Prologue
Who even were the killjoys, anyway?
To the stone-faced citizens of Battery City, they were no one. No one at all. And they never were.
To the crows, they were merely an infestation that needed to be taken care of. Insects. Nothing more than children raised with violence and rock 'n roll, that required extermination in order to make a perfect world, for the perfect people to live in.
The city and the desert probably couldn't have possibly been more different. They were like opposite ends to the coolness spectrum. Only problem was that the people in both places often didn't agree on whether coolness was a good thing.
The desert was full of danger, which, for members of the city, were a good thing for them and a bad thing for the rebels who made their home in the static. Differing opinions haunted the entire state of California, and those who inhabited the deserts knew the risks, but they learned, they adapted. In the zones, only the strong survive. Luckily, most who had the courage to escape the city were strong enough to begin with.
Killjoys were survivalists, they did anything they could do to keep living. Sometimes they'd get into a fit of trouble with some draculoids, or god forbid a s/c/a/r/e/c/ro/w agent, but most of the time they'd just have to find something to do with their time while they're not dodging death, like a rodent carefully dodging traps.
Often times they did things with their time that they wouldn't have done in any other circumstance.
Finger painting. Eating bugs. Joyriding at 4am. Holding hands. Getting bad tattoos. Getting wasted and waking up in places you shouldn't be. Listening to trashy music and singing terribly offkey while your friend screams along. Stealing clothes. Sleeping for seventeen hours one day then only four hours the next day. Drawing on any flat surface. Trying to learn how to juggle and not succeeding. Falling in love.
Boredom is barely a concept in the desert because no matter how dull the days get there's still something out there for you to do. Every day, somewhere in the zones there is someone trying something new and potentially dangerous somewhere out in the zones. There is a non-zero chance that someone will die within the next few days, and they learn to accept that. All killjoys die. But it doesn't matter because even when they're gone, the cause lives on without them. All killjoys die.
This is the story of Party Poison, the killjoy that, one day, did not die.