Wen Ning's guard is not, in fact, making a play for enclave membership, because she's got that already. But Mei was 100% right that they should be sticking around Shanghai to try and figure out what the hell is going on, and also Ayako's not totally sure she wants to let Wen Ning out of her sight even if his sister is going to be right there, so here she is nonetheless. 

"Good morning, Ayako. Did you end up finding the classes you wanted?"

Meng Yao will also accept a closer alliance with Kyoto. They need to team up to stick it to those smug bastards in Seoul.

"I did! Wen Ning's schedule came out pretty much perfect right out of the gate so I just swapped into all of his classes, there's one that looks really cool about visual storytelling in Western versus Eastern literary traditions and a math class about golden ratios that Huaisang's in too." 

"Oh, he'll have a good time with that. Trust a-Sang to find a way to make math an art class."

"Mei and your brother ended up in a math class for street fights, I had kind of been assuming math classes here were just like that? But yeah I'm really excited for it." 

"...how do you use math in street fighting?"

"Throwing things is calculus?"

"That seems like less 'math for street fighting' and more 'math with a vaguely street-fighting-related theme.'"

"I have no idea how Street-fighting Mathematics class is going to work but I'm sure Mei is looking forward to finding out." 

"I just wish we had real science. I coordinated my schedule so at least one person from Shanghai enclave is in all of my classes and can do my homework for me, so I can take shifts with Marian in the nurse's office."

"According to one of my cousins you get chemistry sometimes in the alchemy classes? You're not wrong though." 

"I've been hoping to get biochemistry before I graduate but no luck yet."

Meanwhile, on the other side of the allies--

"Please let me put your potions in my shop, Yanli. This is amazing. It tastes like food."

"I'm not sure that they're that good."

"You don't have to do anything special. Just give me your homework. I'll give you half the profits." Well, forty percent, Yanli's a wimp. 

"Well, all right, if you really want to."

"I do, I do. It's the little luxuries that make life worth living, don't you think?"

...something about that is tugging on her attention but she can't quite tell what— 

Ah well. Back to Wen Qing. "Fortunately on the outside biochemistry textbooks are much easier to find. Not that it does a ton of good in here, of course." 

"I want to learn to heal people now."

"When we graduate you'll be able to complain to the people who run the place, maybe they'll let you take a history or a science."

That still doesn't really solve the problem of wanting to heal people now, though. "And in the meantime there's the nurse. What's that like?" 

"She's incredibly smart. She knows so many things. Apparently Yanli's fibro might be caused by her parents being terrible and that makes her sick."

"...huh. I didn't know that was a thing that could happen." 

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?”

"Wangji, would you please escort him to the bathroom?"

"Yes."

Sure, Masozi can get up and go with him, bringing his precious new clothes to change into.

This is not decreasing the number of questions she has!

(Obviously she's not going to ask. That would be rude. If Lan Xichen is acting like this is all perfectly normal then it's all perfectly normal. That doesn't mean she isn't full of question marks.)

"He grew up in Africa and got to the Scholomance having never learned a spell from anyone else."

Meanwhile--

Lan Wangji is perfectly silent on the way to the bathroom.

"....I no longer have questions." 

"It's remarkable to me how many people judge someone by their clothes."

Silence is fine with Masozi! He’s focused on scanning for mals, though he only finds one teensy worm thing for Bichen to kill.

In the bathroom, he strips and dunks under the shower and uses his old clothes to dry himself a little before carefully putting on the new outfit. It doesn’t, in fact, fit very well - Masozi is taller than the other student whose name he’s forgotten, and also much scrawnier, so the pants show some ankle and also badly call for a belt, and the shirt hangs off his shoulders like he’s a human coat hanger. But they’re clean and comfortable and don’t reek. 

He’s so pleased! He stuffs his abandoned garbage clothes in the very bottom of his backpack, spare fabric seems handy even if it stinks, and then he can follow Lan Wangji back to the cafeteria.

"Appalling," Nie Huaisang says to Wei Wuxian on Masozi's way back, "that's appalling, I am going to fix up his outfit for free. Do you think he'd like embroidered birds?" 

"Probably not."

"I can dream."

"Much better," Lan Xichen says when he returns. "You want to know about radicals?"

“Yes! If there’s time to explain it before class starts?”

"Most characters are formed by combining radical and phonetic. This character"-- he points-- "means 'flower,' which is pronounced huā. Phonetic"-- he points-- "is character for huà, 'change', which gives hint to pronunciation. Radical is character for cǎo, 'grass.' So it's word that sounds like huà and means something like 'grass.' Huā. Flower. The characters themselves are pictures. You see how cǎo looks like grass? And huà is person standing upright and another person upside down. Change."

(Julian does not want to assume he has an invitation to sit at the Shanghai table, but he also doesn't want to look like he's neglecting his bodyguard duties. So, after scarfing down his breakfast with Naima, he's – hovering. And mildly hating himself for looking like such an obvious lackey. Which he needs to get over, stat, because obvious lackeys who have upperclassmen doing their wards at night can't afford to be picky.) 

Masozi is going to be utterly captivated by his lesson on Mandarin radicals for the rest of the breakfast period! (Though not quite so captivated that he stops relentlessly scanning the room for mals.) 

"There's space for you to sit," he says to Julian, "here or down by Jiang Cheng and Wei Wuxian. Depending on how fascinated you are by introductory Mandarin lessons."

"...not especially, thanks." He'll sit with the two freshmen, then. 

Well, there's no accounting for taste.

(His sworn brother is so cute.)

"Hello!" Jiang Yanli says as soon as he sits down. "I'm Jiang Yanli, these are my brothers Jiang Cheng and Wei Wuxian. And this is Nie Huaisang. Would you like some seasoning for your food?"

"How am I supposed to sell it if you keep giving it away for free?"

"I believe in your abilities."

People should stop TAKING ADVANTAGE of his sister's KINDNESS.

Mei looks over at Yanli with interest. "What kind of seasoning?"

"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."

"That's probably easier to work with, but less convenient for a chemistry lab." 

"I will have to suffer and cram my experiments in making alcohol right next to my art projects."

"I take it you're alchemy track?"

"Absolutely not. Incantations. I don't want to spend one minute longer in the lab than I have to."

Huh. Maybe enclave kids have enough slack to go for completely normal non-magic alcohol. 

"Oh? What languages do you have?" 

"English, Classical Chinese, Shanghainese, Cantonese, Japanese, Korean, Thai, Vietnamese, and Tibetan."

"That's exciting! I've been hoping to meet more Cantonese speakers," he says in Cantonese. It's even true – most Chinese enclaves are in the north, and the Hong Kong enclavers don't want anything to do with him. "Not many people pick it up as a second language." 

"People are ridiculous. Cantonese is easy if you know Classical Chinese already. --I'm planning to pick up more Indo-European languages while I'm here and can talk to native speakers." And get them to be his boyfriend!

"I went with mostly Indo-European languages before I got in, they're just easier for me. I'm terrified I'll pick up the wrong spellbook because it's written in hanzi and end up with a bunch of Sinitic languages I've never heard in my life." 

"Eh, I figure I'll pick them up pretty quickly."

"Well, yes, but it would get in the way of my language plan! How many people even write spells in Hakka?" 

"If I get it I'll find out!"

Better him than Julian. 

"I don't even have that many spells in Cantonese and it's my native language. I swear Chinese wizards are just allergic to vernacular." 

Honestly, that's a good idea. Nie Huaisang makes a mental note to pick up Hakka as soon as possible.

"Well, what good is a spell if you can't put in at least six allusions to poetry from the Warring States Period."

"You know, most people at this table don't speak Cantonese," Wei Wuxian says in fluent Cantonese.

"When did you learn Cantonese???"

He shrugs and takes a bite of his pancake. "Around."

How do all these Shanghaiers have time to learn Cantonese. Nobody writes spells in Cantonese. Julian's definitely not bitter at all.

"Oh, I'm so sorry! I didn't mean to offend anyone, I was excited and got carried away. Anyway, I'm impressed, your Cantonese is much better than my Mandarin." 

"Your Mandarin seemed great to me."

This totally did not fix the problem where not everyone at this table speaks Cantonese. (CANTONESE????)

Yanli sunnily butters her bread.

"Anyway, we should all be polite now," Julian says in Mandarin, because oh god the angry one is looking at him. 

The angry one simmers down into his more normal baseline state of rage. "It's fine," he says, in a tone which implies that it is definitely not fine. When the fuck did his brother learn Cantonese?

"Jiang Cheng and I are both artificing track, so I can learn whatever languages I feel like."

Think of the wards think of the wards think of the wards think of the wards 

....fucking enclavers. 

"That's very fortunate," he eventually chokes out. 

"I guess it's also more likely I'll blow myself up with a project so it evens out!"

Julian is going to take a moment to remind himself that Shanghai is the second most powerful enclave in the world and their Dominus is approximately the most badass artificer currently living.