Used by the routines at MATCH_PATTERN, ASK_WHICH and TARGET_TROUBLE.

Nearly everything the game says goes through here, as a compact bytecode rather than text. A byte with bit 7 set starts a two-byte word reference, high byte first: twelve bits of offset into the dictionary and a flag nibble, of which 2, 3 and 6 end the message. A byte from $60 to $7F is one of the COMMON_WORDS; from $20 to $5F, a literal character; below $20, a control code, dispatched through CONTROL_CODES -- below $14 as a subroutine that returns to the message, from $14 up as the end of it.

Checked against the screen, not only read: location 4's description decodes to exactly the words the game printed on arriving there, and so does Bag End's. The v1.0 disassembly credited in build_hobbit.py describes the same bytecode, and pointed at where to look.

The messages are stored end to end from MSG_BUT_FALL_AND_HIT, straight after COMMON_WORDS, and a few are entered part-way through another: five at an element boundary, sharing its tail -- the last is the two banks of the black river, one description entered at two places -- and one on the second byte of the word that ends the message before, which it reads as a control code.