#than BL/ind itself

[trickstump]

We as a fandom collectively goof-slash-complain about the conflicting timelines and narratives of Danger Days- between the album itself, the supplementary materials, the music videos, the later comics, etc.- but I kinda really wanna talk about how that like. Adds so much to the idea of the album.

Danger Days, and the Fabulous Four (to me) is, like, the story of four normal people who became bigger than themselves and then, through that process, sort of lost their personhood after their deaths? Throughout all the narratives, even the ones we most prominently see them in, we never really get a concrete sense of identity for any of the Four. We know their names, their faces, and that they were heroes. We see small moments- of them taking care of The Girl, being a family- but we never get a narrative beyond that for them. That isn't to say they don't have histories or personalities; from the comics, we know they probably did, but as time has gone on, they've been forgotten for everything but their heroism.

In the body of the album itself, without the music videos, we get to know even less: only two of the Four are named in the songs (Jet Star and the Kobra Kid's traffic report), and only three in the text of the record (Party Poison getting a whole song title.) Fun Ghoul is nowhere to be found on the record as a whole. Even then, the only ways we talk about the Four are in their deaths; Jet and Kobra Kid being used as unfortunate carnage in the Killjoy's war against the Dracs and BL//ind, a warning to "die with your mask on if you have to" and then something that's immediately moved on from.

In the music videos, again, we have a slightly better insight into who the Four were as people, but only insofar as we know they epitomized cool gunslingers with rebel spirits that ultimately loved The Girl so much they laid down their lives for her. I think there was a discussion a few months ago here about the concept of "Save Yourself, I'll Hold Them Back" being a much better fit for the narrative of the "SING" MV than SING was, but I also think there's credence to the idea that that was the point.

The intent in storming BL//ind wasn't to be heroes on a grand scale. It wasn't a liberation attempt. It was to save their family, a deeply personal thing that became, to other Killjoys, a rallying cry after the fact. In their absence, the Fab Four's narrative got to be written by the masses, and in raising them to martyr status, their sacrifice became less personal and more symbolic. Their personhood was forgotten, and the details of their lives- and, eventually, their deaths!- didn't matter so much as what they represented: something to fight for.

Anyway TL;DR the narrative of Danger Days, to me, is a story about how in trying to save yourselves you can save the world, but ultimately at the cost of your individualism and identity, even when that's exactly what they're trying to celebrate.

[redfish-blu]

I’m going to be controversial for a minute:

Korse has to be the worst Danger Days character. He was cool and villainous in the music videos but he really overstayed his welcome. It was over for him after SING. He served his purpose, and cut to 12 years down the line, why on earth is he still around?

His C Plot in the comics is my largest criticism of that whole mess in itself. It was unnecessary and took up so many pages that should have been dedicated to Red and Blue, whose arc actually has something to do with the world building and waking Destroya. Not to mention their story is almost an exact mirror of Korse’s anyways except it’s relevant to the plot.

We didn’t need Korse to be redeemed (well they attempted to redeem him but they didn’t accomplish it. They just pulled a Walking Dead and Governor’d him). We didn’t need him to have a sob story. Especially because they didn’t set anything up for the other Scarecrows (you know the fucking villains?). Out of all the BL/i bad guys, the Scarecrows are meant to be the most terrifying. They are allowed personality and freedom over others because of their willingness (programmed or not, it isn’t really clear. Fucking Amazing writing strikes again) to Kill People. Scarecrows know they’re brutalizing humans where as Dracs do not; and Exterminators likely do not either. That is what sets them apart and makes them truly formidable and dangerous. Because they are willingly offing people for their own status and gain.

BL/ind is the ANTAGONIST. We aren’t supposed to feel bad for any of the fascists!! Not one of them! What the fuck?? Korse is shown to still be out euthanizing people, and he wanted to keep his job too. He hasn’t “changed for the better”, he’s a domestic terrorist. Korse didn’t apologize or make up for a single thing he did as a Scarecrow. The second he wasn’t getting benefits (and the benefit of the doubt) he cut and run.

Korse didn’t interact with any of the main characters (save for Val I guess but they don’t mean anything to one another and they didn’t talk). The Girl never saw him or had any awareness of what he was doing. She probably thought he was dead, or just gone. What in the hell was the point of him even being there if he had no part in furthering her arc (I’m kidding myself here a little because the writers did not give two shits about The Girl either)? He is the one who murdered the Four in cold blood and Drac’d The Girl’s mom, if we aren’t forgetting that… I sure as hell don’t believe that would just slip her mind either.

But I know the reason they did all that bs, because doing something different would make a better story, and the people writing anything related to Danger Days are allergic to making nuanced narrative decisions. Especially if they’re writing legacy characters (all of the Fab Four, Cherri Cola, The Girl, Korse, Show Pony, Doc). We got an attempted redemption arc for the serial killing white guy where all of his actions were just cleaved off of him and “actually it was the Director who was at fault for everything he did!” And not to mention the Director… Just makes the entire thing 100x worse (re: racism).

Think of what we could have gotten if we weren’t wasting pages on Korse’s arc where we ultimately learned nothing about him except that he has half a brain and a nameless boyfriend who dies less than a page after we meet him. And that he got fired for not killing enough people. Yes that is what he got fired for, not because he came to Jesus and realized he was doing something bad. He only wanted out after he got demoted. What the hell.

[joysona]

Open invitation to infodump abt your personal killjoy lore on this post !! Wether it be abt ur oc(s), the fab 4 or other canon characters, zones lore, whatever thoughts u have to scream into the void that u don’t wanna put into its own individual post feel free to leave it here!! I’ll start, oc lore below the cut :>

My oc is named sun spot! Theyre the babysitter and a fairy godmother for a gang called the cosmic crew out in zone 3. Other members of their gang include: Daisy Chain, Ballroom Blitz, and Jenny Jazz.

Sun spot has 2 sisters, both lost somewhere else in the zones. Their oldest sister, Milky Way, is a motorbaby tumbleweed that usually hangs out in the outer zones, and their other sister, Kosmic Khaos, is a crash queen and paper boy based in zone 2. Both are squeaky and lay low in thei eyes of BL/ind for the most part.

They’ve kinda been on a side quest to find their sisters for years. The three split up shortly after their parents died, having grown up in the zones. Their parents were ghosted in a firefight so bad it wiped out the gang they called home and everyone just scattered. Sun spot wound up in zone 2 several days later and was taken in by the cosmic crew in its early days, formerly run by a joy named Bottle Rocket. Other former members include Zombie Eyes and Space Age.

The primary function of the Cosmic Crew is to be a safe haven for joys on the run. Their city raids aren’t so focused on taking down BL/ind itself, but rather on dumpster diving, hijacking supply trucks, and scavenging food, clothes, and other necessities to sell for cheap in zone 3. They aim to take care of their own more than anything else.

The cosmic crew is based in zone 3 in an abandoned warehouse next to an old gas station and a single still-functioning streetlight. Inside, there are shopper stalls to buy food, jackets, etc, a huge section of hammocks and grungy old mattresses for joys to sleep on, a medic tent, and a couple workshops for the gangs resident smithy and gearhead to work out of. Walk in and find a tall ‘joy wearing pink bellbottoms and she’ll direct you to a fairy godmother if you need someone to patch up a jacket. The cosmic camp is open to squatters who need a place to crash as long as they dont bring trouble with them, first meal there is always free!

[bloody-sunrise]

personal headcanon

time was, like everything else, perfectly regulated in Battery City. there were clocks on every wall, studiously flicking the seconds away, and they never wavered from their methodical counting. every one of them was digital. every one of them stopped (and/or started smoking, and/or made a few very very concerning noises, and/or exploded) at the moment the Girl set those souls free. take that as you will.

in the Zones, time doesn't work the way it's supposed to. it might be the same day yesterday as it is today, but thats just how it goes, sometimes. don't worry about it. don't think about it. the crew you ate dinner with might have mentioned events from years ago as if they'd happened yesterday; you don't ask them what the year is (as far as they know. as far as anyone remembers out here. sometimes djs will say the date, so everyone's on the same page, but that's only when an undergrad has been keeping track of the days since they escaped long enough to communicate it properly to a dj) and in return they won't ask you if they're dead.

not that you'd know. not that anyone would know. the only 'joys who show up for a meal long after their demise are the ones that no one remembers. memory is important- you're their second chance at being remembered. memory is important, and something (someone?) in the desert doesn't like when people aren't remembered.

meals are when time is least real- whether sitting around a fire eating powerpup or taking shelter in the shadow of a copse of joshua trees to bolt down protein packs, you're likely to find you spent far less or far more time being stationary than you would have previously assumed.

as of the fourth generation of killjoys- the one delivered from the terror of dracs and the tyranny of bat. city, you could expect about half the tumbleweed crews you meet to have long since dashed themselves to bits against the unrelenting tide of bl/ind forces.

don't ask the people sharing scant food with you what the date is- don't ask if you know them as dead, or if they know you as dead.

(don't ask the date in case they say some time in the future. the only crews who show up at the times where time wears thin and wraps around itself are the ones no one remembers. you don't want to know. don't ask.)

there are no ghosts, though, in the Zones. you take any masks you find straight to a mailbox. souls are tied, in an unknown but inescapable way, to those masks. once the mask is delivered to the Witch, the soul is not left to wander. in the Zones dead is dead and alive is alive - even if "alive" is sometime else.

there weren't any ghosts in the city, either, for most (if not all) of living memory. souls were tied inextricably to the mechanisms therein, powering the city that ran on "more than electricity." drac masks trapped souls, assumably permanently; and every building that a person could possibly pass away (pass away- bat. city citizens are polite, couch harsh words in ephemeral euphanisms, speak with gentleness as abstrusely as possible) in is outfitted with half-heartedly hidden, half-understood soul-funneling technology in the walls.

there weren't any ghosts, that is, until the Girl broke every piece of that technology and decimated, beyond the physical and the "spiritual", even the premise it was built on. mourning is frowned upon and attachment, especially to things like masks which could function as soul-traps, is all but forbidden; it will take a long, long time for all the newly-released dead to find their way to the Witch.

and that isn't even mentioning the physical ghosts. family members taken years ago and replaced by (too-expensive, too-fake, too-different) androidic replicas, drac'd where their screams couldn't be heard, are found confusedly wandering their old streets and worksites. they don't remember anything of their time behind a mask; to them, however long it has been since they were last seen has passed in less than a second. most of them won't recognize their body, aged as it has, as their own.

(worse off are the families of the ones who tried to fight Destroya, the oversized robot who entered the city by force. they find their former relatives, their former friends, dead just before they could have been freed. dead just before they could have come back.)

so yes, maybe that face you saw disapearing just around the newly-grafitied corner over there was, in fact, someone who you thought died. maybe it was just their memory, lingering on. you won't know until you turn the corner, too. in the city, sometimes the dead are alive and the alive are dead.

there's too few memories out in the Zones. there's too many in the city.

[chaos-in-bright-pink-hair-dye]

Kobra's motorbike is highly atypical to any other you can see both in the zones and in Battery city, most of those are road motorbikes but his is rather motocross motorbike and is way older than any other. That's because it wasn't made by BL/ind but instead it had already been in the dinner when the fabulous four found it. There were no signs of any owner or even a good reason to why it's standing among the tables but since no one seemed to be searching for it they kept it. A lot of work had to be done on it since it was all rusty and barely standing let alone being able to turn on but once it was done no BL/ind's motorbikes could stand a chance against it, especially on the sand dunes it was created for.

[phoenixwilf]

okay but like... what ARE your food production headcanons. please i love thinking abt where the hell all the food in the zones comes from

i love having excuses to talk about my weird niche headcanons, some of this is stuff i already posted in the tags here, but here’s a more coherent version of what i have actually written down. also this is all kinda specific to an au i’m (allegedly) working on*, so some things may not work as well with actual comics canon, but whatever:

(*here's basically what’s relevant: city kinda big, zones really big, bl/ind is still cartoonishly villainous but is a little more subtle with it, everything sorta fell apart around the cuban missile crisis in 1962 so things are pretty well established by the time 2019 comes around. also droids can live outside the city sometimes.)

most of the fresh produce in the city is grown hydroponically in warehouses (possibly near the docks, idk yet if battery city has a port or not)

foods like grain, cereal crops, orchard crops, honey, and certain luxury items like wine, meat, and dairy products are produced on farms north of the zones past the radiation and then shipped in.

these farms are run mostly by droids (less humanoid and more utilitarian than ones in the city probably) but also maybe some draculoids, because how many zombie cops can you really keep around a city before the civilians start getting uncomfortable and causing problems?

wealthy citizens sometimes have rooftop gardens but those typically only have flowers. a few bl officials elite enough to afford “eccentricity” are rumored have small orchards (like, 2-3 small trees, tops)

neutral towns have more constraints re water and liquid fertilizer so they don’t typically grow much hydroponically. there are some farmers growing enough to mostly support the nearby settlements. there used to be more but the fires of 2012 wiped out most of these small farms, forcing towns nearer to the city to trade more with uh, ‘independent merchants’, or more often, better living itself.

it’s not uncommon for families to keep chickens or goats, and there’s lots of community gardens/greenhouses and fruit trees. also while water certainly isn’t wasted, its not too hard to come by either, because wells aren’t that hard to dig if you’ve got the time

there’s cells in the underground that steal non perishable food (among other items) to sell to distributors through the zones. it’s a whole network but no ones entirely sure how many people are involved outside of their own few contacts.

food and supply convoys headed between batt and the outposts are big ticket hits, sometimes desperate crews work together to bring one down. there’s high risk/reward, but it usually means increased patrols and better living just making the desert a real nightmare for everyone else for months afterwards, whether or not the raid was even successful.

most killjoys eat more than power pup, but if you have no carbons for anything better and no neutrals will trade with you, well what can you do el oh el

you can forage and hunt. duh. depending on where someone is in the zones they might eat anything from yucca to seaweed, cactus, sage, olives, figs, mesquite, chia, piñon pine, etc. lots of native edible plants and introduced plants left to grow feral in abandoned suburbs. (actually why is anyone eating dog food, like i know it’s fun and gross but. gerard. please explain)

[headless-killjoys]

Names ||  Zone Five Quarantine Fair

Prompt: Names / Belief (will be writing a part 2 of this that will be for Belief) @killjoynest

Jet Star discovers a flame burning inside him, and finds his name. 

This is part of my dullahan au! No context needed though since this is more of an origin story for au Jet Star! (Also featuring Destroya) 

Also on my ao3! 

--- 

He remembered the day clearly. He was young, barely 15 years old. He hadn’t even chosen a name for himself yet. His hands had been shaking, covered in the blood of another killjoy, they had clenched into tight fists. He had felt a heat burning inside himself, unlike any warmth he had felt before. Dracs were surrounding him as he scrambled to his feet, quickly snatching the mask of his friend in the event he made it out of this alive. The dracs seemed content to taunt him, confident enough in their own abilities to lower their guard for a moment. It was like a fire had been started inside him. The ray guns and laughter pointed at him were simply the match being struck. The heat was becoming overwhelming, burning hotter as his own anger and despair grew. 

A voice resonated through the ground and through his body. 

<Live.> 

At some point he had squeezed his eyes shut, but the deep breath he took meant he was still alive, which was good. He opened one eye, then the other in shock. The dracs were gone. Not just dead, but completely gone. All that remained were ashes and still burning fragments of fabric and ray gun pieces. There was a glowing light around the edges of his vision, it faded from orange to yellow then disappeared entirely. He glanced down at himself and stumbled back as he stared at his hands, turning them over and back again repeatedly. For a split second, they had looked as if they were burning with a flame that had originated from within him. But then it was gone.  

He quickly discovered that gravity didn’t mean too much to him. On his way to the closest mailbox, he was spotted by another patrol. His heart was pounding in his chest and the heat returned, this time burning through his legs as he ran. He lifted a hand to push his hair out of his face and almost tripped over himself as he glanced down and realised his shoes were burning. Light emanated from his boots, surrounding them with bright yellow and white as his footsteps lifted and he flew through the night, fuelled by sound of the dracs firing at him. 

He didn’t feel real. He believed in the supernatural, in the Phoenix Witch, and Destroya, and the ghosts that lingered on the edge of the safe zones. But the power he had felt was beyond what he could understand. It excited him. And that excitement brought the warmth back in a self perpetuating cycle that kept him eager to discover what else he could do. He had no name, he was just another face in the desert, another fist raised against BL/ind. And now he had another weapon. 

He had contemplated different names, but none of them seemed to fit right. He didn’t know who he was. He looked in the mirror and felt wrong. The warmth he felt inside never seemed to reflect outside. He felt unbalanced, like the flame would grow too strong and consume him. 

Once he started attempting to train himself, it became easier. He had been terrified that he could only use his newly discovered power in near-death situations, in moments of anger or terror. But over the weeks, he taught himself to harness it through any happiness he felt and at will. His hands burned the most, as if the heat inside him was being channeled through his fingers and the light burst out of his hands in a brilliant white and yellow glow. They were the easiest to control, if he concentrated hard enough, he realised he could set his hands aflame with a mere thought, and it was even easier to channel that energy into the shots he fired from his ray gun. 

His use of his hidden powers had become more controlled and less spontaneous than before. The night he had disintegrated the dracs the first time had left him exhausted and he had tried to recreate the energy burst later, letting the heat burn hotter and hotter without releasing it until it had burst out of his body and set his entire being aflame. He had just barely managed to catch himself as he collapsed onto his knees afterwards, but the wide grin it brought to his face had made the pain worth it. 

At 17, he still had no name, but there was one that had been lingering in his head for a while. He liked the sound of it, liked the warmth of it. He had mostly kept to himself in the desert even though he had friends across the zones. He held onto the name like a whisper of a secret, not yet spoken aloud, but he revelled in the joy of having chosen a name for himself. It reminded him of his powers, of the rush of energy and power, of the heat that ran through his veins as he struck down dracs and burnt through BL/ind outposts.  

By chance, one night he sat curled up by a fire he had started himself. His eyes were trained on the sky above, tracing over the constellations. He remembered some of them from pieces of old magazines and books he had found around the zones, relics of the past. A bright flash of light caught his eye, arching across the sky before it vanished. His eyes widened and he scrambled to his feet. He had only heard about them from old stories but seeing one in front of his own eyes was as if the flame inside him had been ignited all of a sudden and he was faintly aware that he was glowing again. The golden light was stronger, hotter, as yet another shooting star streaked through the dark ink of the night sky. 

A low voice seemed to speak to him through the ground itself, the sound reverberating through his entire body. The same one that had spoken before he had used his powers for the first time. 

<My scion.> 

He felt the voice more than he heard it, but the flame inside him burned hotter and hotter. His vision went white. 

<You have a gift. You are not like the others.> 

Golden light swirled across his eyes, and then it receded as his vision slowly returned. The flame still felt warm, but it enveloped his whole body. It had consumed him, but it was controlled, careful, as if his fears had all been scorched away in a single moment. 

He understood. 

<Now, my scion. Your name?> 

He took a deep breath, and the weight on his shoulders lifted. He had made his decision. He knew who he was. 

“Star. My name is Jet Star.”

[stressed-depressed-emo-mess]

Kayla Bueller’s day off (part 1)

(Quick PSA: This is not my oc, this oc belongs to Kayla and she let me write this. Bueller is not her last name, so this is just a giant reference to the movie how school sucks ass and you don’t need it. Go be gay in the desert t( -.-t). This is for @killjoynest and their Quarantine fun fair thing, and the prompt was Escape, so this is a little two-part backstory, the second bit coming in a day or two. <3)

Beginning | Escape

“Ms. Bueller, please pay attention.” Kayla jerks her head up out of her notebook so see her history robot wheeling itself over to her desk. It was getting hard to pay attention to a robot. Kayla, a 15-year-old girl, was just trying to make her way through the fifteen years of school that was forced upon her by this fucked-up excuse of a government. Her parents were firm believers that this was wrong, but like so many others, they had to keep quiet. The war might have only been three years ago, but it felt like a lifetime. In fact, the entire reason there was a robot standing in front of her was that a teacher was caught changing a lesson plan not two months ago. She was really bored and started drawing little flowers in her notebook until the rusty pile of bolts came over and ruined her fun. “You have one demerit remaining.”

‘Shit,’ she thought to herself. She had stopped taking her medication about a week ago, and she already lost two demerits in that span of time. She sighed and said, “I’m sorry.” and the robot turned and went back to teaching its class of twenty. Of course, Kayla went right back to looking out the window. The sky was grey, as usual, and there were hardly any people on the street at this time of the day, so it perks her interest when she sees a figure slipping out from between two buildings. From what she could see, the figure was wearing a bright blue jacket with black pants and- converse? Kayla had only heard about those kinds of shoes from her parents, she never thought she’d see a pair in real life. Her eyes were drawn to the person’s hair, which was a matching blue to their jacket, and slung over their shoulder was a burlap bag. They looked around to make sure no one was following them, and Kayla turned her eyes back to the teacher. She didn’t want to unintentionally blow the person’s cover by staring too much. She snuck a quick look back, however, and the person was gone.

***

Kayla spent the rest of the class thinking about the person- Blue, she decided to call them- and thank goodness it was the last class of the day. Now, she had all night to draw them, and think about where they came from, where they were going, and what they were doing- rebel stuff was so cool to her. She knew Blue was a rebel, who else would be able to get away with that hair around here, and she wanted to follow them so badly. Kayla knew that it was pure luck that she happened to be watching, but something in her gut told her otherwise; like she was meant to see that secret passageway. Those two buildings were like every other in her section of the city; skinny, tall, and exactly identical. She and her mother lived in a smaller apartment, she and her mom had their own rooms, but that didn’t mean they had any privacy. With only one bathroom, it was kind of hard to get any alone time other than her cramped room- which she was in right now. She sighs, and finishes the last bit of her math homework and sits back in her desk chair, rubbing her wrists and then stretching out. She walks over to her small closet, and reaches to the back, and pulls out her favorite outfit. She and her mom had made some striped black leggings and paired it with a red shirt and her favorite dark purple jacket. To top it all off, she had her combat boots- already broken in- and she was very proud of it. It was her own rebel outfit, after learning that you could wear whatever you wanted out in the Zones she immediately put this together. She even had her giant curly hair planned out as well. Kayla knew that she had an escape now- it was exhilarating. She looked at it, up and down, and imagined herself out there, far away from the prying eyes of BL/Ind. 

“Kayla! Dinner time!” Her mom called from down the hall, making Kayla jump.

“Coming!” Kayla shouted back, throwing the outfit back on the hanger and quickly returning it to its place in the back of her closet. She hurries down the small corridor and into the kitchen where her mom was putting the plate on the table

“Just in time,” her mother says, “how was school?” 

“I saw a rebel.” she blurts out, her mother’s eyebrows shooting up in surprise. She elaborates, telling her about Blue, and how she thinks there might be a way out.

“Kayla. That is not a good idea,” her mother says, putting her fork down, “I know we hate the corporation, but I will not have my daughter running around and getting shot. It’s better to have you here and you being safe than anywhere else. You don’t even know if this person made it back, and this passageway might not even work.”

“Mom,” Kayla whines, “I didn’t mean by myself. We could both go.”

“Kayla! With or without me you are not leaving this city! Ever! Now eat your food.”

Kayla and her mother finished their dinner in silence. When she cleans her plate, Kayla excuses herself to her room and quietly closes the door behind her. She jumps over to her closet, pulling out her outfit and laying it on the bed. She taps her chin thoughtfully, then dives back into the closet only to emerge with the belt she had forgotten about for ages. It wasn’t anything special, but it did have a heart for the belt buckle; that was pretty punk in her book. It’s exactly what the outfit needed. She changes out of her school uniform and reaches for her pajamas; she hesitates, hands heading for the jacket. She takes a deep breath and puts her outfit on, complete with the belt, and stands in front of her mirror. It still wasn’t quite right. She looks around her room for something, anything to add, and her eyes land on the bright red lipstick her mom had bought her. It was perfect. After carefully putting it on, she stands back to admire her handiwork. She was proud of herself. This was the outfit- she could feel the sand already. But when would she be able to go? She thinks to herself as she gets out of the outfit, folding it up and set it next to her backpack. 

‘I could always go after school… no, no I can’t do that to Mom… maybe if I convince her to come with me…’ she thinks through plan after plan- she knows she wants to go, but she doesn’t know if she can. What would happen to her mom if she left? 

She sits down on the bed, wondering if she’ll ever get to go when her mom knocks on the door, “Kayla? Sweetheart, I- I wanted to talk to you about this- before you get mad, just let me tell you, I’m terrified. I won’t be able to leave- I’m old, I’ve lived my life, I’m done. I have to stay here,” she comes over to sit next to Kayla on the bed, “but you, you’re 15. You have an entire life ahead of you, and I realize that you might as well be dead if you stay here. You’re going to be forced to be exactly the same as everyone else, I don’t want you to turn into a mindless follower. You should escape while you can. I love you, and this is the best thing for you.” 

Kayla turns her face into her mom’s shoulder and starts to cry, “Thank you, I- I just don’t want to leave you behind-”

“I’ll be fine, love. Now we gotta get you prepared,” she pulls away, a familiar glimmer in her eyes, and Kayla was excited as well. As much as she dreaded leaving her mom, she knew that her mom wanted her to be happy. She appreciated that her mother would put herself in danger for her daughter. Kayla followed her mother out of her room and down the small hallway to the only other bedroom in the apartment. Something was spread out on the bed and as Kayla got closer she realized it was a map. Of Batt city. How did she have this? 

“So, you said you saw someone come out of a passageway… here?” her mom asks, pointing to somewhere on the map.

“No, over here,” she says, pointing on the other side of the school, “I saw them during history class, that classroom is on that side of the building.”

“Right, and the front of the school is there, that classroom is practically at the back of the building, so we could sneak you there without anyone seeing… you won’t even have to go to school that day.” 

“That’s a good idea, students skip all the time- that’ll give me at least that day… Maybe I could find Blue and ask them to take me...”

“Who?” her mom looks at her sideways, and Kayla realized she never told her mom about the nickname.

“The rebel I saw today, it’s a nickname because of the hair,” Kayla says.

“Oh, ok. So are you ok with me just dropping you off back there?” Kayla’s mother asked. Yeah, Kayla was more than ok with that, but all she did was nod her head. “Alright, let’s get your shit together.” 

Kayla was surprised to hear her mom curse, but then she remembered that her mom was also helping her escape an evil corporate government so she probably should stop believing she knew what her mom was capable of. 

“You know, you have a really big day tomorrow,” her mom says, rolling up the map, “you should get some sleep. I can get you food before we leave in the morning.”

“Alright, Mom, thank you…” Kayla says, tearing up before hugging her mom.

“Of course, love. Now go to bed, we can’t have a sleepy Killjoy- especially on your first day,” she says, petting Kayla’s hair down. 

***

Kayla woke up, rubbing her eyes against the sun shining through her window, she sits up and takes a deep breath and smells- is that bacon? She shoots out of bed and runs down the hall to skid into the kitchen where, sure enough, Kayla’s mother was making bacon and pancakes, her favorite. 

“Good morning dear, you had better go get dressed,” she winks at Kayla, a knowing smile spreading across her face. 

Kayla can feel her face heat up as she retreats to her room to get her rebel outfit on. ‘So Mom knew.’ Kayla thinks to herself, ‘All this time, and she’s never said anything…’ she throws her hair back with a hair tie and some bobby pins. ‘I’m gonna have to cut this down when I get out there.’ She reaches over her bed to grab her backpack and starts sorting through her things to see what she would bring. She throws her headphones and her playlist into her bag, her black and red nail polish catches her eye, she grabs the lipstick and also decides to take her sunglasses with her as well. Slinging the backpack over her shoulder, Kayla walks out of her room and back into the kitchen where her mom was taking the last batch of pancakes out of the pan. 

“Well, well, well, look at you!” her mom says proudly, “All decked out, my color-clad killjoy.”

Kayla spins around to show her mom the extent of the outfit and laughs, saying, “Why thank you, I just hope it holds up out there.”

“Oh, it will. I’m just glad you had it already picked out, jacket and all,” her mother says, Kayla asks her how she could be so sure, but before she can, her mom is already plating the bacon and the pancakes. “Time for breakfast!”

***

The pair pulls up behind the school building, and Kayla can see the gap more clearly now. 

“It’s right there,” she says, pointing over her mother’s shoulder and towards the break in the buildings. 

“Alright. I think my job here is done. Kayla, I do have one last thing to give you before you leave-” her mom reaches behind herself to bring out something, Kayla’s teddy bear. “I know you probably don’t want it-”

“Of course I want it!!” she says, reaching out to hold the bear. She opens up her backpack and places it in, gently, and then goes to hug her mom. “I’m going to miss you so much…”

“I will too,” her mother says, holding her close, “but this is what’s best for you… now hurry, we don’t want to get caught.” They pull away from each other and Kayla’s mom rests her hand on Kayla’s shoulder. “I love you.”

“I love you too, Mom,” Kayla says, tears stinging the corners of her eyes. "Goodbye," she says and her mom gives her one last smile. Kayla opens the car door, steps out, and darts across the street. She slows to a jog and peers into the gap, and she sees a glimmer of something shiny; a door. She turns back, giving her mom one last wave, and disappears into the passageway. Once her eyes adjust to the darkness she feels her way along the corridor to a wall of cold metal- the door she had seen from the top- and feels around for a handle. When she finds it, she pushes all her weight into it stumbling across the threshold and as the door closes behind her, she knew there was no going back. She had escaped.

[hyacinthsgirl]

after months, i finally figured out a backstory (and an explanation for her powers) for Chris in her Killjoy!verse YAY TO ME

the main idea at the base of her backstory is BL/ind experimenting on people (children, more specifically) because what's better than brainwashed people at your orders if not brainwashed people with powerful inhuman abilities? so, experimentation started. unfortunately, not all children reacted well to the, let's say, "treatment". some died shortly after. some lost their minds and had to be shot down. only few of them remained sane and alive, but none of them possessed any of the incredible abilities BL/ind hoped for and the project was claimed a failure. via a special kind of pills, the survived children forgot the experimentation on them and were sent back home (i haven't thought of the excuse BL/ind used to take them from their families yet). they kept keeping an eye on the children, but nothing changed throughout the years. in the end, Chris Muir was the only one who kept on living and did not die a brutal death whose cause was unknown to BL/ind itself. however, she did not show any significant change, therefore BL/ind quickly lost interest in the remain of a failed project.

what they didn't know was that THEIR PILLS THEMSELVES blocked the development of the special abilities they tried to awake in their young guinea pigs. when she stopped taking her daily pills and accidentally set an object on fire, Chris was beyond terrified and excited. when she ran away from Battery City, she unknowingly brought a powerful weapon in the Killjoys' hand - a weapon which was supposed to do them harm. BL/ind found this out thanks to surveillance cameras after weeks, and only then did the realize their mistake. as of today, they are trying to capture Hyacinth Girl in order to study what happened to her and - maybe - experiment on her further.

(@hauntedfriends tagging you, of course)

[vampirevenom-kj]

I have nothing to talk about here. So I’ll just tell you why I’m out here I guess. There doesn’t seem to be anything better to do anyway. I was always a “perfect child”. Top of all my classes, and set to go into med development, I had, in the eyes of most people in the city, a perfect life ahead of me. But something, somehow, changed. I can’t remember why but I started to think of sounds as colours, but it was automatic, as quick as if I was looking at the colour itself. That was probably when I started going down this pat. The fact that I could see colour in sound was worrying to the doctors, because it meant I would want more colour, and that was bad. They tried all sorts of drugs, but in the end I just decided to lie that they were working. Easier than getting an assessment every month, I figured. I didn’t take the new pills though. After that, it was only a matter of time before I stopped pills altogether. A few years later, I have my headphones in, listening to the radio, when something happens. I think someone hacked BL/ind’s waves or something, because I heard someone saying something along the lines of “time for a little change!”, before a completely new song played. It was so full of colour, and it was beautiful. I saw a few other people with headphones in looking confused, so I mimicked their reactions, taking off my headphones. That was the point when I decided I was going out to the zones. If your world was full of colourful sound like that song, that’s where I wanted to be. So I prepared, bottling water, getting food, spending a little less on lunch and putting aside the carbons. In the meantime, I’d been thinking about a name. I knew I would need one, because whenever I heard reports there was always unusual names that couldn’t be real. One of the big factors in me deciding my name, I think, was what we were being taught at school. Boring, I know, shut up. We were being taught about the psychology behind “the terrorists that call themselves ‘Killjoys’”, and that involved looking at reports of incidents. One of the names was Party Poison, and I liked the alliteration. Before that I was thinking about “Neon Sniper”... wow, saying that out loud makes me realise how much I would have regretted that... anyway, we were told that, in effect, killjoys were venom to our society, eating away at the Draculoids. Dracs had always reminded me of vampires, so that made me think, “huh, so I guess I’m gonna be the vampire’s venom”, hence the name, Vampire Venom. When I worked up the guts to leave, I threw all my stuff into a bag and just... went. That’s it. A lot of nervous sneaking around so I wouldn’t be seen leaving, but that’s it. So, that’s how I got to be out here. I think that’s the longest I’ve ever spoke for.

>Venom

[disco-danger]

A Sky Like This

I wrote a fic about kids new to the Zones

So here ya go.

She had never seen a sky like this.

Of course, she had seen the sky before, back in the city. Pale bluish grey with occasional wispy clouds, puzzle pieced between the tall shining buildings of the Business District in Level 2. Anything lower than that and you couldn't see the sky through the levels above.

She had caught glimpses of it last night too, although she'd been a little too distracted to really see it, to process it. Last night there had only been the roar of engines, the glare of headlights and flashes of laser-gun fire, all while a voice (voices?) screamed at her to stay on the bike, to keep going.

They'd lost the Dracs after what felt like a lifetime, after one of the runners helping them escape had whooped something that sounded like, “Zone Three, baby!” And when the bike beneath her started to slow she had felt herself sliding sideways, tumbling shoulder first into grit and heat.

She laid there for a moment, disoriented, as the sounds of voices and engines melted together. Her head buzzed and the headlights around her were too bright. Someone grabbed her under her arms in an attempt to get her to her feet, but suddenly her leg was burning beneath her and she couldn't stand, crumpling back onto the ground.

She awoke later, unaware she had even fallen unconscious at all. It was still dark, although there were bright spots of blurry light somewhere she couldn’t make out. The air was thick and hot and smelled like the Lobby, and for a moment panic and fear welled up in her chest at the thought that she’d ended up back in the City.

“Hey, it’s ok, we made it,” said a familiar voice, but the figure speaking remained blurry and dark. “We’re, well, not safe, but we’re out of the City at least. You were hit though. Took a pretty bad fall.”

She blinked, trying to clear her vision, but everything remained a dark blur. There was a soft touch to her shoulder, but she flinched away in pain anyway.

“Phoenix Witch is already looking out for you,” said another, unfamiliar voice. “You were almost roadkill out there.”

She tilted her head in confusion. “Where are we?”

“Container camp, Zone 3,” answered the unfamiliar voice. There was a soft clicking sound and suddenly light flared up around them, sending knives of pain right through her eyes. She snapped them shut and ducked her head away from the source.

“Might take a bit to adjust, you hit your head pretty hard,” the second voice added. “Your legs pretty bad off too. Did what I could, but those lasers cauterize better than anything I could do.”

She nodded, eyes still closed. She could feel it now, a burning ache around her left knee, a particular pulling and stiffness. Her skin on her shoulders and arms and face burned too, although in a more itchy, stinging way.

“Who are you?” she asked after a moment, slowly opening one eye to see the speaker. She didn’t recognize them as any of the ‘joys who’d helped them out of the City. She’d have remembered that shock of blue hair.

“Call me Road Rash,” the joy said with a mock salute. “Don't worry- you undergrads will earn your names and colors soon enough, if you make it that long.”

She risked a glance at her friend, who was frowning at the killjoy.

“We heard that from everyone in the Underground,” her friend said. “We know the odds.”

Road Rash shook their head. “Nah, you know the numbers. But you don't know the Zones. If you're smart, and incredibly lucky, you might make it a month.” They gestured towards her leg. “You're gonna have an even worse off time now. Not that it can't be done. Plenty have. Just makes things harder ”

She let out a nervous sigh, and her friend patted her softly on the shoulder. The killjoy shot her an amused look.

“Top left, it's hard out here. We’re fighting for survival.”

“And freedom,” her friend added.

Road Rash smiled. “And freedom. Just surviving out here is a big “Fuck you” to BL/ind though, never forget that. In the end it's always worth this. It's beautiful out here.”

“I want to see it.”

Road Rash raised an eyebrow at her. “You think you can do that?”

“It's not too soon? Shouldn't she let it heal?” Her friend asked.

The killjoy shrugged. “No time for that out here.”

“And no time like the fucking present I guess,” she said, starting to struggle to her feet. Her knee was stiff, pain burning all the way up to her hip, but she managed to get her opposing leg underneath herself and slowly lifted herself up, her friend watching carefully. Road Rash moved to one end of the metal shipping container, and with a loud screech of metal on metal the doors swung open, letting in a flood of orange light.

Road Rash turned back towards them, sly grin on their face. “You’re gonna love it out here.”

Slowly, painfully, her friend hovering beside her, she made her way towards the outside, both of them blinking against the light.

It took a moment for her eyes to adjust, the light outside so much brighter than that of the small lantern back in the container. She blinked, finding herself in the middle of a cluster of shipping containers, white paint dusty and peeling, the BL/ind logos covered by colorful graffiti art. A few others moved about the camp, but before she could process any more Road Rash gestured for them to follow, leading them around the back of the container.

And here she was standing now, staring out across the desert, the sky painted shades of purple and blue and pink and orange that she had never seen before, refracting off the sands and the few plants that spotted the landscape. It was as if the sky itself was a painting, all the colors banished from the city splashed across the clouds for the world to see.

She had never seen a sky like this.

[redfish-blu]

What's your take on the zones' supply chain? Where do you think they get the soda and radios and whatnot?

I had to think about this one, but I think there’s a few answers for this that I believe can coexist. This ended up being quite long, so the full answer is under the cut!

My knee jerk answer for this is simply stealing. Killjoys raiding unsuspecting BL/ind patrols or convoys, breaking into the city itself, etc. Or just stealing from one another. Looting dead people, the works. And scoping out abandoned buildings for lingering technology. People have always lived out there, I doubt BL/ind went through every single house or structure looking for outdated inventions. Some people probably just had the shit laying around ya know?

Then I started thinking, if Killjoys have semi-regular access to basic necessities without all of them having to go grocery shopping in Battery City, then there must be some source of merchandise that isn’t based in the city limits. So there’s probably (maybe a handful) of factories in the zones themselves. I know there at least used to be facilities of this kind in the zones until the Analog wars, where some of them were destroyed as collateral. I think the remaining ones likely still exist and are probably operational. Just because it would be a really bad idea to have every single manufacturing plant in one place.

So my bet is that they’re somewhere in Zones 1 and 2. Maybe there's a couple still floating around even further out than that, who rely on train lines to import. As the Battery City area does lie within a hotspot of freight tracks, they’d have access to railways from basically every direction. So it isn’t out of the question that those transports and factories would get raided by rebels once and a while, who would pillage anything of use and then distribute it in the zones. Trains would most likely run exclusively at night with their lights off to combat attacks, but they’d still happen.

My last idea for this, which I’ve actually floated for quite a while, is that Battery City itself is giving the resources to the Killjoys. Hear me out.

Battery City is bent on controlling its people, to the point that they have and would go to any length to keep them in. Well, that means they have to be either too afraid or be convinced they’re too comfortable in the city to think about leaving. Why does BL/ind hype up the danger of the Killjoys so much? Because the threat of the terrorist Killjoys slinging rayguns and eating radiation for breakfast is what BL/ind wants its people to be scared of finding if they turn tail and run. BL/ind realized that if they parade themselves as the ultimate heroes in this “war” with the Killjoys, Battery City will fall to their whims.

But they can’t fight a war without the threat, and the threat is in ever-present danger of just starving out and dying without BL/ind even stepping in. So BL/ind goes under the table and sells some food and tech to someone who’ll pass it on and pay them back one day. Who? Well that can get interesting, so I’ll leave it to you.

They plant a few trucks full of shit for ‘Joys to find or raid, they send a doomed convoy of goods into the Zones knowing none of the crap they loaded it with will come back. But they don’t expect it to. With that, they plant those vending machines (we see in the music videos and comics) in some choice places, and a shit-load of Vend-a-Hacks. Just enough to keep people going, not enough to make them wonder if it’s not a coincidence that a truckload of canned food gets intercepted every few weeks.

So yeah! I definitely believe there’s options for the zones yet, without having to stretch to explain it all. Either way I don’t think anyone is starving per say. Maybe skipping a few meals. And the technology kind of comes with that. Plenty of Scarecrows to loot for radios anyways.

[killjoytigermom]

Chapter 4 - Loud Like Love

Her crying practically hadn’t stopped since our escape from Battery City, and by now my head had really started to turn itself against me. I leaned back against the concrete wall of the cool, dimmed stock room of the diner, where I’d taken refuge for a moment, the baby still in my arms. I’d tried, unsuccessfully to get her to suckle, had changed her into a (relatively) clean, hand sewn onesie I’d put together, and had taken her out of the heat, but nothing seemed to soothe her.

At one point I’d left her laying in the stock room, gently wrapped up in blankets, in order to patch up the guys, hoping that maybe the quiet would calm her enough to go back to sleep. After the rendezvous with Party, Kobra and Ghoul in the sewers, we’d made a run straight for the Trans Amp, and were lucky no BL/ind. Forces spotted or went after us. This didn’t mean we’d made it out undamaged, although everyone’s injuries seemed minor. After playing nurse and patching them all up as best as I could, the girl still crying in the other room, I went back in to comfort her once more. I’d gently picked her up again and had laid down against the wall, my legs spread out lazily across the dusty, tiled floor.

“Still nothing,” I heard Party’s voice question on my right as he walked into the stock room as well. I opened my initially closed eyes and slowly lifted my head from the wall to face him. I piped up over the screaming, saying: “My head is going to kill me if this keeps on going.” “That bad?” “Knock me out when she finally falls asleep, I swear to god, at this point I’d rather be unconscious,” I muttered. “Have you… tried nursing,” Party tried reluctantly. “What do you think was the first thing I tried,” I answered, leaning back against the wall once more. “I changed her, washed her as well as I could, tried to feed her but she wouldn’t- not even the baby milk Kobra got on the black market- nothing.” I swayed her in my arms slightly as I summed up all my efforts.

“I’ve got a sore back, shaky legs, a splitting headache, am tired beyond belief, hungry and slightly dehydrated. This new Messiah of ours is sooner to kill one of us than to save us all, really,” I complained as another wave of heat washed over me. I hated the desert environment, but under all other circumstances, I could usually deal. “I remember my grandma used to sing to Kobra when he was upset,” Party said suddenly. I turned to look at him, but I could see in his eyes that he was clearly reminiscing of when he and his younger brother still lived in normal suburbs, with normal lives like normal kids.

“Are you saying I should sing nursery rhymes or something,” I chuckled weakly. “You never know,” Party said with a sheepish smile. I sighed. “Fine. Get me a bottle of water and then leave please. I’m not singing when I know others are listening, you know how I feel about that.” Party grinned and left without saying a word. Truth be told, singing was one of the last things I wanted to do right now, but anything that could possibly shut the girl up, I was willing to try.

Party returned soon enough, kneeled down next to me, and handed me a plastic, label less bottle with water, and asked if he could get me anything else. “No, thanks,” I mumbled before taking a few big swigs of water and ushering him out the door with waving hand gestures, the girl still upset in my lap. I lulled her back and forth a little still, digging through my internal music library to find something fitting. Music was a scarce thing in the Zones, or anywhere at all at this point, really. Which is why a lot of us were grateful for Dr. Death and the tunes he released into the air. Every so often, he’d play something I’d recognize from my childhood, and it’d send me back through a portal to a simpler time.

Eventually my brain landed on a fitting song, but now I had to gather up the courage to start singing at the little, angry, screaming human that wriggled relentlessly in my arms. The first few sentences were always the worst to start off with, after that I’d feel more comfortable. This knowledge didn’t help me much though.

“Love on an atom, love on a cloud,” I mumbled hesitantly and quietly. “To see the birth of all that isn’t now,” I added after a few seconds, playing the track in my head as well as I could. “Can you imagine,” I continued, slightly louder now, “a love that is so proud?” “It never has to question why or how.”

If I tried just hard enough, I could hear the electric guitars play in the distance, my mind playing small tricks on me. It was the only song I knew that was about parenthood, if you looked into the lyrics, but despite me never being an actual mom, this didn’t mean it hadn’t been one of my favorite songs from before the Analog Wars. I’d missed this track, I hadn’t heard it in years, I now realized. My internal radio still knew every key change and drum beat though, and by the time I’d finished the song, it took me a few moments to realize that the girl had stopped crying and was now staring up at me with dazed, sleepy eyes.

[chaos-in-bright-pink-hair-dye]

Pre-war music in the zones

So the question is how you find and store pre-war music. Danger Days is happening around our current time but we also very well know that BL/Ind has droids and AI so we can safely say they are slightly more technically advanced than we are.

In that regard we can also safely say that CDs and DVDs are long outdated and VHS tapes even more so, BL/Ind itself definitely runs on cloud or something of that sort. By this I'm not saying that a way to get old music is by hacking into BL/Ind's storage and downloading it from there, what I'm saying is that most devices that are accessible, even to killjoys if they try hard enough, just don't have the needed hardware or software to play old disks that you could probably find lying in abandoned building thorough the zones.

So rn we are at a point where yes you can find CDs with music that's forbidden inside the city, maybe you could find some flash drives or other portable hard disks too if you're lucky, now the question is how to access what's on them.

Even we can have quite a trouble playing disks 'cause all the players don't work anymore or are not useful and in both cases have been usually thrown out. So there's not a high chance many of those work in DD universe either after so many years. And the war and shit ton of sand all around and getting everywhere definitely didn't help either. Sure someone could repair them but there's another problem, as I said they are long outdated so getting the parts would be extremely difficult.

In the conclusion, unless you are very lucky and have an old car with an old CD player for some reason or some device that somehow survived in the desert for all those years, your only option to listen to other music than what's on the radio is to find someone who has the needed technology to copy files from old disks onto new ones that work with modern technology. So in the end a lot of old music is lost even though someone found it, it just never made it's way to someone who could actually play it.

[chaos-in-bright-pink-hair-dye]

Marriage in Bat city and in the zones

The concept of marriage is way different than what we know now or what the killjoys understand when you say marriage. It's not really act of shared love but rather a legal document aproving you and your partner are compatible and ready to start a family. There are no white flowy dresses, emotional vows or rings with diamonds, that would be just a big waste of materials and resources after all. Instead you both just sign a piece of paper with the right stamp and that's it.

BL/ind doesn't care who are you marrying as long as you are compatible and both from right classes, so same sex marriage? No problem go for it on the other hand marriyng someone from the lovest class when you are in one of the higher cllases? Practically impossible but it's not like there even a slight chance of anyone wanting to do that since you have to live with the person you want to marry for two year before asking for the certifikate to prove your compatibility. You also can't have a bigger age gap than ten years.

Without marriage you're not leagally allowed to have children so unless you are a drug addict who lives on the streets they'll take your child if you don't have a partner. Being married also brings similiar benefits like the ones we have like better taxes but also sometimes chance for better housing or more items suddenly being available to you. And when you get married there is no getting divorced, you have a legal partner and that's it.

On the other hand, marriage in the zones is purely about love, the couple always has a symbol to clarify their bond, be it a ring, a wristband or a tattoo. It's not uncomon to throw parties to celebrate but the act itself is very personal and happens in very small ring of people, either with crews of all people who are gettting married or just some members or even with no one just the parthers themselves. It's not uncommon to mary more than one person, divorces aren't very often but when it's needed no one bats an eye, it's just how it is and when you no longer fit with someone why should you stay with them.

[chaos-in-bright-pink-hair-dye]

There is a lab located somewhere in 4th zone that belongs to killjoys. It's underground in an old bunkr that's older than BL/Ind itself so they don't know it exists which is the only reason they haven't destroyed it yet. It's run by few killjoys that spent enough time in Bat city and were allowed to learn chemistry and pharmacy so now they can take pills from BL/Ind and recycle them into meds both for physical and mental health(mainly antidepressants - you know, living in the zones is very stressful and depressing and you need to deal with it somehow and manufactured antidepressants are better than getting high on radiation or getting yourself ghosted) Sure some of the pills might make you hallucinate for a while but they are cheap and won't brain wash you like original BL/Ind pills would so you better not complain. And why are they cheap? Just killjoy to killjoy solidarity, the scientists are one of the older joys and they understand the struggles everyone in the zones goes through and they care about the kids. Also other killjoys sometimes bring them food or some cool stuff for free as a sign of gratitude so they don't really loose either