Now clothed and sitting on the front of her boat (Prow? Bow?) Lily held her head in her hands. She glanced at her anchor, now deployed properly. Well, mostly. To get it set properly, she would really need to unhitch the boat from the dock, but now she knew what she had gotten wrong.

You were supposed to give it a lot of slack, not none. Also, usually you threw the boat in reverse and gently pulled back until the anchor caught on something. That way you knew it was set, and the slack prevents it from being pulled ever so slightly off a ledge and then not anchoring you to anything if you never go back to a point that shallow. Last night her anchor had just been dangling into the sea, not touching anything! No wonder she had drifted!

“I’m so dumb! Ugh! Okay. I know how to do it properly now at least.”

She opened her phone. “What other knowledge do I need in the short term?” It was 4 PM. The sun would be down in about 4 hours. Already a few of the links she had clicked didn’t work. Youtube was still up and running, but google searches could be a bit spotty. The searches worked just fine, but the links… not so much.

A couple of them had cached versions she could still access though. Besides, youtube had been a good resource. It was funny, she’d actually signed up for their premium service in the last hour. Why not? Money didn’t matter anymore, it was automated so it still worked, and no ads with the ability to download videos so they would be available for 29 days after the internet stopped working? Perfect.

She’d been clicking through and downloading how to videos for a huge variety of different things. How to install solar panels, how to maintain a boat, how to fill the fresh water tanks on your boat, how to pilot your boat, how to purify water, how to siphon gas, how to grow crops, how to milk a cow, how to care for chickens, and more. Anytime a thought occurred to her, she was popping open the app and downloading the first three results for ‘How to X’. She would watch them later. Right now she just had to make sure she had them.

She should have done this this morning. Clothes or no clothes, going out into town had been stupid. Her body needed to recover. She understood that a bit better now. The bath had been refreshing, but she could have caused permanent damage from overexertion, or worse. If she hadn’t been fast enough, that explosion would have killed her.

There was a difference between being proactive and being dangerously cavalier. As it is, she was dreading her next step. It was time to take the boat out again, she’d decided. She was going to drive (pilot?) it north along the coast and look for a still standing house with a private dock. She knew rich houses sometimes had them, so if she could find one that wasn’t burned down, she wanted to. That would give her a home base to work from that she could access her boat from.

Then she’d scout nearby houses in whatever rich neighborhood it was to find one that had an operational internet connection. Or! Wait. Was satellite internet a thing? It was, right? She would look for a house with a dock and satellite dishes. They might still have a connection. Rich houses were pretty likely to have solar power around here too. All in all, it seemed like a good solution. Lily was sure she’d still have to go out scavenging tomorrow either way. She still wanted a cow and some chickens, and if she waited too long they were going to be a lot more difficult to find.

In the meantime, Lily had a few things to do. She unloaded her van the rest of the way, carefully leaving it unlocked with the keys on the driver’s seat. She pulled up the anchor, still kicking herself for yesterday night. Then she headed down onto the dock to untie the ropes holding the boat there. That was quite a process. Would this be so annoying every single time, or would she eventually get used to it?

As she was untying the bit from the back she noticed something. The boat had a name. Well, most boats did. But she hadn’t thought to check it before now. I mean, it wasn’t really important was it? Printed on the back of the boat was ‘Beloved Lily’. Lily stared at the text. That was a coincidence, right? People named boats after women. So, it was just a coincidence, right? Her stomach roiled.

“Oh, I don’t like that. Okay. Think, Lily. Think!” How had this happened? We have ‘magic’. Even if she didn’t understand the rules of it yet, supernatural things were clearly possible now. So, what combination of rules had made a boat appear out of midair right when she would need it? That was a lot more complicated than an explosion, or a piece of wood that burned weird. A boat was… a boat! But more than that, it couldn’t have just been grabbed from her mind or something. She didn’t know how it worked, or all the features it had. Not to mention…

Beloved Lily.

She would never have named a boat that. Not on any level of her consciousness. It was a silly thing to get hung up on in some regards. Really, the boat appearing at all was still a huge mystery. But something about this really stuck in Lily’s mind. She had been willing to assume (at least for now) that she had conjured the boat somehow. But the boat having a name like this seemed to contradict that. She had been feeling beyond hateful towards herself when it had arrived. So, what gives?

Well, she was sure she wasn’t going to get any answers just from staring at it. So, she finished untying it and went back inside. She grabbed her portable blu ray player, and a few things to watch, and sat down at the captain’s seat. Making sure her phone was properly downloading videos, she started up the boat and carefully pulled away from the dock and into the harbor. She oriented herself north, and accelerated to a nice comfortable speed.

Weirdness aside, she thought she was finally starting to get used to this.