"Congratulations, you’ve become world famous, like you’ve always wanted," Naia said, staring at the embarrassing shots of the family of four.

"I wonder how they’ll still show those faces they love so much," Naia said, giggling to herself, all while eating her dried seeds.

She continued scrolling through the app that morning, watching those short videos less than a minute long each. They were quick and fun, and she did not notice that thinking ’one more short’ meant a lot.

She called this ’doing research’. That was to say, she was doing this to find out more about the culture and other things.

She had memories from Nadia, and they were oddly so smooth it felt like her own, but experiencing it at present still felt different, and she did get a lot of insights about the current humans.

Naia wanted to remember how the world was before it was destroyed. She knew that wouldn’t be possible in a few months, so she wanted to do so when she could.

She cackled out of nowhere when she watched a hilarious skit, and then she giggled when a wholesome human-pet interaction graced her screen. This was followed by memes, amazing dance routines, and so on.

The Internet was awesome. Was there a way to keep it running even in the apocalypse?

She then saw cooking videos and mukbang videos and liked them the most. Soon, the algorithm showed most of those which she preferred.

Interestingly, at some point, some more videos of that family emerged. Some resurfaced clips about them appeared as well. Before, their victims were too afraid to post, but now they were coming out of the woodworks.

So she would watch these gossipy videos in between her cooking videos, eating videos, and cute pet videos.

Until she looked at the time, that is.

"What? Two hours already passed? ...how?"

She blinked. She swore she only took 30 minutes!

She shook her head and decided to place various alarms and notes on the phone calendars, reminding her of the apocalypse, and so she didn’t oversleep the next day.

Looking at the timer, she couldn’t help but think of something.

She went to her space and grabbed another phone from her small box of gadgets, which she bought from the department store before. She set it up with a power bank and set the timer.

She set the timer to two months. While she was not sure when exactly the actual Fall, should it happen, would be, she felt like a timer would be useful to ensure she had a sense of urgency.

This was the time of peace, and she found herself being lured deeply into it.

She placed it next to her white board she displayed in her space. It was another purchase she bought the previous day. The timer was there so she could see it the moment she decided to look at the whiteboard. Anyway, time inside the space worked the same as outside.

This whiteboard was like her notepad. One portion of the whiteboard had a large map of the country. There was also a smaller map of the world.

She marked the three locations of the major meteorites. After fifty years, through various methods—some of which gained through dangerous missions—the survivors came to understand the locations of some meteorites.

At the very least, the impact sites of the three major ones were determined.

She marked these up with red markers. As for the smaller ones, likely breaking away from the big meteors, although she did know some of their locations, she didn’t mark them with certainty because there were too many variables.

Instead, she took a compass to draw a wide circle around the main meteors, giving conservative estimates of where the ’small’ meteorites would be.

Of course ’small’ might not be small for little humans like them. A single ’circle’ could cover an entire region, after all.

As for the meteors’ ejecta, she couldn’t consider them anymore. At that point, if the place she decided to hide in was hit by a rogue ejecta, then that was just her bad luck.

At least she enjoyed a few months of peace before dying.

The areas outside these circles, as well as areas far from known fault lines, volcanoes, and oceans were possible areas to settle down in. Nothing was guaranteed; the weather and the world would be too chaotic after the fall, but she could at least zero in on a few places.

The priority would probably be the area near the current capital city, knowing it was the location of the stronghold. While it still encountered a lot of disasters, it still had more chances than other places.

She couldn’t help but fall into a daze in this line of thought.

Strategizing like this, gathering an insane amount of intel, and making the most use of it was not her specialty.

It was Kael’s.

She pursed her lips. If he were here, she wondered how he’d tackle this issue.

...

Freisa City

"The renovation has now begun," Micheal said, reporting the the young man lying down with his eyes closed. "Procurement of some machines and technology is also ongoing."

"We can’t buy hot weapons?"

"We’re a legitimate company working under the law," Michael said, with an exasperated tone that indicated this topic had been touched many times beforehand. "At best, we can buy cold weapons."

"Fine. Dismissed."

Michael nodded and went away, heading back to his office to resume his ’real’ job now that the house was on track. He had to remind himself he was a lawyer, not a personal assistant!

Meanwhile, Kael slowly drifted to sleep. He was administered a few medicine, some of which caused drowsiness, before Michael arrived. His consciousness was already slipping when he arrived.

Otherwise, he’d have given a hundred more instructions, which could’ve depressed the high-and-mighty lawyer.

His eyebrows furrowed at some point, and he soon realized that he was having a lucid dream. The location was a small, clustered room of sorts, and he paused at the first thing that caught his attention.

A whiteboard?