Synopsis 2

He found it buried under a stone slab in the floor of an ancient monastery that stood beside an oxbow bend in an endless river. The manuscript was not unlike the many other bound vellum tomes that filled the library’s shelves, waiting to be illuminated. But this was no ordinary manuscript. Within its pages were the designs for a most curious machine, as well as a phrase book of translations from an unknown language into Latin. There were faint scribbles in the margins, and cut into its pages was a rock as blue as a robin’s egg. Because he was the curious sort, Brother Ignatius “Iggy” Agapitus, who liked to tinker and had filled the monastery grounds with ornate bird houses of his own design, followed the instructions and built the machine in the work shed in the courtyard, which took the better part of that year, 1519. The other brothers assumed the project was to be a large bird house, albeit one somehow powered by the monastery’s waterwheel. Their vow of silence was enough to keep them from asking too many questions. When it was complete, Iggy sat inside with the book on his lap and wondered just what it was he had built. He placed the blue rock in its place. Suddenly the machine spurred and rattled and hiccuped and hummed and ...