The Mothership had been flying back to Earth as fast as it could go for a few weeks now, and Addison couldn't be happier for several reasons. Knowing that they were getting closer and closer to being home every day was filling her with excitement. Zed was a great distraction from her homesickness, and she from his, but they both were missing all their friends and family fiercely.
Speaking of being distracted by one another, their first time definitely wasn't their last. Both felt like every time was getting better and bringing them even closer. They weren't being complete shut-ins hiding in their room, but if they didn't have anything better to do…it never took them long to get fired up over one another.
Addison smiled as Zed walked from their bed to grab his boxers and pull them up his legs. A sight Addison was quickly growing used to as the weeks flew by. So Zed? What do you want to do today?
Well, besides you know. Zed grinned back at her. "We can't just stay in here all day Addie."
"Unfortunately." Addison giggled.
"Honestly though, I'm psyched that we're going back home to Seabrook, and while obviously, I wouldn't ever change a thing about any of this. I'm really glad we finally figured out the coordinates. I know this ship is like half the size of Seabrook, but it's starting to feel a bit cramped."
"Yeah, I know, and it's not even that it's cramped, more like the monotony that every day is more or less the same. Wake up, get breakfast, try reading Alien, power practice, and then free time…which lately has been especially amazing, but just every day like this has gotten old fast."
"Ouch." Zed joked, by now he had his pants and T-shirt on, and right now he was pulling on his jacket over the top of his clothes.
"You know what I meant, and I promise I will never be bored of us together, and showing one another how much we love each other," Addison promised him as she stood up from the bed to start searching for her own outfit for the day. Smiling as she could sense Zed's appreciation as he followed her every move.
"I wouldn't mind something new to do, but I think we're out of stuff we can do on the ship without knowing rocket science or astrophysics and who even knows what else. I still think it would be cool to space walk though." Zed said.
"Well, we can't right now. I'm pretty sure A-Spen told us that we're traveling at light speed, and I don't think even a big, strong, sexy zombie like you can go through that."
"I'm sure I could." Feeling Addison's glare of warning and annoyance hitting the back of his head, Zed quickly turned back to face her again. "I'm kidding."
"You better be, I want my fiancé to be in one piece when we get home."
"And I will be," Zed walked closer to Addison and wrapped his arms around her waist, "but if we could, you know you'd want to do it too. I mean when else are we ever going to have the chance to be an astronaut?"
"Alright, I can admit we can ask them for a space walk sometime. Maybe we can just hover in orbit for a few days in space so we can go out. Do you think they have space suits?"
"I'm pretty sure they do, 'cause remember when they told us the story of how they tried to settle that one planet completely covered in water and then they were attacked by giant space squids? So they have to have scuba gear, which knowing them probably also functions as space gear."
"I think you're right. Ohh maybe we should make a bucket list of everything we want to do before we get home!" Addison smiled excitedly.
"Ok, do you have any ideas?" Zed asked, and they both sat down on their bed, now both fully clothed and slightly less distracting to one another.
"Well, I still want to learn as much alien history as I can before we go back and have to start school again. Although I'm sure that will still be available when we get home."
"Yeah, hey have you tried those glasses that let the aliens just download information into their brains?"
"No, I haven't. Do you think I should? Because given how the groupthink trial went, that doesn't sound promising to me. But I guess I would like to try it."
"Yeah, there's nothing wrong with trying, and who knows, maybe you'll fly through college as the aliens all flew through high school and graduated in one semester."
"No way, I have to be there all four years with you so I can cheer you on at your football games."
"If I even get on the team," Zed said, feeling a bit down that that dream was no longer guaranteed.
"Hey, that recruiter was scared by the alien invasion, not you. And it'll be just like what happened with Coach three years ago. There is no way any coach who knows anything about football would not want you on the team if see what you can do. Plus you do have four state championships under your belt, plus every reason you got the exceptional student scholarship. You're going to keep making history for zombies Zed. And I can't wait to cheer you on as a Panther."
"Thanks, Addison, I know I will. And you'll get to be the first alien on the Mountain College's cheer squad!"
"Do you think I can still get in?"
"To paraphrase you, any coach who knows anything about cheerleading would be the biggest idiot in the world if they saw everything you can do and didn't want you on the team. And you know Bree, Bucky, the Aceys, me, and everyone else would bust down their door if they tried to take back your scholarship or something. You are going to be the star of that team Addie."
Addison rested her head against Zed's shoulder, "Thanks Zed, I know you're right too. But yeah I'm going to be with you all four years, and then…"
"And then someday?"
"And then someday." Addison agreed.
"Come on, let's go get breakfast. One other thing I'm missing is Coach's Froyo, I think I might even be missing vanilla by the time we get back home." Zed joked.
And like they said, they spent their day on the ship just like they did every day. Breakfast, studying, lunch, power training, workout, and dinner. Both tried to make the best of it, but now that they had both admitted to each other their boredom, the day dragged on even longer.
But at dinner, this time A-Lan walked over to them and told them that they had something special planned for tonight that they might enjoy, and he was being surprisingly cryptic about whatever it was, for the aliens at least.
A-Lan led them to the same room Zed had proposed in a few weeks ago, but now the room was filled with rows of metallic white benches and almost the full active crew was seated already and conversing excitedly about something.
A-Lan led them to a bench in the front row where they both gladly sat down, while A-Lan walked over to sit with A-Spen and A-Li across from them.
A-Spen stood up and smiled brightly, "Welcome everyone, as you all know, we are finally on our way home, back to Seabrook. But I think it is important for all of us to remind ourselves how we have gotten here. So we wanted to take tonight to celebrate our history and learn from our past, as well as hopefully teach the newest members of our family some more." A-Spen motioned to Zed and Addison sitting in front of her.
"Let us begin." A-Spen sat down, closed their eyes and after a moment, Addison could see a vision and hear A-Spen's voice in her head. So if this was alien storytelling, this was awesome.
Over 1000 years ago, our people lived near the star Akiridion, on the fifth planet in the system. Akiridion-5. It was a beautiful planet, the land was filled with blue plants, and the sky was a beautiful cerulean during the day, and at night, the skies were always clear so we could always see every star. Addison could see everything as A-Spen described as clearly as any movie.
Are you seeing this Zed? Addison asked him silently.
Yep, I can see and hear everything through you. Zed answered.
We had already lived in perfect peace and harmony thanks to the invention of the Luma Lens and the emotional inhibitors nearly a century before, everything was perfect. There was no conflict, no problems, nothing. Akiridion-5 was a perfect world.
But then it wasn't. As our technology continued to develop, and our people's population grew, we only focused on continued development and expansion, because doing so was most efficient. Because of this, we failed to recognize the signs that what we were doing was harming the natural environment of the planet. As A-Spen was speaking, visions of futuristic-looking cities that spread for miles and miles lit up in Addison's mind. White and silver spread more and more and encroached on the beautiful blue shades of the forests and grasslands that surrounded them.
There were, of course, scientists who studied such things, and reported them at first, especially as certain species of plant and animal life forms began going extinct both because of habitat destruction, and because of the ever-increasing levels of stardust energy in our atmosphere.
You see, we were the only lifeforms on our planet capable of harnessing stardust energy. We believe it originally evolved as a defense mechanism against potential predators and of course the heart of our social connections that allowed us to grow into the dominant sentient species of our world. As our population grew larger and larger, the stardust energy that powers all our technology and surrounds us began to fill the atmosphere more and more.
We ourselves were unaffected by this phenomenon, but the first signs were when plant and animal life started to die off near our largest cities. Large swathes of farmland, forests, and natural plains couldn't take it. And as the plants disappeared, the animal life would die off as well. Again some of us noticed, but our current way of life was working too well for us that we disregarded this fact. We still had more than enough farmland to sustain our species even as our population continued to grow. We chose to ignore the early signs of environmental blight in favor of the continued development of our own technology and society.
The urban center stardust pollution was only the beginning, unfortunately. We of course had occasional electrical storms during rain, but as the stardust levels continued to grow, the storms became larger and larger and began occurring without rain. All that energy, without the cooling rain, to dampen the ground was a dangerous combination. Wildfires became more and more common as lightning strikes occurred and destroyed even more natural areas.
Our cities were of course safe, but it was often impossible for us to stop a fire in wild lands even with all our technology. Hundreds of thousands of sectors of land were destroyed. Destroyed by our actions. But still, we were unwilling to change.
The fires of course released massive amounts of carbon dioxide and particulate matter into the atmosphere on a scale we had never seen before. shifting the color of the skies to a slightly darker shade. Unfortunately, this was enough to create even more cascading effects on the environment. Similar to Earth plant life, our own plants use specific wavelengths of light from our star to create macromolecules to produce and store energy. But with the atmosphere darkened by just a few shades, the proper wavelengths were being absorbed by the atmosphere itself instead of reaching the ground. Which as you can imagine led to more and more ecological destruction.
This was when we truly began noticing that we must do something. We couldn't halt our civilization's development, as that would cause real conflict in choosing which areas to continue, and which to declare ended, and who to blame for the current state of our world. Which would have once again brought us into a conflict that beforehand we had not had for centuries.
So despite our logical conclusions telling us otherwise, we did nothing to try to stop it, instead only hoping that a new equilibrium would occur and the planet would be able to balance itself out into a new homeostasis without us changing ourselves. We were foolish and too full of hubris to recognize what was truly happening.
Eventually, we had no other choice, we realized that if we didn't do anything, our planet would soon be uninhabitable. So we put it to a massive, planetwide vote. Either we change ourselves and search for some way to save our planet, or we stay in harmony as much as possible, and survive…by leaving our planet.
It was a vote of 100% to 0 to abandon our planet, whether that was because we were too scared of conflict, or because we all knew it was already too late to save Akiridion-5, we will never truly know.
We already had local space travel, and we could currently go from our own system to the next closest system relatively smoothly, but we had a long way to go. For the next 50 years, all our focus was on inventing and adapting our technology to create our motherships and everything else we would need to survive, but eventually, we managed to create them in time. It's only thanks to the unity of purpose we have through our groupthink that we were able to accomplish such a momentous feat.
We were divided into groups as we boarded our Motherships, and we all had the same mission. Search for Utopia, the perfect place for our people to call home. Don't accept anything less than perfection. Surely there must be a world out there just as perfect as Akiridion-5 used to be.
And so took turns searching for centuries, while the majority of our people slept the years away. We used both our own motherships and also occasionally sent out scouts to travel farther and explore new worlds, but none ever returned with the good news we were looking for. And every planet we attempted to colonize eventually proved not to be a good match for our needs and desires.
That is until about a year ago. We weren't active at the time of her departure, but we knew that Scout Commander 15-09 had lost contact with us without any trace. Until last year when the signal from her scout ship suddenly appeared in our scanners. At the time we were nearly on the other side of the galaxy, so it took us many months to reach Earth.
And of course, we all know the story from there. It took us some trial and error, but we eventually discovered the most precious thing in Seabrook, and now it is thanks to her that we know where our new home lies. A-Spen finished their story and shared their inner vision and everyone opened their eyes, all smiling brightly at Addison.
"Thank you guys, of course, I helped you, and I'm glad you finally told us what happened."
"Hey, do you mind if we ask some questions though?"
"No, of course not Zed. Ask away." A-Spen answered.
"So the reason you had to leave your home was that your population was too big, and your stardust energy got too strong. But will that happen to Seabrook if you all come to live there, including everyone sleeping in the stasis pods?"
A-Lan answered confidently, "No, the population of our ship alone will have no chance of causing any damage. And hopefully, when we reenter Earth's atmosphere, our ship won't cause a power surge again. We had to make some adjustments after our first entry to prevent any more damage."
"So if there are more motherships out there, are they going to come to Earth now too?" Addison asked.
A-Li answered, "Potentially, we have not had contact with any other motherships since we left our planet. We are all spread out in a different sectors of the galaxy. We could perhaps construct a subspace manifold to attempt to open communications with the rest of our people. Although we can see that no world will be truly perfect for us, and even less so if we can't adapt to our new world. No matter what Addison, we promise we will guarantee our presence on Earth will have no chance of damaging your planet. The last thing we want is to be the cause of another environmental blight."
"Ok, that's great then." Addison nodded happily, and she could feel Zed's relief beside her.
"And all the plants and stuff on your planet were blue? They looked so cool." Zed said.
"Yes, from what we gathered on our short time on Earth. The basic structures of the climate and environment are similar, although Earth's atmosphere is slightly warmer, we had convergently similar plants, like trees and grasses, although they used different wavelengths of light for their photosynthesis."
"Oh wait, I just had another thought. So do you have cows or something on your planet? Cause what exactly is the Froyo we've been eating made out of?" Zed asked.
"I am not certain what the cow is that you speak of, but there are plants on our planet that produce the lactose which is then fermented and frozen at subzero temperatures to produce froyo."
"Oh, well on earth only certain animals can make lactose," Zed said, shrugging his shoulders.
"Wait your Froyo comes from animals? How?" A-Spen asked, looking surprised.
"Um…it's a bit of a long story. Would you guys like an Earth lesson? You can ask us anything and we'll do our best to explain what we can." Addison offered.
"Alright, and it is understandable, from what we could tell, your high school curriculum is quite limited, I was surprised myself that we were able to learn all of Earth's knowledge in a mere 26 minutes," A-Lan said.
"Hey I was too, and trust me, there is a lot more to Earth than just what high school classes can teach you." Zed chuckled, "So ask away."
"OK, so what is this cow you speak of?" A-Lan asked, raising his eyebrow in question.
So then alien story time became Earth trivia night, Zed and Addison would take turns explaining, and usually Addison would try to send mental images to A-Spen to share with all the other aliens to help them better understand what they were talking about. Zed and Addison answered every question they could to the best of their ability, and they talked about just about everything, from cows, birds, cats, dogs and several other animals, to things like cars, refrigerators, different types of trees, shopping… by the end hours had gone by and they both felt like they had covered just about every topic under the sun. Most of the questions were simple, but explaining how the Earth was divided between different human countries seemed unfathomable to them. Even though A-Spen had to remind several of their compatriots that long ago in the past there had been different nations on their planet too before they all united.
"…And that's why when we say it's raining cats and dogs it is just an expression. Cats and dogs don't really fall from the sky." Zed finished explaining with a grin, and then he released a loud yawn that had been building up in him for while.
Aww, is someone tired?
Yeah, it's been a long day, a fun day after all but still long. Zed answered her.
Zed spoke up before the next question could be asked. "You know what, this has been fun, and we'd love to share more Earth facts with you guys, but I for one could use some shut-eye. Maybe we can do this kind of Q and A thing again some other time."
"Of course Zed, we understand. And now you and Addison will soon be counting sheep, although not literally." A-Li said.
"Yeah, something like that." Zed chuckled and sent Addison a knowing look. "We'll see you guys in the morning." Zed and Addison took each other's hand and calmly walked out of the room, with many of the aliens following their lead out the door and into the maze of hallways that made up the ship, but they both knew that none of the aliens would be going to bed for a few more hours, but thankfully they had long since adjusted their scheduling system in a 24-hour cycle for Zed and Addison's benefit.
When they got back to their room, they decided to just sit on their bed together, still talking. Zed leaning against the wall with Addison sitting in his lap with her head leaning against his chest.
"So, what was your favorite question we got tonight?" Zed asked.
"Hmm, I think the biggest thing is how shopping works. I can't believe they didn't really have shopping of any kind on their planet, although it makes sense how A-Li explained it. Since anytime someone needs something, they just thought about it and the message would be sent through their groupthink, and their technology made them so productive and efficient they hadn't used the money for centuries even before they left the planet."
"Oh yeah, I can't believe it either. Even though the wolves never really went shopping before they joined Seabrook. They either found everything they needed in the woods or took it from campers, or convenience stores."
"Oh yeah, Willa's story. Ah, I miss the wolves and everyone else." Addison's laughter faded into a heavy sigh.
Zed wrapped his arms over her shoulders and pulled her closer to him until her back was pressed lightly against his chest. "And now every single minute we're getting closer and closer to home. We'll be seeing everyone again soon."
"I know… and I know we still said goodbye to everyone but…hey you know what we should do?" Addison's excitement started rising again.
"What is it, Addie?"
"We should send them another message telling them we're coming home! That would make them all so happy!"
Zed thought for a moment before replying. "I'm sure it would, but here's an idea. What if we keep it a secret so that when we do show up, it's a surprise for everyone."
"Why would you want to do that?"
"For one, I know from experience that you love planning surprises."
"Oh, like you're one to talk, it just isn't possible for you to keep a surprise from me anymore."
"But I do know I'm right, but not just because I want to show up out of nowhere and surprise them but also….If I was still stuck on Earth, and you were up here and sent me a message that you were going to be back soon. I literally wouldn't be able to think of anything else., I know I'd be staring at the sky twenty-four/seven until I saw the mothership appear again. And right now it's still going to take us a couple of weeks. I know everyone will be excited to see us, but I don't want to make them hopeful with impatience or something."
"OK, I think I understand. But are you sure? Cause during cheer camp, I hated not hearing anything from you. And I know that wasn't your fault but…"
"I know, and if you really want to send everyone a message I am totally fine with that, but beyond all our friends, I really don't want to get Pops and Zoey's hopes up that we'd get back immediately and then have to wait every day, and I'm sure your parents would be the same way too."
Addison sighed, "OK I know you're probably right, we can wait. But that also means we can work together to plan how we're going to throw the surprise for everyone."
"Sure thing, hopefully, this time we won't blow up half of Seabrook." Zed grinned.
"Don't worry, A-Lan and the others won't let that happen…again." Addison lifted her head to look up at him.
You're so adorable when you look at me like that.
Like what? Addison batted her eyes innocently.
"So abso-freaking cute." Zed laughed, and then moved his hands down to her waist and spun her around so that they could now face each other, only a few inches separating them.
And I know that look, and I like it too. Addison smiled coyly.
What are you going to do about it then?
I might have a few ideas, but if you're too tired… I heard you yawning back when we were wrapping up talking about stuff with the aliens.
There's too tired to go over the basics of how Earth works, and then there's too tired for you. And I will never be too tired for you.
"Are you sure about that?
you're still always out like a lightbulb whenever we finish." Addison teased him.
"Oh, is that a challenge?"
"I'd like to see you try." Addison smiled back at him.
"I'll show you the time of your life." Zed leaned in close to capture Addison's lips with his own, one of his hands reaching up to run through her long blue hair.
Addison felt herself melt on the inside and she quickly joined in until she could feel Zed having the same feeling. Zed was the best distraction she could ever ask for. She still missed her friends and family, but when they were together like this, nothing else mattered, and she knew they were just getting started.
In a rush that was growing more and more familiar, Zed and Addison fully embraced each other emotionally and mentally just as much as they were physically. Addison was certain, this was one part of being on the mothership she would never ever get tired of. Every single time was nothing short of amazing, and she wanted it no other way.
Later Addison couldn't help but chuckle to herself, as just like always, a bare-chested Zed was conked out on the pillow beside her, his mind completely blank except for the feelings of love and happiness that always surrounded his brain after they were finished. She snuggled up to him and kissed his cheek once more, pressing her own chest against his. I love you Zed. She then closed her eyes and was soon entering dreamland too, while she wished she was home, nothing could ever be better than spending every night they could, exactly like this, fully showing all their love for each other. This was exactly what her dreams were made of.