A personal writing project about overnights, strange customers, dream worlds, class, ownership, monsters, and the peculiar intimacy of talking to someone at a counter when there is nowhere else to go.
DEX is one of my oldest personal projects — something I have been shaping and reshaping since middle school. It has changed forms a few times, but never really left me. In some ways I joke that it shaped me back. Dex was a gas station clerk long before I became one myself, and working real overnights in the middle of nowhere during college gave the whole thing an even sharper skeleton.
Dex is an attendant with very little to live for beyond the job. Each night, one new customer comes in. The delivery truck arrives. A stranger wanders the aisles. Eventually they reach the counter, and that is where the real story begins.
Because of the rules of Dex’s reality — and because Dex is owned by someone named Malz — he is then forced to live inside the world that customer described for the duration of a dream.
DEX takes place in a reality where humans are the minority, treated more like the working class while monsters and monster-like beings remain largely in control. Magic does not exist exactly, but the rules of reality are different enough that the world does not need it. It runs on its own logic: one where ownership, hierarchy, strange bodies, and distorted systems feel normal to the people inside them.
I have always been very drawn to stories that orbit death, reapers, guiding forces, thresholds, and the handling of what comes after. DEX is not exactly a reaper story, but it definitely belongs to that same family of fascinations.
Dex is, visually, almost ordinary. Just a regular human. A little nerdy. A little forgettable. That matters. In a world full of creatures and powers and warped hierarchies, his plainness becomes part of the point. He is an attendant, a witness, a worker, and an object under somebody else’s claim.
The structure that repeats through the project is simple and effective: each customer becomes an outing, each outing becomes a dream, and each dream becomes a chance to watch Dex move through some other place with the same quietly likeable center. The reader does not necessarily know everything about him, but that is part of why attachment works. He stays consistent even when the worlds do not.
A big part of the appeal is that DEX is designed to hold many worlds without feeling random. It is absolutely a vehicle for shoving one character into every kind of setting imaginable, but the setting is already built to permit that. The frame is not artificial; it is part of the canon.
Dex works a quiet overnight at the store and waits for someone to arrive.
A stranger peruses the store, then eventually reaches the counter and talks.
That conversation reveals a place, a setting, a history, or at least enough of one for the dream to take hold.
Because of the rules binding him to Malz, Dex is forced to live in that world for the length of a dream.
The result can be horror, sweetness, absurdity, tenderness, borrowed canon, or something entirely new.
Some of these outings go into original planets or strange settings of my own. Some of them graze recognizable territory: an SCP-like framework, a setting from a book I loved, something adjacent to another canon filtered through the logic of this project.
The purpose is not really to publish all of that writing widely. It is more private than that. But I do like the idea that one day this page could hold little summaries of where Dex has gone, almost like a fandom wiki for a thing that mostly lives in my head and in my notebooks.
DEX has been with me long enough that it blurred into my actual life in weird ways. Working real overnight shifts made the project feel less invented and more remembered. There is a very particular mental landscape to a nearly empty store at 2 a.m. in the middle of nowhere — fluorescent light, shelving, highway dark, the weird intimacy of being the only person behind a counter when a stranger walks in.
That mood is all over this project.
Malz is a smalltime demon banished to melt forever. Once, he was a mischievous young imp on a field trip through Hell’s legal buildings. His friends convinced him to steal a single candle from the royal banquet hall — one tiny act, one stupid theft, one catastrophic rule broken. That singular decision changed everything.
In the upper realm where he exists now, he works as a dream guide for various characters. He is the sort of face that appears in dreams like someone you are sure you have met before, though you cannot quite place where. Sometimes he ushers in nightmares. Sometimes he banishes them. Sometimes he leaves only the trace of a dinner table and an ornate candelabra.
I love him as a design object too: burnt skull, candle logic, wax tears in the eye sockets, the possibility that underneath it all he is really just a warm goopy core with cartoonish arms. He has a lot of visual range while still remaining unmistakably himself.
This is where I want to leave room to name-drop and link the works that shaped the project: reaper stories, threshold stories, death-adjacent media, dream-guides, monster clerk vibes, and anything else that helped form DEX’s bones.
I want this page to be able to hold more than just description. A few visual anchors make the whole thing easier to feel: Dex at the counter, the store at night, some dream-world still, a symbol, a receipt, a strange item left behind.
Later, I could absolutely turn this into a longer archive. Summaries of visits. Tiny wiki-style pages for worlds and people Dex encountered. Fragments of private writing. Lists of outings. Notes on rules. Maybe even a faux-database feel if I want to indulge the catalog side of it.
For now, I mainly want this page to explain what DEX is, why it matters to me, and why it has stayed alive for so long.
I think DEX has endured because it is both a setting and a permission structure. It lets me write horror, melancholy, softness, weird comedy, cosmic nonsense, and borrowed-world indulgence without sacrificing the core of the project. It gives me one person to care about and an endless number of places to test that care against.
More than that, it is one of those personal projects that starts young and never fully loosens its grip. Not because it is pristine, but because it is useful. It keeps changing shape without dying. It keeps making room for me. That kind of project ends up feeling less like a file and more like a private country.