#thatpumpkinmf

"In York."

"When the fuck was this?"

"When i was at York."

Question: how did Dew get so rich? Like what kind of business is he in (outside of tempt ofc) cuz I was really curious.

HELL YEAH LETS GO (I love that y'all are letting me ramble omg 🥹)

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Dewdrop Delmere did not come from money.

He came from a borrowed couch, a handwritten proposal, and the type of spite that only cultivates in people who have been repeatedly underestimated at close range and decided to take it personally.

He was younger than he should have been when he started working at a small bathhouse on the edge of a ghoul neighborhood that couldn't quite decide if it was up-and-coming or just exhausted. The owner was a human woman named Maren — warm, unhurried, the kind of person who has earned every grey hair and knows it.

The books weren't pretty. The clientele was steady, enough of a trickle to keep the lights on. Mostly human. Mostly unbothered by the presence of ghouls.

But Dew noticed something. He's always noticing something, really. It's his most useful quality and his most annoying one, depending on who you ask.

What he noticed was this: the ghoul community around them was starving for somewhere to go. Not somewhere that tolerated them. Somewhere built for them.

Treatment rooms that ran hot enough for a fire ghoul without someone filing a complaint. Hydrotherapy actually calibrated for water elementals. Proper mud and air quality. Sensory deprivation tanks for the quints. Ceiling clearance that didn't make horns a liability. Space for a tail.

Basic things.

Obvious things, once you saw them.

He wrote up a proposal on his nights off. Three drafts. Tried to make the final one look effortless and slid it across Maren's desk on a Tuesday morning and said, very casually, I think we're missing something.

She read it twice.

Said yes.

Six weeks later there was a waitlist four weeks out. Six months after that the human clientele had doubled, pulled in by a reputation the ghoul community had built entirely by word of mouth, because that's what happens when you give people something they actually need — they tell everyone they've ever met. Within a year, Maren called him into her office, slid a very different kind of paperwork across the desk, and told him she couldn't think of better hands.

He said he couldn't afford it.

She showed him the terms.

He didn't say anything for an embarrassingly long time.

(He still has the original proposal. He will deny this if asked.)

That was Helion — the first one, anyway.

Before it expanded, before it got written up in places that use the word "curated" without irony, before it became the flagship of a portfolio that also includes several mixed-use buildings he started panic-buying when the neighborhood started getting expensive and he got protective about it. He's got an art gallery, several investments that bring in great returns, and, most recently, a strip club acquisition that he swears is strictly good business decision.

He doesn't fully believe he earned any of it. He's pretty sure it was an accident that just kept going and one day someone's going to notice and ask for it back.

He thinks about Maren and that moment every time he does something similar for someone else. The stable rents in the mixed-use buildings. The vacant storefront he handed to Ifrit with a two-week deadline and no real plan; just the instructions to make it less of an eyesore. Now it's a genuine community anchor, a gallery featuring all ghoul artists with a great bar and live music on Thursdays. The benefits package he's already quietly drafting in the margins of his Tempt acquisition notes, because dancers are athletes and athletes need to be taken care of and someone should have thought of this sooner.

What he hasn't figured out yet — what Bell has been trying to tell him for years in the patient language of optimized Fridays and hazard pay and you built this, you earned it — is that noticing the gap has always been the skill. Noticing what people need before they've named it. Finding the way to meet it.

It was the skill when he was scrubbing treatment rooms. It's the skill now.

society: ok