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A fantastical alien city nestled into a rocky mountainside, with domed buildings and intricate spires, glowing under a deep twilight blue sky. A winding path leads through a foreground bursting with oversized, colorful wildflowers in shades of purple, orange, and yellow. Two figures walk along the path towards the city. The landscape features distant, sharp, jagged mountains. The art style is reminiscent of a detailed, hand-painted animation still with bold outlines and a rich, saturated color palette, inspired by Moebius and classic science fiction art.
The aliens who landed on Earth asserted that they needed a place to live after their species freed itself from slavery but in the process of destroying the slavers, their homeworld and colony worlds were all destroyed. They had little understanding of the slavers' ship they used to escape, the enslaved having been assigned to jobs requiring little technological know-how ; on the other hand, that little know-how exceeded human knowledge, so they had *something* to trade the humans for the sanctuary they received, even if it was not nearly as much as might be expected from a star-faring species. Since crash-landing in the Sahara, they had set up settlements like this one in places far from human habitation. This makes some humans suspect that the aliens are operating under some form of the Prime Directive, avoiding human interaction to keep from disrupting human societies. Some conspiracy theorists believe that the aliens have far more science than they will admit, and even that they are not refugees but rather are an advance reconnaissance team.
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Part of my series "On An Alternate Earth."
"On An Alien World : The Alien Refugees' Settlement" © 2026 A.J. Jones. All rights reserved.
Accompanying text is ©2026 A.J. Jones. All rights reserved.
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A.J. Jones hereby asserts his moral right to be identified as the author of this work and all accompanying text.