I. The Search for the Thread
Alex headed to his next class, but his mind was already consumed by the Mission: "The Advisor". Finding a vulnerability in Jessica Reed, the personification of public perfection.
How do you find a flaw in a system with no visible errors?
Alex activated Cunning (Level 2) and reviewed the information from Perception (Level 6). Jess was public in three domains: Dance, Student Council, and social life. All seemed to be absolute strengths.
"The flaw isn't in what she shows, but in what she hides," Alex muttered.
He decided to start with the most boring and least social place in the school: the Student Council's archive room, located in the basement, next to the boilers. Even Jess couldn't be always impeccable there.
The basement was cold and smelled of dampness and old paper. Alex arrived undetected and cranked Perception to maximum, focusing on any sign of recent activity near Jess's cubicle.
He found no discarded documents or stressed notes, only perfectly organized folders. Jess was methodical to an extreme. But then, his Perception detected something that didn't fit: a micro-streak of moisture on the floor leading out of the archive room and toward the abandoned laboratory hallway.
What would Jessica Reed be doing in an abandoned lab?
He followed the trail, which led him to a forgotten classroom that used to be an old computer lab. The door was slightly ajar.
II. The Hidden File
Alex slipped inside. The room was dark and dusty, but one corner pulsed with the cold light of three monitors and the hum of a server. The atmosphere was one of tension and code. There were piles of empty pizza boxes and energy drink cans.
Next to the monitors, absorbed in a screen showing lines of code and Gantt charts, was a girl.
She was not a popular person. Her hair, a vibrant dark purple, was tied up in a messy bun. She wore thick glasses, comfortable clothes, and her face was one of deep concentration. She typed with a speed and ferocity that suggested the computer had declared war on her.
Alex did not move. The girl, sensing his presence, snapped her head up.
"Who are you?" she asked, in a low, sharp voice, without a hint of social greeting, only alarm. She quickly tried to minimize three windows, but Alex, with his Perception and Cunning on maximum alert, had already caught the header of one of the open files: "Voting and Archiving System 2.0 (Critical Failure: Database Integration Error)."
Alex smiled internally. He had found the project. And the person who was paying the price for its failure.
III. The Infiltration
The HUD blinked, assigning a new designation for the girl:
[TARGET IDENTIFIED: THE DECODER (Maya Reyes)] Base Collection Value: RARE. Social Rating: N/A (Voluntarily Isolated). Specialization: Programming and System Architecture (Level 5).
"I'm Alex," Alex said, stepping out of the shadows and adopting a posture of academic interest—the one that had worked best with Jess. "I saw the light on. I didn't mean to interrupt, but... that thing you have there doesn't look good."
Maya crossed her arms, covering the screen with her body. "It's none of your business. And if you tell anyone I'm here, you'll regret it."
"I won't say anything," Alex promised. "But I'm good at system diagnosis. I heard rumors that the Student Council was trying to modernize the voting system for the spring elections. Is this it?"
Maya hesitated. The frustration on her face was palpable, outweighing her desire for privacy.
"It's worse than that," she admitted, lowering her voice. "It's Jess Reed's personal project. She promised the administration a complete digital archiving system and a foolproof voting portal. I've been sleeping here for three weeks. The database code is a mess, and it has to be running before next Monday, or her credibility is shot."
Alex felt a click in his Cunning. This was the vulnerability: Jess, the social leader, was failing spectacularly at a technical project that required silence and competence. If it became public, it wouldn't be a minor embarrassment.
"Monday, you say. And the database is failing to integrate with the front-end," Alex speculated.
Maya blinked. "How the hell do you know that?"
Alex used his newly acquired Charisma (Level 12). Not to lie, but to sell a partial truth with undeniable authority.
"I saw the code structure on your screen. I know what you're trying to do. The middleware architecture is too linear, which is terrible for scalability. You need a microservices approach to isolate the failure. Or, in simple English: you need to separate the server from the database with a temporary buffer so the error doesn't crash the entire system."
Maya stared. It was an advanced concept. An expression of sheer astonishment replaced her hostility.
"You... you understand this," she whispered.
"Enough," Alex nodded, knowing he had just gained a valuable resource, Maya, and the critical information for the Mission. "Tell me something, Maya. Does Jess know how bad this is?"
"Jess thinks it's just a little bug that a night of coffee will fix," Maya replied bitterly. "She has no idea that her entire reputation as a future 'leader' depends on me managing to resurrect this Frankenstein of code in less than 48 hours."
Alex had his answer. Jessica Reed's vulnerability was not emotional or social; it was the arrogance of having taken on a technical challenge without understanding its true complexity, and believing that her social charm could solve a server failure.
Now only the hardest part remained: presenting Jess with the "invaluable and unsolicited" advice without getting murdered on the spot.
Mission "The Advisor": Vulnerability Data Acquired. Next Phase: Execution.