Once Griffie withdraws from the sheet, the pencil marks begin to vanish. As there is no backpack in the way, this is visible to both Griffie and the crew.

Griffie looks at the vanishing pencil marks with an irritated expression. Of course the markings would behave like that, they require access to the Earth field to exist, and that isn't present outside of the bubble. How the spheres are staying together is unknown. Probably the note disintegrated too, then, but at least they clearly saw it.

Griffie rummages through their supplies for something small and pointy. Holes in the non-elemental paper should persist, and in theory you can write words with them, right? After the first minute of attempting to laboriously copy the glyph-sequence that might mean "incorrect" – they don't know which parts of the shape matter and which don't – they look frustrated again. They get out their pencil, finish rewriting the glyph-sequences, and then just show them to the spheres. The same slow pan that clearly worked last time.

They continue this process with the rest of the pages unless interrupted.

While this is happening, another drone shows up. This one has a screen on it. It alternates between displaying a video of Griffie poking the center of a ring on the screen on a drone, and said ring.

Well, it's pretty clear what this is requesting. Or at least it appears pretty clear. How much do I care whether that display is an illusion or not? Honestly, not that much compared to demonstrating that I'm capable of promptly getting the message. This probably isn't some very complicated hostile act because there are so many simpler hostile acts available.

Griffie pauses in their attempts to label correct and incorrect words and pokes the center of the ring.

The ring turns into a solid circle, flashing black and white for a moment, then switches to display something like the second note, except rather than having only one series of gylphs in the bottom box, it has both stacked on top of each other, one with a ring next to it, the other with a solid circle. The solid circles appear next to the text that appeared in the second note's bottom boxes. At the bottom righthand corner there is another ring, not in any of the boxes.

OK. This is like checkboxes? And here there is a display like the second page, but with the checkbox-circles next to what I'm calling "correct" and "incorrect". And then a checkbox-circle for saying I have looked at this page too?

Griffie taps the checkbox-like ring in the bottom-righthand corner.

The ring turns solid and flashes, then the text/image pairs change and the bottom boxes only contain rings, no already filled in circles.

Griffie gets out the first piece of paper and attempts to use it to fill out the checkbox-circles with the same scheme that the previous display-image used, tapping the rings that they want to turn solid in each pair.

The tapped rings do turn solid, and after answering them all and tapping the last ring, it goes to matching up bits of Celestial with images, like Griffie was doing before.

Griffie successfully rates the bits of Celestial as matching or not matching the images, hopefully with no mysterious technical difficulties this time.

There are no technical difficulties this time! After some of that, though less than the full papers that were given to Griffie, another drone arrives carrying what looks like a precise copy of Griffie's pencil, and the screen turns to look like Griffie's parchment.

Griffie tries making a few marks on their parchment and on the strange paper with the strange pencil first, and also decides that it's a good time to use Detect Magic again. Hopefully the sphere-operators will not be too concerned that Griffie isn't immediately doing the thing that they are very obviously being asked to do, namely writing on the glassy image tablet.

The strange pencil doesn't leave any marks on Griffie's parchment or the strange paper, and the tip doesn't feel like the right material.

None of the objects except for Griffie's appear to have magical auras.

Alright. Time to do the obvious thing now. Griffie attempts to use the pencil-replica on the glassy image tablet.

That results in marks! However, it is somewhat difficult to write on the surface, as the drone gets pushed around by the process.

Griffie holds onto the tablet to stabilize it before making some labeled sketches.

A few seconds after Griffie starts holding onto the tablet, the screen goes black.

Does tapping it with the fake pencil get it to return to its previous state? How about letting go of it again?

Upon being let go of the drone flies away, tablet screen still black.

Well, that didn't work. Maybe the tablet that doesn't rely on the Elemental fields to exist can't handle the presence of the Elemental fields either?

Maybe the sphere-operators will try another thing soon. In the meantime maybe, since they seem to have good image processing, it's time to show them a book? Holy text or Sylvan dictionary? The holy text has more images, but it's not like the images are labeled, and the dictionary is a dictionary. The sphere-operators might be annoyed that these aren't in Celestial. It still hopefully looks like productive effort.

Griffie gets out the holy text of Immonhiel, carefully keeping it in the Life Bubble effect, and starts showing the sphere-constructs pages. A bit faster and with less panning, this time, if they have such good images of the containers that's hopefully overkill?

While doing that, the tablet drone returns. This time, however, as it approaches, the tablet pops off the drone, attached by a cable, and with an imitation pencil also attached by cable.

Alright. Apparently the sphere-constructs don't want to be grabbed. A reasonable preference. Griffie attempts to draw with the new fake-pencil and glassy tablet.

This works a lot better.

Griffie holds onto the tablet for stabilization. Alright. What vocabulary to convey. Let's name some of the objects that are actually present and events that recently happened in full view of the sphere-constructs? It's not a good vocabulary-set but it's a very concrete one. Griffie draws and labels in Celestial the following:

• A shaded circle, mimicking a sphere lit by a single light source. Labeled "sphere".
• The pencil, writing squiggly lines on actual parchment. Arrows pointing at the pencil and parchment. Labeled "pencil" and "parchment".
• The fake pencil, writing on the weird paper and failing. Arrows pointing at the pencil and paper. Labeled "fake pencil" and "paper". Speculatively, the fake pencil is also labeled with the alien glyph-sequence that might mean "no" or "false" or "incorrect", followed by the word "pencil".
• A drone, labeled "sphere-construct".
• A sprig of mistletoe, like one on Griffie's headband, labeled "plant".
• A sprig of holly, like one on Griffie's headband, labeled "plant".
• A stylized drawing of an unclothed leshy, the sort of being Griffie is. No anatomical detail is present save for dots for the eyes. Labeled "plant-construct".
• Grids like Griffie used for the prime numbers, going from 1 to 20, labeled "1 rectangle" through "Set of 20 rectangles".
• A sketch of the most visually prominent constellation, labeled "Set of stars".
• A spiral, labeled "spiral".
• A swirly star, labeled "spiral-star".
• A leshy holding a pencil, labeled "Leshy holding pencil".
• An open backpack with a piece of parchment in it, labeled "Backpack holding parchment."
• A leshy grabbing a tablet-drone, labeled "Leshy holding sphere-construct". Next to this, the alien sequence that might mean "no" or "false" or "incorrect" appears.
• A leshy grabbing a tablet on a cable extended by a drone, labeled "Leshy holding tablet from sphere-construct". Next to this, the alien sequence that might mean "yes" or "true" or "correct" appears.

At this point Griffie notices that they have drawn and written an awful lot of things without checking whether the communication format works very well, and decides to stop and wait a bit for a response.

After a long pause during which the tablet ceases to receive input, the screen is completely replaced.

The screen now contains a series of rows. Each row has a box with an alien glyph sequence on the left and an oval with an image in the middle. 

On the right each row has one of two things: Some have a box containing a Celestial glyph sequence followed by two rings, one with the alien glyph sequence used for matching words and the other with the alien glyph sequence used for non-matching words. Others have an empty box with a parchment-like background.

The first several rows have ovals containing each item from the container collection that Griffie labeled, with the alien glyph-sequences corresponding to the containers from the first page on the left and with Griffie's labels for each of the containers on the right along with the ring setup.

The next row has an oval containing the entire container collection, the document header on the first page on the left, and a parchment space on the right.

The next row has an oval containing Griffie's sketches of holly and mistletoe, with no label on the left, and the Celestial word "plant" with a ring setup on the right.

The row after that has an oval containing a pictures of many different varieties of holly and mistletoe, with an alien glyph sequence on the left, and the Celestial word "plant" with a ring setup on the right.

Then, at the bottom right corner, there is a single ring, like the one that was previously used to advance.