Twenty years, a large enough chunk of human time, was but a blink in his life. Twenty years could go by so fast for the comfortable, the easy-going. But for him the past twenty years had been a grueling drag of futilely wasted time. Each passing moment a glaring reminder of failure. This mission was to be only twenty of the human's Earth-years, yet here he was nearing the end of that time and he'd accomplished next to nothing. His leaders would be checking in soon, and when they realized how little he'd done they would be deathly furious. The past twenty years he'd spent struggling, failing, grappling with a task somehow more daunting than he'd ever imagined.
The next twenty years to come, unbeknownst to him, were to be an unimaginable nightmare.