Gazing up, past the realm of balloons
Asaph Hall saw a sight to cause swoons
“Look at these, way up here!
We’ll call this Dread, this Fear”
Before then, they weren’t sure Mars had moons

“Uhh, where are we going?” Jack asked.

Matthew was not thinking clearly.  He was using too much oxygen for running, and not enough was getting to his brain.  He was paying the price for never having been on the track team, never jogging, never owning a treadmill.  Matthew did not believe that even professional athletes were capable of complex thought while running with all their heart, but he figured that they at least could tell where they were going.  In his condition, the best he was able to come up with was: “Up.”

It may be true that the simplest answer is most likely to be correct, but that doesn’t mean it’ll be the most satisfying.  “Can you be any more specific than that?” Jack pressed.  He was no track star either, but he was much better at running and talking at the same time.  It suited him.

“No,” Matthew replied breathlessly.  Even if his brain had been functioning perfectly, his lung capacity would have kept him from producing anything but one-syllable answers.

“Maybe we should slow down for a second and figure out where we are, then,” Jack suggested.

“Okay,” Matthew agreed.  He was running on fumes anyway.  The moment the word was out of his mouth, he came to a sudden halt and collapsed, as if his friend had lassoed his feet and pulled back hard.  Matthew sank gratefully into the grass, very glad that his friend’s suggestion had jolted him out of his running trance.  There was no reason for him to continue, and there hadn’t been for the past several minutes either.  He had lost sight of the person he was chasing a while ago, but he kept running, his legs taking over decision-making powers usually assigned to the brain and propelling him forward for no reason other than the primal pleasure of sprinting.

“So where are we?” Jack asked after some quantity of time had passed.  Minutes, hours, days, something like that.  The sun was still up.

Matthew cautiously opened his eyes.  Then, when that did not immediately make him feel like he was about to vomit, he lifted his head and looked around.  “We’re on the Palatine Hill,” he said after a brief scan.  It was as much news to him as it was to his friend.

“Alright then.”  Jack grinned appreciatively.  “And what’s special about it?”

Matthew rotated into a seated position, treating his legs as gently as possible.  He turned his eyes away from the ruins to face the street.  He forced himself to stare at the blankness of the pavement while he gathered his thoughts.  He knew the question Jack really wanted to ask was, “Why are we here?”  Matthew had no answer to that.  Not one that he was willing to admit to, anyway.  So he answered the question his friend had asked.

“It’s one of the Seven Hills of Rome,” he explained.  “It’s located in the center, and some believe that it’s the first place where people lived here.  Later on it was where many rich and powerful Romans built their homes.  The ruins and excavations you can see are of the palaces of emperors—‘Palatine’ is where the word ‘palace’ comes from.”

Jack nodded.  “I see.”  The look of concern in his eyes faded, replaced by the more common light of mischief.  “So this is where the upper crust lived, huh?  All those scheming politicians sitting up here in their ivory towers and looking down on all the poor schmoes in the Forum over there?”

“Something like that,” Matthew said.  Jack’s description was closer to the truth than usual.

“Sounds like it could be worth a look,” Jack declared, standing and offering a hand to his friend.

Matthew wasn’t sure that he would be able to walk, but when he got to his feet, his legs, though sore, were not as crippled as he had expected them to be.  He continued to stare away from the hill for a few seconds, afraid of what he might see there, but when he finally looked up he saw nothing but ancient walls and seemingly harmless tourists.  No one was dressed entirely in gray.  No one was staring at him.  No one appeared to be beckoning him to follow.

He was . . . “relieved” was not exactly the right word, but it was something close to that.  He was glad that, for a while, he did not have to worry about the identity or purpose of the gray-clad figure, but he did not think that the problem was gone for good.  Matthew was beyond thinking that the person was a trick of his mind.  When he saw the figure in the Forum he had been sure.  It wasn’t a ghost, it wasn’t Jack’s powers of suggestion, it wasn’t a residual character from his Forum fantasy; the person was real, and for some mysterious reason (Matthew was sure it couldn’t be anything good) it was following him.

He couldn’t mention any of it to Jack, not because Matthew was afraid he wouldn’t believe him, but because he was afraid he would.  Jack’s madness was bad enough when he didn’t have anything to go off of other than the crazy ideas in his own head.  Matthew did not want to see what his friend could do with live ammunition.

“Man,” said Jack, staring up at what was left of the upper floors of some ancient noble’s house and then turning back to look at the Forum.  “There wasn’t anything subtle about those old Roman aristocrats, was there?  They were just a bunch of wealthy puppeteers with those . . . you know, those cross things with the strings.  Do you think the common people down there could feel it when the schemers up here stared down at them?”

“Oh, I’ll bet they could,” Matthew answered quietly.  He had felt it himself when he stood in the Forum, and he was not entirely sure that he wasn’t still feeling exactly the same sensation.

On and on they ran and pushed
Their freedom to prolong
Barret started panting
“Who made . . . this damn train . . . so long?”

“Questions later!” Barret yelled
“I don’t care ‘bout the how
We are all completely dead
If we don’t jump off now!”

“You won’t plummet to your death
This tunnel has a floor”
Then, without another word
He pushed Cloud out the door

This week’s puzzle:

Two disfigured men try to make the world understand the full meaning of their injuries. A lawless man knocks both of them out of buildings.

Last week’s puzzle:

A man travels to an unfamiliar place to help out two thieves, experiencing considerable difficulty due to transportation and terrain. He solves some of his problems with lies and contempt, but he cannot get the job done without a couple of skid marks.

And the answer is . . . ▼

His illustr’ous title to maintain
Francis the Second switched his domain
The HRE was done
Split by Napoleon
As Austrian Emperor Frank’d reign

Matthew stopped.  He closed his eyes.  Inside his head, the Forum came alive.

“What are you doing?” Jack asked.  “Are you tired again or something?”

“No,” Matthew replied.  He could barely hear his friend over the mixed sounds of conversations and lively debate, bartering and negotiating, threats and outright attacks.  He was not able to recreate it perfectly, having forgotten some of his Latin from college, but the sheer size of the crowd in his mind meant that a few scattered words here and there were enough.  “I’m simply taking it all in.”

“Well, do you think you could find somewhere else to do it?” Jack pressed.  “People are going to bump into you.”

“Isn’t that the whole point of the Forum?” Matthew said, chuckling slightly.

“You’re starting to weird me out a little, man,” Jack said, his voice unusually anxious.  “Normally you would be telling me all about who built this building, and when, and why, and then who tore it down to get the materials to build this one over here, and so on.”

Matthew paused in the middle of his conversation with an Egyptian merchant who was telling him the latest news from Alexandria and opened his eyes.  “And what about you?” he asked curiously.  “Shouldn’t you be spouting some wild nonsense about impossible conspiracies or the ghosts of the past?”

Jack shook his head.  “I don’t know this place,” he replied.  “I liked the Colosseum better.”

Matthew grimaced.  To be in Rome and not know the Forum . . . “The Forum is just as interesting as the Colosseum,” he countered.  To those who really appreciated history, of course, it was much more so, but he didn’t want to push the issue too much with his friend.  “It just takes a little more imagination.”

“Ah, my imagination’s not that good,” Jack said.

Matthew raised an eyebrow.  “You’ve got to be kidding me,” he said.  “After all that garbage about restless spirits that you made up in the Colosseum, you’re trying to tell me that you don’t have a good imagination?”

Jack shrugged.  “That wasn’t imagination.”

Sadly, Matthew knew that his friend was telling the truth.  Jack didn’t make all these things up.  He got them from movies like Spartacus and Gladiator.  He got them from TV shows.  He got them from trashy novels.  He absorbed it all, like a sponge, and then, again like a sponge, he regurgitated it in such an unfamiliar way that the original source was often unrecognizable.

Matthew sighed.  His return to the mental Forum would have to wait.  Some things were too important to be left unexplained.

“The reason I’m not telling you about the buildings,” he began, “is that the Forum isn’t about buildings.  Sure, there’s the Rostra, the Regia, the temples, the house of the Vestals, but those aren’t what really define it.  The Forum is all about people.  This was the heart of the greatest city in the known world.  It was a conflux for people of many different walks of life, classes, and races.  Senators and beggars, masters and slaves, Africans, Jews, maybe even Britons.”

“So what did they do here?” Jack asked.

“They talked.  They interacted.  They spread gossip.  They traded.  They fought.  They rioted.  Ambitious politicians would stand here and give speeches, trying to discover the secrets to controlling the terrible power of the Roman mob.  A few lucky ones succeeded, though often not for long.  There’s an old saying, ‘Vox populi, vox dei’—the voice of the people is the voice of God.  Well, in ancient Europe, this was where that voice could be heard.  It was capricious and difficult to understand, but if you could learn to speak it, you just might be able to make yourself master of Rome.

“But it’s not really about the demagogues, either.  The Forum was the place of ordinary people.  They came to get the latest news and to chat with their friends, to watch and listen to the glorious chaos that was the city of Rome.  And now that’s what I’m going to go back to doing, if you’ll excuse me.”

He started to close his eyes, but he could see that his friend still looked puzzled.  “Tell you what,” Matthew said.  “If you can’t imagine it, then just try to strike up conversations with random people.  That’ll give you a better feel for the Forum than me explaining the history of the Temple of Antoninus and Faustina.”

“If you say so,” Jack said, shrugging.

Matthew returned to his Forum, but unfortunately he was no longer able to fully enjoy his conversation with the Alexandrian merchant.  His mind was too focused on the present to truly get into the fantasy.  He had realized only too late the potential danger of telling Jack to start conversations with whoever he happened to find, and thus a quarter of his brain . . . and then half . . . and then nearly two-thirds was focused on keeping track of what his friend was saying, just in case they were suddenly going to have to run again.

For a while Jack managed to avoid trouble.  At least he stayed in roughly the same place, so Matthew didn’t have to follow him and could therefore keep his eyes closed.  The things he said were not particularly intelligent—he asked people to speak because he wanted to hear the voice of God and suggested that they start a riot and march on the Colosseum to demand justice—but as long as the people he talked to kept ignoring him, it didn’t really matter.

But then he heard an unfamiliar female voice saying: “Really? You’re going to get everyone here to rise up in protest?  How?”

Followed by Jack: “Well, in the old days, politicians would give these great speeches to sway the hearts of the crowd.”

“Alright,” Matthew said, irritated.  “I think that’s gone far enough.”  He opened his eyes.

And then, off in the distance, he saw the gray-clad figure.

“Alert! Alert!” the speaker blared
“Security Type A!
Unident’fied passengers
Are on this train, I say!

“We’ll now conduct a thorough search”
The speaker once more blared
“What do we do?” Tifa asked
Cloud lied: “I am not scared”

Jessie came back to their car
Her face pale white was hued
Redundantly she blurted out
“We’re screwed! We’re screwed! We’re screwed!”

Barret rose without a sound
And quickly took command
“Calm down!” he said. “Just means we’ll jump
Sooner than we had planned”

“Lockdown!” the speaker announced
“Beginning with Car 1!”
Barret surveyed all his troops
“Well? Run, you bastards! Run!”

They barreled down the aisle
And the door they made it through
Just in time to hear the speaker:
“Now lock down Car 2!”

Most unfortunately, the picture hint portion of the puzzle will continue to be down this week. The feature is proving more complex to implement than originally anticipated.

This week’s puzzle:

A man travels to an unfamiliar place to help out two thieves, experiencing considerable difficulty due to transportation and terrain. He solves some of his problems with lies and contempt, but he cannot get the job done without a couple of skid marks.

Last week’s puzzle:

One man is accused of being a poisoner and sends an old man to a dark death, and another man gives poison to a child and defiles a corpse. One man spoils his best friend’s chances for love, and another man gets relationship advice from someone that people almost never listen to.

And the answer is . . . ▼

He called the Saints to Go Marching in
Jeepers Creepers, Street Blues of Basin
Tiger Rag, Mack the Knife
Let’s honor Satchmo’s life
What a Wonderful day to begin

As those of you who have been paying attention may have realized, today’s post is the 100th content post to be presented on this website.  What does this mean?  Well, with four posts per week, it means that the experiment has been going on for approximately 25 weeks, or just under half a year.  And what does that mean?  Almost nothing.  However, because everyone likes big, round numbers, I have included something in today’s entry to mark the occasion, though if you do not wish to waste most of your day, then I will recommend not putting a lot of effort into finding it.