Episode One Hundred And Twelve – Volcano Day
The tiny band of survivors are all that’s left of Humanity. They don’t have the right skills, or enough people, to rebuild, but they do have a time machine and the ability to pluck people out of history who’d otherwise have died in various disasters, and those people would have the skills.
Everyone in the past knew this sort of stuff, right?
And they’d be really grateful, and be happy to do what we said, wouldn’t they?
Volcanic activity caused by the gravity of a nearby body moves across the planet in a regular and predictable way, so a sufficiently daring crew could take advantage of that to run their heist when they know that everyone will have cleared out.
Of course, that does mean dealing with the eruption.
It’s one thing to find that you’re living in a simulation & try to step outside of it, to meet the entities who created you. What happens when you get access to the controls?
Explorers find the under-construction robotic invasion fleet which someday soon will wipe out Humanity.
Right now, it has no idea they’re there, but that’s going to change if they’re not very careful indeed.
The reason we’ve never found aliens is that humanity from an alternate timeline has been wiping them out to ‘protect’ us, whether we want them to or not. The trail of genocide is, apparently, for our own good.
Without money, the orphanage will close. The folks who should have solved the problem are in jail or on the run, so it’s up to a strange time-traveller and their companions to set things right.