Masozi is up very early in the morning, and (quickly and efficiently) makes the discovery that the curfew at night also continues through until morning, and retreats to his room, where for lack of anything better to do he asks the void for a spell to fight mals. 

He gets a handwritten manuscript in Zulu, crudely bound in a folio with unidentified stains on it. It seems to be a package of spells, most of which are about mind-controlling mals into fighting for you? Which isn't really what he wants right now? Maybe someday when he has WAY more mana capacity. It would be useful for getting through the graduation hall, if he could make some of the mals fight the rest so they were distracted. Right now it's not realistic at all. 

One spell is for trapping a mal on the spot, which is at least not useless. It's not as mana-efficient as he would like, but it's cheaper than his standard sort-of-spell that he invented himself, and he ought to be able to use it a couple of times without resorting to draining beetles. 

He has time for a few minutes of attempting the meditation thing that Wei Wuxian described to him. It doesn't get him very much mana, though; possibly because he finds it too pleasant. It's....restful, feeling safe enough in a room to just sit still and pay attention to his breathing. 

And then it's time for a dash to the bathroom - no time to get mal grubs though he does check if any are hiding in the plumbing or down the drain and there are a few - and then he heads off to find 'Room 1' as described on his slip of paper.

There's a girl there who he hasn't met yet. He smiles at her, quickly, before scanning for mals. "I'm Masozi. Pleased to meet you." 

"I'm Rebecca. Oh, you're that guy who followed us down to get the hand-me-downs, right?"

"Yeah. I wasn't coming to get hand-me-downs, though, I mostly wanted to learn my way around the school better so I won't get lost later." 

...Did she also overhear the senior shouting at him? Masozi isn't sure what he would say if she did, and either way he's not going to be the first one to bring it up. 

"Yeah, I was gonna say, it didn't seem like they wanted to give you any stuff."

Bobbie jogs into the room, finds an open safe spot and sits. She keeps an eye on Masozi when she's not scanning for mals.

A timid-looking girl slinks nervously into the room, eyes darting around. She takes a seat that suggests nobody warned her about vents. 

"Hey. Don't sit under a vent if you value your neck"

She startles a little, then looks up, sees the vent, and moves to a safer seat. 

"Thanks."

"Aren't any mals in that vent," Masozi offers. "...Or anywhere, except there's a cocoon thing under that desk, we should warn people not to sit there. I checked. S'my affinity." 

"Should we... kill it? The cocoon thing?"

"Before it hatches, yeah. Don't think it's going anywhere today. I don't have a mana-efficient spell for killing it though."

And he is trying to be very good about not using malia until the school is back to being as dangerous as South African cities were for him. He also spent some of his earlier meditation time focused on trying to feel his magic and see if he could have less of the vibe-of-untrustworthiness on purpose. 

After he's deposited the mousy Shanghai freshman in his own homeroom (and checked all the corners and underneath every desk and issued stern instructions not to get near the air vent), Julian has just enough time to sprint across what feels like half the school and arrive entirely sweaty and out-of-breath. Brilliant first impression, right there. 

To tell the truth, he'd expected the Scholomance to look like one of those awful Victorian boarding schools straight out of David Copperfield or maybe Roald Dahl, but it's a still little unsettling just how on the nose he was. The bronze apple in particular has to be some long-dead Englishman's idea of a sick joke. 

Luckily, he's not the last one to arrive. He scans the room and takes a seat near the middle – not at the coccoon desk – with the giant girl between him and the door. 

"If it's a cocoon would it be hard to just... squash?" With..." She looks around for something that could be used to squash it. "Um..."

Masozi has a backpack full of books but he is absolutely not disrespecting his Mandarin library book on meditation or his spellbook of mal mind control spells - which he reminds himself not to think is horrible, the void might get resentful, the void was trying to give him what he asked for and it's definitely in his affinity and he should have been more specific that he wanted not that. 

"I don't know but it might have some sort of defence. If we bothered it. I haven't seen that kind before but some of the cocoons zap you or squirt acid if you try to squash them." 

"We don't actually have to come back here after today, do we? If it's not going to hatch, I say we leave it well enough alone." 

"But it will hatch, even if it's not going to do it right now, won't it?"

"Maybe one of you should tell Orion Lake at breakfast. He loves killing mals. He was really happy when I pointed them out for him yesterday." 

"Okay, I'll probably be sitting near him."

What. And who? And, also, what. 

"I think it's mostly just eggs and some of the very little ones, this early in the term. If he wants it, he's welcome to it." 

"Oh for fuck's sake."

She conjures up and bounces a small fireball under the desk in question.

"Are you all planning to just sit around gabbing when an actually dangerous mal shows up?"

Well that's... rude but at least the cocoon is burnt up now??

"Personally, I'd like to save my mana for when that actually dangerous mal does show up." Since they're going to need every last drop when things get really bad. "Thanks for taking care of it, anyway." 

"Eggs hatch. And it was cheap, I got more mana walking over here."

Naima has an almost kind of reasonable amount of mana, and is also dead inside. And kind of outside, in that all of her limbs are extremely angry with her and she doesn't feel like she could run very far or very fast to save her life. Hopefully she would turn out to be wrong if it would actually save her life. 

Walking across the school in this condition: great for building additional mana! Also great for making her want to kill something, though. Metaphorically. She's not really in any condition for actually killing things, either.

She sits down gingerly in a safe-looking seat and takes in the room. Smiles a little when she sees Julian, that's lucky. ...maybe she can manage to take a class or two with him, not that that's actually the most important thing to be optimizing for, here.

A grumpy-looking girl, well-fed and well-dressed and wearing for some reason not one but two power-sharers, walks into the room. She gives the place a quick once-over for mals and then takes a seat with a good view of all the other students.