Historical person brought into our time

This was a fun one to do. As the title implies, it’s regarding a historical person brought into the modern age. I chose to not go full modern as I wanted to display the kinship between two female rulers and so set it back when Great Brittain had a Queen instead of a king.

The year was 2012, the whole country was out celebrating Queen Elizabeth the 2nd’s 60th year. Cleopatra had found herself looking at gleaming glistening walls with pictures of the queen’s face throughout this place in which she found herself. She was happy that a woman was still in power and able to put these pawns in their place; but she found a large number of the pawns appeared to be sitting around not doing anything.

Trying to get her bearings, she looked up at the sky to find the sun shining high but barely feeling even warm compared to what she had been used to; and looked around trying to make sense of where she was. Rather than being surrounded by stone and sand, she was instead surrounded by materials she couldn’t quite fathom or understand. Standing by a statue - trying to make out who it was - she noticed it was not of herself or of the queen she could see celebrated everywhere, but of a man. Why would a man still be celebrated when a woman had been in power for 60 years; had it been her in power she would have had it torn down and replaced to ensure people knew who to worship.

Once again properly looking at her surroundings, she noticed many of the men were walking around shirtless. Normally this would have pleased her; the men she had when she ruled were chiselled, perfect walking hunks of meat who would have died to protect her. Instead what she saw was men who looked closer to multiple catapult stones stacked atop one another and they barely managed to walk in a straight line. She found it egregious that so many resources had been allowed to be allocated to fattening up these men, who clearly were unable to assist properly within this empire.

Little did Cleopatra know that she had found herself smack bang in the middle of Newcastle. Each man she had seen was likely pissed out of his mind and probably had just finished a kebab or a large 4 pack of Gregg’s finest sausage rolls (not that she would have had any idea who Greg was). It was probably a good thing that she hadn’t decided to try and speak to any of them as the likely response would’ve been something like “why aye pet, ya doing canny like?” and would have really made her start to question her sanity.

As continued to survey her surroundings, she noticed that almost every single person was reading from a little stone tablet permanently. Every so often it would make a noise and they would rub their fingers against the stone which she imagined was painful. It never even occurred to her in the moment that stone couldn’t make a noise except crack.

In her stupor at the world around her, she has not noticed she had been staring in the same direction for a while, and being dressed in her finest robe and garb, many of the people passing by had started to mistake her for a living statue and started to throw small discs of metal of various sizes down at her feet. She had no understanding why or care really.

So there she stood, only wondering where her guards had gone and why she stood in the middle of an unknown place and wanting to go back and reclaim her place on the throne of Egypt. She was still at least happy a woman ruled as queen, wherever she was.

Meanwhile back in 40 BC, Cleopatra’s guards stood just as dumbfounded at the fact their queen had just vanished in front of their eyes. However it didn’t take long for them to decide it was fine to take the wine that sat next to the throne, and to drink until they were far beyond merry. In many ways, the men of Newcastle and her guards had more in common than she would ever realise.