Group Precipitation

by FanOfMostEverything

Coerced Confession, by FoME

Author's Note:

You'll probably want to read User Not Recognized before this if you haven't already.

Relatively spoiler-free summary for those who choose not to: Wallflower discovers that she's invisible to technology and transfers to Ravnica High, where they can better show her how to deal with a very unusual form of magic. She makes fast friends with White Hat, a member of the hacking club who's more than a little starved for social interaction given how most of her peers have no idea how to even talk to girls, much less recognize when one's interested in them.

White Hat was a lot less vocal about her personal life after the tour of Ravnica High. She'd answer Wallflower's questions about herself, but always in roundabout, evasive ways that contained barely any actual information. It all came back to what White had told Wallflower the day they'd met: The only weapon more powerful than information was control of that information, and White refused to be disarmed again.

Wallflower, on the other hand, refused to put up with White's cryptic bullcrap any more than she had to. The summer lessons with Lazav were making it clear that she'd be dealing with a lot of it now, and her patience for such things was limited. But Wallflower had ways of making White talk.

Tears streamed down White's face. "You're a cruel girl, Blush," she said. "I don't know if you were always this twisted or if I did it to you, but you're a cruel girl."

Wallflower smirked at her. "You know how to make it stop, Miss Hat."

"You're a monster, you know that?"

"I am merely curious. And you will tell me what I want to know."

White's fists shook. Her lips pressed against each other. Finally, she lunged at Wallflower with a screeching battle cry.

Through a blend of slightly greater height and maneuvering around the tree in Canterlot Park where they'd been sitting, Wallflower kept the cupcake out of reach.

"You did this to me!" cried White. "You dragged me to the most amazing bakery I've ever been to just so you could get me hooked and milk me for information! I'd be proud if I didn't hate it so much!"

"Quid pro quo, White," Wallfower said in a singsong voice. "Tell me what I want to know, and the Chocotastic Special is yours."

White said nothing, looking away.

"Well?"

White crossed her arms. "I may have been so focused on the cupcake that I don't actually recall the question."

Wallflower betrayed none of her amusement. She'd been on the other end of too many awkward moments to hurt White like that. "I just want to know what happened when you tried to ask out Dovri."

"Ugh. Fine." White thrust a finger at Wallflower. "Don't get any ideas, mind you. Even if I never do penetrate that thick skull of his, I called dibs!"

Wallflower shrugged, moving a step away from the finger nearly brushing her nose. "He's not really my type, anyway."

White rolled her eyes. "Yeah, your type makes your brain melt just by looking at you."

"If you don't want the cupcake—"

"Okay, okay!" After a deep breath, White said, "So. I sent him an anonymous email with an attachment that had a nonexistent file extension. If he had just opened it with a code editor, reversed the resulting character string, removed every prime-numbered character, converted the result to ASCII binary, rendered the bits as a QR code, and scanned it, he'd get a 404 error because the URL would be 'Want to do something this weekend? White.' Literally could not be more straightforward, but he still didn't say anything. Now gimme the cupcake."

Wallflower didn't hand it over, but her grip got loose enough in her confusion that White snatched it out of her hands. "Uh, I'm not exactly speaking from experience, but have you tried just asking him? By... speaking to him?"

White, cheeks smudged with icing, balked at the idea. "I don't want to seem like I'm desperate!"

Comments

[Dark Feather]

White, cheeks smudged with icing, balked at the idea. "I don't want to seem like I'm desperate!"

Yes... despetate...

[Eroraf86]

Codes within codes. Reminds me of the character files for Doki Doki Literature Club. Also Timber and Twilight texting.

[FanOfMostEverything]

8789814
The inspiration was roughly one part DDLC's .chr files, one part the Overwatch Sombra ARG.

[Snowdrifter]

Seemed perfectly reasonable to me...

[BenRG]

Oh, so White Hat is a Tsundre of some kind?

[mastermenthe]

8791922
White Hat is as tsundere as her Github code commits.