Something in the middle of the design was completely messed up, in a way that the computer had determined it was unlikely to solve and had passed on to her.

That was, of course, the entire point of the test, and the intended solution was for her to manually work out where it was going wrong and make a few changes that the AI would learn from and adapt into its own solutions.

Instead, Alex read the tags on everything heading into the snarl, telling the AI to generate something effective to fill that space– though mirrored in a way that it wasn’t trained to recognize. She’d need to manually re-orient it once she got back to this level, but once she was past the secondary generation phase it wouldn’t notice the fact that she was just telling it to fix itself.

Two minutes later, she got back a response. There were, of course, still issues, as that was what the AI had been designed to do for this course– create almost-effective solutions, with a few errors intended to be difficult to solve.

Instead, she repeated the process, this time resulting in a single, easily-solved error at the small scale.

From there, it was simple, if more time-consuming than she preferred. Her fix on the AI’s solution to the AI’s solution to the AI’s solution, presented as though she’d been working very hard on it, rather than simply waiting for the much more powerful machine to solve it for her.

As usual, she was the first one done, standing up and stretching from the place she’d been sitting in the back of the classroom, trying to ignore the heat that had built up in the room.

As usual, she’d be marked off for idiosyncratic methodology and otherwise receive full points.

Alex didn’t particularly care. If they’d wanted her to use the standard solving methods, then they should have made those methods make sense.

Though, if she were being honest, they probably did, to other people. Her inability to follow the moderately long ruleset had been what led to her current methods to begin with, and the insistence that any human-added sections should be easily human-read was both annoying to her personally and usually wasteful.

She had tried to complete it the intended way, at first, but when she’d been marked off the exact same points as she lost doing things this way, she’d basically just given up.

It wasn’t her problem if the professor had to spend the time running it through a checker to see if it worked; they were supposed to do that anyways.

Not that they always did. It had happened before that she’d been told her solution didn’t work before Alex insisted on “re”-running it through the checker.

She waved to Jerome, or whatever his name was, on her way out the door, earning herself yet another glare from Ell. They were very invested in the “rivalry” of being the students who were best in the class, and the fact that Alex universally finished well before the other two made them very annoyed with her on an ongoing basis.

Though it was possible that they also had a thing for Jax, because Val didn’t seem to be bothered by her existence.

But then again, Val pretty consistently held the top spot by being incredibly good at the solving as well as the methodology, where Ell managed perfect methodology and near-perfect solving, which sometimes set them behind perfect solving and genuinely awful methodology because of the grading scale.

So if nobody stood to be a threat to him, why would Val care?

Posting up outside the room wasn’t exactly the most entertaining thing that she could be doing with the hour she had left, but with everything going on in the game, she couldn’t afford to miss Bo on the way out.

Which was why, when Ell came out before he did, they saw her leaning against the nearby pillar, glancing over from her phone.

Alex suppressed the urge to wince when they approached her.

“Feeling worried your fix isn’t good enough? You were out of there way too fast to give it proper consideration.”

“No.”

Atypically, that actually seemed to set them back for a moment.

“Uh. Okay. Why are you out here, then?”

“Waiting for Bo. I need to ask a favor.”

They gave her a strange look at that. “Bo? What for? He’s not exactly who I’d expect you to need something from.”

Alex shrugged, considering for a moment whether to say more before deciding that it didn’t really matter. “Rune stuff. He knew my old character, and I’m just gonna ask him to return a favor.”

“Wait, I thought nobody knew your old character? Gage certainly seems obsessed by it.”

“Wait, his name is Gage? Where the heck was I getting J’s from? Ugh.”

“You… actually didn’t know his name.” Ell said, taken aback again. They blinked twice then shook their head. “I’m sorry, I thought you were… You know what, it’s not that important. How did you not know his name? You talk to him like, every class day!”

Alex didn’t really have an answer for them. It was nice to not get sniped at, though, so she let her face twist into the self-deprecating smirk. “It’s the truth, though. I don’t remember names like, at all, unless I’ve got them written down somewhere.”

“Don’t you have his phone number? Why not just put it on there or something?”

“He has my number, but he’s never sent me anything.” Alex leaned in, faking conspiratoriality for a second as she did. “Between you and me, I think he thinks I’m intimidating.”

Ell coughed out a laugh, seemingly against their own will. “I can see that. Most of the people in our class think that about you, to be honest.”

Alex rolled her eyes. Sometimes it was beneficial, but the fact that she’d picked up that reputation was annoying or problematic much more often than it was helpful. “I know.”

“What is it you need Bo’s help with, even? Need a new rune or something?”

Alex raised an eyebrow. “No. I need him to tell Dread Silence something.”

Ell narrowed their eyes at her. “Dread Silence pays people for info.”

Alex nodded. “But then they’d know it was coming from me.”

Bo came out of the room then, and Alex waved him over. He looked between her and Ell for a second before giving her a questioning look, but she just shook his head and, luckily, dropped it.

“You need something?”

“Kinda, yeah. Can you carry something to D-S for me?”

He looked pained. “You’re doing something again.”

She tilted her head slightly, affecting an innocent smile for a second. “Who, little ‘ole me?” Alex dropped the grin, though. It was useful for the joke, but not for the continuing conversation. “They can know it’s from Novsha this time–” Ell made a noise there. Not unexpected after their comment about what she needed, but she also didn’t stop the sentence to explain to them. “–but if it’s possible, keep that in the guild. I’ve got something about one of the top guilds that the others are going to want to snap up if they can.”

Bo considered for a second, then pulled out his phone and sent off a text.

They’d done this song and dance before. Every time, the guild had wanted her info, and every time, Bo got her the thing she needed for it. This time, though, the payment was going to be just making sure that the information was both known and highly priced enough that everyone in the game would know in a week.

He got a response back pretty quickly this time. “Terms?”

“I want it public knowledge by two weeks from now, an open secret by a week from now.”

He pursed his lips. “That’ll cost half a blue, then, probably. Why?”

Alex grinned. “Need it to get out for my plans to work. Currently it’s like a two vee a hundred fifty, and I need to add some chaos to the board.”

“I see.” Bo cracked his own smile, though less obviously than her. He’d been one of her early guildmates, and meeting up again in this class was just an unexpected benefit.

He’d mostly forgiven her about everything that had happened around then, luckily. But he hadn’t forgotten– and he especially hadn’t forgotten that of any of the people leading guilds at the time, it was her team that had specialized in navigating chaos.

Others were better at creating it, destroying it, or riding it, but while Falling Dawn was rarely the first to clear any new content, while they were active, they were almost universally the first group to clear it without any deaths.

“Doable. What is it?”

“The Alliance picked up a purple a few days ago. Broke some promises to get it, too. But I have it on good authority that that they lost contact with it, and it’s got a fairly long rune quest. They’re trying to recover it right now, but the original members who left don’t even have it anymore.”

Bo’s grin changed to a near-laugh followed by something approximating horror. He’d followed the line to its natural conclusion. “You didn’t.”

“I didn’t, actually. I don’t even know where that rune is right now, and neither does The Alliance. Oh, and also fun info, though you can probably price this separately: it’s the first in a new Rune class.”

Bo’s eyebrows shot up. “You could’ve gotten a hell of a lot for that.”

Alex smiled. “I’m not on Novsha anymore. I’m going to need to start rebuilding my good will, mostly ground-up.”

“Any idea on when you’re gonna tell me the new one’s name?”

“When this garbage is over. Need to be careful about what gets to D-S, y’know?”

Bo sighed. “You’re never gonna let me live that down, are you?”

“Eh. Maybe. Just not yet. Actually, know what? Consider this the last time I bring it up, if this works out.” Alex said. “I’m not in the mood to hold too many grudges.”

“It’ll be done. Smurfs’ll be on it by tomorrow.”

“Not that they’d ever admit to doing any work with D-S.”

“Of course not. The guild works on implausible deniability, anyways. See you later.”

With a wave, Bo was off to his own thing. It would technically be possible that he could tell his guild that information while out of the game, but based on her own experience with him she expected that he would wait until he could get the payment in advance. That information type was often like that.

Annoying, sometimes, but also a useful tool when she had her own timescale.

Sending it through Dread Silence had its issues– being one of the bigger guilds, they would have their own need to get their hands on a rune like that, and it was possible that they’d actually ream up with the Alliance to find her.

On the other hand, they also had their own reputation for selling even information that they were currently acting on and for having a much lighter touch on their members than many of the other guilds at the same size. It was also a near guarantee that her existence would stay a secret to the other guilds, while everything else came out extremely quickly. Even better, their position meant that the other guilds would assume that the information was gotten in a different way; perhaps even one that made more sense to them, coming from a disgruntled member.

Even if it came from just one other guild, that attempt to figure out that member would, itself, be useful in drawing attention from everyone away from her.

“I don’t know how I didn’t see it before,” Ell commented. “It’s not like you’re trying to hide it all that much.”

Alex turned back to them. “You wouldn’t be the first person surprised by it.”

“Still. Something about you bothered me, and I could never put my finger on it. I think it was just a missing piece of the puzzle.”

Alex raised an eyebrow. “You happy, now that you know my character name or whatever?”

Ell scoffed in response. “Not that. Not exactly, at least. You really don’t study at all, huh?”

“No, not really,” Alex said, a little confused. “But what does that have to do with…”

“The whole… effortless thing. Pissed me off, cause I thought you were faking it, putting in as much work and thought as I was.”

“Oh. Sorry.”

Ell raised a hand in a sort of half-shrug. “I don’t actually mind you being better at it than me. But the whole ‘oh, I don’t actually care that much’ combined with constantly showing me up and assuming you were putting in the hours? That, I minded. Sorry about uh. Everything, I guess.”

Alex looked them over once. “Frankly, I barely understand what I’m doing. I’m just really good at getting the AI to do most of the work for me.”

Ell shook their head. “Before today, I wouldn’t have believed you. Can I buy you lunch as an apology?”

“You don’t need to, but… sure.”