ᚠᚨᚲᛊᛁᛗᛁᛚᛖ
"This looks like it's for you,” my mom said with a frown and a smile, handing me the sheet of thermal paper. It was a fax with a French sender number in the header and handwritten text in large black marker letters. The text was written in Elder Futhark, the oldest form of the runic alphabet, which was used by Germanic peoples until around the 8th century.
The fax was from my cousin █████████, who lived in ████████, France. We had always been very close, always inspiring each other with the weirdest ideas and plotting secret plans to take over the world or simply wreak havoc on our families. We shared a nerdy fascination with Scandinavian black metal and other niche genres - the more brutal, the better. We were both good at drawing, fascinated by satanism and demonology, Nintendo games, manga, fantasy novels, weird cartoons, and of course Beavis & Butthead. We usually only saw each other once a year, when our families would meet in ███████ or ████████ during the fall holidays to go hiking and spend time together. The rest of the year, we mostly kept in touch by sending each other arcane faxes. The internet hadn't been a thing yet.
We obviously worked for a secret agency called ███. Our codenames changed constantly. At one point I was Blackjack and he was Azagthoth. Our imaginary boss was M.A.G.G.O.T., and much of our correspondence consisted of planning and briefing each other on secret missions.
In the beginning, we wrote in English, even though we spoke German with each other in real life, simply because it felt cool. But it wasn't secret enough, and our moms had a reputation for reading our private stuff, so we had to come up with something better. Given our shared niche interests, Elder Futhark as a parent-proof code was the obvious choice. I'm still not sure what to do with this particular life skill, but to this day I'm fluent in reading and writing runes.
I translated it without thinking. The message turned out to be an urgent operational briefing from ███ headquarters regarding a supervillain named ███. It concluded with strict instructions not to bring the ██████ ████ Nintendo cartridge.