"Yes, let's. --You might want to talk to Wei Wuxian about math, he's a prodigy." 

"- I wanted to talk to someone about geometry! It was so interesting!" Masozi is slightly bouncing again. "I think I have a math class with Wei Wuxian, I put it on my schedule. ...I should learn more of the Mandarin writing things first though. That's important. And it's interesting as well." Bouncebouncebounce. 

Meng Yao squeezes Lan Xichen's hand.

Right. He wants to explain Mandarin to Masozi. But he already spent an entire breakfast ignoring the rest of his enclave in favor of Masozi, and if he does it for lunch it will go beyond "Shanghai is rationally investing in this kid" to "Lan Xichen is irrationally fond of this kid and making bad decisions." And if he disappears from lunch-- well, Wen Qing can handle it, but if he and Masozi are both gone there will be speculation about what he's up to, and the last thing he needs is someone questioning whether he's letting romantic feelings get in the way of his judgment. He had enough of that problem in his relationship with Meng Yao.

"Wei Wuxian can also help you with that," Lan Xichen says neutrally. 

"Okay!"

Masozi has utterly failed to notice any of the subtext here! It seems very reasonable to him that of course Lan Xichen, as the leader of the enclave, is way too busy to personally teach him - it was slightly confusing that he did at breakfast but it seemed like maybe he was happy about having an excuse to not do other more annoying things? Masozi knows very little about what running an enclave would be like but it makes sense that a lot of it would be annoying and not nearly as interesting as explaining how Mandarin writing works. 

Probably Lan Xichen also has other important things to think about right now, so Masozi keeps his own thoughts about geometry inside his head until they get to the cafeteria and he can find Wei Wuxian. 

No, he won't. Lan Xichen is going to ask him about geometry.

Masozi read ahead of the lecture in his textbook and learned about a math theorem for figuring out the sides-length of a triangle if you know one side-length and the angles, and then he got distracted trying to infer how you could do this for shapes that have more sides than a triangle - not like a square, that's too easy, but a shape with four sides that isn't a square, so sort of like the view-from-the-side of a cardboard box that someone sat on - and he thinks he figured out a trick to turn that shape into one rectangle in the middle plus two triangles on each side that if you imagined moving them together would make a rectangle...

Masozi barely has the words to describe all of this so instead he draws out imaginary shapes in midair with his hands. 

Half of Lan Xichen's brain is ohmygod he's perfect and half of Lan Xichen's brain is this is an excellent investment.

At the lunch table he, regrettably, has to talk to Xiao Jinyu from Chang'an enclave about what he wants in exchange for taking advantage of Jin Zixun's wards affinity, so he drops Masozi off with Wei Wuxian.

Masozi runs by the cafeteria line first to grab as much food as he can; a lot of it is scorched or otherwise suboptimal but he doesn't care. 

He plops himself down next to Wei Wuxian. "I learned some geometry today!" he says brightly. "Also I think I have a math class with you. On..." he squeezes his eyes shut and tries to remember, "- on Tuesdays and Thursdays right before lunch, I think? Something about math for street fights." 

"--you know I kind of wonder what the school's thinking putting us in the same class if you just learned Geometry."

"The school gave me a lot of math! I also have one about math and music, and one about logic for spells? And I wanted the one with you because it sounded interesting and you're good at math and then I can practice Mandarin at the same time." Masozi seems to be under the impression that this is a perfectly reasonable plan. 

Wei Wuxian has no idea what normal people math skills are. He's used to Madame Yu calling Jiang Cheng (freshman taking calculus) a retard who's a disgrace to the Jiang name, and has adjusted to assume Jiang Cheng is somewhat below average. "Yeah, that sounds like a great idea!"

Masozi is so excited about the math. 

"How do you write numbers in Mandarin?" he asks. "Does it have long division too or do you do a different thing? I just learned long division and it's really neat because instead of doing it all in your head and having to keep track of all the pieces, you can just do it on paper without even actually having to think about it! Although I get less mana that way, I don't get why more people don't do the problems in their head just for mana. Ooh and the book mentioned a 'square root' and then I was wondering if you could make a kind of long division only it's square-root-division - I was trying to figure out if that'd work but I didn't finish before the end of class -" 

He shows Wei Wuxian his very heavily-molested piece of scratch paper, which appears to have also been folded into origami shapes and unfolded again multiple times. 

"Fuck, you need better paper." Wei Wuxian hands him two notebooks a Shanghai aspiring ally got him on a supply run. (Shanghaiers don't do their own supply runs.) "Want the answer or want to see if you can figure it out?"

"I want to try to figure it out but I think not right now? I need to eat and I should go make my old clothes into a bag so I can put the mal grubs in it and give back Lan Xichen's container." 

"You can eat while working. It's called multitasking."

Then Masozi will eat his burnt food while starting a new page in the notebook. (The paper is much nicer than what he was able to grab on the supply run!) He starts out noting down some of what he just learned, and then flips to the next page and plays around with square-root-long-division. He's clearly unused to thinking about math this way, and frequently goes back to instead drawing stacks of squares to visually represent the problem, but it's also obvious that he's fast at thinking through different angles on it, and is soaking up the material covered in his class so far like a sponge. 

When he's done eating, he gets up. "I think I should go do the mal grubs bag now, and maybe try to get a few more of them from a different bathroom so I can give that to Lucy before the end of lunch." 

Wei Wuxian helps by asking leading questions! He's a very good if occasionally trolly teacher, especially when he refuses to believe something Masozi has established is true.

Masozi is initially incredibly confused by this teaching strategy and responds to it by getting stressed, but after a couple of iterations he realizes Wei Wuxian is doing some sort of teasing thing, and calms down about it. 

"You are good at math!" he says brightly as he starts packing up. "I'm really excited for the other class. Can I talk to you more about my other math classes too?" 

"Yeah, of course. Any time. I love math."

He is CORRECT to love math. 

Masozi goes off at a run to collect more mal grubs from bathrooms before the lunch period is over. 

"How is he?" she asks Wei Wuxian once Masozi leaves.

"Brilliant. Absolutely brilliant. He could be an artificing genius."

"So Lan Xichen's not biased by Masozi being pretty."

"Is Masozi pretty?"