And Let Me Tell You About Beauty : Part Two

“Ok, let’s start with the basics. Back in the rummy days, there was a war, and it was big. Almost every continent was involved.” I tilted my head at the word ‘continent’, and he sighed. “A continent is a big piece of land. You couldn’t imagine how big it is, even I can’t begin to understand how enormous they are. It is also surrounded by sea.” I didn’t know what a sea was either, but I let it go. “Nukies were involved, and a lot of them. The continents would bomb each other because they didn’t like the way they thought or acted. Everyone knows that one hit Zeca as well, but nukies hit everything else too. There used to be big cities everywhere, with many people, but they were wiped out. The continent we live on had a council of their own back then, and they came up with an invention.” his eyes lit up. “This invention was called the lifesphere. They didn’t tell anyone about it until the nukie hit the town that the lifesphere was placed over. It went all the way up into space, so that nothing would change in that little patch of land. It would hold everything in it, and if a nukie hit, the people and things inside would survive. Nothing could get in, and nothing could get out. The people that were inside there lived on, and still do. After the nukie hit, the lifesphere was deactivated once just let some people out that wanted to repopulate and restore the planet.”


“So that’s how we are here? The people that left are our founders?”


“No I’m afraid not. There were a few survivors of the nukies, which is why we are here.”


“But what happened to the people that left?” I asked him. I wasn’t so sure that this man wasn’t off his rocker.


“They were never heard from after that day.”


I wasn’t sure that I believed this man. He sounded kind of crazy, besides who ever heard of a lifesphere? That was just nuts, no one could have the technology to do that. “Describe Raski.” I challenged him.


He seemed to go off into another world as he started telling me this. “In Paradise, the sky is blue, the sky is supposed to be blue, actually, not this dirty brown, and there’s no dirt in the sky either. You can see to the stars. Stars are beautiful you know? They’re little white specks on the night sky, and they light your way sometimes. There‘s so many of them, you could never count them all.” This man was truly crazy, there was only one star, and you only got to see it when the sky was thin and the dirt cleared up a little. “There’s things called plants there. They’re green, and grow up towards the sky, they never move from where they’re born though. And the slums were not like this.” he spread his hands across the room, “The slums were brand new, and there were no ashes, no blackened ruins. No one would dare live in a place like what we live in right now.”


“And how do you know this?”


His eyes glittered faintly, and he smiled. “Because I’ve been there.”