Is Wei Wuxian supposed to be paying attention to this? Wei Wuxian is not paying attention to this. Wei Wuxian is doodling a picture of Lan Wangji in his notebook. 

Brenda is stealthily Googling Wei Wuxian under her desk to figure out which of the faces she has seen every day all year corresponds to that name. Hopefully there is a picture of him on the internet somewhere.

He has an Instagram! His Instagram consists of pictures of himself shirtless (he is very pretty), himself in cosplay outfits (all as female characters), himself on roofs and inside abandoned buildings and in other places that it is probably not terribly legal for him to be, random birds he saw, his neighbor's cat, him glomping a mildly terrified fourteen-year-old, a musical performance with the caption MY SISTER IS SO SMART!!!!, a science fair project with the caption MY BROTHER IS A MORON!!!!!, a bunch of makeup with the caption SHOPLIFTING HAUL!!!!!!, and himself FaceApped into a girl.

Brenda is not totally clear on whether this is what you would expect from a normal person's instagram, and is kind of unhappy about the shoplifting, but at least she knows what he looks like now. She joins in the general shuffling around everyone is doing to talk to their lab partners. She is prepared to do the entire project herself but it only seems polite to give her partner a chance to participate if he wants to do that.

"Hi, uh, Wei? Or do you go by Wuxian? Sorry. Anyway, uh, we're lab partners?"

"You can call me anything you want."

That is insufficient guidance aaaaa. 

"Okay. So, um, do you have thoughts on how you want to do the project? I was thinking trebuchet with a counterweight, if we do a block and tackle we could get a nice big one . . . "

"That's booooooring. She obviously wants us to do a trebuchet."

Brenda is not used to thinking of "someone wants you to do the thing" as a reason not to do it. 

"Would you rather do a spring or something? I'm okay with whatever."

"She said 'no explosives, no gunpowder,' and that's clearly a challenge."

"I mean, yes, the challenge is the whole point? I guess she didn't say no electricity or no steam power . . . "

"Right! If she hadn't forbidden explosives, I would be like 'yeah, fair, let's make a really awesome trebuchet.' But she specifically forbade explosives. And if someone goes so far as to forbid you to use explosives you should come up with the most bullshit thing that is, technically, within the rules."

Brenda does not at all follow this logic but she is not going to take the precious gift of a project partner who gives a shit and stomp all over his dreams. "I guess I can see the argument that if she didn't say no electricity then electricity is allowed. And I bet if we did it well we could get a ton of extra credit. Except batteries are probably chemically powered--maybe a big capacitor?" 

"Oh, I like you. --Wuxian isn't pronounced 'woo-zee-ahn." (He pronounces it like 'wooshian.')

"Oh! Sorry. Wuxian. Got it." (She pronounces it correctly this time.) "Um, anyway, I think charging a bunch of capacitors with a hand crank should be allowed. I can go ask . . .?"

He starts sketching on a piece of paper. "Okay, but if you ask, they might say no." 

He gets annoyed at his sketch, crumples it up, and throws it at Lan Wangji. 

Lan Wangji says something in Chinese. 

"Love you too!"

Brenda goes and tries to ask the teacher if electricity is allowed, but there are two pairs of people demanding to swap lab partners and a pair who already want an extension even though the due date is the last day of school and a pair where neither of their parents have any power tools asking if they can please borrow a drill from someone, and Ms. McDaniels recognizes Brenda as "that clever quiet one" and goes "Yes, of course, whatever you like" without really processing the question.

Brenda heads back to Wei Wuxian's seat and says "It sounds like we're allowed! Want to meet up in the library after school and come up with a design?" Hopefully by then she'll have figured out a polite way to ask if he's willing to chip in for parts and whether his parents will let them use their garage.

"Yeah, that sounds great!"

"Awesome, see you then!"

Brenda spends gym class having ideas and Spanish class sketching designs (it's okay because she labels them in Spanish), and is in the library two minutes after last bell with a couple pages of diagrams, a provisional parts manifest assuming a tight budget, a second provisional parts manifest assuming a bigger budget, and Fermi estimates of how much charge they can crank into a capacitor in sixty seconds.

Wei Wuxian shows up fifteen minutes late to the library. "I made the designs in math class! So you can take a look at them probably."

"Sweet, trade you." She hands over her own designs, which are still only labeled in Spanish, and takes a look at his.

"...wait, you actually did stuff for the group project?"

She can't be offended because she was absolutely thinking the same thing about him, so instead she just giggles nervously. "I--I did, yeah. I. Like science projects."

"Do you want to do all your group projects with me for the rest of forever."

Oh dear, it's one of those times where someone is definitely telling a joke and she can't tell if it's a nice joke or a mean joke. She hesitates a bit too long, then laughs and says "sure" like it was a nice joke while internally bracing for it to turn out to have been a mean joke.

"Okay, see, you're making a face like you think I'm joking, which is very reasonable because I joke a lot, but in fact I'm completely serious about wanting to do all my group projects with the pretty girl who actually does work."

"Pretty girl" is an entire minefield all on its own but wanting to do group projects with someone who does work is pretty reasonable separate from that.

"You also do work, so, sounds good to me." It's not like she has friends she especially wants to do projects with instead. Time to stare very intently at these here sketches and come up with something useful to say about them.

"No, I don't. I build railguns, that's completely different from doing work. It's just that, by coincidence, building railguns is what I'm supposed to be doing right now. If I was supposed to be building a paper-mache model of Colorado I'd be playing a game of Don't Do The Work Chicken until it's the night before and I make Wen Ning do it."

"Oh, I see. Railguns are admittedly more fun." Building a paper mache model of Colorado would also be fun because she could use different colors of paper for different rock strata and possibly represent the aquifers with giant paperless blobs of the goop but that is Off Topic. 

"You should meet Wen Ning. He is the best person in the world. You'd love him. Unless you have terrible taste but I feel like you don't have terrible taste. You have a vibe of a person who has good taste."

"I hope I have good taste, but of course I'm the least well-positioned person to evaluate that. I'd be happy to meet Wen Ning." This last is sort of a lie, in that her actual emotion around meeting people is a sort of vague undirected fear, but this is one of those cases where nobody wants or has a use for the full truth and it's fine to just make the expected noise.

"Right, so, let's look at the diagrams. --This is in Spanish. I don't speak Spanish."

"Oh shi--shoot, sorry, I was doing it in Spanish class, just a sec--" she snatches the paper back and scribbles translated labels.

He snatches it back. "No! Don't translate it! I want to figure it out!"

"Oh! Okay, sorry." He likes puzzles! She can definitely respect that. She goes back to looking at his designs, making very faint annotations he can erase easily if he doesn't want them. They're very practical, aware of the ways that hardware-store materials are not the same as idealized objects in a textbook problem. She likes his idea for the shape of the armature and how the golf ball will sit on it better than her own, but thinks her way of arranging the capacitor array will be more reliable.

Wei Wuxian does NOT make annotations. He shoots questions at her as soon as he has one and half the time gets distracted or figures out the answer before he finishes the question.

Brenda is happy to answer questions and doesn't mind being interrupted with the answers. She sort of minds being interrupted with something tangential but it's usually something interesting so hey, whatever. At least he understands what she's talking about and doesn't ask her to use smaller words.

Eventually she forces herself to ask, "So, um, what kind of supply budget are we looking at here? Just because there are some ways to make it more reliable or more powerful but we'd have to buy extra parts, and I don't know, like, what seems reasonable, in that area, for you." She has some money saved up from her cashier job and not a ton to spend it on, but she's by no means wealthy and good luck getting her parents to chip in.

"...we can get whatever parts you want as long as you promise not to ask me where I got it from."

"That is way more tempting than it should be but actually I would really rather we not steal anything. Not that I can stop you or anything. But I would really prefer if we didn't, if that's okay with you."

"You don't know that I'm going to steal it. Maybe I know a really good Dumpster near a Home Depot and I'm worried that if people know about it they'll grab all the stuff before I get there. Maybe I can spontaneously generate railgun parts and I don't want anyone to know my powers because they'll experiment on me. Maybe I'm Lan Wangji's secret mistress and I'm going to use my womanly wiles to get him to buy it for me out of his trust fund."

She is pretty sure he is joking but if he actually wasn't talking about theft she has just been very rude, so. "I can promise not to ask where you got stuff if you promise the answer isn't stealing?"

"Oh, no, it's definitely theft. But I could be Lan Wangji's secret mistress. You don't know I'm not."

"Oh, yes, definitely. I am completely ignorant of who is who's secret mistress." And also of who is publicly dating. 

"If you're not going to let me get it the fun way-- is taking Wen Ning's allowance also going to be against the rules."

"That sounds like it's between you and him, really." If someone told her that an important part of modern teenage friendship was constantly pickpocketing each other she would be skeptical, but only because people in books usually don't go in for that.

"Oh! Excellent. In that case our budget is, uh, my entire savings which is like a hundred dollars and also maybe seventy-five dollars from Wen Ning. I could probably steal forty or fifty dollars from my brother and that doesn't technically count as theft because he's my brother."

"And I can also put in about that much, and that should be enough to make it really powerful if we're careful with it." It's not literally her entire savings but it will leave her with somewhat less than she likes to have on hand in case of emergencies. It will be fine; she'll earn it back eventually. Cashiering is reliable work.

"We are going to have the COOLEST project."

"We are!" She bounces in her seat a little. "Do you want to work on it at my house or yours, mine doesn't really have a good place for it but I do have my own room."

"I'm not going to turn down an opportunity to go into your bedroom."

WHAT is she supposed to do with that statement? Hopefully she is supposed to stare at him like a deer that's about to be roadkill because that's what she's doing.

"Have people not flirted with you before? They should. You're cute. You make these little noises when you're excited." He demonstrates.

People imitating her is pretty much always a mean joke but Wei Wuxian is somehow managing to radiate genuine friendliness on a wavelength she can see. Which is almost but not quite worse because it requires some kind of response. She goes with "Thank you?"; it's pretty all-purpose.

"Any time!"

"So do you actually want to do all the construction at my house or was that just part of the joke? Also do you want to do the shopping bit together in case being in the hardware store makes us think of things we should change or are you cool with just splitting up the parts list."

"I was serious and we should do the shopping together! It'll be fun."

"Sounds good!" She was hoping he'd say that--doing it separately sacrifices a lot of opportunity to adjust on the fly--but it's important to give people easy opportunities to avoid interacting with her. 

He slings his arm around her shoulder. "Want to do it now? I don't have plans."

Someone is touching her someone is touching her someone is touching her fuck there were words she was supposed to respond to but someone is touching her. 

She ducks out from under the arm and then feels bad about doing that because it was rude. "Uhhhhhh yeah sure now is fine. Now is good."

"Cool. Do you have a car or something?"

"No, I usually bike."

"Same. Or I get a ride from my brother, but you know hope springs eternal."

"Hmm. Might be best to walk this time, in case we end up with more stuff than it's easy to bring on a bike." She has the biggest and sturdiest bike basket she could afford, of course, but that doesn't make all the long rigid components of a railgun much less obnoxious.

"That sounds great! More stuff to do that's not my homework."

"Okay!" Brenda collects her stuff, stands up, and swings her backpack on, a process that seems to involve more elbows than one human can have at a time.

Walk walk walk.

"You know you totally knocked me out of first place in the class rank."

"Oh." There's got to be a polite response to that. Sorry is no good because she isn't actually sorry. Thank you probably works for this too. "Thank you." Heck, now she's second-guessing herself because it's not clear if she's thanking him for telling her (polite) or thanking him for performing imperfectly in class (rude and dickish).

"Well, sometimes I beat you. Third quarter sophomore year we were both behind Lan Wangji, which was horrifying. I almost thought he smiled. --Anyway, good job, you should try to sabotage your grades senior year so you don't have to give a graduation speech."

"You would definitely do a better job with the speech." Sabotaging her own grades sounds like licking her own elbow: perfectly plausible as a string of words, but any attempt to actually do it would not succeed.

"I would have more fun with the speech, whether it's better is a matter of opinion."

"I guess speech quality is pretty subjective, yeah. I bet it still helps, on average, when the person giving the speech is having fun."

"Adults hate it whenever I have fun. In particular, I don't think they want their graduation speech to be about how school is bullshit, anything useful we learned in high school could be learned just as easily in on-the-job training that we're paid for, and that we've wasted our entire adolescences on an elaborate test of conscientiousness, intelligence, and conformity, which I somehow have won despite having no conscientiousness or conformity, leading to a result that could have been established in two days with an IQ test."

Brenda shoots a tiny grin at the floor. "I like getting to learn things I won't need for a job. But you're right that the class ranking is bullshit. They should be comparing us all to some objective standard, not to each other."

"No one's going to stop you from learning things if you're not in Teenager Jail. Adults learn things all the time. Or, well, they don't, but they could."

"Maybe.They could certainly stand to teach us more per semester."

"You know," Wei Wuxian says, "in Chinese if you like someone you would put "a" in front of their name. Like I call Wen Ning a-Ning, and my sister calls me a-Xian, or Xianxian when I'm acting like a four-year-old again. But I don't think that works well in English. a-Brenda. a-Bren. A-da."

"Oh! Ada!"

Shy little smile. "I like that." She has a nickname! A non-malicious one! Also it reminds her of Ada Lovelace, which, awesomesauce.

He bows. 

"Miss Lovelace."

Happy little squeak! "I was thinking that too! . . . Maybe I will start calling you Babbage. Um, only if you want me to, I mean."

"Only if I can enlist you in my projects. --The legal ones," he clarifies.

"Ooh, what sort of projects?"

"Currently I'm working on a big array of LEDs that you can program to be any light show you want. I have a bunch of origami animatronics in progress. And I used my Arduino to make a snake that swims."

"Those all sound like a lot of fun and I'd love to help."

Hardware store!

Wei Wuxian keeps putting unrelated items into the cart because he thinks he could probably come up with SOME good use for them. 

Brenda is kind of stressed about this, because on the one hand it's none of her business if he buys some additional stuff while they're there but on the other hand what if they don't collectively have enough money to pay for it all. She bites her lip a lot but doesn't say anything.

Wei Wuxian is totally oblivious to other people's feelings, and also thinks that this big piece of wood could be GREAT for making a ballista.

It would be great for making a ballista, is the thing, and she wants him to be able to make a ballista, though admittedly she might feel differently if she lived next door to him, but that's not the point. 

They do eventually manage to find everything they need before the total amount of stuff in the cart after tax exceeds their budget, so she's spared the necessity of saying anything and can just steer the cart toward the register.

"...I forgot my wallet."

"Shit. I can't cover all this myself--" and thank goodness, honestly, because if she could she would have to decide whether to loan Wei Wuxian money, "I can go park the cart in the back of the store and sit around while you run home and get it?"

"Give me a sec." He pulls out his phone.

"A-Qing, my darling, my sweetheart, my angel, my light, my life, my heart. --Right, yeah, I forgot my wallet. --I know, I know. --I promise. --I promise. --I know. --I'm definitely going to think about doing that very seriously. --I know! --Yeah, I'm at the hardware store at"-- he gives the address-- "can you send a-Ning over? --Thank you, love you, you're the best."

Having siblings and/or friends sure looks nice. She fishes the school library's paperback copy of Have Space Suit, Will Travel out of her backpack and starts reading it while they wait, standing on one foot with the other one twined through the understructure of the shopping cart.

"I liked Starship Troopers better."

"Starship Troopers definitely had more going on. This one has better weird aliens, though."

"Tell me about it?"

"Have you read it already and what level of spoilers do you want?"

"No, and I love spoilers."

Wei Wuxian thinks he should ALSO be tangled on the shopping cart. 

"Okay, so there's these two sets of aliens, and one of them is your straightforward wants-to-conquer-earth types, and the other ones, at first we just meet one of them and she seems like a total sweetheart and helps out the humans. But then it turns out her species thinks of themselves as, like, galactic law enforcement, with the authority to just do whatever to whoever in the name of their alien conception of keeping the peace. So they genocide the conquering aliens and put the protagonists on trial as a proxy for whether they're going to genocide humanity too."

"Oh! Like in Space Opera! Probably the trial is not Space Eurovision though."

"No, but I think Eurovision has clearer standards of what counts as doing well or badly."

"Oh? What was Have Spacesuit Will Travel's?"

"A very vague definition of not being warlike, which kind of has to be vague given that the people enforcing it do a genocide immediately beforehand."

"Well, no one thinks it's bad when they're the ones doing it."

"Yeah. I bet if there are really aliens out there they'll be at least this weird and obnoxious but probably in some way we've never imagined."

"I think they won't have concealed ovulation and they'll think it's very fetishy that we can have sex throughout the month."

Brenda turns slightly pink but says, "Yeah. Or they'll reproduce by fission and think it's weird that children exist."

"Or they'll turn into women when they're on top of the social-- a-Ning!"

A-Ning is about two years younger than Brenda and Wei Wuxian. He's very pretty and also very terrified. He gives Brenda a little wave. 

TACKLEHUG!!!!

Brenda gives him a little wave back, says "Hi--" and then cuts herself off because she just realized she doesn't know his actual name, just an affectionate nickname it would be rude for her to call him. 

Bounce bounce bounce while continuing to tacklehug a-Ning.

"Guess what we're doing, a-Ning! We're going to make a RAILGUN! This is Ada, she was assigned as my partner, she's really cool."

"It's nice to meet you, Ada."

"It's nice to meet you too. Thanks for helping us out."

Wei Wuxian disentangles from the tacklehug holding onto a-Ning's wallet. "Let's go pay."

Onward to the checkout! Brenda splits their hoard into two piles of equal price so they can each pay for one.

Wei Wuxian resplits the hoard so that they're each paying for half of the railgun stuff and he's paying for all his impulsive ballista-related decisions, which would be much sweeter if he wasn't paying for it with a-Ning's money.

Brenda smiles appreciatively and hopes [whatever a-Ning's proper name is] gets some joy out of the ballista or the general state of friendship-communism or both.

"Ooh! Can a-Ning help us make the railgun?"

"Uhhhh it's probably against the rules, but it would probably still be within the spirit of the rules if he just helps with the construction and not the design or the report?" Personally she would find it awfully constraining to work on building something where she wasn't allowed to have ideas on the design but maybe she's just a control freak like that and he'll be fine with it.

"Who needs rules anyway. We have a railgun, that's better than rules. Come on, a-Ning."

"I want to get a good grade though . . . " she informs her shoes as they finish bagging up their haul.

"Why, though?"

Why is any good thing good? "College admissions?"

"Do you seriously think you're not going to get into a totally fine college."

"If I do, it'll be because I got good grades." (Also she needs So Many merit scholarships if she wants to go anywhere other than the state school, but let's not get into that.)

"I don't know if I even want to go to college. I think I might hitchhike to Alaska instead."

"What do you want to do in Alaska?"

"No idea! That's why I need to go there!"

A-Ning had quietly picked up all of their purchases and carried them to his bike. (He's surprisingly strong.)

"But then why Alaska in particular--actually we should get moving. Thank you!" 

It's not far to Brenda's house. Her yard has a crabapple tree with crabapples growing on one side and granny smith apples on the other.

Apples!

He gets off his bike and starts climbing the tree to obtain apples.

Brenda parks her bike in its usual spot in the garage and comes back to help unload the parts. "I hope you like the apples! Isn't tree-grafting neat?"

A-Ning locks up Wei Wuxian's bike and helps unload the parts.

Wei Wuxian throws an apple at a-Ning's head. (A-Ning catches it.) "It really is! Did you do it or someone else?"

"I did! I got the cutting from the guy who runs the apple orchard out west of town the year I did a report on soil composition." She lets them all in the back door, briefly transferring one of the bags of electronics to her teeth so she can get at her keys, and leads the way up to her room.

It's not a messy room, per se. There are no dirty dishes lying around, no laundry piles on the floor. Nonetheless, every flat or nearly-flat surface is covered in stuff. Books, notebooks, loose papers, and several odder things. There's a potted carnation with a half-blue half-red flower. There's a radio with its case off and its guts strewn across the top of the dresser. There's a tray with a map of the US covered in tendrils of something green and slimy-looking. There's an ant farm in the corner, clearly once inhabited but now vacant. There's an assemblage of gears and shafts built around one of those spirograph drawing kits for some inscrutable purpose. There's a big jug of water atop the bookcase, dripping from a pinhole onto a stone block with a tiny stalactite which is itself dripping onto another block with a tiny stalagmite and running from there to a collection tray on the floor.

"Sorry about the mess." Brenda nudges the slimy America under the bed, consolidates the radiosplosion, scoops several piles of paper onto different surfaces or into drawers, and clears enough floorspace for the three of them to sit and assemble stuff.

"This isn't messy. You should see my room. My room is messy. Isn't it, a-Ning?"

A-Ning nods enthusiastically.

"I'd ask you to tell my parents that if I thought it would convince them of anything," she quips.

Wei Wuxian flops on the bed. "You should tell me about your projects. All of them."

Oh gosh what an excellent thing for someone to say! And he probably means it because she can't think of anything she said that sounded too much like badgering him to listen!

"So the slime mold under the bed is solving an instance of an NP-complete problem, it's not as fast as a computer because it's not made of transistors but it's better than the actual US highway system on some metrics which is very impressive for mold, I was trying to do something similar with the ant farm but my parents were afraid they'd get out, but the artificial cave has been going for three years now and I'm hoping to take it to college with me someday, and the carnation is just early stage, I want to try cutting it into six bits and getting a full rainbow but the last one died on me so I'm working up to it, the radio was my grandma's, it fell off her balcony and died and she was gonna throw it out so I dibsied it and I've got it mostly working again but I want to get the range longer, that thing with the spirographs optically scans a design, analyzes, and reproduces it, I should really come up for a name for it that isn't "that thing with the spirographs", and I had an origami hyperbolic plane in progress but I think the radio knocked it down the back of the dresser so I might just start over."

"........wow you're extremely cool."

"Thank you!"

"Can I look at the radio? I want to look at the radio." Wei Wuxian immediately goes to look at the radio without waiting for Brenda to give her permission.

She doesn't try to stop him. What's he gonna do, pitch it out the window again? More likely he'll either make some progress or just poke around. Or knock bits into the all-consuming void which is the gap behind the dresser, but she's going to have to do another expedition back there one of these days anyway.

Wei Wuxian has QUESTIONS about the radio! What does this bit do. Why did she make this decision. He thinks it would work better if she did this other thing. 

A-Ning brought the Hunger Games and is going to read it until he's needed. 

Brenda has answers! And more questions! And they should totally do that other thing, he is so right, let's do that right now.

Obviously they should do that other thing. He's very smart and great at everything. Just ask a-Ning. 

Yes, a-Ying is smart and great at everything. 

(Brenda does not actually say anything to a-Ning because he is reading a book and she has (her own notion of) good manners.)

Radio maintenance is not quite as fun as biology but it is very fun.

About halfway through the radio project he gets distracted by the spirographs, and then he gets distracted by trying to understand exactly what the slime molds are up to.

She has a complete explanation of the spirographs, and an incomplete but extensive explanation of the slime mold across several levels of abstraction from mathematics to physiology, and absolutely no sense of time, so if neither of them remembers that they're supposed to be building a railgun they're supposed to be building a trebuchet and were planning on building a railgun they're just going to stay sidetracked until her mother yells that it's dinnertime.

"...Shit. I should probably be getting-- somewhere other than home. A-Ning, what's for dinner?"

"Pizza but my mom's still mad about you bleaching the couch."

"Your mom doesn't care about science. This is why there's widespread scientific ignorance, you know. People not supporting teenagers in their experimentation. Valuing their couches over the advancement of human knowledge. Also, I think it looks better that way. It's unique. You're not going to have any other couch with that pattern of bleach stains. You could probably sell it as a piece of abstract art."

Brenda has tripped the circuit breaker, clogged the sink, and neglected to declare the pet praying mantis too many times to throw stones. "I can ask if you can have dinner with us if you want, but warning that Mom will complain about not having been told in time to make more food and Dad will complain about me having boys in my room."

"We could give them something to complain about if they're going to complain anyway."

"I'd rather not give them any more things to complain about," Brenda says, the innuendo whooshing so far over her head it doesn't even ruffle her hair.

"Ouch. Crushingly rejected."

It's not surprising that he's the sort of person who would trip the circuit breaker or whatever as a prank but she does actually like her parents when they're not being annoying.

"Sorry? I don't know why you'd want to, surely you get plenty of opportunities to mess around elsewhere." 

"But I don't want to mess around elsewhere! I want to mess around with you!"

"I'm glad. Just--let's get downstairs. On my way, mom!" She goes downstairs first to explain things to her parents.

"a-Ning, did you see how badly she rejected me. I'm crushed. I'm destroyed. I have never been so thoroughly blown out by a girl in my life."

Pat pat. "Maybe she's a lesbian."

"Oh! That's true. Do you think we could set her up on a date with your sister? She's cool and Wen Qing is cool and so together they'd be the most cool."

Brenda comes back upstairs and says, "Okay, come on down, they made enough for leftovers and I said I would cook tomorrow instead so it's fine. If you like spaghetti and meatballs and broccoli."

"Bet they're not spicy enough."

"A-Ning, you should go home for dinner." This opinion is accompanied by Wei Wuxian pouncing on him and giving him a full-body hug.

"They are basically zero spicy, sorry. Uh, do you want to come down and eat or not?"

"I'm going to come down to eat and I'm also going to complain!"

A-Ning nervously waves goodbye to both of them and leaves.

"Goodbye. Um it was nice meeting . . . " aaand he's already gone, never mind.

She leads Wei Wuxian down to the kitchen and says "Mom, Dad, this is Wei Wuxian, my friend from school."

"Did you have him in your room with you?" 

"Dad, we were working on a science project!" 

Mr. Banner responds with a suspicious glare; Mrs. Banner looks, if anything, disappointed. Brenda determinedly goes and starts filling everyone's water glasses from the sink, pointing out which chair is the guest chair on the way.

Wei Wuxian sits on the guest chair, sort of. He looks like he's about to fall off at every moment but somehow doesn't. 

"Hi! Your daughter is really smart! Probably you get that all the time. She has a really cool slime mold project. I guess you know about that, she's probably told you all about it, but it's really cool because--" and he's off.

He's so nice! She kind of wishes he would be nice about a different project, because she had to fight pretty hard to get permission for the slime mold and she doesn't want that getting reconsidered, but he's still nice. She tries to contribute some compliments on his intelligence and engineering skills, but has trouble getting a word in edgewise.