Penny had a little problem, she had uncharacteristic loss of creativity during the weekend and simply couldn’t come up with any interesting pranks. She had thought about creating and enchanted DVD and fill it with illusion magic to resemble the movies with cursed video tapes and horror movies and urban legends, but who rented DVDs these days? And even if someone did rent her “cursed” DVD after she spread rumors about it on the internet, there was always the chance someone could get hurt or even die with a prank this drastic. Then she thought of casting selective illusion magic on the Hero’s sword to make it look like a dildo, but then remembered she already did something similar to the Demon Lord and besides, she pulled her last prank on the Hero, so now she had to pull one on the Demon Lord or else it wouldn’t be fair. In the end she chose to ditch the creativity and go for something old and tried, if a little boring.

Penny got a bunch of A5 paper and wrote all sorts of things on her computer, then took her flash drive, the paper and teleported to some random town to print things. She was a little paranoid the government could trace her through her printer if she used her own. Maybe she had watched too many movies or she was right, but either way it didn’t hurt to be cautious. She even shapeshifted to a random identity while printing, so she wouldn’t be recognized. When she was done, she teleported back home and started casting compulsion spells on the printouts. And I can already hear the question rising about what compulsion magic is. Yes, yes, I will answer it. Compulsion magic is part of the prankster arsenal of magic spells and is the weakest, most mundane application of mind control for the purpose of pulling a prank. No, it can’t control a person like a puppet or a minion or make them fall in love with you. The spell simply makes you really want to push that one button, which activates the prankster’s trap, or pull that rope that goes and disappears into the ceiling, or sniff that pretty flower that would spray you with ink, or pollen, or something stinky. Now in this case, Penny was compelling people to do what was written on her papers.

Next, Penny tinkered with her teleportation magic, to make it work like the portal gun from the game Portal, creating one portal before her and another at a place she wanted as an exit. It was long overdue for her to create such a spell and also, she didn’t want to waste a lot of effort and time with pulling such underwhelming prank, so she was just going to sit back, watch some government people on her monitors and teleport her papers through the portals. She of course made sure they were invisible, then cast the spell on herself and took a roll of duct tape from her pocket dimension. Then she opened her portal and started sticking papers on the backs of unsuspecting people with the tape.

In the halls of the White House, a file clerk was transporting documents, when he was kicked from behind and stumbled forward, dropping everything he was carrying. When he stood up and turned to see who had kicked him, another person saw the sign taped to his back and he was kicked again, stumbling on the floor. In another part of the building a scream of pain was heard, as a grown ass man received a whedgie by a woman a head shorter than him. He also had a sign on his back. In yet another part of the building, a woman received a hug from behind, then another from someone else not a minute later and another after that. She had no idea what was going on, but the hugs lifted her mood a little and she didn’t mind. After a few more hugs, the paper on her back fell off, but she had good mood for the rest of the day. Another man received a pat on the back from almost everyone coming from behind him in the hallway and he had no idea why. He felt like he was in high school again, after some big sport victory and everyone was congratulating him. There was both good and bad things written on the papers stuck to the backs of people and luckily for the people with ‘Kick Me’ ‘Give Me a Wedgie’ ‘Slap my Bootie’ and others, the enchantments only lasted for a few hours. If people wanted to do it after that, it wasn’t because of the compulsions.

Back with Penny, she was just programing a few new fabricators with the things she wanted them to start fabricating for her new facility and then got back to finishing her work in space. She fabricated devices on her first fabricator, then enchanted them and used the life pod to fly up to satellite orbit. The next few hours she installed a device on every satellite connected to communications, internet, GPS, weather and military. There were only around 20 000 satellites floating around Earth, so it would take her only one more week to take them all over. Then as she was finishing her current batch, she received a call on her glasses from her company, so she took it.

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-Penny, we found the perfect building for the new facility. We know you are in a hurry, so we completed the price negotiations and bought it, the paperwork is finished and just needs your signature. If you sign the papers today, we can start working on the building tomorrow. We also arranged more meetings with tabletop manufacturers for next week, but we can take care of them if you enter the rules for their games in the console, we assumed it wouldn’t take you much time, seeing as you did it from one day to the next.-

-You people are doing fantastic work. I just have to finish working on something and can be there in one hour to sign the documents. Then tomorrow morning, before going to the building I will stop by the office to enter the data for the new games. How are the preparations for the launch of the HoloCon going?-

-We distributed advertising materials to some media, sites and agencies. We also hired some new people to take care of our site and servers and they are telling me, we don’t have enough servers to take care of the expected load the consoles would put on them. Do you want us to take care of that, or do you have preferences of what servers to use?-

-Oh, don’t worry about that. I have some high end servers that I can transfer to the office together with cooling equipment. But soon we will have to change buildings if we continue to grow at this rate. I will have to look up some solution.-“If the one I have in the works doesn’t work for some of my employees.”

Penny looked at how many satellites she had left and concluded she could be done in half an hour if she stopped working leisurely and hurried, so she got back to work. When she was done, she teleported herself and the life pod to her lab and then got ready to go to the office. Another half an hour later and she was signing the papers for the new property. Now she just had to hire some transporters to transport the tech she was fabricating and some builders to install it and renovate the building a little. She calculated that if she paid them for a little overtime, they could finish before the unveiling of the console. They may even hold the press conference there and show off the capabilities of the technology. Yeah, they should totally do that, I think I will write it that way.

After finishing in the office, Penny visited Jenny to see how she was doing, help her with some groceries and tell her how things were going. She told her how she had applied the holographic technology and the game console’s processing power to make the tabletop games into holographic adventure LARP and all the agreements they were getting. Then she got home and started working on programing the new tabletop game’s rules and other things, the she looked in the hard drive where she kept all her stolen schematics for some next generation servers and cooling equipment for them. She really hoped the hard work will soon be over and she could go back to doing and researching whatever she wanted. And if things worked like she was hoping, soon she could go adventuring with Jenny by her side.

The next day, early in the morning, Penny was observing the people from the transportation company as they were loading the equipment for the facility. When they were done and drove off, she went to the office to drop the new programing for them and then also went to the site of the building to supervise the people there. And that is pretty much how the next week was spent. At some point she called someone to transport the new servers to the office, but that was all that was different. That and the next prank she pulled at the end of the week, which was going to be the last one she pulled before it was time for her big one, which she was going to pull a week after the unveiling. As for the prank, it wasn’t anything big or epic, she just got a whoopee cushions and rigged it to release containers of laughing gas as someone sat on it and then put it under the chair in a government meeting room a few minutes before some big wigs were going to have a meeting, together with the invisible canisters of gas. That had to do until she was ready for the big thing, which was hyped so much and The Author was hoping wasn’t going to turn into a disappointment for his readers.

So, after supervising the builders for the entirety of last week and making sure they knew what they were doing, she left them to do their job during the next week and continued doing some finishing touches for the big reveal at the end of the week. She finished a few more games for last minute testing, updated some that her testers had found problems in the story or inconsistencies and returned for verification and then started creating a production line in her factory for the game consoles and all of the peripheral equipment for them. And then the remodeling of the building was done, everything was installed and everyone was ready for the press conference. And then the big day came and Penny couldn’t wait to see what everyone’s reaction would be to her game console. Could it measure up to the giants in the industry and surpass them or was it going to be forgotten by history as just some short lived novelty?