A Brief History of The Rust
Under the cut for minor spoilers.
So the founder of The Rust was a woman named Helena Rust- that’s how it got its name. She was originally unaffiliated with Triple N and The Nickelport Rust was just a small self-published newspaper years and years ago- long before the MC was even married or in college or any of the Model Citizens: Unmasked events started. (As a reference point, Finley would’ve been around 8, Ricky about 10, Raf and Lucy around 6-7, Eileen around 6, Jacob about 5-6, etc. etc.) Back then the name wasn’t even The Nickelport Rust- it was The Bay Rust, because it was specifically about the bay area within Nickelport, which had a high rate of lethal crimes. (Nobody swam in the water back then because that’s where bodies were discovered, if at all. A popular game to play for kids back then was to spend a night in one of the abandoned warehouses without freaking out and leaving. Since then that area has been cleaned up a lot, and almost all those warehouses have been repurposed… but it’s still an area with a relatively high crime rate- just not as bad as before.)
Helena Rust grew up here. Her family was your normal Nickelportian middle class, but because she grew up in what was the then-equivalent of The Rusty Side, she saw a lot of heroic and villainous action first-hand. And she wanted to be a part of it. But she didn’t have any powers, nobody in her family did.
Now, this is where I can start verging into some spoilery territory, since while it isn’t a big part of this book, if all goes according to plan you should learn more about Helena Rust in Model Citizens in general. So I can’t say why or how she gave up on her dream and started to expose heroes and villains alike (and even resent them on some level), but long story short: she did.
I can say, however, that the first publication of The Bay Rust wasn’t even in a newspaper, it wasn’t even an article. It was a series of photographs taken by Helena Rust of one hero’s abuse of power. And they boomed in popularity. It sparked a brief, but fiery, series of riots and protests surrounding the legal immunity given to heroes. Some new policies were put into place and the people were placated. But they weren’t ever enforced. And Helena Rust was, essentially, hunted down. So she went into hiding.
Nobody really knows where she went, or how she got the idea, but a few months later the first ever public of The Bay Rust appeared at street corners and dollar stores around Nickelport’s bay area. All on heroes and villains and exposing them. There were only two writers (one of whom used an alias and the other was signed H. Rust) and the paper totaled up to shocking three full pages. But it spread like wildfire.
Now, I should mention, The Bay Rust never published identities. Only actions beyond the public eye. Heroes killing innocents to get the villains, stuff like that.
Slowly but surely it grew, for around three years The Bay Rust remained small, but more and more people joined, all under different aliases to save themselves from what happened to Helena Rust. Then, Triple N finally gained the news monopoly it continues to hold into the present timeline, and The Bay Rust was squashed under an inflow of mass media. Stores stopped selling it and its popularity dwindled until people just kind of… forgot.
Then, in a desperate, struggling effort to keep publishing, The Bay Rust got risky. Before it was mostly on small-time heroes and villains but it started going after bigger and bigger figures to try and keep its funds and keep its name out there. For five years it held onto some microcosm of the public eye by going after exponentially bigger stories. But it couldn’t keep up, it didn’t have the resources to expose these people and half the stories were scrapped because it was so selective in its stories. It was during this time that they finally started exposing identities, the first time they did so sent a new shockwave through Nickelport and drew attention, but even then it wasn’t enough to hold the paper together. Not to mention, it was the finally push that earned The Rust the infamy among the powered community that it holds today. It was also what killed its founder.
Helena Rust was found dead in the street around three years later. They said she was killed in one of her exploits, a misstep by a practiced reporter who was in over her head… But there’s also some suspicion that she was murdered as an act of revenge. Nobody really knows who did it or why. (Again, for age reference of when this took place, Finley would’ve been about 19, Ricky about 21, Raf and Lucy around 17-18, Eileen around 17, Jacob about 16-17, etc. etc. So most everyone would have known about Helena Rust’s death.)
The Bay Rust died even faster after that. It couldn’t keep up production and people left, one by one until finally an offer came that they had to take. Triple N bought it. Then they ignored it, and The Rust disappeared entirely for a good year or two.
Then they decided to do something with it, and thus The Bay Rust became The Nickelport Rust and their headquarters were moved from one run-down shack to another. And, well, it slowly became was it is in the present timeline.