"Mn."

"Do you think someone's going to steal my stuff? I hope no one steals my stuff."

"Mn."

"You know what I don't get? Your brother. Why does he have a sworn brother in the Scholomance? Uh, hello, everyone's going to die. You have plenty of time to fall in love outside, with people who are confirmed not dead."

"Mn."

"And a maintenance track kid too? What the hell. He must have an enormous dick or something. You're not going to catch me falling in love here, nope. All the girls and all the guys are going to be falling at my feet begging me to fuck them and I'm going to be like 'nope, you are a distraction from my studies.'"

"Mn."

"Don't look at me like that! I so could do my homework. Especially since it's going to come to life and try to murder me if I don't. --Lan Zhan will you save me from the ferocious homeworks."

"Yes."

"You're a saint. I love you. I'd suck your dick if I weren't sworn to celibacy. --You know, this is why I helped Nie Huaisang smuggle in a bunch of porn. I bet if Lan Xichen had been practical and thought ahead like me he wouldn't have fallen in love."

"Mn."

"Twice! You know, once I can forgive but twice just seems like carelessness."

"Mn."

It's after dinner but there's probably still an hour or two to go before curfew, if he's kept track of time, and so Masozi is walking around getting a better sense of where things are in the school. Apparently 'homeroom' is first thing in the morning tomorrow, and he won't know where he has to go until he gets a slip of paper under his door? At which point he wants to already know the most efficient route there, that minimizes the number of mal-hiding-places he passes. 

Also, pacing around the school and using just his eyes to check for mals rather than his detection sort-of-spell - it must be a spell, though he hadn't consciously realized until now that there was any incantation involved and that the words he would loop in his thoughts or mutter under his breath were relevant - is at least a good way to bank up some mana, so he can do a ward on his door tonight without having to use his beetles. Since apparently it might be bad for him to do that, not to mention it supposedly makes him have creepy vibes, and right now it seems feasible to avoid. 

He's about to just walk past the kids talking in Mandarin, but...wait what are they even doing? 

Masozi stops walking. "Do you - need help with something?" he asks - in English, meaning it might not be understood, but eh he can at least try to offer. 

That person said a sentence in English. Lan Zhan didn't totally catch it but he's pretty sure from the intonation that it was a question.

"No," he says, because that's generally a safe answer to questions.

This kid has a mildly creepy aura. It's nothing you'd notice if you weren't looking for it and weren't Masozi, who has been training his situational awareness for years; most people, if they think of it at all, attribute it to him being goth.

"I forgot my room number so we're checking every room for my cockroaches! Lan Zhan is here to hit the mals with his sword because I can really only do much with things once they're dead."

"You forgot your room?" Masozi gives him a shocked look. "Do you remember if it was top or bottom, or inside or outside the ring, or near a bathroom or stairs...?" 

"I think it was one of the odd ones out but I'm not sure."

Helping some dumb unprepared kid who managed to forget his room number on the first day is probably not a great use of his time, but then again, he's out here anyway. And the other kid - Lan something? - has a sword, which will be useful if Masozi does spot any mals. 

"I can help you look, if you want," he offers cheerfully. 

"Yeah! Sure! That would be great! I'm Wei Wuxian, this is Lan Wangji, we're from Shanghai enclave. Don't mind Lan Wangji, he doesn't talk much even in a language he actually speaks well."

Lan Wangji hears his name. "Mn," he says on the grounds that it's appropriate in all situations.

"My name is Masozi. Pleased to meet you."

Masozi will try checking alternating rooms, so he and Wei Wuxian can leapfrog past each other and hopefully do this twice as fast. Nope, no cockroaches in this room. The next one is locked which means it's presumably another student's. 

Making conversation is a thing, right. "You brought cockroaches?" he asks, as they reach the end of this hall. "I have dung beetles." 

"Yeah! My affinity is corpses and my martial brother's affinity is animals so we brought in cockroaches because they don't die and we can both use them."

And he's planning to use them for malia when he can't get enough from cheating but let's not discuss that.

"...That affinity sounds kind of inconvenient." 

This guy...definitely has some kind of vibe, now that Masozi is actually paying any attention to that. It's perhaps easier to tell because he's clearly not paranoid or careful or on guard, so the slight feeling of danger is out of place. 

- is THAT the kind of thing that other people were noticing about him? Huh. 

It does imply that this is someone who might have some actual firsthand experience with maleficing, and therefore be more useful to ask for advice than the kids who clearly never even considered using it and seem to be mostly going on "common wisdom" which might or might not contain any truth. 

"Can I - ask you a question?" he says. "I didn't go to school or anything before this so there's a lot of things I don't know about wizard magic." 

"Of course."