He does not catch. "A plane is more aerodynamic."

"I bet I can get a spell to make the stupid boat fly."

"If you use the enclave's mana for that I'm taking your power-sharer away and giving it to Masozi."

"I really think you should give it to Meng Yao? He's Lan Xichen's boyfriend."

"Fine. If you use our mana on stupid shit then I will give your power-sharer to Meng Yao and then you'll be eaten by a rogue pair of scissors and I will not be sorry." 

"Wouldn't that be more 'stabbed to death'? I don't think scissors have mouths, rogue or otherwise."

Tianjin let Huang sit with them in the lecture hall, where exact numbers of chairs at the table is not a concern. They're near-ish Shanghai, and she's on that end of their clump.

That's a lot of mals. It's staggering to believe that running this gauntlet has better odds than staying at home. But without her father she won't have even as much protection as her siblings had and most of those are already dead.

Masozi is going to have a REALLY HARD TIME learning anything academic in this class until he manages to calm down his reflexive panic some, but he sure does manage to take in quite a lot of details about the mal-replicas shown. And eventually he even thinks to grab his textbook, amazing. It's in Chichewa, which is disappointing because he doubts literally anyone else in the school speaks that. Probably he should ask Wei Wuxian - once they're out of this WORST CLASSROOM EVER - if he can borrow someone's Mandarin textbook so he can start learning the secret code written Mandarin more efficiently... 

Masozi is not really able to focus on reading his textbook at all. 

Ribo arrives reasonably early, she never left the cafeteria. She takes a middling seat and looks over the the diorama. There's an awful lot of Mals she's never studied pictured. That's exciting, a little intimidating, but also exciting. And for the moment at least she's not in mortal danger so it isn't even that weird to be excited... right?

Mei looks at the mural and closes her eyes and breathes. Her job is to get Ayako through that. She has four years to be ready.

She's not sure she will ever be ready.