S-ENF-026 - TROLL ARTIST

Item #: S-ENF-026
Object Designation: Troll Artist

For Penelope Khan, it was just another ordinary day.

A quiet morning in the library, spent catching up on the latest exciting string theory research. Apparently they'd proved it was either definitely true or definitely not true. Now all they had to do was work out which.

A stroll around the town at lunchtime, and a quiet pint in a pub. Then back to the library, for more enthralling reading. Penelope had her own cozy little nook, right up on the top floor of the building where nobody ever went. She sat in a comfortable armchair and watched the rain patter against the windows, a huge stack of books on the table in front of her.

Yes, this was the life. Just a perfectly normal, unremarkable day. Without any Foundation shenanigans whatsoever.

Penelope turned over the next page of her book, and saw something interesting. A slip of paper. Someone's bookmark, maybe? She turned it over.

A drawing. A very good drawing. A masterpiece, in fact, worthy of Da Vinci in his prime. Of her. Sitting at the table, clearly deep in thought, biting her lip. Dark hair tied back. Glasses perched on the bridge of her nose.

The only thing missing was her clothes.

Penelope looked down at herself, and saw she was mistaken. In fact, the drawing was a perfect likeness.

She took a deep breath, willing herself to stay calm. Okay, so she was sitting at the top of the library, with seven floors of patrolling staff and students between her and the exit. And she was on the other side of town from her rooms at St. Anne's College, which meant a long awkward run through the busy streets of Oxford. But, on the bright side, at least she was naked.

Wait, no, that was the problem. The bright side was that nobody could see her right now. If worst came to worst, she could just hide up here until nightfall, and sneak out.

Her phone buzzed.

Penelope picked it up and inputted her passcode, a seven-layer cryptographic hash that would take longer than the entire lifespan of the universe to crack through brute ****. She wasn't taking any chances with Foundation secrets!

She looked at the screen. It seemed that a number of pictures had just been posted to her Facebook and Instagram accounts. Pictures of her. They only showed her from the shoulders up, but it was still fairly obvious that she didn't have any clothes on.

They'd been tagged with her exact location. The caption read "Come and find me, boys! First person to reply to this with a full-frontal shot gets a thousand dollars!"

The phone buzzed again. The picture had three hundred views. Wait, no. Now it had five thousand.

Penelope put the phone down, and went to look out the window of the library. Despite the rain, the pavement below was crowded. Dozens of people seemed to be headed inside. They had their phones out, as if they were prepared to take a lot of photographs on short notice.

She shrieked, and jumped a foot in the air. Someone had just slapped her very hard on the bottom! She spun around, but there was nobody there.

Another sketch was sitting on the table. It showed Penelope, in the air, about a foot off the ground. No hand was in sight, but the expression on her face made it very clear that she'd just been slapped extremely hard on the bottom.

Penelope went to tear it up, took another look at it, and sighed. She couldn't do it. It was just far too nice a sketch.