snowflake challenge #4: headcanon time! the criminal underbelly beneath the psychonauts

we are doing two today! because i was so excited to do this one :D

In your own space, add something to your fandom’s canon. Leave a comment in this post saying you did it. Include a link to your post if you feel comfortable doing so.

if you followed me on twitter you might know that i am a little bit obsessed with otto mentallis because characters with mind control powers are literally kryptonite to me and my single-track mind. i love the bastard. i love that he's a lot more of a complex character than just the game's red herring, because in many ways he is a villain despite not being the villain and i am just obsessed with that.

i'm writing some stuff right now for gross otto/self-insert comic and as a result of it, i have a single concept to bestow upon the world:

the grulovian mob is bankrolling the psychonauts.

they're not the organisation's only benefactor. of course, governments the world over fund them to deal with their problems. but the mob contributes a lot more than you'd expect!

i don't have much beyond that currently, beyond the mere existence of the grulovian mob and its entanglement with the psychonauts. now honestly i don't know a lot of organised crime history, i really need to know more and i like to incorporate little glimmers of reality into my work because i think that adds nuance, so none of this is set in stone. i think the crisis and the attempts to rebuild the country post-maligula's tyranny would probably lend well to organised crime. some members, especially those higher up in the ranks, will be veterans who fought for grulovia in the civil war against maligula. everyone is traumatised as fuck and wants to keep a grip on stability with all they've got. so i can see organised crime kind of making its way in as a means of 'protecting the people' after all this. and, then they would go international because they also have such a high proportion of psychics.

powers the world over are obsessed with obtaining psitanium and psilirium because with those minerals, you can make anything happen. i think maybe the drug trades around the world would be very interested in synthesising these minerals into a drug you can take. maybe different strains will give you different psychic abilities, temporarily.

so... consequently i can very quickly see a scenario in which the psychonauts donates small amounts of psitanium to the grulovian mob, the kind no one would miss, and in return, they share in the profits. it gets laundered, goes unnoticed.

( this is the point that we get spoilery so i'll put the cut here )