Word Count: 1,840


"What's that?" his friend Eren asked later during lunch.

Armin handed him the yet-unopened note. "It's a puzzle."

Eren opened and stared at it, clearly very confused. "Good luck, man. It's just numbers."

The blond boy laughed and took it back. "I know. They should be just atomic numbers arranged to make poorly spelled words. It's not that hard." He glanced at what the note had for him this time:

68 / 9 77 16 / 17 92 / 3 99 / 49 / 74 85

Er first clue lies in wait

Er? Oh, it must have been for want of a Y for 'yer'… even though Yttrium existed. At the very least, he could now at least joke that whoever liked him talked kind of like Hagrid…

49 / 33 / 27 68 7 68 / 5 53 / 90 / 31 22.

In a corner by the gate.

That literally narrowed it down to about two general locations in the entire school. Well, this would be easier than he anticipated. He wasn't sure whether the writer was making a pun on their possible sexuality by putting 'BI' in place of 'by', but he found it to be an entertaining thought.

74 2 75 / 90 / 38 92 66 7 16 / 88 75 3 / 45 8 95,

Where the students rarely roam,

…There were pretty much always people by the two gates to the school, at least when he was there.

He hoped it wasn't talking about a gate into the fourth dimension, because he didn't have the funds to go into researching that quite yet. Or for the next few years.

13 8 7 / 90 / 3 23 49 , 5 75 85 1 49 / 1 13

Along the living, breathing hall

The what now?

3 99 / 18 / 45 8 76 / 90 85 / 53 / 6 13 / 67 25

Lies a room that I call home

He really wished that the scientists could hurry up and discover more elements and give them single letter atomic symbols so that he wouldn't have to suffer through all this bad spelling born out of desperation rather than stupidity.

And also, he had no idea what room any student would call home on their godforsaken, dirt-poor campus covered in gum wads. They either had to be pretty poor themselves (wouldn't have surprised him; to get a poor school, you had to have poor residents funding the school), or that room had better be pretty damn homey.

95 8 7 / 90 / 75 95 16 , 92 / 9 53 60 / 90 / 3 81 / 32 75 7 / 66 8 3.

Among the reams, you find the little green dolly.

He handed the note, complete with the (hopefully) sensical translation of the code to Eren just as their friend Mikasa sat down with her own lunch. She too glanced over at the note with the riddle on it.

"It started out making sense, but then it fell into a downward spiral of nonsensical misspellings," Armin lamented. "A 'living, breathing hall'? I mean–" He was reduced to nothing but strange hand gestures and strangled noises; eventually, he flopped down onto their lunch table out of sheer confoundment.

"I've got nothing." Mikasa shrugged as Eren handed back the note.

Armin looked it over again, rereading the riddle in its entirety, hoping that it would make more sense if read like that.

The only two locations by gates in the school would be the guard shack by the front of the school and the music and drama rooms in the outskirts of the back. Both were fairly populated in the mornings and afternoons, when everyone was entering or exiting the school. However, the back gate was the one with the hall that the least students traversed, since no one liked going to the music or drama rooms because of how out of the way they were.

So, three options. The band room, the choir room, or the drama room. He still had no idea what the 'living, breathing' line meant, but it seemed negligible for the moment.

Being a band student himself, he knew that many of his classmates considered the band room to be like a second home to them, hanging out there during lunch and pretty much living there as it seemed from time to time. From his few drama friends and even fewer choir friends, they seemed to think the same about their own respective rooms as well.

So, the line "Lies a room that I call home" ruled out absolutely nothing.

But "reams" was a word for piles of sheet music bound together, which ruled out the drama classroom. That meant the little green dolly was…

"Shrek," he said aloud, probably sounding a lot more suspicious than he did epiphany-like.

"What?" his friends said in unison.

"The Shrek doll in the band room," Armin explained. "You know, the one everyone likes to put their hats on? I'm pretty sure that's where the next clue is."

They looked blankly at him.

"...I explained someone left a crush note on my desk asking me if I wanted to go on a scavenger hunt to find them, right?"

"What?" Eren cried.

"No," Mikasa said right after.

"I thought it was just a random puzzle."

Armin grinned sheepishly at them. "Well, uh–" for want of something better to do, he finger gunned them– "now you know."

Eren peered curiously at him. "You're really going on a wild goose chase to find someone like that?"

"Well, wouldn't you?"

"Pff, no. Too much work."

Armin began to inhale his lunch and pack up. "Well, you honestly have the brain capacity of a teaspoon sometimes. Some of us happen to have curiosity." He stuffed the last of his food into his mouth and slung his backpack over his shoulder. "See ya later!"


He'd never been inside the band room for lunch before, aside from the few times he'd hung out with Eren and Mikasa in practice rooms because they had to practice or copy homework or whatever it was they needed to do in a soundproof, security-camera-free environment. Usually nothing too illegal.

It was a lot less populated than he anticipated.

He wove his way passed the line of people waiting to use the lone microwave near the door, the only one students were allowed to use since the nurse stopped offering hers, passed the other line leading into the director's office where store-bought goods were sold illegally as an infinitely-ongoing fundraiser, to the little table by the year-by-year panoramas of the marching band where the stuffed Shrek doll sat in all his Burger King crowned glory.

Feeling a little self-conscious, he stuck his head down the crown and felt around.

(He felt very awkward about it, and he silently vowed to never acknowledge that he ever did this, ever.)

There, wedged between the crown and the doll's head was yet another note. He fished it out: it was folded into a triangle, just like the ones that had been on his desk had been. Not wanting to stand out in the open, he ducked into the nearest empty practice room to read it.

Muffled bass clarinet played in the background; though nobody outside the door could ever hear what went on inside the practice rooms, the walls between them were unfortunately thing. But he ignored it and read the side of the note that had English.

In the laboratory, you are studying the first-order conversion of a reactant X to products in a reaction vessel with a constant volume of 1.000 L. At 1:00 p.m., you start the reaction at 25℃ with 1.000 mol of X. At 2:00 p.m., you find that 0.600 mol of X remains, and you immediately increase the temperature of the reaction mixture to 35℃. At 3:00 p.m., you discover that 0.200 mol of X is still present. You want to finish the reaction by 4:00 p.m. but need to continue it until only 0.010 mol of X remains, so you decide to increase it once again. What is the minimum temperature required to convert all but 0.010 mol of X to products by 4:00 p.m.?

And then, just beneath that was:

Now take your answer
Negate by two and repeat
Until you've your code.

The problem itself was typed, unlike everything else he had so far received, all of which had been hand written. It was probably the sender's old homework, or perhaps just a spare from their class. Alas, they must not have shared the same teacher, for he did not recognize the problem, but he got to work anyway.

Whoever was sending him these seemed to be really into poetry: the last handwritten bit on the bottom of the page had the syllable scheme of a haiku. He had to admit, he was a bit of a poetry freak as well, and man did the alliteration in the last line please him.

49℃.

He looked at his work and double checked everything. It had been a year since he had taken Chemistry (he had chosen not to take the AP course this year because he knew he would be bogged down by AP Lang) so he knew he was a little rusty. Satisfied, he was about to begin deciphering the haiku when the bell signalling the end of lunch rang.

With a sigh, he folded up the note, slung his backpack over his shoulder, and walked to class.


He snuck a peek at the back of the paper, where the true riddle lay, during history, hoping that perhaps it would make it more obvious as to what the haiku meant, for he had not the time to think about it at the moment.

49 27 27 / 13 11 9 43 41 23 11 13 / 25 9 13 11 / 19 49 13 13

11 35 15 21 9 37 35 / 11 35 33 13 / 45 27 49 13 13

11 21 / 37 15 49 43 9 49 11 41 .

11 49 27 29 / 49 47 21 9 11 / -1 21 25 47 33 41 13

11 49 27 29 / 49 47 21 9 11 / 49 11 21 25 13

11 49 27 29 / 49 47 21 9 11 / 49 27 27 / 33 23 / 47 41 11 5 41 41 23 .

33 23 / 45 49 13 41 / 1 21 9 / 43 21 23 ' 11 / 35 49 7 41 / 33 11

47 1 / 13 21 25 41 / 45 15 49 -1 1 / 25 49 37 33 45

11 35 33 13 / 45 27 49 13 13 / 33 13 / 49 27 13 21

49 / 45 27 9 47 .

25 49 49 .

Oh. Oh dear. This one was quite long. He had no time to solve for it at the moment, not when dates called.

However, it did not escape him that all the numbers were odd.


Author's Note ii. hello yes part two. i forgot to include the riddle in the previous chapter so uh whoops. it's okay. offer still stands.

mm i love sending these shingeki kids to a dirt-poor school covered in gum wads like my own. also our band room really does have a shrek doll in it. i swear to god it does. i'd post a picture of it but alas not yet. and also ff doesn't allow that. what the hell ff get up to ao3's level. mm probably going to add bonus content to the ao3 version of this bc they actually let me do cool stuff like that.

anyway wow thanks for all of you guys' support! ! ! ! i really appreciate it. have a great day~~