My objective is to build an AppleScript that does nothing more than ask the user how many pages he or she wants to scan, and scan each page into a hardcoded location. I think that to get the job done, my AppleScript will need to tell another app, perhaps the one for the scanner, to initiate the scan.
AppleScript definitely can't do stuff like scanning by itself, so it would depend on the application or API that you are going to use.