Field Journal, Sixth Season of the Coastal Dig.
We have at last identified the purpose of the Preparation Gathering, a rite the Ancients staged whenever a female of the tribe grew round with new life. The evidence is overwhelming and, I confess, deeply moving.
The central artifact is the Vessel of Ascension: a tapered container, festooned with dyed pulp streamers, atop which the honored female was seated as upon a throne. Around her the tribe amassed offerings, each sealed in bright decorated husks and each, crucially, torn open in public view while onlookers vocalized in ascending pitch. We take this to be a ritual of collective divination, the pitch of the cry indicating the perceived potency of the gift.
Most gifts were miniature garments, absurdly small, clearly ceremonial rather than functional, for no creature could survive in vestments so tiny. We now believe the Ancients buried these effigy-clothes to trick malevolent spirits into attacking the doll-sized decoys instead of the coming child. A protective sympathetic magic. Elegant, and ultimately futile, for we find these garments everywhere, discarded within a single season, the spirits presumably unconvinced.
Note also the Cake of Prophecy, a dense sugared mound whose interior was dyed either blue or pink and whose severing before the assembly caused the loudest cries of all. The color foretold the child's destined caste. That the Ancients staked so much on so trivial a chromatic omen tells us everything.
Here, then, is what we know of the Screen People. They were a species terrified of the unknown and armed against it with nothing but sugar, small cloth, and the united volume of their own voices. They gathered to shout welcome at a soul who had not yet arrived, at a face none of them had seen.
A frightened, tender people, singing at a door before anyone knocked.