The Simplex Arcana

Long before humanity even thought about history, an anonymous someone wrote a book. This book detailed the ins and outs of true magic and was regarded as the first and last source of information on learning said magic.
Then the cataclysm came, The Yggdrasil Shudder. The Antideluvian age came to a sudden halt. All knowledge vanished from the minds of those who survived. The world shifted, changed by forces beyond the power of gods. True magic was gone, and the prestige is what remained.
The Simplex Arcana is a tool, a frustrating, inconsistent, and often contradictory tool. The Prestige uses the same principles, but the application is so different, nothing in the book is true. Then again, everything in the book is 100% correct.

Isn't it only Magic?

The Prestige and true magic are different. It's why those who use the prestige get upset when the terms are confused. True magic could break fundamental laws. It could create and destroy matter, it rarely failed or backfired, and anyone could learn how to use it by simply opening the book and scanning its pages.
The Prestige is nothing like it. It forces you to find the flames yourself before you can cast the spell. It forces you to measure risk and reward, and learning it is a cruel and unusual punishment in and of itself. All this assumes you survive the rite that must be taken before even looking into how to cast the simplest of spells.
The Prestige requires The Simplex Arcana, but nothing in the text can be considered a fact when you read it. It must be read, memorized, and then fully tested to determine if there is any truth. This experimentation is a long and dangerous process. You never know if a spell will be cast, or if the effort will maim you beyond repair.

The Good Book

The Simplex Arcana is a book measuring 1 foot, by 11 inches that contains 777 physical pages. The pages, however, are more than sheets of paper. The paper is ancient, heavy and dense. The book has a black and brown leather cover.
Geometric designs are stitched in gold thread across the cover and the same design can be seen faintly on its pages. The book is heavily resistant to any type of wear and tear that may occur during use. It is flame retardant, hydrophobic, and any attempt to destroy the book will usually be met with a strange whining sound that is reminiscent of laughter.
When you open the book, the pages will be entirely blank. As you scan the pages looking for any sign of text, streams of black ink will flow down the page the book is turned to. The ink will form words in a strange language, linger for a moment as the reader tries to understand the text, then the words will morph into the language the reader understands most.

Contradictions

One of the more frustrating elements of studying The Prestige is how one practitioner can read the text, experiment with its teachings, and then meet a practitioner who has an entirely different set of results.
Both practitioners believed they knew what worked and what wouldn't, only to find that they were both equally correct and incorrect. The Prestige differs from one person to another. This is why the text is needed. By engaging in these experiments, one can learn the closest thing to magic there is.
These contradictions led to Grimoires. A grimoire is the collection of notes, detailed experiments, and findings that the practitioner lists on empty spaces and margins of their copy of The Simplex Arcana.

Grimoires

The grimoire is a means of showing one's work during their journey. While learning The Prestige, it's important to document your findings and compare them with others. While The Prestige has been around since ancient Greece, the actual focus on studying it began in the last few centuries.
The lack of those who survive the rite is the main reason for the slow progress. There are so few practitioners that the data collected is minimal. Finding similarities that make sense between two users who happen to share the same gifts continues to be difficult.
The grimoire is a personal thing. The notes within are a product of blood, sweat, tears. After every success and failure, the practitioner's power grows, and their understanding does as well. The only exception to this is Arcana Discordia, which is taught by a Discordian to their sponsored recruit who technically died in the rite to begin with.

Fun Fact: Babel

The language of the book is called "Babel," a language as old as language itself. Babel is a combination of every language ever to exist. It's impossible to understand, but those who study it believe that uncovering its secrets could grant The Gift of Tongues, or the ability to read, write, speak and understand every language you hear.
The Gift of Tongues is widely considered a myth, but in The Web, myths are found to be true all the time. Those who study Babel will learn the intricate and elegant way that seemingly contradictory grammar is blended.
There are patterns present in what words appear from what language during the text from start to finish, but much work needs to be done before this arcane mystery is resolved.

The University Archives

Subject- Simplex Arcana, The
-Designation: Text-
Personnel: Scholar Will (White) -surname redacted-| Division- Inkwell, Task Force: White|

The following lists key findings during the study conducted by The Alexandrian University, and serves as a summary of the full report.

1. This copy of The Simplex Arcana was sent to the university as a gift from The Oxford Cabal to better understand the physical elements of the text and analyze it from a different perspective.
   The Cabal assures us that the text was recently produced, the new copy appearing in the library within three hours after an older copy was removed, security feed backs up the claim. Designation: Self-Replicating Text
   Addendum: 1-A Carbon dating results indicate the book is somewhere near 250,000 years old.


2. The book's pages are responsive when viewed, even by those who do not have The Prestige. The book's pages begin blank, then text will appear written in Babel. The text will then translate itself to a language the reader understands.
   
   Addendum 2-A: In bilingual readers, the book will always choose the language the reader understands most, usually their first language.
   
   Addendum 2-B: There is increased brain activity when reading the book. This activity mirrors how the brain reacts when someone delivers information, recalls memory, and enters deep contemplation. The book is a direct cause of this as it only occurs when reading an opened page written in Babel. The activity is far more prominent than it should be. Current hypothesis: The book uses Babel as a means to scan for a language the reader will understand. Regardless, the transfer if information is present, as the book responds by changing the language and the brain returns to normal. Designation: Memetic.


3. The book can be voice activated by one who has The Prestige. By stating a specific subject directed at the book with the intent for the book to reveal information on the subject, the book will turn its pages, stopping at the page with the requested information.
   
   Addendum 3-A: The book contains more than information on The Arcane. A practitioner of The Prestige requested information from various other subjects, testing a hypothesis. She was successfully able to reveal pages on US History, pages detailing confidential phone calls of world leaders, and a recipe for Devil's Food Cake.
   
   Addendum 3-B: After further study with a second practitioner involved, the practitioners attempted to get the text to reveal song lyrics. Each attempt succeeded, but one was able to get lyrics that were not revealed to the other. After fifty attempts, the text slammed closed, refusing to open for three days. We promptly stopped testing the theory, but we believe the book varies on what it can show to each individual outside of The Arcane.


4. The text is not bound by its physical pages. The pages are not labeled, but a count on the book revealed it to have 777 distinct pages. When each page is taken in a sequence using the command: "next page," the book never turns the page but uses the current page, the ink changes to match the adjacent page instead. There is no telling how many pages the book contains. Addendum 4-A: Study ongoing, current count is 12,342 pages.


5. The book exhibits a sense of intelligence that we believe comes from the complex enchantments that went into its creation. The enchantments are so well done, that the book can emulate sentience. We've found that even if information is available to a reader, the book seems reluctant to display certain subjects, needing to be prompted up to 5 times to reveal the information before it will do so. Some subjects were outright refused. Subjects include The Scarlet Arts , criminal records, the true identities of The Black Betties, and other details that are classified even among other organizations in The Web.


6. The book has a "personality." Recent studies show that the book does have a sense of self. It is, at least in part, truely sentien. Each copy of the text differs in personality and this often reflect the practitioner who reads it the most. This personality develops over time, implying that the reader has a memetic affect on the text as much as the text does on the reader. Regardless of the personality, the text always addresses the reader as "Dear Reader."