Those adorations mounted on every church wall and displayed in cheap frames on every Catholic retiree's credenza next to the family porcelain collection, actually got his look spot on. Gaunt, bearded, Kurt Cobain hair but darker. Pictures of Jesus the world over seemed...accurate.

But the most shocking thing about Jesus, who sat there in front of me, surrounded by people hanging on his every word, was that he was white.

Whiter than me and I'm from Minnesota and have Scotish roots. If I run outside naked on a snowy Christmas morning I'll be invisible. I'd only just arrived but before I stumbled upon this scene I was the odd man out (even having accounted for the era and come dressed to blend in). Everyone else: the Romans, the Middle Easterners, were all darker-skinned. I thought that my time machine journey to Jerusalem would have at least proven out the obvious: that Jesus was white-washed over two millennia.

Not true.

There he sat. And there I stood. Confounded.

When my initial shock started to wane that's when I became aware of the fact that Jesus himself, messiah and savior of all mankind, so I read... was staring me down with a rageful resolve that I'd only ever seen from my son when I'd take away a toy as punishment. I grimmaced, but his hard glaring eyes didn't break. Then I picked up on a twitch of his head. An indication to meet.

I walked behind the bazaar wall where he'd been, I don't know, holding court? I don't know how to describe the market-sized adulation. Somehow though he'd placated them to occupy themselves and had escaped. This I knew because now we were alone. He still held that rageful look, and I was still its target.

"What are you doing here, goddamn it?" he hissed, suddenly.

"Goddamn it? That's... out of character. How the hell? You speak English?"

"Ya damn right. I know the noggin' of an American in any century. Just what in tarnation are you doin' here?"

"Are you... are you southern? Wait... I have questions--"

"You better saddle up back on whatever time funky horse you rode in on and get back to your age, or you'll have us both caught out!"

"You're not Jesus you're some guy from... from Texas?"

"I am Jesus, you goddamn neophyte!" He caught himself and continued at a lower volume. "You need to leave here."

"Tennessee? Georgia? I think I can place Alabama and Louisiana but my ear isn't that trained. You're an American, that's clear to me."

"Why are you here?"

"I built a time machine. I wanted to see Jesus. Wasn't planning on talking to him. In English. In American."

He was muttering under his breath. "First time this has happened..."

"What?"

"You gotta go. Not the time, not the place."

"Do you speak the languages here? How do they not know you're foreign... and... timeless?"

"You want answers, partner? I ain't got 'em, Sam Hill."

"Tarnation? Sam Hill? Man, what year are you from? Are you Jesus Jesus or have I stumbled into some off-putting parallel dimension where you've found yourself comically replacing him? But then how can you speak Aramaic?"

"I'm busy saving the world, fella. There's your answer, now skeedattle!"

"But wait--!"

He'd given me once last hard glare before he turned and shuffled back out into the bazaar.

I had to sit down. I sat on an old basket full of soddy woolen sheets. A million questions still rolled around my head. But the questions were so non-sensical, the situation so bizarre, that my brain couldn't do anything. I could hear myself laughing, and I floated up into a morbid out of body experience, observing myself sitting there in the dark, a time traveler in the midst of discovery.

After ten minutes of this, I came to my senses. I went back to my time machine and initiated the return trip. A flash of light, and I was back in 2022, in Foley, Minnesota.

Everything looked the same. Same furniture, same house, same doting family. Same Netflix line-up, same neighbors and cars. I drove around. Same town. Same church. I should've been glad that I hadn't irreversibly changed anything, but all I could think was... what the Sam Hill is going on?

I had to go back. Because, honestly... wtf.

​

/r/velabasstuff

by all means please do!

I found the Emperor at the back of his study fingering through an unknown volume that he had plucked from the shelf. His deep cherry stained desk, carved three hundred years ago, still glinted candlelight across its scratched surface. Of all his majesty's royal halls and apartments whose grand ornamentation festooned the Great Palace, only this study betrayed a humble beginning. None now could remember when the Emperor's kin walked among the commonfolk.

"Godliness..."

I remained frozen. Rarely did the Emperor speak to his advisors, and much less directly so, even to those among the highest echelons of his council.

"Godliness, Ramsey... godliness in a man. Unquestionable only insofar as he be unassailable."

The Emperor's words took me by surprise and my tongue, as loose as he must know it to be in debate with the others, did not move.

"The Great Palace never saw a single year without an addition, you know. Of course you know." His eyes raised from the pages and sent an icy message to my own. "You know so much, Ramsey."

My heart sank and I looked to the floor, and cupped my hands tightly before my frock. Whatever I could do to submit and retreat; retreat from the Emperor, retreat from his presence. He knows.

"These grounds are measured in ages. Thousands of years and immeasurable expense. It is a city. Every turn reveals another incalculable structure. Soaring vaulted heights, to remind the people here of godliness. My godliness.

"The Empire began here, Ramsey. In this study. You did not know that, of this I am sure. From the time of my ancestor when this was a village and he a mere chieftain. And now, the Grand Palace. A symbol. But what symbol so vast and empty. A city of air and gold."

The Emperor slammed shut his tome, shocking my ears and giving me a visible start. He dropped it on the desk. He looked at me now, directly. Fury shone red in his eyes as he squared up not a meter from where I stood. I cowered in submission and untameable fear.

"Godliness in a man is preserved by the space around him. It is a buffer, like a protective cloud. It raises us, and paints us like gods at the height of grand murals. All else is below, separated from we who are untouchable and godly. My Empire. My holiness!"

Just then he lurched, and knocked me to the ground in a rage. I fell, but out of obedience rather than the force of his lunge.

The Emperor's royal garment tangled in his elbows, and he struggled briefly to right the knot.

"Folly! " he cried. "This Empire is built on the momentum of my standard's conquests. It is preserved by the space this palace has created." His voice broke, and he was heaving. Desperate.

"Never before has one come so close, Ramsey. But never has an Emperor known what must be done."

I couldn't manage even a word. The Emperor was on his knees now. An impossible vision of a man. A broken man.

"You see now, Ramsey? A year wasted planning an act so easy to undertake as it happens. You see what you must do, now? Here and now, Ramsey?"

Though my knees were buckling in terror, I managed to regain my feet. The Emperor stayed like a beggar before me. A small person in a small room.

I retrieved the heavy tome that had been dropped onto the cherry desk. A workable instrument for the task. The Emperor prepared this to be his fate, because the title of the book fit the occassion. "The Last Emperor", it read.

As I looked from the engraved golden letters back to the Emperor, I saw that the rage in him had been replaced by a subtle, knowing smile.

My own fate was sealed. But the Empire would change, forever.