Name's Delilah "Dolly" Malone, private eye by trade, sissy by nature. Obese, overweight, and unapologetic about it, I waddled through this apocalypse in a Barbie pink ankle length trenchcoat that billowed like a parachute in the fallout wind. Underneath, my pink Victorian mourning attire clung to my rolls, a long pink satin gown with subtle sheen highlights that caught the dim rad lights just right, making me shimmer like a forbidden dream. My oversized pink satin headscarf framed my face, tied in a bow that screamed Rococo excess, and a sheer pink chiffon voile veil draped over it all, misting my vision in rosy haze. Glossy shiny deluxe blouse frills peeked out at the collar, frilly as a sissy maid's apron. Dramatic pink lips, pink eyeliner I painted myself like a doll in a world gone gray. Hard boiled? Sure, but with a soft center that melted at the wrong touch. It started like any other gig in this irradiated hellhole, the kind where the client slinks into your office smelling of desperation and cheap perfume. My office was a gutted bungalow on what's left of Sunset Boulevard, walls papered with faded starlet posters glowing faintly from the rads. She walked in or slithered, more like a femme fatale straight out of the old reels, but twisted by the apocalypse. Tall, gaunt, with skin like irradiated porcelain and eyes that could melt lead. Called herself Veronica Voss, heir to some pre war studio fortune, or so she claimed. "Dolly," she purred, her voice like velvet over razor wire, "I need you to find my husband. He's gone missing with a stash of pre-war gold the kind that could buy us a ticket out of this wasteland." I should've walked away. But her gaze lingered on my pink ensemble, a smirk playing on those blood red lips. "You look... exquisite," she said, tracing a finger along my frilled blouse. Love or money? Hell, in my line of work, it's always both. I took the case, lured like an innocent lamb to the slaughter. Average? Me? Law abiding? In this world, survival's the only law, but yeah, I was tempted. She dangled promises, a cut of the gold, a night in her arms, where I'd be her pretty little doll. My heart, buried under layers of satin and fat, fluttered like a trapped bird. The trail led to the ruins of the Hollywood Sign, now a jagged "HOLLYW D" mocking the sky. Dutch angles everywhere, the ground tilted under my heels, my pink gown swishing as I lumbered up the hill, veil fluttering in the toxic breeze. I found clues: a scorched map to a vault in the old MGM lot, whispers of a heist crew Veronica's hubby had assembled. Perfect crime, they thought crack the vault, grab the gold, vanish into the Mojave like ghosts. But greed's a hungry beast. I pieced it together from rad scorched notes and bullet riddled bodies: internal betrayal, bad luck from a radstorm that fried their getaway vertibird. The hubby was dead, double crossed by his own femme fatale wait, no. By Veronica? My gut twisted. That's when it got personal. Digging deeper, I uncovered photos in the vault pre war snapshots of a man who looked too familiar. Me? No, couldn't be. But the face... my face, slimmer, harder, before the bombs, before the pink. Amnesia hit like a sledgehammer. I'd blacked out chunks of my past after the fallout, waking up in this body, this craving for satin and veils. Identity crisis? You bet. Turns out, I wasn't always Dolly. I was that hubby or a clone, or some rad mutated twin. Veronica had lured me in before the war, manipulated me into a heist for her studio's hidden fortune. I stole, I killed, she betrayed me, left me for dead in the blast. Now, post apocalypse, she'd tracked me down, not knowing it was me under the pink, the fat, the frills. She wanted the gold I'd stashed in my fogged memory. Corruption seeped in like fallout rain. The case turned dangerous her goons on my tail, corrupt Enclave remnants posing as authorities, accusing me of the old murders. Innocent man on the run? Wrongfully accused in a world where justice is a loaded .45. I evaded them through the twisted streets, my trenchcoat snagging on barbed wire, pink satin tearing like my sanity. Hiding in a bombed out mansion, I confronted her. "You," I gasped, veil askew, lips smudged. "You did this to me." She laughed, that velvet razor slicing deep. "Darling, you were always a pushover. A little love, a little money and look at you now, all dolled up." She drew a pearl handled pistol, the trap sprung. The heist gone wrong? This was round two. I lunged obese, but fueled by rage knocking the gun away. We tumbled in Dutch angled chaos, shadows twisting like my gown's sheen. But greed won. She grabbed the gold map from my pocket, shot me in the gut. As I bled out on the irradiated floor, pink staining red, I realized: destruction was always the endgame. For the lured innocent, the doomed detective, the betrayed sissy in a world of gray. Fade to black, darling. Fade to pink.