And, from the darkness, with a flourish of fog and glitter cascading around them like so much sea spray, emerges a figure.

Inhumanly tall and with unnaturally much of that height being leg, they cast a striking silhouette.  They are clad mostly in deep red velvet layered over black silk and leather, composed into a strange and quite ornate outfit.  Tasteful sparkles of gold and silver jewelry ornament them there and there and there, and they too are masked, though in a simpler style, evocative of a black skull.  A mane of densely curled golden blond hair pours out from their scalp, whipping around them in the gale.

The fog dissipates and the wind quiets as their gaze flicks between the assembled ceremonialists.

The assembled humans[A] all look at each other--actually most of A look at the androgynous one with the fancy yarn--and then back at the tall blond person[B] like A're expecting B to say something. The one with the weaving smiles encouragingly.

The dramatic newcomer produces some sort of static, in the air and clinging to the humans' skin and building in their ears.  This lasts only a moment before it resolves, like an old radio being tuned, into music.  Orchestral, grand, intricate; it sounds like its source sweeps and teleports through different locations in the clearing.

And after not very long, it pauses, the last note ringing, and if any of the humans think back on it they find they aren't quite able to remember the tune.

The newcomer continues to stand, posed elegantly, where they appeared.

One person starts applauding, which gets the rest to join in. Then the one with the spiderweb photo raises a hand and says, "External: sorry, I can't tell which muse you metaphorically-are?"

The metaphorical muse produces a shorter musical phrase.

"I was unable to extract syntactic content from that," says the weaver. (This is a single syllable in Convergentlanguage, and sounds very different from the two-syllable word for "I was able to extract syntactic but not semantic content from that" and the one syllable for "my interpretation of that was ambiguous or low-prior in a way I cannot easily phrase a clarifying question about".)

What a musical muse this is.  This time there's - maybe the barest hint of meaning in it?  For a split second, the speaker's confusion is echoed back to the group.

The masked person[A] looks around, hurries through the concluding phrase with A's metaphorical heart not really in it, and then pulls off A's mask. "Are you okay, person?"

Confusion concept music??

The writer tries singing the chorus of a song about meeting new people [B] and learning about B and befriending B.

The newcomer watches and listens intently, and then . . . does not stop doing that when the singing does.

. . . How about the first verse and then the chorus again? A couple more people join in on second chorus.

They keep up their very focused observation, and, once they're sure the people are done singing for the moment:

Friendship concept!  New people concept - new place concept?  (This is the first communication they've added an aspect of novelty to; it's metaphorically a bit fuzzier around the edges but not much less comprehensible.)  Old place bad old-new place good-bad, old place bad bad bad bad new place good question mark friendship concept?

This kicks off a huddle and a hasty conversation.

". . . Alien telepath?"

"Alien telepath."

"Outsidepredictionspaceevent!"

"Very."

"We're gonna clean up in the markets."

"Help us figure out communicating with the alien first!"

"I'm going to!"

"I call trying first."

Then the humans all turn back to the new arrival and the one with the pieces of colored glass says "This is a good place. We're friendly and we want to help," and holds out one of the pieces of glass--a translucent deep blue one with its sharp edges already covered by copper tape--in an open palm. "Would you like a present because we're friends?"

The alien doesn't react to this for several long seconds, then steps forward to examine the glass.  Their footsteps are audible (though they sound a bit unusual), but the train of their skirt brushing over the forest floor is not.

They bend down close to look at the glass, then look up at the person holding it without sending anything.  They do not seem to have much of a concept of personal space.

Well, everyone knows that if aliens exist they're inevitably going to be super weird. At least this one is bigger than a mouse and smaller than a traincar and doesn't think the standard polite greeting is an exchange of internal organs and is generally pretty tame by the standards of First Contact fiction. She flinches a little but keeps her hand out and tries singing another song, this one a little kids' song about how everything in the world is beautiful and the world is a great place to be.

They back off a bit while listening, and again wait till several seconds after she's finished to respond. Then, wordlessly and musically, they ask what a present is.

Aliens in First Contact fiction do sometimes have no concept of private property, so the genre is doing at least a bit of its intended job as scenario planning for reality. "It means I will be happy if you keep it with you and do things with it and use it for whatever you want to use it for. I use things like it to make big art pieces." As they say this they concentrate hard on first their remaining supply of these colors and then on their last stained-glass window as currently installed in a client's house, in case the telepathy does images, and then they hastily pull out their handcomp with the other hand and bring up a picture, in case it doesn't.

Well, this gets the alien to gingerly accept the glass, whether or not either of the nonverbal communication attempts were successful.  They turn it over in their hand, examining it from different angles, then close their fingers around it, return their hand to their side, and cast their gaze back up to the group.

The person with the yarn runs out of impulse control. "Where did you come from? Why are you on Firstplanet? To what extent is that what you always look like and to what extent did you pick it to match the context?"

They again send the old place concept, with an attached connotation of bad bad bad bad rather than that being explicitly stated after the fact, and also maybe it seems kind of naturey?  The badness distinctly has the flavor of being boring or stifling; the alien doesn't seem likely to be fleeing a dying world or dealing with a similar level of threat.

The next response is a bit hard to interpret, but the pieces that come across have something to do with getting help from someone more powerful and something about random chance.

They look like this all the time because of a previous context.

That seems pretty promising as these things go! 

"Do you want to come back to the city with us? The city has more people and more things to see and do."

'Yes,' they say, and this time it sounds (or, well, "sounds") like words and not like music.

"Ayyyy, syntax!" says the one with the yarn.

"The end of the train line is a few miles this way," says the erstwhile ceremony leader, taking a few steps that way and making a beckoning gesture. The mathematician and the glass artist start packing up the lanterns.

The alien follows the ceremony leader and pauses when they do.  'Elaborate on 'train'.'