What ever happened to the good old fashioned love letter? Even aside from whinging about technology having possibly ruined it, it seems to have become a lost art somewhere, culturally as well as technologically.
Oh wait, that’s right. The love letter died when it started being appropriated by mass murderers, stalkers, and psychopaths. The love letter died when an anonymous profession of love became a venue for abuse, manipulation, and threat. IE, precisely the reason why I of all people am humbling myself to ask for help from the one man on the planet who probably does have something better to be doing than dealing with death threats and implied terrorist intentions.
He’d done his best to be deferential of Stark’s typical decorum and boundaries. They weren’t yet at the point where he could just pop in at any of his properties in a whirl and expect to be welcomed, so he’d jumped through the hoops and made an appointment and had even refrained from opening a portal straight into the lobby. He had, granted, summoned one to dump him just outside, but with the austerity of what they needed to talk about, he figured he didn’t need to heap salt on the wound by making a show out of being strange. Though most days he didn’t have the option of avoiding it, given it was just a part of who he was.
Still, when he was politely escorted to the elevators and given directions on where to find the engineer, he did his best to reign himself in. It was easy, with the weight of the letter resting in his pocket and the overall burden of the conversation they were about to have. He had already dispatched every sorcerer he could trust on the matter, but there wasn’t just a supernatural issue at hand. There was a security issue as well, and Stark was about the only person he knew of who both could handle the task or could be trusted to pass the information along to Homeland Security.
He hadn’t gone to the OHS himself because frankly, he could only imagine them laughing him out the door. That was one disadvantage to sorcery - it completely barred any serious treatment by governmental offices. Which left him a more abstract approach, but he believed a more secure one in the long run.
When he reached the doors indicated, and they ushered him in without any prompting, he finally found the man of the hour. “Thank you for penciling me in, Stark,” he greeted, stepping into the room so the doors could shut behind him and give them some much needed privacy. “I apologize I had to be rather vague about the impetus for the meeting, but it’s a sensitive matter, and I’m trying to keep it as secure as possible.”
