I do not own Skip Beat!
Hi guys! This chapter is inspired by allsecretstaresweet's specific request lol , this is dedicated to you darling! I hope you'll enjoy it, and thank you for the inspiration! I'll try not to bore you guys with the details, and keep it as simple as possible, let me know if you have any remarks or if you want to correct any mistakes please! Enjoy!
Ch10 : Fool me once
Kyoko stared at the poster hanging in front of her, then sighing deeply, she clicked her tongue "Tsk, there's nothing to do about it anyway…"
"Why the long face?" a familiar voice asked her.
She snapped her head up to meet his gaze, just to see Tsuruga Ren, an upperclassman, she also came to know him because of his rivalry with her childhood friend Fuwa Sho, for some reason, he seemed to enjoy teasing her as well, he wasn't particularly mean, but he wasn't the charmer everyone knew him to be around her.
"Hello, senpai," she said, in a monotone voice "how good to see you."
"Ah, the sweet smell of sarcasm in the morning!" he said smirking; putting his hands in his pant pockets he looked at the poster Kyoko was so interested in "Hmm? Is this what's making you so blue?"
"Doesn't matter, I'm not gonna participate anyway…" Kyoko said trying to brush him off…
"Why not?"… and failing.
"Heh…" Kyoko's face darkened at the memory, she had participated at the competition the previous year, working her butt off on the project, just to find out that her partner had presented it under his name, just his name! stealing all her hard work and the first place prize, she knew she had a bad feeling when he proposed to present it instead since she did all the actual work, 'serves me right for being naïve' she thought "Let's just say I have a bad history with this competition…"
"You mean because of Fuwa?" he asked with an amused grin.
"How did you-" she tried to ask how he figured it out just to be interrupted.
"Come on Mogami, half campus knows that he's not … bright enough to come up with a program like that himself!"
Kyoko snorted, he had a point, Sho might be in a computer science major, but he wasn't half as interested in studying as he was in flirting with young ladies.
"So, I heard he was participating with Aki this year…"
"With Shoko senpai? Really? What was she thinking?" Kyoko crinkled her nose in disgust, Shoko Aki was a very talented and hardworking classmate of Ren, she was known to be right after Ren and Yashiro in the upperclassmen's top students list, for some reason, Kyoko found it hard to imagine her and Sho as partners.
Ren shrugged "Wanna teach him a lesson?"
"What? With you?" she raised a brow, giving him a questioning look.
"I'm as fond of him as you are and I happen to have the time for some fun." He was giving her a cheeky smirk, as if challenging her, and without thinking twice about it, she had agreed.
"Deal, but we'll split the work in two." She said, leaving no place for arguments, 'fool me once shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me'.
"Fine by me!"
The contestants were gathered, the professors explained the rules to the competition one last time, they also reminded them of the time they were given and wished them good look.
The competition in question was different to last year's, that one had coding as a theme, each participant have been given a problem they had to solve by coding a series of programs in various coding languages, they then had to present their work, and the winner would be chosen based on the most optimal program, in that case, Kyoko's.
This year though, it was taken to the next level, the competition had a CTF theme, CTF stands for 'capture the flag', the contestants had to find a specific password to access a database, this was the University's way of raising awareness, and reinforce database security.
The competitors were placed in teams such as each team was in an individual booth, they were using the university's computers, and each of the challenges was designed in a different way, so that each team had to solve a unique challenge, instead of attacking each other's computers and defending their own flags, it was a jeopardy-style competition.
On their way to their booth, Kyoko and Ren spotted Sho, who wasn't wise enough to ignore them "Soooo? Found a new guy to take advantage of your work?" Ren had to physically keep Kyoko from choking Sho to death, "Easy! You'll get back at him when we win this thing!" he practically had to drag her away.
When they received the signal, all contestants started typing on their keyboards, going through data and analyzing it, Kyoko and Ren had cleared most of their way through, one step ahead of everybody else, Sho was casually leaning back in his chair, his feet resting crossed on the table, his partner was doing all the work, this was too advanced for him anyway, the only reason he was there was because he had been told that last year's champion must participate by his groupies, and he went and sweet talked Shoko to make her accept being his partner.
Kyoko stopped at the last clue, she tried to extract the password, but she ran out of ideas.
"Senpai, I'm stuck!"
"What's up?" Ren rolled his chair closer to her.
"This! The last clue was an audio track, but it's just gibberish, I tried slowing it down, reversing it, I even isolated the background noise and analyzed it separately, nothing!" she sighed as she removed her glasses and pinched the bridge of her nose, they started off pretty well, how can she be stuck at this stage?
"Did you check the voiceprint?"
"Of course, the flag wasn't there."
"May be we should, try again…" Ren grabbed the mouse and opened the track with an audio editor, he clicked on the spectrograph feature, and the screen showed a visual representation of the frequencies, usually, in these cases, passwords show up as written numbers in the spectogram but this one just looked normal.
"See?" Kyoko wanted to bang her head against the keyboard, 'this is so frustrating!' she thought.
"Just a minute…what's this?" Ren squinted at the screen, he seemed particularly interested in the lower part of the spectrogram.
"There's some sort of pattern …" Kyoko said after catching up.
"yeah, this is…"
"Mors code!" she yelled, it was true, the pattern that they noticed was a succession of dashes and periods, they deciphered the code and got a chain of letters and numbers, all that was left was writing the password, and they would have access.
"Will you do the honor?" Ren said.
"Gladly." Kyoko smirked, and slowly typed the key code.
A message flashed on the screen to inform them of their success, and a host came to their booth, to escort them out, all that was left now, was to find out whether or not they were the firsts to clear the challenge.
As they walked towards the stage, Kyoko's heart almost stopped as she saw Shoko and Sho being escorted out of their own booth, had they cleared the challenge before them?
They waited for the rest of the teams to join them when the time was up, and everyone gathered on the stage that usually served for graduation speeches and formal events.
"Alright, thank you for your hard work, and let me say before the announcement of the winner, that you've all winners in this competition, you are now more knowledgeable and more experienced than before, and this was the purpose of this competition…" The professor that was announcing the result kept on talking, but Ren and Kyoko were more focused on glaring at Sho who had been smirking slyly at them.
"And now, please allow me, to announce our winners…" everyone went silent, holding their breath with a nervous expression, except for Sho, who, for some reason, was smiling from ear to ear.
"Mogami Kyoko-san and Tsuruga Ren-san! Congratulations!"
Sho's smile fell, and his jaw dropped, Kyoko's eyes went wide and Ren just smirked, he then turned to look at her as she jumped in her place laughing in joy before she turned to high-five him.
"May I please have your attention for a few more moments?" the professor pleaded, and Kyoko's heart skipped a beat, was there a mistake, was he going to announce another team as the real winners?
"In light of last year's events, the comity had decided to investigate the winner of the previous competition, and with Tsuruga-san and Shoko-san's assistance we have made the discovery, that Fuwa Sho was not the real winner, as he was deemed unable to produce the winning program, after today's competition it was confirmed that the one who did, was in fact Mogami-san!"
Kyoko clapped a hand over her mouth, she looked at Ren and who brightly smiled at her she mirrored his smile before hugging him tightly "Oh my god! Thank you!" she said as she pulled away.
"Uh…um…sure!" he said, blushing at the sudden contact.
The rest of the day was spent celebrating, and exchanging thought on each team's challenge, it was a pleasant experience to most people.
Sho threw a fit after learning that Shoko had been given the password from the start, she was told to wait for Kyoko and Ren to finish up, that's why they got out of their booth at the same time they did, Ren was not given any hints, he was supposed to assist Kyoko and find out if she had what it takes to make last year's winning program, so he and Kyoko still shared the prize which consisted of a week-long school trip to the university of Oxford.
"So, still have a bad history with that competition?" Ren asked as they sat on first class, flying to England.
"Not the least bit!" she said staring out the window with an excited smile.
A/N : SOOO? Come on guys tell me what you thought of it! By the way, the Mors code hidden in the audio track's spectrogram is a real thing, we were shown something similar to that in a steganography challenge in my computer science club, I thought it was awesome and thought why not include it, CTF challenges are real as well, for those who like you can google them, I'm no pro and still haven't tried one but I tried to create a similar setting I'm aware that in real life, CTF challenges are on a higher level and way more advanced so please forgive any inaccuracies.
*Happy new year*, I'm thinking this is the last update for a little while, I'll be very busy preparing for the semestrial Exams (I'm terrified tbh XD ), and for those who read 'The Touma-kun chronicles' please forgive me for not updating, I'll be back by february at most and work on both fanfics !
Kris : Lol I love how you guys 'LOVE' Sho XD it cracks me up, I'm glad you liked the chapter, I was kinda worried about it not coming out right, Thank you for the cute review I wish you'll enjoy the next chapter!
G2 :Lmao I'm so glad you liked it XD I was really worried you'd be disappointed by the chapter, thank you so much for reading and reviewing, and I'll do my best to update quickly once I'm back!
Everyone : thank you so much for reading these littles stories, I hope you'll have a great year!