The Scrap Hounds

The Scrap Hounds are structured as a brutal hybrid of street gang, survivalist militia, and doomsday cult, with Jack-in-Irons at the absolute center. There is no pretense of equality. Authority is earned through strength, cruelty, and usefulness, and it is maintained through fear and spectacle.   At the top sits Jack-in-Irons, undisputed warlord, prophet, and executioner. He is law, doctrine, and punishment made flesh. His word is treated as revelation. Orders are not debated; they are obeyed or paid for in blood. Jack reinforces his dominance through ritualized violence—public beatings, pit executions, and trophy-taking—ensuring no one forgets who rules the yard.   Beneath him are the Chain Lieutenants, the biggest, meanest, and most loyal Hounds. These enforcers command smaller crews, oversee raids, guard key scrap sites, and enforce Jack’s will. Their authority lasts only as long as they can hold it; weakness invites challenge. A lieutenant who loses a fight or shows mercy too freely doesn’t stay a lieutenant for long.   Below them are the Pack Leaders, veterans who’ve survived multiple raids and pit nights. They lead scavenging teams, handle recruitment, and break in new blood. Pack Leaders earn respect through results—bringing in scrap, captives, or victories. Failure means demotion, humiliation, or being fed to the pit.   The bulk of the gang are simply The Hounds—rank-and-file members, scavengers, raiders, and pit fighters. Loyalty is enforced through indoctrination: “Nothing Is Wasted” applies to people as much as steel. Those who prove useful rise. Those who don’t are repurposed as labor, bait, or entertainment.   At the bottom are Thralls and Pit Stock—captives, failed initiates, and broken members awaiting judgment. Some are forced to fight for survival. Others are worked until they collapse. A rare few earn their way back into the Pack through bloodshed brutal enough to amuse Jack-in-Irons.   There is no formal hierarchy on paper, no ranks stitched into jackets. The structure is fluid, violent, and constantly self-correcting. Power flows downward from Jack and upward through fear. The Scrap Hounds believe civilization already ended—and in their world, only the strong deserve to organize the ruins.

The Scrap Hounds don’t prepare for the end of the world—they rehearse it.   Their culture is built on the absolute conviction that society is already rotting, that laws, cities, and institutions are just thin coats of paint over a carcass. Where survivalists hoard and wait, the Scrap Hounds push. They sabotage infrastructure, stoke violence, and glorify collapse, not out of ideology in any refined sense, but because ruin validates their worldview. Every blackout, every riot, every abandoned block is proof that Jack-in-Irons was right.   “Nothing Is Wasted” is not a slogan; it’s doctrine. Objects, people, suffering, fear—everything has value if it can be repurposed. Scrap is sacred because it is honest: broken, discarded, but still useful. The Hounds wear their world on their bodies—armor made from tires and car doors, trophies taken from the dead, scars left unhidden. Cleanliness, comfort, and mercy are treated as lies told by a dying civilization.   They romanticize brutality as truth. Strength is virtue. Cruelty is clarity. Compassion is weakness dressed up as morality. New recruits are taught that empathy is a chain that gets you killed, and those who cling to it are deliberately broken or culled. The fighting pit isn’t just entertainment—it’s education. Watching someone fall teaches the Pack who matters and who doesn’t.   Jack-in-Irons encourages spectacle because spectacle creates belief. Ritualized violence, public punishments, trophies mounted in plain sight—these aren’t excesses, they’re sermons. The Hounds chant, paint sigils, and carve symbols into steel and flesh alike, not because they believe in gods, but because fear works better when it feels inevitable.   They don’t see themselves as villains. They see themselves as honest. In their minds, everyone else is pretending the world still works, still cares, still has rules. The Scrap Hounds believe they’ve already crossed the line everyone else will eventually be dragged over. When cities burn, they expect to inherit the ashes—not as caretakers, but as kings.   And that’s the most dangerous thing about them: they don’t want the world to end out of despair. They want it to end so they can finally be right.   Preferred Crimes   The Scrap Hounds don’t specialize so much as they indulge. If an act feeds their war machine, spreads fear, or hastens social decay, it’s not just permitted—it’s encouraged. Crime, to them, is less a business and more a method of environmental engineering. Still, some atrocities are core to how they survive and grow.   Pit Fighting: The heart of the Hounds’ culture. Captives, rivals, defectors, or unlucky drifters are thrown into crude fighting pits surrounded by scrap barricades and screaming spectators. These fights are rarely fair and almost never voluntary. Winners may earn temporary favor, recruitment, or better rations. Losers become meat, parts, or warnings. Pit fighting reinforces hierarchy, hardens recruits, and provides ritualized violence Jack-in-Irons uses to maintain control.   Human Trafficking: The Scrap Hounds traffic people the same way they traffic metal. Prisoners are sorted by “usefulness”: laborers, fighters, barter stock, or entertainment. Homeless populations are primary targets—easy to disappear, hard to trace. Some are sold to other criminal groups or black-market buyers; others are kept for pits, forced labor, or indoctrination.   Theft: Industrial theft is their bread and butter. Scrap yards, construction sites, rail depots, abandoned factories—anything that can be stripped, hauled, or repurposed is fair game. They steal vehicles not to resell, but to crush, weld, and weaponize. Copper, fuel, tools, generators, heavy equipment—resources first, profit second.   Vandalism: Not random, but symbolic. The Scrap Hounds vandalize infrastructure with intent: sabotaged power stations, wrecked transit lines, defaced civic buildings. Graffiti isn’t tagging—it’s prophecy. Messages about collapse, waste, and survival are scrawled across walls in oil, rust, and blood. Every act is meant to say: this world is already breaking.   Kidnapping: Used tactically rather than opportunistically. Targets include rival gang members, vulnerable civilians, and anyone Jack-in-Irons decides would make a useful example. Kidnappings often precede pit events, forced recruitment, or public executions designed to spread fear through nearby neighborhoods.   Violent Crimes: Assault, murder, torture, arson—routine tools rather than extremes. Violence is used openly and theatrically. Drive-by smash raids, ambushes with improvised weapons, and brutal retaliations are common. The goal isn’t just to eliminate resistance but to make resistance feel pointless. Fear is harvested like scrap.   In the end, the Scrap Hounds don’t commit crimes to enrich themselves or climb the criminal ladder. They commit them because every broken body, burned building, and vanished person is another crack in the world they want to see collapse—and another proof, to themselves, that they’re already living in the aftermath.

The Scrap Hounds don’t hide their intentions behind fronts or excuses. They aren’t interested in legitimacy, reform, or coexistence. Their message is blunt, screamed in spray paint and enforced with chains:   The world is already dying. They’re just speeding it up.   To the Scrap Hounds, governments, laws, and social order are rotting carcasses propped up by denial. Their public agenda is to accelerate collapse—cripple infrastructure, terrorize communities, dismantle systems of trust—and prove that civilization is fragile, wasteful, and unworthy of survival. Every riot they incite, every transit line they destroy, every neighborhood they brutalize is meant to push society one step closer to the edge.   They don’t want chaos for its own sake. Chaos is the crucible.   When the lights finally go out and the old powers fall, the Scrap Hounds intend to be ready—armed, hardened, and unified under Jack-in-Irons. In that new era, strength replaces law, cruelty replaces mercy, and those who can turn garbage into weapons will rule over those who couldn’t adapt.   In their eyes, the ashes aren’t a tragedy. They’re a throne.

The Scrap Hounds don’t measure wealth in numbers, accounts, or favors owed. They measure it in weight, bite, and how much damage something can do when swung, dropped, ignited, or driven into a crowd.   Their primary assets are hard resources: scrap metal, industrial machinery, fuel, vehicles, heavy tools, stolen construction equipment, and anything that can be reforged into armor, weapons, or infrastructure for violence. Entire yards of rusted cars, decommissioned transit vehicles, and abandoned factories are not blight to the Hounds—they are armories waiting to be awakened.   Money, when acquired, is immediately converted into materials. Cash that can’t be turned into steel, fuel, explosives, or bodies is considered dead weight. The doctrine of “Nothing is wasted” extends beyond ideology into strict internal enforcement—members who hoard abstract wealth or luxury items without functional value are punished or stripped of status.   Their greatest asset is Scrapcraft itself: the collective skill and obsession with building. The Scrap Hounds deliberately construct nightmarish, overbuilt post-apocalyptic equipment not only for utility, but for indoctrination. Every welded blade, chained shield, and improvised flamethrower is a ritual act—proof that the old world’s refuse can be turned into instruments of dominance by their own hands. Function matters, but authorship matters more. If you didn’t build it, it doesn’t truly belong to you.

Before Jack-in-Irons, the Scrap Hounds were barely a footnote.   They began as a loose, half-delusional militia scattered across rural Ontario—preppers, survivalists, junk hoarders, and men who mistook paranoia for prophecy. They stockpiled canned food, stolen generators, and rusted firearms, preaching collapse while never quite daring to force it. Law enforcement categorized them as nuisance extremists: loud online, quiet in practice, more likely to implode than act. A problem for social workers and local sheriffs, not a real threat.   Then he found them.   No one knows where Jack-in-Irons came from—only that he walked into their camps like a prophecy given muscle. He didn’t argue doctrine or refine their ideology. He proved it. He broke machines with his hands, lifted engines like offerings, and showed them that survival wasn’t about hiding—it was about domination. Where they preached collapse, he performed it.   Jack culled the weak first. Doubters vanished into pits. Leaders were broken publicly and replaced with whoever survived the beating. Under his rule, the militia stopped pretending to be defenders of a future and became architects of its destruction. He reorganized them along industrial corridors, dragged them out of forests and fields, and planted them in scrapyards, rail depots, and abandoned factories—places where civilization’s bones were thickest.   The move into Toronto marked their rebirth.   What had once been rural noise became an urban threat. Jack turned scrap yards into fortresses, transit relics into temples, and scavenging into doctrine. He taught them to raid infrastructure, seize materials, and convert captured people into labor, recruits, or spectacle. The fighting pits emerged not just as entertainment, but as social cement—fear made ritual.   By the time law enforcement revised their threat assessment, the Scrap Hounds were no longer a militia.   They were a cult of collapse with a warlord at its center.   Jack-in-Irons didn’t create the Scrap Hounds. He finished them.