Tomonori is not sitting in the front row. That would be dangerous. He does spend an extra minute just walking around, trying to decide where to sit, which loses him several potential seats that he was considering. He finally sits in one of the only remaining seats that's left in the fifth row from the front by the time he's dithered so much about it.

Misaki arrives early and takes a seat toward the middle, which seems like a good trade between close enough to see and far enough to be safe-ish. She could sit on the English side of the room but their gossip is less interesting.

That is a lot of mals. She's going to die. The thought just comes to her, unbidden, that in four years she's not going to have become capable of dealing with all of that. She - well, she's going to take it one step at a time, right, learn about one mal and then another, learn one spell and then another... but that's not going to work and she knows it.

She doesn't want to think about that. It's not like spending the next four years nonfunctional from panic would improve her chances. Her textbook is right where she expects it and she can split her attention between that and the display and any chatter that happens around her and not think about the future at all.

Lan Wangji sits next to Wei Wuxian and watches the illusory mal closely so it doesn't get any ideas.

Whoa, that's cool illusion magic. He wonders how they did it. Is it artificing or, like, really really stable incantations? It has to be artificing. 

(He continues on this train of thought until five minutes after class has begun.)

This is the WORST CLASSROOM.

How is he supposed to focus in this classroom?????

There are TENTACLE THINGS right THERE. He puts his head on his desk and closes his eyes tightly.

"They're not real."

"You don't know that! Sometimes they become real!"

"Stop it! You're embarrassing everyone!"

Wen Ning sits next to Ayako, opens up his textbook, and begins to make five sets of flashcards. Then, after a moment's thought, he starts to make eight.

Masozi follows the Shanghai freshman in, scans the room to orient himself, and almost immediately is filled with PANIC. 

…Five seconds later his mal-sensing background spell confirms that the mals are illusory. This does not really do much to help with the PANIC. All of his honed survival instincts are screaming that he needs to not be here, but it’s a class and he can’t just - run away - and most of the other students don’t seem nearly so freaked out, he has to…try to calm down…

Instead of managing to calm down, he stands frozen in the aisle, unable to even consider looking for a seat. 

Wei Wuxian waves frantically. "Masozi! Over here! Over here!"

Masozi manages to unfreeze himself just enough to head in that direction. 

He doesn’t sit down. Sitting feels too vulnerable. He hovers by Wei Wuxian, tense and frantically trying to watch the entire room at once.

"God. You reek. We've gotta get you a shower if you're going to be hanging around with us. --Also, chairs, you still sit on them."

Ha. Ahaha. This is fine. She is 100% completely fine and unworried about anything. 

She's known the numbers her whole life, of course, but there's numbers and then there's that. There's so many. 

Wen Ning is on one side of her and Mei is on the other. She takes her textbook and glances at Wen Ning's flashcards and whispers "good idea" and starts working on her own. 

"Oh! I'm making a set for you, ma'am. I make very good flashcards."

"Thank you. But I'm still going to make a Japanese set, it's good to have both I think." Write write write. "We can quiz each other later?" 

"Yes, ma'am. That seems like a good plan."

(Is that a real actual smile? It's so tiny.)

Masozi is definitely not fine. He sits down by Wei Wuxian and huddles up with his arms wrapped around his knees. 

“Sorry,” he mumbles. “…I don’t like this room.”

"Yeah, it's pretty freaky. Helpful reminder of graduation, right? Gotta study hard."

(He is not studying hard. He's folding zhezhi paper boats.)

Julian trails in after Shanghai, takes the seat directly behind Wen Ning, and does his best not to look up. All his concerns about the inherent equal dignity of wizardkind seem awfully small and stupid in the face of that solid mass of mals. 

"I, um, I'm making flashcards for you, sir?" Wen Ning says anxiously to Julian. "I make them for everyone in my enclave. I'm good at making flashcards."

Julian refuses on principle to feel sorry for a Shanghai enclaver, but the poor kid obviously wants so badly to be helpful. "Thanks! That's very kind of you." 

Second tiny smile. "Thank you!"

Masozi is paying zero attention to the seat pocket in front of him, but he’s also failed to explicitly notice that a textbook is expected or should be read. 

Wei Wuxian throws the boat at Lan Wangji's head. "Lan Zhan! Catch!"

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.