Word Count: 1,428
He had just settled into his fourth period Calc class when the bell rang. Again. For much longer than the regular tardy bell.
The class, usually buzzing with chatter was stone silent. There had been no drills planned for the day, not that anyone had been informed of, anyway.
"Lockdown, folks," Mr. Berner sighed, shutting and locking the door the second the bell stopped ringing. "Get under your desks, and I'll turn off the light."
So there Armin found himself, back to back with Annie, the girl who sat next to him, knees tucked in as they huddled in the dark beneath their conjoined desks. The classroom was abuzz with quiet chatter, its occupants excited, confused, and frightened all at once.
They were silent at first, but shockingly, Annie spoke up, quietly, with an air of apathy that just didn't seem completely genuine.
"So. Have you been doing anything?"
Considering the circumstances, Armin would have been more concerned if she were able to pull off perfect apathy, so he thought nothing of it. "Well, there's this puzzle I've been working on," he whispered to her, careful not to mention it was a scavenger hunt to find the girl who had confessed to him. "I got it this morning, but I haven't had much time to work on it since, well, class."
"What's the puzzle?"
He wriggled around so that he could fish the slip of paper out of his pocket, unfolded it, and read it quietly to her.
A pause.
"Might I help?"
A pause from him as well. He'd solved all the other puzzles on his own and had taken a certain pride in doing so, too. But, no one else was even remotely interested in the hunt, so in a way that was the default.
"Sure," he said, fumbling in the dark for a pen. "Let me just hand it to–"
"No," she replied. "It's all right. I'm good at puzzlers like these. What's the first hint again?"
Armin quietly flipped over the paper, for he was already scribbling out the options on the back, and read it again best he could in the dark. "Lena's best grade was her foreign language; her worst was history." He flipped it over again and was able to finish writing out the options before Annie spoke again.
"...Okay, we can't use that yet. What about the next one?"
"Third or fifth period she had with either Diana or Sean."
"How are you organizing these?"
"Uhh… five columns labeled 'first' through 'fifth' with a list of the friends' names, the teachers names, the grades, and the subject names in the same order down every column."
He felt her nod ever so slightly. "Scratch out Diana and Sean from the columns labeled first, second, and fourth."
"Mmhm… Second period was a grade above first; fifth was a grade above fourth, and third was a grade above fifth." Armin gave it some thought, then scratched out the F in the second column and the A in first: second couldn't be last if it was above another class, and vice versa for. He did the same for fifth and third.
"And because third period was a grade above fifth, but fifth was already a grade above fourth, third also could not have been the D," he muttered.
"So that means second, third, and fifth could not have been history because they were not the worst grades," Annie continued for him. Armin blinked, having not anticipated for her to do that for him. But he scratched history out of those columns anyway.
"Diana and Sean shared either math or science with Lena."
"Not useful yet."
"Schultz, Jinn, and Ackerman taught different grades during third and fifth." He scratched them out of those columns before he even finished reading the line. "Schultz taught Mei and Lena, Constance was so stupid that constantly reteaching him the material accidentally made it her best subject, and her fourth period (which she did not share with Mei) wasn't taught by Jinn."
"Scratch Mei, Jinn, and Schultz out of fourth.
"Gotcha. Sean's help in their math class gave Lena one grade above her grade in Bozardo."
They continued on like this, whispering the logic between them between long stretches of silence as they used up all the obvious clues. After almost two hours had passed and the lockdown had still not been lifted, Armin broke the chain.
"What class were you supposed to have right about now?"
She sighed and leaned her head back so that it rested on his shoulder a bit. "Band. We're practicing for the festival competition at Sina next month. It's hell. The tenors are always rushing, the flutes are always dragging, and no one can ever hear the bassoon. Or anyone, really, when the trumpets are playing." She shifted. "Our balance is horrendous, and we have to hear Ms. Nifa complain about it all the time."
"Sounds… hectic."
"It is. Oh, first and fourth could not have been the A's because there were classes with better grades than they. Therefore, second period had to have been the A."
He dutifully scratched out everything so that it complied with what Annie had told him. "I can't believe we missed that," he said.
"Mmhm."
"So, what do you play? I played clarinet last year for concert band, but I didn't want to do marching this year, so yeah."
"Bass clarinet, but no one could ever hear me unless we played Let it Go, like at the winter concert."
They both heard her phone vibrate.
"Mina's in Zoë. She says Ms. Zoë looked out the window and saw like ten million police officers swarming the baseball and football fields. Apparently, they're catching some escaped convict, and we're trending on our local Twitter."
"Huh." He wasn't too concerned; the occasional updates kids gave to Mr. Berner for lack of official word from Principal Dok had told them that much, but it all seemed too surreal to really sink in. Besides, he was focused on the last few pieces of the puzzler falling into place.
"Aaaand they caught him. Bell to let us out should ring any minute now."
And she was right.
It rang to let them out to a very late lunch just as he scratched out the final cell.
Second period: Jinn for foreign language. Lena shares it with Constance and got an A.
The Mr. Jinn at their school was not a foreign language teacher, but rather, a math teacher. His freshman math teacher, in fact, but that was beside the point.
Armin supposed the puzzler, while tailored to include real teachers' names, couldn't be completely accurate to the real life. And besides, all he was looking for in the puzzler was the teacher name. All other information discovered in the puzzler was irrelevant.
He caught Mr. Jinn just before he left his classroom for his own lunch break.
"Mr. Jinn!" Armin called, causing the man to pause as he locked the classroom door. He looked up and saw Armin, and a smile formed on his face.
"Armin," he greeted. "Doing well in Calc?"
"Yeah, yeah. Just got out. Didn't learn much today though."
"I can imagine."
"Mr. Jinn, what's your Hogwarts house?"
He cracked a grin at his former student. "Right to the point, huh?" He began to unlock his room. "The real answer would be Hufflepuff, but the girl left me with a raven to give you." He hurried back inside but came back in less than a minute, plopping the said stuffed raven into Armin's hands. It had a scroll– the riddle!– in its beak, which was held closed via a tiny, rubber hairband.
Armin pulled the tiny scroll out and tried to hand the bird back to his old teacher, but he shook his head. "That's for you, kiddo."
"O– okay." He wasn't sure what to do now, so he tucked the toy under his arm, waved goodbye to Mr. Jinn, and walked off to find Eren and Mikasa. As he did so, he took a look at what the scroll said.
Say hello to lisa, it said on the very front.
"I don't know any Lisas," he muttered as he unrolled it.
tiwpn tmicpn dehipn xhpn taswpn
dgupn dcvtgapn pciwpn jhjpapn
dehipn gttiwpn djaslpn qpn
He looked at the scrambled mess of nonsense letters on the back.
"Oh, come on!"
Author's Note iv. i would have included a table as like supplementary material/visual aid but ofc ff doesn't allow tables. this is why people like ao3. i have to say this is a really nasty code to crack, but all the clues you need are there.
i actually pulled out this pack of puzzlers my seventh grade teacher gave me before summer started to keep me occupied that i just hadn't touched for like three years, found one that suited my needs, replaced names and messed around with stuff, then solved the puzzler and wrote down how just for this fic. and then i didn't even include everything lol. i figured you guys would get bored of that kind of stuff so ye.
mmmMMMMMmmmmMMMMm... follow/fave/review/whatever my dudes. validation would be great. drabble offer still up. have a great daaay~~
