What it means to work hard
Several years ago...
Toshiya: "You know what, boy? As much as I like you, you kinda eat half of my food, you know. And most boys your age already earn their own money!"
Elliot: "B- but... what... how???"
Toshiya: "Pfhhh... It really pisses me off how little you know about the world. You don't seem to understand what it means to work hard!"
In the post-apocalyptical wastelands, to live means to survive. But life is not devoid of entertainment, in fact it's overburdened by it because for many people the only way to survive is to entertain another. The other options are not so good: stealing, killing... not everyone can do it. Ultimately, one can just go and become a slave voluntarily, in hope to find a good master, food and shelter, but most people are frightened by the thought because good masters exist only in fictional stories that rich parents sometimes tell to their kids.
Thus, many not-so-rich children start their life in this world as entertainers and live almost circus-like lives until they can learn something better than that. Girls usually do belly dancing and boys do contortion because it's harder. There are not so many girls in the desert and they're usually treated as princesses and not allowed to do hard work or take any risks, they can be flexible sometimes but without anything really extreme.
Boys, on the other hand, have much harder lives. There seems to be a general belief that if you're born as a boy, you must suffer a lot in your life and that's perfectly normal for a boy to be in pain, hungry, scarred, not liked, and yet he's not supposed to drop a single tear because he's a boy after all. So all kinds of extreme skills became very popular in the desert world, including difficult acrobatics and contortion. Young acrobats can be witnessed at any bazaar doing unbelievable stunts for small cash, food and gifts.
Sometimes homeless boys do everything on their own, but usually they have someone who takes care of their training and also shares all the earnings, be it parents or an older and smarter friend or even some ignorant thug who just keeps the boy as a half-slave and trains him hard, living off the boy's unusual abilities.
Many boy contortionists suffer and cry a lot through the daily training to be good enough to work at bazaars because the human body was not built to do what they're forced to do with it... But there are also those who are gifted with a natural flexibility, a capable body and have a good trainer who is more like an older brother, has his own ways to make money and doesn't take much of the boy's earnings, only something for his help. Either way, each contortionist's story, reasons and future are really different...
These concepts and the characters in the drawing belong to Kukkii, story and drawing by me ^^