CAD4-040
Barista: Sahir Bali
Date: Jan-6-2020
Receipt: CAD4-040
Subject: Business as Usual
To be clear, Eoin O’Dwyer is a fraud.
Not the dangerous kind—no stolen identities, no fleecing widows of their pensions. No, Eoin’s the old-school kind—a storyteller, a give-the-people-what-they-want fraud. The good kind. He’s spent a lifetime feeding the world’s hunger for ghosts, fairies, and things that go bump in the night.
He grew up in The Gross Wyrm, an inn older than most countries, and one with a long-standing rumor—if you believe in that sort of thing—that it was a favored haunt of the Unseelie Court in the dead of winter. His father ran the place before him, and his father’s father before that, each generation carrying on the business with the same mix of warm hospitality and just enough reverence for the unseen to keep the stories alive.
Where his ancestors honored the whispers of the old stories, Eoin hopped onto a box at the side of the road and started shouting them at anyone who would lend him an ear. He traveled far and wide, collecting tales like a magpie hoards trinkets. From the Bavarian forests to the bayous of Louisiana, from the catacombs of Paris to the ghost towns of Nevada—If there was a legend, Eoin chased it. If there wasn’t? He made one up.
And that’s where the fraud comes in.
He knows the Coffee Trade, knows the line between truth and legend—he just doesn’t much care for it. He’ll use cheap tricks to wow tourists, but in the end, he often creates more problems than he solves. Many people in this business treat it as science, history—fact. Eoin is content to mix and match and muddy the waters. One of his own creations? That the Serpent of Eden wasn’t just a serpent—it was a tsuchinoko from Japanese mythology named Daichi.
Some people call that deception. Eoin calls it good business.
That’s not to say he doesn’t believe in anything himself. Quite the opposite. Eoin’s got his own set of rituals and rules when it comes to the Fae. Never take the first offer, never give your real name freely, always pay your debts in full—and above all else, always speak in even numbers of words. It’s a habit as old as he is. Ask him why, and he’ll just grin—give you a different answer every time.
And yet, for all the showmanship, for all the embellishments—something about him rings true. Last night, as we drank ourselves toward ruin, he laughed off Rachel’s sighting of the Black Hound as a local legend. A shadow trick of the night. A nothing.
But I watched his hands shake when he poured his next drink.