Page 5 of Time Traveling Space Bastards
“Yes, I know. My parents basically banned anything Sci-fi in our house, but I snuck episodes ofDr. Who.I just assumed you found the real Devouring Mother and abandoned me.”
“No, we had it right the first time.You’rethe Devouring Mother and who we were looking for. You’re also in terrible danger,” Kuka said.
Well, fuck.
It was an honor to be in the presence of the Devouring Mother, but we seriously fucked up. We hadn’t time traveled before and this was our first time on this planet. We might have stuck the landing better and not ended up in a pool where a child in her sleeping clothes came out to greet us.
Kuka and Enix were going to explain this all wrong. They were my brothers, but they wereterriblewith women. I mean, they knew what to say to get them in bed. We technically stole Enix from his owner. If we brought him in to get the empathy programming added, they’d just give him back to his old owner and no one wanted that.
Kuka was a brat prince. His parents pushed him to fight for the throne, but he never wanted it until he realized how bad things would be under his brother, Valtens. That was when he started being serious about it. Before that, it was pretty women and strong spirits.
I saw it all because I’d been hired as his bodyguard. Kuka was a good guy. He just needed a nudge to do the right thing sometimes. And he didn’t exactly have any sisters. There were five Saki in my litter, and I was the only male. I’d both had the shit beaten out of me by females and had to beat the shit out of males for females.
She didn’t need me to kill anyone for her. At least, not yet. It would probably come to that. She’d been through an ordeal, and she needed it explained to her in a way that wasn’t going to make all of this much worse.
Now that we were here, in her time, this place was primitive compared to our home. No one believed her because they didn’t have the means to travel to our galaxy. This was the only planet in theirs that could sustain life. We had multiple planets that could in ours. We’djustfigured out time travel. They were still light years away from that.
I started talking first because we needed to go all the way back to the beginning, so she kneweverything.She was a writer. Details were important.
“First things first. We don’t come from a planet you would know. You don’t have the technology or the balls to get to our galaxy because you’d have to build a craft capable of going through a black hole and find people willing to do it. You’d also have to locatethatparticular black hole.
“There’s an entirely different galaxy behind it. There’s a sun, two moons, and six planets that can sustain life. Each planet has different beings on it and different people running it. Some have their own religion and some only believe in science. Some of the planets hate the others, but we all have a system of trade to keep things functional.”
“Our planet is called Ourilia,” Enix said. “It’s a beautiful place, or it used to be. It’s run by a monarchy, but you already know that.”
Sometimes, I wanted to strangle Enix. Kuka, too. If he wasn’t made out of metal, I’d totally let her hit him when he pissed her off again. It wasn’ttimefor that yet.
“It’s from my books, but I made all that up. It was just some self-insert fiction because none of my therapists believed me. I hoped you bothered several other people looking for your Devouring Mother and they’d reach out to me.”
“Listen, when our planet was discovered, they foundyourbooks. They named the planet and based the entire society off of them. K.C Fox became our god, but most people call her the Devouring Mother. The names from your book are common names on our planet. They are considered good, holy names.”
“Wait, you’re telling me that my self-insert alien smut is your fucking bible?” she shrieked.
“They are holy texts, yes,” Enix said. “The Enix were eventually created to the specifications of the holy texts.”
She looked like she was ready to faint. I wasn’t a particularly religious person. Actually, I wasn’t at all. I believed in myself. The holy texts were a pretty entertaining read, and reading was one of my pleasures. It sounded like fiction to me and apparently, it was. But our ancestors basedeverythingon it and things eventually got very complicated because of those texts.
Also, we probably should have eased into that part because I was pretty sure she wanted to hit someone again. I’d only stop her if she went after Enix because I didn’t want her breaking her hand. I didn’t mind if she needed to hit me. Technically, I was Kuka’s bodyguard, but if she didn’t want to hit him now, she probably would later, so we might as well get it out of the way.
She grabbed the bottle she’d been drinking out of before and took a giant gulp. As soon as she set it down, I took one, too. I believed the Devouring Mother was a real person who wrote those books, but I didn’t think she was a prophet guiding our planet like everyone else did.
Still, she was in danger right now and she might be the one thing that could stop my home from destroying itself. We needed to do this right and so far, we hadn’t.
How was this my life right now? Maybe someone with a much bigger ego than mine would have loved to have just found out they were basically Alien Jesus, but that wasn’t my thing. If you looked up religious trauma in the dictionary, my photo would be next to it.
When I was eight and everyone thought I was just a liar who was acting out, there was a boy in my class who was particularly awful about it. He shoved me in the mud and ripped a shirt I bought at aStar Trekcon my dad took me to the year before. I loved that shirt and I’d basically never be able to replace it. They were only made for that con, and my dad swore he’d never take me to another one if I didn’t stop lying.
So, I did what any self-respecting eight-year-old girl should. I jumped out of the mud and beat the shit out of him. He got a black eye, a bloody nose, and ingested a lot of mud and everyone was mad atme.He started it, I just finished it.
His mom had some choice words about rods and putting the fear of God into me, which my parents took literally and I didn't have a very good time with any of that.
Plus, those books were written by twenty-two-year-old me. Twenty-two-year-old me had just spent four years enjoying their freedom in every way possible. I didn’t get to be a normal, dumb teenager, so as soon as I got out, I gotallof that out of my system. I tried what I wanted to try and had several one-night stands with questionable, but very attractive men.
There were alotof alien-on-human fucking in my books. Which should have given them some kind of hint they were written by some horny girl figuring her shit out and not a prophet, but here we were.
“I’m an atheist,” I said weakly.
“What’s that?” Kuka asked.
