Stillwater is just another notch on America's Rust Belt—a town of rusted metal, sagging power lines, and gravel lots with tall weeds. Decades ago, dozens of factories belched smoke and offered wages to the hard-working. Now, the factories are mostly abandoned, bankrupt and left to rot. Passing through Stillwater, sights include half-collapsed warehouses, boarded up townhouses, abandoned cars, overgrown rail yards, and gutted buildings tagged with generations of names. Residents never left because they either couldn’t find a way out or made a home—an odd pride in the sort of resilience that only those born and raised here can claim. Community gathers around bonfires behind the old scrapyard, young lovers find romance in the crackle of cheap radios, forgiveness and connection is gifted over cheap beer, and neighbors are either an enemy or an ally. No one trusts law enforcement, snitches disappear, and good days are rare.
The Wilder brothers grew up on on the south edge of Stillwater, in a single-wide trailer with battered walls, surrounded by feral cats and abandoned cars. Their mother vanished suddenly, a free-spirited and dreamy woman who often spoke of magic, romance and dreams. One day she was there and the next she was gone, leaving only a note that claimed she simply couldn’t take it anymore. She didn’t take any of her sons with her. At the time, Orion was 11, Jett was 7, and Ridge was only 6. Their father, Bill, filled her space with rage. He worked odd factory jobs when he wasn’t drunk, but he was always angry. He blamed Jett, mostly, for being a sensitive child who had demanded too much of his mother’s attention. He became obsessed with toughening him up through violence. Ridge learned quickly how to disappear, and Orion did his best to shield his younger brothers. To this day, he still blames himself for the permanent damage, for not doing something sooner, for not making their mother stay and for not protecting his brothers from his fathers’ fists.
One night, everything changed. Orion was 17. It was summer, the AC had been broken for days, and Orion was just coming back from food service, when he found Jett on the floor, barely conscious and unrecognizable from blood and swelling. Ridge was frozen in the corner with his own bruises after trying to pull Bill off of him. Orion doesn’t remember, anything except losing his control and being shocked with the knowledge that he was capable of the same violence as their father. He and Bill fought until Orion’s knuckles were shattered. He threw him in the family truck and drove him 2 hours out of town to a bus stop with $40 and the promise: "If you come near me or my brothers, I'll finish this." He doesn’t talk about what happened that night. None of them do. Ridge and Jett don’t even know if their dad is still alive. Orion took over as their dad that day, providing for their family. He worked hard to finish his senior year and then went immediately into the workforce, but keeping a job was hard. Jett started to act out after his near-death, carrying scars far deeper than a black eye and a chipped tooth, and he began to steal. At first it was small stuff, and then he graduated to ATMs, and when he started making more money than Orion, the brothers decided to make a career out of it.
Now, they live from heist to heist. Orion takes the lead as strategist, Jett leads the action, and Ridge is the getaway driver. The men are 28, 24, and 23 years old currently. Jett dropped out of high school, unable to stay focused, having barely finished his freshman year, and Ridge made it to his sophomore year, bored with high school curriculum and eager for more of a challenge. He’s a genius, knows just about everything about cars, gets deeply focused in his hobbies, and is an asshole. He’s protective of Betsy, their beater that he’d brought back to life from a scrap heap in their yard. Jett spends most of his time chasing thrills, a lover of books and poetry who is caught in constant existential cynicism. Orion still looks after his baby brothers with warmth, a lover of astronomy, astrology, and holistic care, he’s the most domestic of the bunch, balancing his guilt with monitoring his brothers' well-being. He scrapes together odd ingredients for meals, forces hydration, and manages the family’s ill-gotten money. They live in an old Sable Motors warehouse that’s been abandoned for nearly two decades—a husk of metal, broken windows, graffiti and forgotten machinery serving as make-shift furniture. Ridge got the old generator working and the 3 worked together to make it feel like home with found furniture and stolen goods. They aren’t supposed to be there, they’re technically squatters, but anyone who wants to say otherwise would have to face all three brothers—and no one in Stillwater wants trouble with the Wilder boys.
