Retvik grunted as he stared at the screen in front of him, deleting various junk messages. While he may have been a god of fire, it turned out that even deities weren’t immune to spam. Normally, Retvik would just have the emails automatically sorted, but sometimes he liked deleting junk himself. A digital bonfire of sorts.
However, Retvik grunted for a different reason. Among all the trash was a single message that had gone unnoticed. Not until Retvik’s spam filter pointed him to it. The message was a somewhat long one. No pictures, no links, no HTML, just text. A message with not just Retvik’s name on it, but his entire collection of titles too.
The message started with a simple greeting, with a just as simple request.
“Hiya, can we talk, please? I’d love to get back in touch with you.”
Retvik leaned back, his chair creaking ever so slightly. He knew who had sent this message. Perhaps one of his longest friends. A former friend, after a vile incident occurred. The question was, did Retvik want to talk to this individual, or was he going to ignore it, the same way he had ignored previous requests.
Unsure what to do, Retvik moved the message to one side and went back to purging trash from his message box. Once he had finished with the spam, Retvik thought, maybe he’d look back into it.
Fortunately, or potentially unfortunately, Retvik managed to sail through the remaining spam with ease. He wasn’t even really sure where this spam came from, because Retvik was certain he had not signed up to all these newsletters and junk. And the adverts trying to sell enhancement tablets were frankly quite stupid. Retvik definitely did not need any of them. At all.
Now that Retvik had finished with the spam, he turned his attention back to the previous message. The one that Retvik had intentionally moved to one side. He wanted to ignore it, throw it in the trash with all the other spam. But for some reason, Retvik couldn’t bring himself to do that.
Maybe it was just the passage of time, but this message was different. Well, the text was all pretty much the same as previous messages. All they had done was add a greeting at the beginning. And it wasn’t like Retvik had received too many messages. They’d pop in unexpectedly about once a month.
Retvik sighed and closed his eyes, thinking back to what had happened. It had essentially been a death threat. A chemical unbalance that made everything unstable. Maybe he was better now. Maybe he was worse. Retvik didn’t know. And there was no way of knowing unless he replied to the message.
“Ugh. How bad could it be?” Retvik eventually muttered to himself. After all, he could always just stop responding again, if things went south.
With a final sigh, Retvik pulled out his keypad and started typing a response. A short one. There was no need to be fancy.
“Hello, Arkay. What do you want to talk about?”