There are places in this universe that are very different from the planet you and I inhabit. Take, for example, the planet Ma'av in NGC 5194 (the Whirlpool Galaxy). There are two things that make the Ma'avians unusual. First, their planet is unusually rich in metals. Early in the natural history of Ma'av, eukaryotic life evolved a unique form of vacuole that was used to store these metals. Different metals are stored in different vacuoles. Sentient Ma'avians are able to release these metals from their fingertips and combine them as needed. This gives the appearance that Ma'avians can create metal objects out of nothing. They can also combine these metals to make catalysts that act on whatever they touch, which also appears magical to most non-Ma'avians.
Second, Ma'avians only have two types of color-sensing cones; one perceives blue–green spectra and the other perceives purple spectra. Red looks purple to them and yellow looks green. They see orange as white. To some degree they see the world roughly the same way that a human with tritanopia would see the world, but with purple and green instead of red and blue. I have endeavored to show you how they see their own world rather than how you would see it if you were there.
These illustrations were drawn using Stable Diffusion 2.1.
