I am nothing more than 3 raccoons wearing a trashbag. Thank you.
✨ Cover concept!! ✨
Caelum Mikhailovic is a chemically neutered millwright for Covenant Ore & Fuel. He's sardonic and cynical, despite being plagued by a violent martyr complex and zero working dick (sorta). He wears a company-issued kill switch after surviving a mass-casualty accident he tried to prevent. He accidentally robs an entire truck loaded with pharmaceuticals just in time for his obsessive ex-best friend and enforcement officer, Rowan Krejnik, to start to see the fault lines in the carefully curated framework of the company.
Many of the atrocities depicted in Rusthound, such as state capture, human experimentation, eugenics-based care-to-labor pipelines, and industrialized labor discipline, are all derived from the historical record.
The Veiled Concordat merely consolidates those realities.
It operates as a single entity that multiple corporations have accomplished in fragments. Every mechanism has a historical precedent, and the innovation is consolidation under a corporate charter with legal sovereignty. The VC did not invent these mechanisms, obviously, but synthesized them into one cohesive corporate-theological structure.
The ridiculous facts:
Autistic hyperfixation treated as a liability
Gifted kid burnout weaponized by labor systems
Feral whimpering dog trope, but it’s not cute
Executive dysfunction + religious mechanical reverence
Genderfucked violence, roles scrambled to a wet pulp
Chemical control as caste enforcement
Queer intimacy where gender is equivocally a LaCroix, all fizz, no flavor, and 100% pain.
This isn’t dystopia for funsies, but this is the real shit:
Abuse cycles inherited as debt
Sexual repression as company policy
Body horror that’s not metaphorical
Anti-capitalist to the marrow
Obsession in place of safety (bc the only way to survive this is self-inflicted psychosis via maladaptive daydreaming, obviously.)
Competence kinks and failure spirals
Hierarchy rot, religious technocracy
CW: body horror, dysphoria, hormonal dysregulation, addiction, explicit sex, toxic dynamics, state violence, coercion, medical trauma, gender modification, religious technocracy, and good ol’ class rage.
