"People went out to the west to start their lives, but every time you start something, you have to finish it… I like to tell the whole story, and I like to feel out a whole town, a whole way of life. Colorful figures don't interest me…"

I glance over at Amy, who was now toying with my paints, drawing miniscule designs on her toenails, and Damien blushes. "I mean in writing… I don't like writing about the colorful characters. They take over the plot, the scenery, the minor characters… It seems like that's all people can talk about is that one damn rainbow person running around, being dramatic. Now, who do you know can do that?

"I like writing about the lives of every day people, as they made it in the west, forging their lives out of this dirt." He flicks my painting. "I write serials about a town called Greywood, each serial a new person… I have about six hundred. I'm almost done with the first generation."

"Sounds like an obsession," I say, regretting the word the second it's out of my mouth. He doesn't seem insulted, though. Instead, he smiles wistfully.

"Sometimes it's good to have an obsession… I think, deep down, everyone has one. What's yours?"

"I don't have one," I shrug. He glances over at the stacks of canvases.

"What about that? Isn't that at least a little bit of an obsession?"

"Not really..." I admit, tugging on a strand of hair, trying to resist the urge to stick it in my mouth. Old habit. Bad habit. Behind closed doors habit. "It's a way to pay the bills. I'm just really good with colors, and there's a market for people that know how to add a little color to a room, on the cheap."

"But it's not what you really want to paint." He's studying me now, and I can see a sort of poor man's rivalry in his appraisal. He may be struggling, but he didn't sell out, he didn't bow to the almighty dollar.

"No, it's not."

"What do you really want to paint, then?"

"I've... I've forgotten." I twitch, then rise. "I guess you could say my obsession is eating every day. I'm kind of finicky about that whole starvation thing."

Amy, having finished up with my paints, fans her feet with an old tablet of writing paper. "Does obsessing about an obsession count, Dee? Because then, I think you'd have two to keep you warm at night." She quirks a smile at him, and his smug, faint grin fades. She goes back to drying her pedicure masterpiece. "If I have an obsession, I'd think it was men... Not the jokers you find around here, of course, otherwise, I'd be sick of my obsession before it could even start. No, I mean guys like there were back before the fallout... Like those cowboys you hate, Dee. Guys who rescued girls, and didn't expect some payback later. Heroes. That's what I'm short on... I've even read some of the old books, and some of those picture books... Whadya call 'em, Dee?"

"Comics," he mutters darkly, and now it's my turn to grin. He may be true to his art, but he sure as hell isn't the hero Amy is looking for.

"Comics! That's right. I even read some of those... But it's not really an obsession. Its more a hobby, something to think about when there's nothing else to do." She smiles as she studies her toenails, fanning them out for us... It seems she's made some copies from my jungle painting... lopsided, the wrong color, out of proportion, but still, at least I could recognize them.

"I don't think you're going to find what your looking for in a place like 'Carnal Capers,'" I say dryly, rescuing my uncapped paints before she decides anything else lying around might need to be spruced up. "Hell, you wouldn't have found it back when it was Roddy's... there's a reason you only read about men like that in books. That's the only place they exist." I catch a glare from Damien as I shelve my tubes again, and shrug. "Don't shoot the messenger. If it's any consolation, not everyone's looking for a hero. I'm not."

"Then what are you looking for?" asks Amy, now onto a stack of old magazine discs, choosing one at random and popping it into a viewer. She skips over tutorials on flowers and lingers over an article on portraiture.

"Who says I'm looking?"

She shrugs, not looking up from her article. "Who says I expect to find a hero? I don't. But I also didn't think I'd live through whatever it was we all had... And I did. So did you. So that should be worth something, shouldn't it?"

She had me there. I sit on my bed, where the painting the jungle now lays. I touch the dark skinned man in the painting, imagining the muscles built over a lifetime of climbing trees and laboring in the fields burned out of the thick green brush… I saw the world before come alive in the canvas, pieced together from the smatterings of what was left. I had spent hours, days, as a youth and not so youth scouring the archives for writings about the way it was before the fallout—I pretended it was for research, but really, it was to blot out the soot covered world around me. Mountains, peaked in snow, dotted with hide-made huts and shaggy animals; oceans, stretching as far as one can see, and beyond, ships crisscrossing it’s surface, sending shadows over the milling life beneath; and I saw the sun, filter through water, leaves, snow, clouds… And a part of me is comforted that not everything was destroyed by the fallout.

Okay, so maybe I do have an obsession.

I look up at Amy, now back at my canvases, studying the smears with a child’s fascination… I might as well have drawn unicorns and fairy tale castles. She had the look of someone who had grown up only seeing the city, only knowing the city… It wasn’t as if we were taught about the old ways… Why teach what you cannot give? It was all white outside, a nuclear winter, and we were the last coal in the cooking fire, red hot in a dead landscape.

"There's nothing wrong with the guy," I say, suddenly taken over by the irrational importance that was laid on me telling her what the days before were like. She blinks, not understanding, until I tap the man in the picture. "There's nothing wrong with him… He isn't sick. Back when there were jungles, the people who lived in them were dark skinned, like the boiler guys."

"Why?" She screws up her face, a mild interest tempered only by the wariness of an impending lesson. "It looks wet and shady there. Why would he be burned?"

"Because he isn't burned. That's the way he was born. Dark. They were all born dark. It's a part of evolution… The dark skin helped them adapt there. The sun would have made them dark anyway, so I guess the—"

She rolled her eyes and flipped a hand at me, dismissing my dark man and his acrylic garden. "The sun? I may be a NEP dancer, but I haven't drunk all my brains out, you know. How could the sun have done that to him? It's high." She raises a hand, fanning her fingers out and turning her wrist left and right. "It couldn't have done that."

I stare at her, and behind me, I hear Damien chuckling. "Cherry, they don't teach that kind of stuff where she came from."

"Yeah, but…" I struggle. "I mean, where the hell are you from?! I thought everyone knew how the sun works! You have to know that!"

"Why?" shrugs Amy, rising with a little huff of insult. She purses her lips, tossing her hair like a spurned lover. "It's not like we need to know anything about it, or any of these stupid places. They're all gone! Why waste our time?"

"Waste!" I rise, a laugh threatening to tear out of my mouth. "Waste?! How can it be a waste! We have to know… We're not going to live in this damn bubble for the rest of humanity's span! I mean, it'll be okay to leave one day—"

"When?" she asks flippantly, studying her jungle studded nails.

"Um…" I blinks. "I don't know… I mean, that's not up to me. I don't have access to any of the controls or readings, of course, so how could I know? But one day, one day we'll settle outside of the city again."

She laughs, showing off white teeth, just tinged enough so that you know it isn't some paste that made them that pretty. "Might as well be never, then. It's not going to happen our lifetime. So why should I have spent all my school days slaving over some digipad droning on about leaves and suns and farming, and dull crap like that? We can't use it in here, and we aren't going outside… And if we do, I have the feeling I wouldn't be one of the ones to be on the first ship out. The past is pretty on paper." She glances at her watch, a round beaded bauble attached to her belt. "Hmph… Almost time for my next shift. Coming?"

I stare at her as she makes for the door, and I feel Damien pat me on the shoulder, giving me a sympathetic smile as he follows her. "You get a lot of this with Amy. I'd start building your pain tolerance now."