KOATR

KOATR: KING OF ALL THE RUST - A retro-futurist story of androids, time, and what survives. Art, lore, and story fragments from a world of rust, memory, machines and love across time.

[koatr]

KOATR is a retro-futurist sci-fi story about androids, time, and the things love will not let die.

This page is where I’ll be sharing art, lore, character pieces, story fragments, and pieces of the world as it comes together.

Ultimately, I see KOATR’s final form as an animated hybrid project created in collaboration with many people. Because of that, the images I post here are mainly bookmarks: design notes from Aeris, not the world’s official final form.

At the center of KOATR are two lives moving toward the same catastrophe from different directions, each trying to harness the power of an ancient wormhole for the person they love.

One act breaks the world. Another tries to reach back through the wreckage.

Radio, a young tinkerer trying to reach someone she loves in the past, one salvaged part at a time.

Levon, the heir to an android empire trying to force time itself to spare the person he loves.

I’ve been building this world for the past few years, mostly as a personal project because I loved making it. Now I’m starting to share it publicly.

Thanks for looking through the rust.

-537

[koatr]

Levon and the dream - Digital - 2026

One year, 3 months before Zero Day

Levon is plagued by a consistent vision. Someone tried to kill me. He fears the black waters. It's just an ugly dream...

-

Good new. Bad news. The good news, your boy got a job with Titmouse Animation! The bad news, KOATR will necessarily take a back seat for at least 6 months. I'll post as much as I can because KOATR isn't going anywhere. The countdown to Zero Day is inevitable!

[koatr]

Striper - Digital - 2026

Aerisian Fauna.

Adapted to feed off the ever abundant etherite.

The Aerisian taruk/taruka or striper, as it is colloquially known.

A deer-like animal adapted to life on Aeris, recognized by the glowing bands running across its body. Like much of the planet’s wildlife, it carries the mark of an environment shaped by etherite.

[koatr]

Striper - Digital - 2026

Aerisian Fauna.

Adapted to feed off the ever abundant etherite.

The Aerisian taruk/taruka or striper, as it is colloquially known.

A deer-like animal adapted to life on Aeris, recognized by the glowing bands running across its body. Like much of the planet’s wildlife, it carries the mark of an environment shaped by etherite.

[koatr]

Sim's Marking Day - Digital - 2026

Marking Clinic 703. Ollinwood, Jadeya. 1967 - 1971.

2 years before Zero Day

Ritualized tracking systems. The Aerisian way.

[koatr]

Radio heading back south - Digital - 2026

3 years after Zero Day

Heading home.

[koatr]

Radio at the scrap yard - Digital - 2026

2 years before Zero Day

KOATR's final form, or rather the dream version of it, will be a hybrid animated story. Because of this, all the visuals here are my sketches, notes for collaborators etc. Radio will likely look different when the story takes its final form, but this is a close version of the Radio I see when thinking of her.

She reminds me of my mom's side of my family, my aunts, my grandma and her sisters, my cousins.

[koatr]

Ruts in their natural environment - Digital - 2026

with infant rut

[koatr]

RUTS (face variants) - Digital - 2026

Rodent-like, etherite feeders that thrive in neglect and early 1970s Jadeya has plenty of it.

I wasn't thinking monsters when making these, just urban pests.

[koatr]

Radio and Zots at the abandoned cryo stall warehouse - Digital - 2026

late 1972/early 1973 - 6 months before Zero Day

The bottom half of this page was one of the first ideas that came to my mind when thinking of the culmination of Radio's journey in creating her time viewer. I saw a dancing Zots, a silent Radio. It was finally done.

This image, or versions of it made tracks in my mind for months before I put together a rough version just to lock it in place. The version you see here is the final one and I think it did justice to the images I saw in my minds eye.

The top half is newer, roughly from a few months ago. As I saw it, the process from start to this monent must have had lots of similar vignettes but problem was I hadn't drawn any so I gave that one a shot. Typical Zots and Radio banter.

[koatr]

South Larks Sorting Ground 9 - Digital - 2026

A toxic dumping ground where cheap tech is picked over by autonomous sorters instead of human workers. Radio rigs scramblers to blur their vision long enough to slip through, while Zots has his own problem: the machines see him as scrap worth collecting.

[koatr]

Zots' Limb Components - Digital - 2026

More Zots bits.

His limbs are a mix of old android components, scooter parts, tiller pieces, salvaged joints, and whatever Radio could make behave long enough to call it a body.

Kept alive one solved problem at a time.

[koatr]

Zots' head components - Digital - 2026

If the last post was about Zots’ personality, this one gets into what’s sitting behind that glowing cat grin.

Radio built his head around whatever she could make work. A rigged home game console. Extra memory drives. The attitude card slot. Home-made ether catchers for that extra battery pack punch when my boy gets low. Locking plates, salvaged wiring, and all the little fixes that keep a homemade botsie from falling apart.

Zots is the kind of machine that only makes sense because Radio kept solving one problem after another until the thing finally talked back. And when he did, his first words ever were a call from the future.

[koatr]

Zots - Digital - 2026

Radio’s botsie, built outside the usual school competition path and held together by scrap, stubbornness, and whatever parts she could get her hands on.

He’s whimsical, street-wise, sharp, quick-witted, emotive, and mostly incapable of keeping his mouth shut. A homemade android with a black-market attitude card, a rusting voice, and the kind of loyalty that comes with complaints attached.

For Zots, I thought wise guy, slang talk, old-school b-boy energy, with the heart of the hardest hard rock. He considers himself Radio’s big little bro and is one of the integral parts of KOATR.

Zots’ face was one of the first clear images in my mind that said, “I gotta do something with this,” way before KOATR was more than just a few random sketches and ideas.

[koatr]

Attitude Cards and a Typical Writer - Digital - 2026

Without one, a botsie is just a lifeless metallin husk. The body might stand, the limbs might twitch, but there’s nobody home.

The cards are written on repurposed game cartridges by script jockeys, many of them former writers and techs shoved out of work by the same specialized androids they helped bring into the world.

Some write clean cards.

Some write black-market cards.

Some put a little too much of themselves into the work.

That’s where a botsie gets its voice.

Its timing. Its mouth. Its temper. Its bad jokes. Its strange loyalty.

A good card makes the machine useful.

A great one makes it impossible to forget. Unforgettable...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JFyuOEovTOE

[koatr]

Botsies - Digital - 2026

In the world of KOATR, androids are commonplace. From service models to security units, they are part of the everyday song of Aeris, as well as one of the story’s main character arcs.

I saw botsies as high school robotics projects turned neighborhood mascots, cobbled together from scrapped metallin and street-wise ingenuity. Inner-city schools with enough funding compete to build the most realized hand-made androids, and botsies are the result of those competitions.

Some teams dismantle their projects afterward. Others keep their creations running for as long as there is a willing engineer or caretaker, because repair and replacement are constant work.

Attitude Cards

Without these, the android is just a lifeless metallin husk. Once inserted, the creation comes to life, imbued with all the grit you’d expect from a disgruntled ex-script jockey, robbed of a job by the same specialized androids they helped write.

A typical botsie is willing to go down with the ship, but it will smack-talk you the whole way down.

[koatr]

Radio and Zots, a year before their world changes forever - Digital - 2026

A small scene from KOATR: Radio and Zots working on her time viewer.

This machine becomes one of the major turning points inthe story, but here it's still something rough, tough, and dangerous (shouout to old school L.A. graffiti! )

Radio builds, fixes, keeps it moving. Zots talks too much, complains, and would still throw himself in front of a train for her.

Shoutout to The Simpsons!