Handcomp picture of a train! The writer wins the race on this because she has a train as her lock screen. Meanwhile the glass artist explains, "A train is a machine for bringing people between a fixed set of places. We can all get in a big metal container and it will move to a new place and stop and move to another new place and stop and do that several more times. And when it gets to the place near where we want to go we will get out and walk there."

"Hey, where do we want to go? City hall is going to be closed. I guess we could call the emergency line?"

"If I was the person working the emergency line I would be happy to be called about aliens."

"I vote we work on language all night and go to City Hall in the morning when the alien can say if they want to or not."

"Good point, I change my mind. Hey alien, you got a name?"

'Ancorabenilisifentiliane,' they say, not looking up from the handcomp.  'What is this.'

"I was unable to extract syntactic content from that," four of the seven people say in unison. "Repeat very slowly?" Adds the weaver.

'An-cor-a-ben-i-lis-i-fen-til-i-a-ne.'

The programmer concentrates for a few seconds and then says "Ancorabenilisifentiliane. I'm Tren."

The others introduce themselves as Voli (the MC), Artha (with the photo), Kara (with the yarn), Neren (with the glass), Tona (with the weaving), and Mark (with the novel). Also they push back the hoods of their cloaks, which reveals that Mark has about six rings in each of her ears, Neren has pointy ears and no eyebrows, and Tona has six-color rainbow hair.

They nod to each of them when introduced, then turn their eyes back to the nearest handcomp.  'What is this,' they repeat.

"This is a handcomp! It can get most information that isn't a secret--text, pictures, how to get places, math--and I can communicate through it with anyone else with a handcomp, and it can record and display pictures and sound and video and keep track of appointments and play games and things."

They stare for a while.

'How.'

Tren says, "It's made of millions of tiny parts that can do logical operations and follow sequences of instructions in order, and it has sets of instructions to do those things, and it can get more information and more instructions from other machines via radio waves, which are a kind of invisible light. Invisible to us, I mean," he adds, pointing at himself and the other humans.

Stare stare stare.

'It is very regular.'

"The process is very regular, yes. Here, let me show you the camera." He turns on the front-facing camera and holds it up so Ancorabenilisifentiliane can see their own face. "See?"

'No.'

"Can you describe what you do perceive? Is the problem localising the handcomp in space, interpreting the 2d projected image, the pixels, the frame rate, other?"

'This is intended to display a 2d projected image?'

"Yes. Can you describe what you see in this area?" He traces around the edge of the screen with his finger.

'I see rectangles, in three colors.'

"Oh cool, you have really high visual acuity! Uh, hm, can you try to--reduce your focus a bit? Do you see how the relative brightnesses of the rectangles varies from one part of the screen to another? Our eyes integrate the brightnesses and interpret each set of three colors as a single color and the pattern of those integrated colors is the picture the handcomp is displaying. If you can't figure it out right now that's okay, just, handcomps are really useful. Actually let me give you a simpler image to practice on." He switches to a picture of a dark gray square on a white background.

'Describe the image the handcomp is currently displaying.'

"It's a dark gray square on a white background. With a bit of metadata at the top; please ignore that." He covers the top centimeter or so of the screen with his thumb. 

'I see the outline of this.  The colors differ; I see the square as' [untranslatable concept, rendered as music] 'and the background as' [second untranslatable concept rendered as music].  'Your species sees only one consistent set of colors?'

"Uh, most of us have about the same ability to detect the any given frequency of light, in a band between--I forget and I don't know if you even understand our measurements, both ends are somewhere in the nanometers, anyway some people have reduced sensitivity to some of those frequencies and can distinguish fewer colors than the modal person. There's a project to enable people to see more colors than currently possible but they've only succeeded in mice."

'How many colors can the modal person see.'

"We have three kinds of light receptor and can distinguish--let me look it up--about a million hues, but Convergentlanguage buckets them much more closely, we only have a few dozen words for colors."

'I see.'  Blink, blink.  Blink blink.  'Are your three kinds of light receptor attuned to the three colors which this projects.'

"Approximately--the handcomp colors are optimized for combinations of them being able to reproduce anything we can see. How much of the electromagnetic spectrum can you see? Can you see the handcomp-towers?"

(There's a tower on the far side of a lot of trees from here, broadcasting its signal and listening to the locals' devices in the 700-800 MHz band.)