The Fairy's Survival Skills

The Fairy's Survival Skills is the first single-episode storyline of Humanity Has Declined. It is the 9th episode of the anime series.

Summary
The Mediator receives a letter from a group of fairies who are depressed after enduring bullying in their society. Desperate to find a place of their own, they enlist The Mediator to help them find asylum. When they arrange to meet on a dock, it breaks apart and leaves The Mediator and fairies drifting on open water. They quickly get on a boat and arrive on a small island. While the fairies are still depressed, they begin to see the bright side of the current situation when The Mediator suggests they start their own country here. Mirroring events from earlier in the timeline, she accidentally accepts becoming its ruler. While it takes a while to set up the bare necessities, the new kingdom soon begins to thrive and The Mediator loses herself in the fun and prestige she enjoys as its queen. The fairies reproduce rapidly and invent great technologies that turn the island into a paradise with heated water and electricity. The project goes south, however, when the fairies begin building monuments and exhaust both the land and local fauna, leaving fields barren and the inventions from earlier unusable. The Mediator orders them to tear down the monuments and begin construction on a simple boat to leave the island with, sending the fairies into a new depression.

A storm sets in and prevents the residents of the kingdom from leaving, which The Mediator realizes, too late, is spawned from the combined sadness of all the fairies in her land. As a flood wipes away all they made, the fairies request that they start anew somewhere else and ask if The Mediator would be their queen again. They are then saved by Grandpa and The Assistant, who are none too pleased to find that The Mediator permitted an entire ecosystem to disappear just to humor the fairies.

Trivia

 * The episode is a not-too-subtle play on the excesses of development and the need for environmentalism, as the fairies deplete their natural resources for prestige projects and leave their kingdom uninhabitable.
 * While it's unclear whether this or The Fairies' Subculture should come first in the timeline, it is assumed that this story happens first. This is because The Mediator is less experienced and cautious in this arc, whereas she is more confident, calm, and able to deal with large amounts of fairies in The Fairies' Subculture.