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This is written from the viewpoint of several hundred years in the future and most of this bit is on Earth, which is just fine, though there are some changes, and not big ones, either.
It wasn't the great invasion long foretold by the urban myth people and conspiracy theorists of a few centuries ago, but there was a small number of aliens on Earth now. Most of them were alone and though they all knew that there were others like them here, none of them knew specifics or locations.
They'd been sent here to learn, just as Earth governments had sent some people to the alien's point of origin. It was an exchange policy.
Our story concerns one of these exchange students. At the point where we begin, he is in a very rural part of Central America and he hopes to be gone very shortly. He's not crazy about the local humans and there is the threat of another hurricane passing through at any time. He's already been through one, thanks.
He relates to the general tale in that he's an Anubian, so allow me to set a few things out about them if this is the first chapter that you've ever read of this.
The way that we walk - us humans that is, is another way to categorize us on this planet that we love so much. We walk in a way known as Plantigrade, which means that we walk using our toes and all of our feet. The system works not bad for us and it's how we've all gotten around for the past bunch of millennia.
As long as we're walking and not running.
When we run, we tend to use our toes more and not much of the rest of our feet any farther back than the balls of our feet.
When we do that, we are unconsciously approximating the way that another set of animals here get around. Those types are, most of them, capable of quieter and quicker locomotion than we are.
Those creatures walk on their lower digits all the time and their way is known as digitigrade.
Anubians aren't from here, but they walk as digitigrades all of the time with one difference. Their back feet are much larger and stronger than their front feet, much wider too, and that allows them to walk on four legs - or just the back ones if they want. And their back legs are shaped like canine back legs.
Their hands aren't paws though they can use them that way or they can use them as hands, mostly because of their thumb joints, which have a much larger range of motion than ours do. So they can walk or run on all fours without spraining their thumbs.
For a good visual, in this work of fiction, I've made it so that once humans meet them; they call them Anubians because to us, they really resemble a lot of pictures that you might have seen of the old Egyptian god, Anubis.
0_o
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D'Jymm walked along the old grating, careful to keep an eye on exactly what it was that he was expecting to bear his weight. Some of the catwalks looked as though the winds which would be blown inland by the next tropical cyclone whenever it came would surely rip them clean off. But by the time that you actually got to them wondering if they stood a chance to hold you up, you found that they only looked like that. They were fine to walk across or along.
He understood things in terms of the way these things were constructed; a large flat area of grating was also an area where maintenance work might be expected to be done, so they were often built with a bit of load-bearing potential.
Conversely, some sections looked like they might only have been there for less than a decade and they turned out to be just hanging on, deathtraps to merely step on.
Of more concern were the ladders and thin, one man catwalks up here. He wasn't as thin as a cat of any sort for one thing.
And where he was at the moment, it was a long way down.
He looked off through the rain into the distance for a few moments. This place wasn't as old as it had appeared at first glance. But it was abandoned and he surmised that it might have been one of the last of it's kind in this part of the world. He thought about it and supposed that if that had been the case, then when humans had finally weaned themselves off running their vehicles on hydrocarbon fuels, the last few running places like this would have been shut down with little or no notice.
That was an aspect which didn't make any sense to him. Even if the facility had been decommissioned, why was it still standing here the way that it was? There must be a thousand electric motors here, many of them large and expensive. And they'd been selected for outside use, every one that he saw was the totally enclosed type. The paint on the outside would go dull in the first decade or two, but that was about it.
He looked around, trying to imagine how many ... miles of piping of all sizes that he could see.
And if they ever had to burn off volatile organic compounds, there had to be incinerators of some kind here. If those incinerators were of the catalytic type, then you needed a catalyst and far more often than not, platinum was the material used for that.
He looked around again, trying to imagine the amount of platinum a place like this would need. If the catalyst wasn't all neutralized, there was a hell of a lot of money here.
He'd seen the first tendrils of vines and other leafy tendrils growing up one wall of the office building, but it was the start. Another thirty years, he reckoned, and no one would ever know to look at the place that there was a refinery under the shrubbery.
Another thought caused him to smile at the irony.
Just like the dead cities in the jungle around here and across the region; the Olmecs, Aztecs, and the Mayans, he thought, certain that he'd left out a couple that he didn't know about due to his being an unintentional immigrant.
The people themselves - well, their descendants really, they lived on today, but the ancient civilizations were buried under leafy greens.
Looking down, he saw a few vehicles sitting around, trucks, mobile cranes, transport lifters and utility vehicles for the most part. They seemed to have adjusted easily to their later role, rusting quietly while providing homes for the field mice. He knew that there were likely more sitting around than he could see.
He didn't know exactly when this place had been left behind by it's workers and it's owners, but judging by the reclamation work done by the surrounding rainforest, it might have been as long as fifty years or as little as twenty. He wasn't from around here, so he had no definite way to tell.
He'd only known that he'd had to get past some galvanized chain link fencing to get inside the perimeter.
As he'd neared a likely-looking place earlier, D'Jymm noticed some of the signage as he got to the fence and he looked at it.
