Page 6 of Time Traveling Space Bastards

I t 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 were terrible with 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’d just figured 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 knew everything. 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 locate that particular 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’t time for 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 found your books. 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 based everything on 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.