The Ballad of Adler Young, Canto 2.5

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It looked like I had my work cut out for me.

With a sigh, I readied myself for a long and tedious study session. I reached into the bookshelf, pulled out one of the scrolls, unrolled it, and began to read.

Only half the books and scrolls are written in a language you can understand

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"Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit," the scroll began.

"What is this gibberish?" I exclaimed in dismay. It wasn't similar to Old High Elvish, or Standard Elvish, or any language I had ever seen before.

I pulled out one of the other scrolls and found that not only was it written in the same mysterious language, it contained the exact same text!! Another scroll was covered with cryptic diagrams full of dotted lines and numbers interspersed with blocks of the cryptic "Lorem ipsum" message again. Whatever it was, it must have been important for the scribes to have copied it so many times .. but unless I could find a Gibberish-to-Elvish translating dictionary, it wasn't going to be much use to me.

All of the scrolls turned out to contain the enigmatic text, so I set them aside and turned to the books.

those appear to assume the reader to already have advanced knowledge on the subject.

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This was slightly better - at least it was in a language I knew, but I quickly realized that the books were almost as useless as the scrolls. They seemed to be in some sort of code or technical jargon which assumed the reader already knew all the basic principles of operating the tower.

Tour Scryinge for Compleat Dummyes, the most basic of the guidebooks, still had instructions such as: "Elevayte ye Veeblefetzer to ye fourthe positione & apply Ebenezum's Equatione, rememberinge to applye Wuntvor's Corollarie to ye factorial resulte."

Nowhere among these books could I find a basic guide to explain what a Veeblefetzer was, nor how to work these equations.

>Who reads the manual? Just go straight to tinkering until something useful happens.
>use the boring but thick books to fashion a crow-proof armor

The only use I could see for these books was perhaps as shields / bludgeons for warding off crows the next time I went outside .. but that wasn't going to help me operate the scrying tower. Was it even possible for me to do so? I stared at the orb and thought.

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The last time I had been here, I had touched the orb. This caused it to show me a brief glimpse of a strange empty field, and then the orb had dissipated and the rings had fallen onto their pedestal. So, touching it was probably not the right thing to do.

Somebody must have come in here and repaired it, because clearly the orb was present and operating again now. I wondered who had done that, but there was no way to guess.

At a loss for anything else to try, I focused my mind and composed a Gramarye commanding the orb to open and let me use it.

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The next thing I knew, I was standing in the middle of the eerie plain that I had seen before.