During Reva's first year working with the romance tours in Ukraine, when bachelors asked her about her day job and she was in a rare mood to divulge, she'd frame what she did as a rescue mission. She was plucking endangered snails from their shrinking habitats and reviving their populations in captivity. One day, she'd reintroduced them into ecologically protected zones of which there were few, but Rome wasn't built in a day. She toured all around the country, including the self-proclaimed People's Republics of Donetsk and Luhansk, where the war puttered on.

She evacuated survivors even if she didn't have room for them. She had vowed never to repeat one of her early mistakes: once, she'd chosen not to rescue the dozen Annilika severus from their ravine at the base of the Carpathians, but by the time she came back for them, new terrarium at the ready, the ravine had been filled by a mudslide. She never saw another Annilika severus snail again. And she witnessed just enough miracles to blind her with hope: two rare Tordionus bazilikae on an onion stalk sticking out of a dumpster, when she wasn't looking for them. Another time, a cluster of newborns at the edge of a military range. These early successes had to be signs- she was destined for this rescue mission.

She and her charges would outpace environmental destruction. It wasn't impossible, after all. She'd steer her Noah's Ark to every nook and cranny of the country, no leaf unturned. "A dangerous thing, early success," a bachelor told her during one date, describing his own investment ventures. A jackpot in his early 20s had led him to believe in his own so-called instincts until he hit financial ruin. But Reva was hardly listening. Her interpreter had long ago wilted into her martini, and Reva's eyes were glued to the terrarium cam on her phone looking at her snails. These dates were but a sham to get the financially well-off bachelors to invest in her lab.