Mei appears with her tray and takes a seat. "Speaking of healing alchemy... I got put in Common Ingredients in Traditional Chinese Medicine, have you had that one before?" she asks, with the implication "And do you have copies of any of your papers from it?"

"Yes, I had it last year." 

"Did you keep any of your notes?"

"As it happens, I did."

"If you'd be willing to trade me those, that would free up an entire class period that I'd be happy to put to some more productive use."

"Remind me what your affinity is?"

"Luck, or something like it."

"I'm not sure how to value my notes in luck potions, but my brother could certainly use more luck."

This is probably true.

"I know a potion that will give you either a good feeling or a feeling of impending doom when you go through a doorway, depending on how dangerous what's on the other side is. Assuming I can get the ingredients, I could brew up enough to cover him each week during those class periods, if I didn't have to pay attention to the lecture."

This is around the point at which Masozi finally makes it to the cafeteria, extremely late for breakfast. He's inexplicably carrying what looks like one of the drawers from his room desk, and doesn't even bother heading for the cafeteria line, just goes and talks to some students on the Anglosphere side, and then troops off looking disappointed. 

...Oh, right, he should coordinate with Shanghai on whether they need him for lookout duty. 

He heads for the Shanghai table and waits politely for someone to acknowledge him. His desk drawer contains a large number of squirming mal grubs. 

"That would be very generous of you."

"Good morning, Masozi," he says in English. "I confess I have no idea what you're using those grubs for."

"They're to feed Lucy and Wilbur's spiders familiars." He points to the other side of the cafeteria. "I'm trading it for spider silk socks. But then I didn't have another container and neither did they." 

...He is slightly too hesitant to ask outright if he could borrow one from them. 

Hey, quick question, what is even happening.

Meng Yao presents him with a container from his backpack. "Please return it before this afternoon, I have a maintenance shift."

“Thank you!”

Masozi beams at him, and then sits down - on the floor, after scanning for mals, he’s not used to things like ‘tables’ or ‘chairs’ and has not obviously been invited - and starts transferring grubs to the container, using a scrap of fabric torn off the hem of his shirt as a makeshift glove but otherwise very casual about scooping the grubs up.

"You're welcome to sit at table," Lan Xichen says in the exact tone he would use to say that someone was welcome to help themself to a glass of water.

??????????????????

“Thank you very much,” Masozi says, politely but still mostly focused on his grubs.

He finishes transferring them, closes the container, and puts it away in his backpack, swapping them for his meditation book and one of his bits of scrap paper. He’s been carefully copying over a list of unique letter-symbols in it and then organizing them by similarity and trying to notice patterns in which symbols show up together, which was the only way he could think of to make progress learning Mandarin on his own. 

He sits down at the table and smooths out the slightly crumpled paper. “If you’re not too busy,” he says almost shyly, to no one in particular, “I would be very grateful if someone could tell me what these letters are so I can write it down.”

Zixun and Zixuan safely wrapped up in Tang romantic poetry? Excellent.

This kid is great.

"Chinese has very difficult writing system. Each character represents word. I can tell you meaning of words or explain phonetics and radicals?"

“Oh! So it’s not like an alphabet, it’s like a secret code???” Bounce bounce bounce. “I tried to make my own code once but I ran out of paper for it. What are radicals?”

"Before you do that," Meng Yao says, "you should change into Song Lan's clothes. They won't fit very well but this evening you can go to Nie Huaisang's room for alterations. 278B." 

They can't have someone wearing rags sitting at the Shanghai enclave's table. 

“Oh. Okay. Should I - go change somewhere else?”