Excavation Report, Grand Assembly Hall, Stratum 4.
We have at last unearthed the site the fragments call a "Con," and it has reordered everything we believed about the Screen People. Prior scholars held that the Ancients feared the beasts of their dying world. We now know the opposite. Here, thousands gathered in a single climate-sealed chamber to become the animals they mourned.
The evidence is overwhelming. We recovered dozens of ceremonial pelts, artificial and painstakingly made, each a composite of a creature that no longer existed in pure form: a wolf with the eyes of a machine, a fox in impossible blues. These were not disguises. Disguise conceals. These were declarations, worn openly, in a lit hall, before witnesses.
The wear patterns on the interior show long hours of joyful occupation. The Ancients did not put these skins on to hide. They put them on to finally be seen.
Around the pelt-wearers we found the lesser devotions: small square tokens exchanged hand to hand, bearing painted likenesses of the wearer's chosen beast. We believe these were relics of recognition, offered to say I know what you are, and I am glad of it. There was a fee to enter. The Ancients paid gladly to stand in a room where their private animal was public and permitted.
Consider what this required of them. Outside these walls, we have found no such pelts, only the grey uniforms of their labor. They kept their true shapes folded in bags, carried through hostile streets, and released only here, among their own kind, for three sanctioned days a year.
They were a people who suspected the human form was a costume, and the animal underneath the truth, and who built one bright room where, at last, they could take the costume off.