Artwork by  deets Excellent work! I love his expression of trying to look natural but appearing rather uncomfortable in the process. Excellent job!

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Suave. Sophisticated. Debonair. A gentleman of high birth and nobility. All of these are terms Dexter would use to describe himself. A prideful rat, Dexter would never permit anyone to think him lowly. It was something he could generally get away with. While his self-believed traits were debatable, there was no denying he is highly intelligent. And it was an intelligence he used to always try to stay one step ahead of everyone else and prevent them from discovering the truth; he is a fraud.

Dexter’s upbringing was rough. To call it humble would be an understatement. Even among other rats, Dexter’s background was considered undesirable and the rats that came from such backgrounds were often seen as nearly feral. While nothing special among the others he grew up with, Dexter had only two distinctive attributes, his light fur (compared to most everyone else’s solid brown) and his keen intellect. While unrefined, he always had a focused mind, which led to him learning to read well before his peers, though it wasn’t saying much as some couldn’t read, even as adults. Nevertheless, amidst the daily scrounging and foraging for food to stay alive, Dexter would find books in trash cans, dumpsters and sometimes in the homes and stores he occasionally raided when times got tough. It was through this that he began to self-educate, reading anything he could get his paws on which included no small amount of cheap romance novels, tabloids and on rare occasion, textbooks. This created a skewed an inaccurate notion of what it must be like to be someone important - to have wealth, power and notoriety. He craved it. He craved it desperately with every fiber of his being; he wanted to be these amazing people who were always sought out, looked up to and who wanted for nothing, all the while fear and hunger were Dexter’s only companions. Becoming one of these people became his singular focus so in the years to come, Dexter sought out more texts and educational material, even sneaking into schools and libraries to get ahold of more advanced material that was not often thrown out, and so nearly impossible for him to acquire by other means. He knew he was at a deep disadvantage; his background would only evoke pity or disgust. So he started working to reinvent himself, studying dictionaries to learn frivolous words to expand his vocabulary, practicing lines from the fictional novels he read and acting in ways all others considered vapid and superior. He know he didn’t have the proper associations to be a rich businessman, or the means to go to school as a doctor or lawyer, so he focused heavily on the practical sciences, figuring it was his best path of entry as a lab assistant or entry-level technician where then he could distance himself as far from his upbringing as he could and begin his journey to the top. His plan was largely a success. After years of study, believing he had mastered all he could, he spent a day cleaning himself up, stole some clothes (sewer rats rarely wore any because they would be ruined almost immediately) and managed to muddle his way into a lowly position as a lab tech. Despite all he had learned, he realized it wasn’t enough. He thought he had managed to get away without having any formal training but he had been deluding himself. Still, Dexter was nothing if not a keen rat so with a façade of supreme confidence, he learned as he went along, often staying just far enough ahead to stave off suspicion or failure, filling in the gaps in his knowledge. Amidst this, he had, for the first time in his life, made a real income. More than he ever had before. Something he could live on and in comparative comfort to what he once had. He needn’t go hungry or naked anymore. But in his distorted sense of what success is and what it would looked like, not even acknowledging he had accomplished the near impossible by breaking free from his poverty, he doubled his efforts and his focus to blow past his superiors, achieve greater success and someday have the life he had dreamed of – the perfect lives of those people he read about so many years ago in those cheap novels.

In the years after his initial success, Dexter continued to strive for greater achievement, forgoing love, friends and family to reach a small level of note and enough wealth to live a modest but contented life. Now, 30 years since the day he was born, well on his way to greater achievement, he begins to have the tiniest of doubts about this path he has chose. Just the smallest twinges of regret and loneliness. He begins to wonder, has he made the right decision?