Word Count: 2,392
He showed it to his friends again when he found them. Mikasa said nothing, choosing instead to passively watch the riddle get solved, but the scribbles caught Eren's attention, so he and Armin huddled over the piece of paper together.
"...Well, everything ends in a -pn. That's probably just filler that we can get rid of," Armin slowly said.
tiw tmic dehi xh tasw
dgu dcvtga pciw jhjpa
dehi gttiw djasl q
They stared at it for another minute.
"All right, but this still doesn't mean anything," Eren said. "What's on the other side, anyway?"
"'Say hello to Lisa'," Armin replied. "But we don't know any Lisas so maybe she's overestimating my connections."
"Maybe it's some kind of code. Didn't you say that the backs of all these notes have been relevant in some way or another?" Eren suggested as he flipped over the note anyway.
"Except for the last one, yeah. They provide the code… for which to solve… the riddle." Armin stared at the scroll again.
Eren shrugged. "Well then, it's probably important. And hey, this L isn't even capitalized. Can't be a person if it's not a proper noun."
Armin flipped it back to the gibberish side. Well, not really gibberish. If he really tried, he supposed there could be a pattern to it. Perhaps it was one of those letter swap codes? But then?
Lisa.
Oh.
He turned it over yet again and underlined the L and A. "L is A. It's one of those letter swap codes where it starts with L as the letter A."
"Nice," Eren said as Armin started scribbling out the key on the empty part of the paper. "I guess that cracks that code."
eth extn opst is eldh
orf ongerl anth usual
opst reeth ouldw b
They stared at the result.
"...Well, it's better at least," Eren said. They both gave it some thought for a moment, and then he said, "Maybe it's like Pig Latin, where the end comes up to the front. What would -pn come out to be in the letter code?"
Armin thought about it for a second. "-ay, like in Pig Latin. So if we rearrange it like that we get–"
The next stop is held
For longer than usual
Stop three would B
"...B?" he said, confused.
"Bees?" Eren asked.
"Bees?" Mikasa said, speaking for the first time since they had begun solving the riddle.
Armin handed her the cracked paper. "It just stops with the letter B."
She read it over. "The first two lines sound like a fermata. Dunno what the last line would be."
"Maybe she means the rooms where she planted the notes are 'stops'," Eren suggested. "Mr. Jinn was the third room, right?"
"Not counting Ms. Nanaba, yeah," Armin answered. "But this just… doesn't make any sense?"
They all huddled around the riddle, scrutinizing it and analyzing it from every angle they could think of.
"Hey, it's a haik– oh, wait. The last line's missing a syllable. Nevermind," Armin sighed.
A few minutes passed and the friends stopped huddling, having memorized the not-quite-a-haiku.
"You still have that old invisible ink pen, right, Mikasa?" Eren suddenly blurted out.
She looked skeptically at him. "Yeah, it's in my backpack, but why?"
"Worth a shot to find any hidden messages."
"I think that's a stretch," Armin said, "But I guess it can't hurt."
So Mikasa took out her old invisible ink pen and shone the built in UV light on the side that said, "Say hello to lisa", and lo and behold! A faint fermata and a flat glowed beneath the blacklight.
"The next stop would B ," Armin said. He had no idea where it came from, just that it came to him. "Oh my god it's that cheesy music pun 'Without music, life would B ' but in a different context with an incomplete haiku that we were supposed to complete. With the word flat. Which we have now done."
"So now what?" Eren asked. "If the third stop is a fermata and the next one is a flat, then… ahhhh. You need to overlay the school map so that the fermata is where Mr. Jinn's class is and wherever the flat falls would be where the next hint lies."
"Yeah, that makes sense," Armin replied.
"Hey Armin, I'm just curious, but why are you going through all this work to find this girl?" Mikasa asked. "I mean, I'm just saying. You do have a lot to study without this kind of wild goose chase taking up your time and energy."
"I dunno. I told her I would find her. Why do you ask?"
Mikasa's normally stoic expression slipped into a frown for just a second, but she managed to keep her composure. "She's not really someone I'm fond of."
"Really? Who is it?" Eren asked.
Mikasa beckoned him over and whispered into his ear. He gave her a pointed look. "Oh, come on, Mikasa. She's not that bad."
Sensing an argument that might spoil the girl's identity for Armin, he grabbed the note, stuffed it into the same pocket as the stuffed raven, and said, "There's no such thing as an objectively good or bad person. Maybe Mikasa thinks she's bad, but if she likes me then I don't think she'll be a bad person to me."
With that, the subject was dropped for the rest of their brief lunch.
It was half past one in the morning. Armin lay awake, staring at his empty ceiling, for his mind was too full to fall asleep.
But they were not full of thoughts on his schoolwork, or of all the AP homework he had half-assed that night. Nope; tonight he found his thoughts drawn to the girl who sent him on this scavenger hunt.
He had a hunch as to who she was based off little details scattered throughout his last two days that he had only now begun to string together. He could definitely see her doing this sort of thing; the girl he had in mind was the subtle type.
He'd never given her much thought before, but now that the possibility that she liked him loomed over the horizon, she seemed to be all he could think about.
He had long since found the room where he would find his next hint. He'd cracked code after code, riddle after riddle; he'd figured out so many puzzles almost all on his own in the past two days, but he just couldn't figure out how he felt about her.
He sighed into his pillow and tried to fall asleep once more.
"Mr. Smith?"
The extremely tall and eyebrowed man glanced up from his desk. "Armin. You're at school early. Come in."
Armin obeyed. "I don't suppose this place would be flat?"
Mr. Smith's eye suddenly had a dangerous gleam in it, a gleam that Armin would frankly have been afraid of had he not studied under him for the last few months. "Well that depends on what map you're looking at. We're on the second floor, after all."
He pulled the note out from his pocket and cracked a smile. "This one, sir."
"A job well done, Mr. Arlert. I have to say, the other teachers have been talking about this lately."
"Have they?"
"They have indeed. It's all Ms. Zoë would talk about during lunch yesterday. She thinks you guys are cute, and I daresay I find myself agreeing." He reached into his desk drawer and pulled out a piece of paper folded in the same triangular style as almost all the other notes and handed it to Armin. "You're almost there, lad. Give us a love story that'll last the ages. Or at least a viral meme."
Armin found his face flushed at Mr. Smith's words. He knew the man tended to ship his students, supposedly because he had given up his own love for teaching, but this was just plain embarrassing. "Thanks, Mr. Smith. I'll see you fifth period," he squeaked and headed out the door.
Returning home, find the office
Find the drawer that's full of chopsticks
Don't be rude and buy our wares:
Chocolates, chips, and cups of noodles
Sweets and drinks among the doodles
Bring one, bring none, but heed my rule:
Should you bring some, I shall not show,
You'll know me when you're all alone
"Chopsticks…" he muttered.
That wasn't the only thing about this particular note that had caught him off guard. There was no code to crack, just the riddle to solve, and by all accounts, it sounded like the band room. But he had already been to the band room for this hunt, and even then he thought they didn't have chopsticks.
He knew the nurse's office had a drawer full of chopsticks because the nurse had a stash of cup noodles for whatever reason (probably in case a patient got hungry, but cup noodles…? Really?), but as far as he knew they didn't sell anything.
He knew the second he read the last three lines, he knew this was his final stop. He was going to see if his hunch was correct. But what he couldn't really get was why make the last note so simple?
They really had been getting progressively harder, so to be left with only a riddle to solve was a bit of a disappointment. But he supposed it wasn't easy coming up with all these codes to crack and riddles to solve…
He read it over again. He checked his watch. He had just enough time to run down to the nurse's office before the bell rang for classes to start, so if he was going to start somewhere, might as well be there.
She had not been in the nurse's office. He ran to class soon after he found out and left the riddle to stew in the back of his mind as he went through his first four classes of the day regularly. Perhaps it was the band room after all.
He decided to skip lunch with Eren and Mikasa for the day, he knew they wouldn't mind, and made a beeline for the band room.
It was less crowded today than it had been the first day he had come in and retrieved the note from the Shrek doll, but perhaps that was because lunch had just begun. His hunch was nowhere in sight, but he suspected she was in a practice room.
He recognized Jean, a trumpet player in the previous year's concert band, as he walked out of Ms. Nifa's office with an unopened cup of noodles and– gasp– a pair of cheap chopsticks. That confirmed it: he was in the right place.
He walked into the black market office and found it empty save a girl he knew named Sasha, who greeted him brightly.
"Haven't seen you in here since last year, Armin! You're not thinking of transferring back into band? We could use someone as good as you. Just the other day I was passing by during concert period, and I heard the most awful squeak."
He shook his head. "Just back for a visit. I'm looking for someone– don't tell me– but I'll have a cup of ramen."
"That'll be a dollar, then."
He walked back out with his goods and surveyed the room. There was definitely a line for hot water and the microwave, so he decided cooking his noodles could wait. Instead, he turned to the practice rooms.
The one where he had read the first riddle was taken, but the next one's light was off. Knowing her, she was probably just trying to keep the mystery up for as long as she could, if she had a regular practice room at all.
He opened the door up a crack and slipped inside, not turning on the light at first so that he might surprise her rather than vice versa, but before he could flip the switch, the door closed behind him, and just as he did manage to turn on the light, hands slipped over his eyes.
"I guess you found me," a dryly familiar and completely expected voice said. "Nice job on that; I worked really hard on those riddles. But it's not over yet: you still have to guess who I am."
"Annie, please."
Her hands came away from his eyes, and he had to blink a few times to be able to see properly again.
"So you knew I liked you."
"Not you for sure, but I've had a hunch."
He turned to face her, and they stared at each other for a good, long moment. Her face was bright red, and as the time passed, he found his was probably getting there, too. He found he had no words to say to her despite having spent hours the night before thinking about what he would say if he were right. Nor did Annie say anything, and Armin suspected it was for the same reasons as his own.
Armin swore he could feel time crawling by on his skin. Crap, he was panicking; crap, he had no idea what to say, and crap, he wasn't giving Mr. Smith either the love story that would last the ages or the viral meme.
"...I half expected you not to come," she said, breaking the silence at last.
He blinked. "But why wouldn't I?"
She broke his gaze and shrugged, looking instead at the out-of-tune piano. "I figured you'd lose interest in the riddles after a while and think you were wasting your time with it all and just… stop."
"Well, lucky for you, I like riddles."
She laughed. "I think this confession is proof enough of that." It was strange hearing her voice so devoid of apathy, but also beautiful.
"Riddle me this, then:
"Will you go on a date with me?"
Author's Note v. if you guys want an epilogue where they go on a date just ask b/c i've been thinking about it for a while. not that i think anyone's going to like this enough to ask but eh. who knows. i'm a little busy rn but maybe i could make something? also those strings of things leading to his hunch it was annie are scattered throughout the fic. i'm not going to hold your hand through this but if you remember all the little details you should see where they are.
the code used at the end of the last chapter is called kiss code - K is S. swap it out for any letters that'll form a word with is in the middle and bam. mist wisp whatever you so desire. i got it from a book bc if you google kiss code you can't find it haha.
mmm cliffhangers. gotta love them. but it's also cute. mm yes. the line where it's like "give us a love story that'll last through the ages, or at least a viral meme" is actually taken from a book called unwind and it was great and ahhhh... one of my fave lines tbh. i feel like the continuity was botched at times but whatever. follow/fave/whatever. just leave me reviews. please. thank. have a great daaayyy~~
Bonus:
She laughed again. "That's not a riddle."
"Well, why not?"
"Riddles are hard; they're supposed to make you think."
"Mm, well then, what's your answer?"
"Yes."
