Meeting new and mysterious people online has often been the content for murder mysteries and savage dramas, not to mention some very sad and very real life tales. On this occasion, separated by thousands of miles, the threat ratio was within acceptable limits. Drab is in California, I am in Berlin. Drab ( in case you hadn’t guessed it this is not his real name) is a member of Twitter of Time, a fan community on Twitter for the Wheel of Time series created by Robert Jordan and as a story brought to a conclusion by Brandon Sanderson.

Drab has some very different approaches to the Wheel of Time to my own and he has set himself a role to play online in supporting the story he loves. As he puts it “my role is to engage fans and play the role of media consumer and media provider.”

Hidden away beneath all of that, Drab also has a number of t ...