Happy birthday @0vergrowngraveyard !!! 💛🫶✨

Wanted to draw their lil AU Tails, Onyx from their @the-emerald-isle-au! (I know he’s meant to be a lil rascal so let’s just say this is the lil face he makes before tearing someone to shreds like the lil legend he is ✨)

I was asked recently the relationship between Rat, Peter, and Grandfather so here’s my sloppy attempt to put that together. TW for sexism and child abuse and drug abuse and murder, that stuff.

One thing I have to note is that with this interconnected plot, I like to leave things open enough for people to derive multiple meanings. The wolf, for example, could be: A literal wolf, something being interpreted as a wolf but isn’t, Satan, a metaphor for evil, a hallucination, or just an homage to Little Red Riding Hood, Three Little Pigs, Peter & The Wolf, and other old tales! That being said, I do like having one set line to follow for the purpose of wrapping up a story, but it’d be fun to see what people get out of it. So just keep in mind that sometimes, something could mean A, and I’ll say it means A, but if you wanna read it as B that’s fine by me too. Or C, D, etc... To relate the connection I have to start from the source: Hito! Hito is an old God. All of my stories revolve around Hito. All of them! I’ll probably state this fact with all my explanations because it’s super important. Hito had some believers who roamed this ghost town of NM. Mr. Bradley, the wealthy son ( of four ) of an old tycoon in TX, decided to go on some holy crusade to the desert and “live off the grid”, back to them Simpler Times. He was also shunned from the family for being too wildly religious and just generally an unreasonable person, very controlling and quick to anger. Comes off as a conman than a business man like his brothers. So Bradley and some like-minded men and women set out for this desert land, killing the natives that lived there. Keep in mind the setting is late 1800s, not that that is to justify anything. The people who lived there were Hitotians, people who dedicated their lives to worshipping Hito. Kiling a Hitotian is an unforgivable act, as is desecrating land of hers, which Bradley and his bunch did both. The 3 pioneers and their wives set up temporary homes, they had all the building equipment brought over and they were going to start constructing the town now that the natives were gone, building a church and homes and fixing up whatever’s been torn down. That night they each had a respective home outside the village limits: one home made of bales of straw, another of wood, and Bradley’s made of stone blocks and brick. The 3 men starts seeing things at night but chalked it up to their exhaustion from working. Then one night, soon after their arrival and building had begun, and keep in mind there’s no electricity so it’s pitch black save for oil lamps and natural light, so Bradley’s woken up by the sound of feet pounding against the desert earth, hay being knocked asunder and the other two men getting ripped apart. Their wives and children are spared -- for now -- but up comes Bradley, who is visited inside his stone home by a creature with black arms and legs and long hair. The idiot opens the door to his home after some loud knocking persists and hey it’s Hitotian demons and they’re Madder than Hell. Bradley, who begs to be spared, is confronted by these creatures. Hito’s there but unseen, but Hito is always accompanied by vizier-types that translate English words to her, and they communicate with humans. If Bradley wants to live, then he’s going to have to make a deal with Hito. His wishes were to continue building the town and to live there, for a son to carry on his name, and upon seeing the dark-limbed creature’s teeth, he asked to have his wolf teeth. Hito gives him what he asks for, in return, he has to carry out human sacrifices on her hallowed ground til the day he dies, and discourage procreation. Hito’s whole schtick is to elimate humans from the Earth, so making more is kind of dumb, right? So he agrees and they leave him. He’d made the mistake of staring into the black-limbed creatures eyes, which made his eyes SUPER light sensitive at all times, hence the sunglasses. Even the darkness is too much. The black-limbed creature with the wolf features is supposed to be Rat, but how and why Rat’s story starts in 1962 Florida as an 8 year old boy isn’t supposed to be answered, I want people to try and figure that out with clues ;) it’s a multiple choice answer! I know the answer but I’m choosing to keep it quiet. Bradley conceives Peter, but it’s with a prostitute and not within the confines of marriage, so it’s something he’s ashamed of. He slept with most of the women in the village but none of them ever became pregnant. He kept tabs on the prostitute, then she gave birth and he took Peter and killed her, bringing her back to the village for a woman Gretchen, one of the wives of the 3 original men who founded the land, to care for him. As Peter got older, so did Bradley, and he was getting lazy with keeping his bargain to Hito. Killing people became tiresome. Torture was fine, tormenting the orphans in the home he helped run with some of the women whose husbands were sacrificed for Hito in the past. Hito will accept torture but it’s no substitute for rital sacrifice and he knows this. He’s threatened that if he does not comply. they’re going to take something from him, and he doesn’t take the threat seriously. That’s when the black-limbed spirit begins to roam the dusty land, fouling crops, killing livestock, disturbing the inhabitants. Bradley uses the wolf metaphor for sin, and how they need to appease God with more sacrifices. Again, he gets lazy, no one dies, so the spirit starts visiting young Peter at night. Peter is fascinated with the creature that he sees as a giant wolf and wants to befriend him. A running theme with my stories is that Hitotian demons will prey on children because they’re impressionable and easy targets. At first he’s delighted with how strange the wolf is, but things go south fast. The wolf starts showing him disturbing visions of death and destruction and Peter wants none of that. The hauntings begin, the hallucinations, the nightly visits. Bradley, who has convinced Peter that he’s his grandfather and not his father because of the shameful secret of conceiving him with a prostitute, exacerbates things by telling him his parents were eaten by a wolf, and plays up the theme for his sermons and how if you don’t wanna get eaten by the wolf, you gotta be good. Peter, who just minds his own business and is being assaulted nightly by this creature, starts losing his mind, so his grandfather, who’s already a child abuser at the orphanage, decides to take manners into his own hands. Peter is to be tied and gagged to his bed until he “stops with the wolf business”, thinking he’s making it up at first being a fantastical child, then he thinks his son is “broken in the head” and decides Peter is too much trouble to keep around, he’s so fearful and sad and has to remain sheltered so he doesn’t incite the village into panic, or to make rumors spread. Bradley tries to conceive another child with the women in the village but again, none of them get pregnant, so he has to keep Peter around to carry on his bloodline, which Bradley thinks is So Important. With Peter tied to his bed through most of his childhood, he feeds Peter twice a day and indoctrinates him. If he misbehaves, he injects him with “medicine” which is heroin, causing him to hallucinate and get very sick. ( Keep in mind, Bradley gave drugs to the orphans as well, just to see what would happen and to see if he could give them to Peter when he misbehaves ) Eventually, Peter learns the way of the Lord as his grandfather taught him, and the visions of the wolf stop. Not completely, but enough to sleep at night. Because of this, Bradley decides to take him outside more often, or when the sun comes out. Because of the cursed land, Hito has a blanket of overcast to prevent growth of crops to punish the people. If Bradley makes a sacrifice, the sun will come out. Peter has prophetic visions of what he perceives as Christ ( It’s Rat! ) killing everyone and seeking revenge from the sinners of the village. Peter’s got it in his head that God is wrathful, hateful, and black and white ( which is why I use a b&w motif as Peter’s BG in some pics ) and becomes a raving fanatic for Christ. Bradley has pretty much given up on his son at this point, and eventually plans on overdosing him, leaving the village, and trying again with another son with a woman outside the village. He’s kept all his thoughts and secrets down in a journal he hides in his room that Peter later discovers. Bradley starts giving sermons about love, God is love, we all need to love each other and procreate. Going against Hito’s wishes intentionally thinking it’ll “reverse the curse” and with his son no longer holding value to him, or the village really, he doesn’t have anything to lose. Peter becomes outraged by his grandfather’s changing of tune and his desire to get Peter to give him a grandson ( hey it’s another bloodline option to fall back on! ) but Peter doesn’t want to follow his orders anymore. Peter wants to preach and set everyone straight in the town with the Lord, to keep the wolf away and to bring Jesus into everyone’s lives, whatever it takes, so by some luck he manages to lock Bradley into the room he was held captive in for most of his youth and torture him, putting him through interrogation, breaking open his head to let the Lord in, to fix his sinful ways. To be fair, Bradley did raise Peter to believe this stuff, but it was also a mix of the child abuse, the drugs, and the Proto Rat spirit. Flash forward many years later, Rat’s an adult and comes across a murderer at an active crime scene and pursues him when he runs. There’s a sequence I want to draw of Peter trying to get away from Rat in a Florida swamp and Rat tormenting him in a similar fashion to how young Peter was being tormented as a child, causing his regression fear. The encounter, up close and personal with Rat, tells Peter that this thing, whatever Rat is, is linked to his past with the wolf. He doesn’t know how or why, but it’s something inside of him that he can’t deny, just as strong as his devotion to God. Throughout the journey with Rat and his group with Peter there as a pack member, they have talks to try and dig and see where the two are linked, why they’re linked, and ultimately what they’re looking for with each other’s company. Amy is constantly trying to get in-between them because she thinks Peter is trying to harm Rat and break up the group with his religious presence, despite his participation with the murders and ritual activities. She’s also extremely protective of Rat and very immature. I’ve been asked too about Peter’s religiousness and the Hitotian aspect. If he joins with Rat and the ritual chain of command is Hito - Rat - Pack, but he’s this cultist Baptist, how does that work? WELL, Hito’s wormed into other religions as well, and a lot of times she’ll speak to people “as Jesus” to do murders for her, which plays on actual crimes of people murdering others because “God told them to” and in this case, Peter didn’t know any better and really thought God was telling him to do these acts. At the end it dawns on him that Hito was using him for sacrifices and it causes an internal breakdown that he either needs to go head-first into obeying Rat and Hito or turn away and find redemption. Rat is manipulative as all Hell and uses Peter’s trauma to dominate him into a submissive follower, like the other Pack members, conditioning him, using his flesh-realness as proof, not some invisible God, and illustrates supernatural power to him, much like the Devil would in a biblical tale to convert a holy man. Rat keeps what he knows about Peter and Bradley fairly secret too, not wanting to reveal his hand. The affliction that Bradley has with the sentient meat, hooked up to the medical machines is residual Hitotian energy leaking into the real world through suffering. Torture and suffering causes a dimensional “gateway” to open, bringing Hito closer and closer to resurrection, and one thing you need to know about Hito is when she retreated from Earth to regroup for a take over, something happened in her transition into a parallel dimension and it turned her inside out, so instead of her being a singular being in a world, she BECAME the dimension, insides and guts and blood and the air, her memories, everything. Something she hopes to fix once enough people have been sacrificed. Bradley’s gone mental from being forced to remain alive with his brain rotting. Both him and Rat have seen into the dimension and it’s a thing where once you see it you’re never the same. For Rat, his body calls to the alien dimension and starts to rot, preparing for a new body with new cells and genetic coding. Bradley’s human body is soft and weak and unfit for transition, so it drives him mad. He thinks if he eats Rat he will become as powerful as he is. Peter doesn’t know about any of this, just that his father ( he learns he’s his father from the secret journal ) is a horrifying meat monster, and that Rat is definitely not human but linked to his past. Denial of Rat is almost like obeying his father Bradley, so maybe his following of Rat is rebellion of his father’s ways, how we all rebel against our parents wishes? Maybe it’s Rat’s real presence, and not an invisible one? Is it the proof he provides? Is it a need to really give into evil and be one’s trueself without shame or remorse, or will human morality trump our animal minds? Learned behaviour versus the heart’s desires? Lots of questions arise! I want to show how the wheels turn for each member of the Pack ( I know y’all mostly see Peter lately, but all the Pack members sans Ryan have very deep links to Rat and why they follow him! ) I hope this answers the question more or less, I love keeping things open to interpretation because it’s fun to see what people think up if they get invested, but I do have a storyline I’m going for as well. I use musical inspiration as well as classic kids tale elements, biblical elements, coming of age, brutality of man, the idea of transforming onesself, etc etc... But I gotta have that horror element in everything :) if anyone has any questions please feel free! I answer them anonymously unless requested otherwise.