Page 2 of Delivered to My Alpha Alien Lovers (Mail-Order Matings #20)
Tylan
One Earth year. My travel partner and I had been assigned this location for that length of time, and while we had requested it, we had not dreamed it would be approved. Others had made the same ask and been turned down. What gave us the edge, we might never be sure of, but it didn’t hurt that Farsel’s uncle had the ear of the committee.
As the months passed, and we traveled extensively, we observed that many citizens of this world did not appreciate what they had and spent so much of their time fighting with one another.
Natural beauty, what they hadn’t already paved over, still remained, but it might not for long if their citizens did not exercise care. We’d been to planets that had already passed the point of no return. As intergalactic cultural anthropologists, we never knew what we’d encounter, especially in locations so far from home. Earth was the most distant anyone on our planet had traveled, yet the most similar to our home. For one, we could breathe and move here without any special equipment. The atmosphere retained by the orb contained appropriate amounts of things such as oxygen, the gravity was only a bit less, and they actually had water in large quantities. Even we didn’t have such oceans and rivers.
We hurried to gather our data in time for the return of the ship that left us here, gathering our belongings as well and preparing for departure. We had a tentative date, but space travel could be affected by many factors, and therefore the precise time could not be anticipated too far in advance.
At first, we’d welcomed the additional months we were informed of. Political issues at home had affected funding for scientific research, but it should all be resolved soon— Enjoy your extra time!
Five years later, we were still waiting for our ride. We had enjoyed and made good use of our time, even opened a little business because no more funds would be coming our way. Unlike the alien superheroes of comic book fame, we did not have any powers like flight or invisibility. The gravity difference did give us a little more athletic ability, and we were highly educated even among our own people. But no more than that.
“How old are we again?” Farsel asked me over breakfast, proving that no matter how many degrees a man had, he could still have his weaknesses. “I have such a hard time translating age from our world to here.”
“We are thirty-two here. And before you ask, yes, we have reached the age of mating and are very soon going to feel the effects.” That was the one thing we’d been dreading. We could live the rest of our lives here, if we had to, regretting only our possible inability to get the results of our research home. After the one message, we’d neither received nor been able to send any.
But the mating time could not be put off. It would come sometime in the next Earth year, and if we were still here, we would have to mate with someone from this planet. Or try to. Would it work? Not if the bond did not form. But we’d have to try.
“If we mate here, we will never be able to leave,” Farsel said. “We will be trapped here, forever.”
“You don’t know that.” Did he? “If we can survive here without any breathing devices or other such things, our mate should be able to do the same at home.”
In nearly six years on this world, we had not turned our attentions to any females beyond admiring them for their attractiveness or perhaps kindness. But if the symptoms of mating disease began, we would have to try.
At best, if we missed the mating window, we would be alone forever. But, at worst, we would die. Most survived at least the physical effects, but the mental… Few lived long lives who were not mated in time.
“How would we even find someone?” he asked. “If one of us gets the symptoms, we will only have a short time to find our mate. And from what we’ve observed, most humans take months or even years to find and mate with their significant other.”
“I guess we’d better try to find a way. Maybe one of those online dating services or something.”
“I’ll look into them then come to the shop in a while.”
We sat for a while, in silence, before Farsel left for work, and I poured a second cup of coffee and went to my home office to see if I could find anything on social media to help us with our need to find a mate. Singular. On our world, where females were born far less often than males, good friends would often vow to share a mate when they grew up. And it was fortunate that we had done so because it was going to be hard enough to locate one woman willing to mate with us.
I settled back with my coffee and started a search.