Geometry is math that's about shapes, Masozi thinks? Probably?? In any case, if that's what it is then it sounds AMAZING and he's so excited. 

He still pauses at the entrance to the classroom and carefully scans the entire room for any sign of mals. Maleficaria Studies has left him EXCEPTIONALLY jumpy, which is really saying a lot. 

"Pardon," says a voice behind him, "you cannot be walked through, and are so unlike a door in that way."

"Is there something wrong in there?" asks another voice.

Masozi jumps six inches in the air at the voice behind him! And then steps out of the way. 

"Sorry!" he says, in heavily-accented English. "Looking for mals." 

"- oh, it's you. Are there any?"

"- Probably not? There usually aren't right now and I haven't seen any yet..."

Masozi is still holding off on deciding whether or not to actively burn mana and scan for hidden mals until he knows whether anyone else in this class is non-useless at situational awareness. Rebecca.....is pretty useless at that. The other girl who he doesn't know, is ?????? on this front. 

"Hey, what's holding up the line, did someone die in there already?"

"No, he's looking for mals, it's his - thingy - affinity."

"...and? Did he find some and nobody wants to be the first one in, or does looking take a long time?"

Looking does, in fact, take kind of a long time when Masozi is trying very very hard to minimize mana usage because apparently even ""cheating"" by taking mana from bugs might risk causing him brain damage right now?? that would make him stop thinking that people dying was bad?? 

He scans the room visually, first, but he's accumulated a decent chunk of mana from this (horrible) morning in Maleficaria Studies, and doesn't need to use any malia to do a couple of brief spot-checks. 

"- There's some eggs laid up there," he says, flatly, pointing at a random spot of ceiling, though in fact he means the ventilation pipes somewhere above it. "Think it's fine for now." 

And he looks around for free seats. And takes the most dangerous-looking spot nearest the ceiling vents, since he knows he can handle it and he really doesn't want anyone else to die. 

Rebecca sits behind him so he won't be looking at her because he's KINDA creepy but like in a useful way so she wants to be nearish.

Bobbie takes a sensible seat not right next to the vents and checks her desk for mals even though Masozi said it was clear.

"Hey. Chicago. It's safer farther away from the vents."

"My name's Rebecca," she says, but she sits a seat farther back.

"Rebecca, then."

She should try to remember that if she wants to try to keep Rebecca alive. In the long run that's probably a doomed prospect but - She feels bad for her, and wants to try to at least give her a shot if she can.

Rebecca's geometry textbook appears. Rebecca sighs long-sufferingly and opens it to the page with a worksheet sticking out of it, since apparently if you don't do your work it EATS YOU. Which, what the fuck, but she can't exactly skip homework to go to a karaoke bar, now, can she.

Masozi spots a textbook at the desk where he'd planned to sit, so he sits down and opens it. 

- Ooooh. Wow. That's - okay it's pretty hard to follow, right now, Masozi does not exactly have any formal education in math - but it's also beautiful and amazing and he's captivated.

"Does anyone in this school have calculators," Rebecca asks Bobbie, after getting stuck on needing to divide something.

Masozi turns around in his seat. "- What's a calculator?"

"Maybe one of the other mundanes happened to have one on them for some reason? But no, it's not worth the weight limit, and the school doesn't supply them 'cause they're electrical."

"I don't remember how to do long division..." Sigh. "Calculators're little machines that do math for you. Not like all of it but most of the most annoying parts."

"Here, you just - fuck, I don't know how to teach long division. Sorry. I'll try to help you out with that if I've got time left after mine."

"Thanks, but if you don't have time I'll ask Zeke."

"...Can't you do it in your head?" Masozi says, with some confusion. "You just - pretend it's all little boxes that you're piling up and you're trying to make a pile of them that's this wide - that's the number you're dividing it by and you stack them and then if you don't have a whole row at the top you pretend each of the boxes is ten littler boxes and you just do it again....?" 

"No, I can't do long division in my head! I mean, I can for small numbers if I'm like how many measures would it take to get this many quarter notes down in this time signature but I can't do it for big numbers, nobody's like 'all right now let us sing this one in 147/4 time'."

"....But that's just a forty - that's ten fours - and then a hundred, and eighty is two forties so that's twenty fours so thirty, and then another twenty which is five fours so thirty-five, and then seven is one-and-some - so thirty-six - and then you pretend the leftover three is thirty, and twenty-eight is...five plus two fours so that's seven-of-ten, and then you pretend the leftover two is twenty and that's five fours, so it's just thirty six and seven-out-of-ten and five-out-of-a-hundred." 

Masozi says this like it's all completely obvious. 

"....Also what's a 'time signature'?" he adds, after a few moments. 

"- so for one thing I didn't mean I wanted to divide a hundred and forty seven by four, a time signature is different from that, it's a music thing."

"Oh." Masozi is tempted to ask more questions but they should probably focus on the actual class, he can learn about music things on his own time. "What are you trying to divide, then?" 

"Apparently I want to divide seven hundred and four by thirty-two."

Why is the weird homeless maleficer also a math genius. That is so weird.

"Okay, right. So you're going to want to split that one up twice. I might need to ask you to remember some pieces for me? So you have a seven hundred and then a four. And you want to divide both of those by thirty-two - oh, this is going to be yucky, sorry, there's going to be really small awkward extra bits - I'm going to write it down, actually. So I don't lose track." 

He scribbles something in completely incomprehensible notation on his slightly crumpled single scrap of paper. 

Then frowns intently. "I...think probably the easiest way for this is to divide it by two a lot of times in a row? Thirty-two divided by two is - sixteen - by another two is eight - another two is four - then another two is just two left, right?" Masozi lifts up one more finger each time. "So that's, um, five twos? So we're going to take seven hundred, half of that is....it's the same thing as seventy, right, but times ten...so half of that is thirty-five, and half of thirty-five is, um, fifteen plus half of five so seventeen and then five-of-ten...." 

Masozi continues to narrate out loud until he gets to the final answer - or, well, two final answers - adding together 21.875 ("twenty-one and then eight-of-ten and then seven-of-a-hundred and then five-of-a-thousand) and 0.125, to get the answer of...

"...Oh. It's just twenty-two! That.....might've been easier not to split up into two parts. But I didn't know that beforehand. Sorry." 

- OK maybe not actually a genius. Still kinda weird.

"Is that like how you do it written down?" Masozi asks the really tall girl. "Or is it a different way of splitting it up?" 

"Oh - I - you put the number here and the other number here and you draw this funny half-box around it and then you divide it here and then carry it here and then if you need to you add a decimal place and keep going?" She didn't really follow Masozi's explanation of his method and doesn't know how they compare.

Masozi is, after the fact, admitting to himself that his default method was kind of stupid for this particular problem and he should've gone at it a different way, except he's not sure how - multiplying up, maybe, figuring out how many thirty-twos he needs to stack to get to 704.... 

"- Ooooh!" He bounces a little in his seat when he manages to grasp what tall girl is doing with the numbers! "Instead of pretending the leftover boxes are piles of ten tiny boxes, you just move it over to the side! That's clever!" Bouncebouncebounce. "That's called a.....decimal? So a number that's one over from the dot there is that-number-out-of-ten?" 

Is he... bouncing...? About long division.

"Uh. Yeah."

He turns back to Rebecca. "Okay, we should try doing it again that way - did you follow that or do you want me to show you how I think it's supposed to go?" 

"I think you - talk too fast for me or something, I lose track of the numbers when you say that many of them. So I'm not sure you explaining would help."

Bobbie finishes up her own worksheet and waves Rebecca over "I'm done, I can help you with your long division now." She's fine ignoring the lecture today, since it doesn't seem to have touched on anything new to her yet.

"Thanks!" Rebecca scoots over. She has done her best with the problems that don't require long division.

Bobbie does her best to explain long division. Rebecca used to know it so probably she only needs a reminder and the fact that Bobbie is a shit teacher won't be too much of a problem. Bobbie's way is probably more like the way Rebecca was taught than Masozi's, at any rate.

Eventually Rebecca catches on adequately to how long division works and she is able to finish the rest of her worksheet. "Where do we turn these in - that slot there?"

"Yeah, that looks like the most likely candidate. It's different in every room, always somewhere where the papers will end up out of sight. You want to be quick and careful turning things in, some of the cleverer mals like to hide in the dropoff points, it's probably safe today but you want to practice good habits for later when there's more about."

"Masozi, is there a mal in the slot?" Rebecca asks.

"Oh, do we have to give it back?" Masozi has finished the problems on his worksheet - mostly just writing down the answers without showing any work, since it was in his head, though sometimes he drew weird box-sketches or made notes in his bizarre personal shorthand, and then he did a LOT of doodling or making up other problems to play with on the margins, and then he did an amount of folding it up into weird presumably-math-related origami and staring at it.

He smoothes his worksheet flat-ish again, brings it over to the drop-off point, and examines the slot. "No, it's safe." 

"Thanks!" Rebecca turns in her sheet and spends the last minutes of the class period writing out notes on how to do long division in case she forgets again and re-reading the chapter.

Nia has excellent study habits, although she's not actually that quick at most of the subjects. She gets through her worksheet, takes responsible notes, turns her assignment in. "It looks as though today this class gives us no homework, does it look like that to everyone else?"

"That's smart, but he won't always be around, you should also practice being careful on your own." And he might lie some day, let a mal jump you and then drain you for malia as you're bleeding out with no-one the wiser that he planned it.

Bobbie goes up to the slot and narrates her own checks.

"No oil slick or moisture around the slot, there's some scratch marks but they're worn smooth and dirty so they're not fresh. No unusual odor." She brushes her assignment against the slot and then steps back. No sign of any response, so she steps forward again and submits her worksheet.

" - Also you guys both submitted things and didn't get grabbed so that's a hint that it's safe, but not a guarantee."

"What would grab you but not them?"

"Maybe I've got more mana than both of them right now and it's hungry enough to risk it, maybe it doesn't know I'm good at fighting and just wants more meat, maybe it's a psychic mal and I'm more vulnerable than they are, maybe there's someone else next to me and it wants to try to grab two at once. But, also, I was explaining for Rebecca, who might sometimes be the softest target in the room. Especially if she never does her own checks."

"If there's something in the slot how do you turn things in?"

"You should really be checking the whole room all the time," Masozi points out. With only the teensiest flicker of resentment that he feels he's been disproportionately taking on the burden of constantly checking the room on behalf of the other students. "I'm sure you'll get better at it with practice but you should practice it before there are more mals again." 

"If there's something in there usually someone has to kill it or chase it away. Some rooms'll have more than one place you might turn things in, it's worth looking to see if there's another plausible spot, like some rooms have a lectern for some reason and you could put it in there - "

"How am I supposed to do math and also check the whole room all the time?"

"You don't have to be looking for mals literally all the time, just do a quick check every problem or every few minutes. It can be kind of tricky to find the right balance, if you check too much you miss what's going on in class, if you don't check enough - well you won't know you weren't checking enough until you do know and then you're in trouble. You'll get better at doing it quickly over time."