"Thank you, miss, but I'm perfectly alright." It doesn't look like Yanli would object to anyone taking advantage of her generosity, but the angry one will actually be in his graduating class.  

Masozi takes so many notes, in an obscure mixture of written Chichewa and personal pictographs he used as mnemonics as a small child, scratching them on rocks in charcoal, before he knew how to write. 

He manages to extract himself with enough time to spare that he can run back to his room and ditch the spare drawer, container of mal grubs, and abandoned garbage clothes, and still find the Maleficeria Studies room on time. 

"All right." She says to Mei, "it's my latest project! I'm trying to figure out something that will make food taste like it has soy sauce on it."

"Something other than putting soy sauce on it, I assume."

Smile. "Well, there's not much of that here."

"So it's an... imitation soy sauce potion?"

"Yep! Except you only need a few drops of it to flavor the whole meal. --It's hard to do much that's more... generally useful... in here, with my affinity the way it is. We don't have a kitchen."

(Julian is not interrupting the enclavers. Julian is trying to figure out the 4D chess that must have occurred to result in a couple of Kyoto freshmen doing grunt work for Shanghai. Julian hates 4D chess.) 

(Mei is also not entirely following the 4D chess but as the child of minions she goes where Ayako goes and so she is here.)

"Well I'm sure people will be grateful for the ability to flavor things. Your affinity is cooking?"

"Food in general, although it's quite opinionated about the food staying meaningfully food. I can't attack a mal with a fifty-foot monster made entirely out of bread-- or, I can, but it doesn't work better than anyone else's attempt. a-Xian's affinity is much more cooperative, he can do whatever he likes as long as it involves a dead body somehow."

...well that throws Shanghai's bizarre friendliness to the obvious maleficer kid in a new and alarming light. 

"I brought in cockroaches and Jiang Cheng and I are gonna share. He does live animals and I do dead ones."

Julian cannot afford to offend Shanghai but it's starting to look like he also cannot afford to be associated with whatever the hell is happening here. 

"That's... clever." Mei does not want to talk about corpses or bugs or bug corpses over breakfast. She tries to steer things back in the imitation soy sauce direction. "A food affinity seems like it could be useful for making potions, though. Does it make things be food when they weren't very to start? A bunch of the more useful stuff tastes awful."

"Yes! I have a potion I can mix in with any other potion that makes it taste exactly like strawberries."

"Now that's amazing. I've been working on a recipe for a poison-detector that would make great lip balm, except the taste is bad enough no-one would want their lips covered in it. It might actually be usable if it tasted like strawberries!"

"Maybe some work period we should experiment to see if they work well together."

"Sure! Probably should wait until I've get some Intro to Lab under my belt, anyway. I imagine the lab here is a bit different from the one at home."

Ayako, meanwhile, is contemplating four-dimensional chess.

In most enclaves, students make alliances with people they want to bring in to the enclave, but the Japanese enclaves— or at least, the old ones, of which Kyoto is one— have a policy. There aren't no alliances with helpful people who will be brought into the enclave after graduation, but they're limited: there's one, maybe two, Japanese independents in a Japanese enclaver's graduation alliance. Everyone else is an independent from somewhere else, not to be brought into an enclave in Japan but to be aggressively sponsored for a spot in an enclave of their choice, so that the enclaves of Japan have friends and allies all over the world.

Ayako doesn't know Lan Xichen very well. She's studied the etiquette of Chinese wizards, of course, but before the Scholomance there wasn't much call for her to speak to them. But she's had that strategy— to find the most brilliant people from as far afield as you possibly can, and do it early, and make a skilled ally where nobody was expecting to find one— drilled into her for years, and she knows it when she sees it.

She isn't sure, if it were her, that ignoring the aura of malificer would be a good enough idea to seem worth it. Presumably Lan Xichen had his reasons. But even if Ayako has no idea what those reasons might have been— it's the second day. Having found and scooped up Masozi already, when he doesn't even speak Mandarin, indicates both impressive dedication and slightly terrifying skill. Or at least, that's what she plans to explain to Haruto when she talks to him at lunch today with her pitch for why she and Mei should sit at Shanghai's table going forward.

(It doesn't remotely cross her mind that it looks like she's doing grunt work for Shanghai. She's from Kyoto. Obviously she isn't sucking up to Shanghai, why on earth would she feel the need to do that, it would be like London sucking up to New York.)

When it looks like Mei and Yanli's conversation has reached a stopping point, she says, "Mei, I mentioned Julian Chan to you yesterday? This is him, he's working with us on the Wen Ning thing. Julian, this is Masane Mei." 

"Oh, you're the enclave guy, right? That's badass."

No, it's not, it's going to be badass in four years  and a day in the unlikely event it doesn't first get me killed. 

"Yes, that's me! I'm still figuring out how to get the most out of it in here. I bet I can find a way to make our rooms bigger, at least when I have more mana."

"Oh, Nie Huaisang would like that, he's trying to fit an entire chemistry lab in his room."

"I am not! I'm only trying to make things that won't kill me if they blow up."

"Where do you have your void? If you've got a ceiling I bet I could do a contained loft." 

Julian is not as confident as he sounds but, hey, it's going to be at least a year before he's strong enough for anyone to call him on it. 

"Void wall, unfortunately."