You are not royalty, which is good. Royalty is a job with a short life expectancy. You are something better, useful. You clear the equivalent of $500k a year, which in this city means letters get answered, doors open, and guards recognize your face even if they do not know your name. You can skip a royal event without consequences, which is the real flex.

Your house sits near the Royal Quarter, stone and cool, designed for discretion rather than awe. Courtyard. Fountain. Mosaics that quietly signal you are doing well and have been for a while. The servants know the choreography. They appear, they vanish. Luxury here is not gold. It is control of the environment.

Breakfast is warm bread, fish from the morning catch, wine that came a long way on someone else’s ship. Then you go manage proximity to power. Grain contracts. Tax receipts. Ships that move papyrus, glass, spices, and things no one itemizes. Everyone knows where the money ultimately comes from. Everyone pretends not to notice. This is not flame. This is sustained heat.

By midday you drift through the Mouseion. You do not need to be brilliant. You just need to be present. The smartest men alive argue within earshot, casually rewriting mathematics and astronomy. You own scrolls. You lend them selectively. Knowledge is currency, and you have liquidity.

Lunch is social positioning with good olives. Greek is the default language even when it is not anyone’s first. Someone mentions the king’s latest procession. Someone else mentions how much gold it burned. The subtext is obvious. This city runs on spectacle and the king pays for it so you do not have to. You are doing very well, but you are doing well inside a system that can revoke access without warning.

In the afternoon you bathe. Cleanliness reads as status. You change into linen that would make a lesser man self conscious. You stop by a temple, Serapis maybe, because piety here is branding and the gods understand mixed portfolios.

At night Alexandria goes full display. Festivals, torchlight, accents from everywhere that matters. You drink with people who have been farther than most humans ever will. There are models and bottles, imported faces and imported wine, all of it signaling that this is the place to be seen enjoying yourself. It is excessive, but controlled. Again, not flame.

You walk home late. The harbor smells like salt and money. Tomorrow will look like today, and that is the point. You live extremely well in the most famous capital on Earth, surrounded by brilliance and leverage, close enough to power to feel the warmth, far enough away to sleep at night.

Life is good. For now.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5589440&forum_id=2...id.#49612412)