoic as she rose from her chair, whispering something in her closest Praetorian’s ear. When he left the room, she strutted over to where I knelt and lifted my chin, just as before, recovering rather well.

“Why do you continue to bother me, Jacob?” She asked. “Is it that you have seen me naked and you now wish for more? Is that why you brought your Amazon this time?”

I smiled. “Now that you mention it, yes, that’s exactly what I’m here for. How nice of you to offer.” I glanced at Helena and leaned my head in closer, dropping my voice to a whisper. “It’s good that you’ve already stripped her half naked, but we should probably wait for her to regain consciousness first. Doing it while she’s just lying there seems a bit weird. Don’t you think?”

Agrippina’s face twitched and I had a hard time suppressing the urge to mimic Santino’s goofy ass grin.

Score one for Hunter.

And in that moment Agrippina didn’t seem so threatening. She was just like me. We only appeared more confident than we really were because we hid our fears behind defense mechanisms. I believe the clinical term for it was Narcissistic Personality Disorder. I remember because my sister tried to diagnose me with it when I was sixteen years old. It’s basically a disorder in which people have an inflated sense of their own self-importance. Generally, they used some kind of grand show to hide how fragile and low their self-esteem really was.

But unless you knew that person suffered from the disorder, it made him very hard to read. It was obvious when some people were happy or sad, but that wasn’t the case for people like Agrippina and me. I hid behind my sarcastic wit and the idea that I could outthink just about anyone, and Agrippina covered herself with her sexual countenance. We disguised what we were truly feeling with a phony façade of self-confidence and bravado.

At least I had before recently. I felt like I was much more open now, and it was ironic that I had Agrippina to thank for that. And in that moment, everything I felt concerning what had passed between the two of us was gone, and I felt a renewed, legitimate sense of confidence.

“You know, Agrippina,” I said, with a shake of my head, even though it still hurt. “I think I finally understand you.”

“You do?” She asked sternly, taking a step back and crossing her arms across her chest, the maneuver pushing up her breasts and exposing them even more. I would have laughed if I didn’t need to stall. I wondered if she even knew what she was doing.

“Yeah, I think I do.” Now that she’d pulled back, I started working on freeing my knife. “You use your looks and promiscuousness to get what you want, never taking no for an answer. You bat your eyes, pucker your lips, and shake your ass expecting everyone to drool all over you and do whatever you want them to do. We have a name for people like you where I come from. They’re called cheerleaders. But, just like most of those pompom waving charlatans, deep down, you wish you were something else. Something more. Someone who people actually like, not someone they fear and loath. Deep down, you’re just a child, clawing for a way out.”

Agrippina’s eyes narrowed at my little speech. I almost thought I saw something shift in her expression, but if it did, the evil inside her quickly suppressed it. She frowned at me before turning back to her chair, speaking as she walked.