Around Eleven Hundred Years Later…

A human scientist and an elf scientist sat in their lab. A selkie curator hovered nearby. They were finally scanning the newest manuscript in the national library’s collection. Its previous owner had been a Lord who donated it in exchange for paying taxes. How he got this priceless 10th century manuscript was unknown. It was one of the few surviving manuscripts from that particular monastic house that survived the dissolution of the monasteries. The house style was particularly interesting. Manuscripts originating from the scriptorium were easily distinguished if it was illuminated by Brother Benet–he had a tendency to fill manuscripts with pictures of demon babies. (Which, the scientists decided, was no wonder. Legend said he was the first human to successfully carry a demon/human hybrid known as a cambion. Their cambion colleague was supposed to attend the imaging session as it was emotionally important to her, but she had the flu and was unable to make it.) 

“Alright,” the human said. “This quire in the middle looks like it has a palimpsest of some drawings, but they’re hard to decipher. Let’s use the ultraviolet light on it to see what we’re looking at and if it's worth doing multi-spectral imaging on it.”

They got out the ultraviolet light and held it over the parchment. 

The elf nearly dropped it on the manuscript, but the selkie caught it. 

“What the hell? Be careful with that!” The selkie snapped. “This is priceless!”

“Oh my God,” The elf said. “Did you see what was on the page?”

“No, I was too busy catching the light before it damaged an eleven hundred year old manuscript!”

“What did you see?” The human asked.

“Uhhhh….I don’t want to say in case I’m wrong.”

The selkie held the light over the parchment. “....What the fuck?” she whispered.

“What the fuck indeed,” The human laughed. “Is this for real?”

Under the neat uncial was a drawing of an elven monk fucking what looked to be a werewolf monk. 

“Oh my God,” The selkie said. “This is incredible.”

“We’re gonna lose our funding,” the elf muttered. 

“No we won’t,” The human said. “It’s not like we purposely set out to discover this. We will be in all the tabloids though. So be prepared for getting bullied on social media for daring to say gay people existed in the past.”

“I’m so excited to catalogue this,” the selkie flipped the page. “I wonder if there is more?”

To the selkie’s delight, the entire quire was filled with erotic images that had been meticulously scrubbed out of the parchment once upon a time. She couldn’t help but wonder what happened to the person who drew them and what this Wulfric would think if he learned three strangers over a thousand years later knew what his genitals looked like. She also wondered if it would be possible to get funding to test the parchment for biomolecular analysis for seminal fluid. Oh, the days ahead were going to be filled with frantic writing for grants and funding applications. 

What fun! 

AUTHOR'S NOTE:

 I did research on how they find hidden texts in manuscripts, but I’m not sure if this is 100% accurate. I know people who do know how to do it, but I’m not asking them to beta read my story when the discovery the scientists make is gay porn. Sorry. (Feel free to tell me what I got wrong in the comments, if you know! Glass houses, pot calling kettle black, devil’s sacrament and all that.)