Before he gets to the cafeteria, he's interrupted. "Masozi!" Meng Yao says. "It's good to see you. Come to the bathroom with me and Lan Xichen."

- ack! 

Masozi is so very startled by this, and freezes. 

"It's all right," Lan Xichen says gently, and mutters under his breath and sends him a little you're-safe-everything-is-okay. 

(Wen Qing is back at the cafeteria holding down the fort at the Shanghai enclave table. This is not a three-leaders situation.)

AAAAACK something is touching his MIND– 

– ok, right, relax - it's okay - it's one of his (tentative) allies, he shouldn't appear to panic about it - 

Masozi turns, taking a deep breath, and tries to retrieve the last ten seconds of his auditory memory. 

...right, they were asking him to...go somewhere....? 

He should probably trust them, or if not he should at least follow their instructions. 

"Okay," he says, making eye contact with Meng Yao and turning to follow him wherever they're apparently supposed to be going now. 

"How is your first morning of classes?"

"- I really don't like the Intro to Maleficaria classroom, but geometry was really really interesting?" 

"It's pretty frightening. You do get used to it. Do you want calming spell before maleficaria classes, to help you focus?"

"....Is that a thing you can do? Does it - make you slower at - reacting to danger -?" 

"I have a lot of them. I can aim for one that's state of calm focus? But there really isn't much danger in the Maleficaria Studies classroom, all the other freshmen are there."

"- But I need to look out for all of them too! Because most of them don't know - how to be careful, yet - and I don't want them to die -" 

Masozi breaks off and curls into himself, a little, because he's not sure that was a helpful-for-his-survival thing to say? ....He meant it, though. And he doesn't want to lie. 

"Well, you can't look out for them if you're panicked," he says, "and you certainly can't look out for them if you aren't learning about what you're supposed to be looking out for. But we can experiment and find a spell you like."

"- Yeah. That makes sense. Okay." 

Masozi approves of 'experiments'. He's thought that this was an incredibly good concept ever since he first saw the word (and guessed its meaning from context) in one of the books that he maybe-sort-of-stole from a library on his way to South Africa. 

"All right," he says when they reach the bathroom. "You shower, and Meng Yao and I watch out for mals. --Do you know how to shower?"

"- I tried to shower before? After you gave me the better clothes? ....If I didn't shower enough then maybe I don't know how." 

Masozi says this with zero embarrassment or self-consciousness, because he hasn't even considered feeling that way and if he had he would very quickly notice that it wouldn't help. 

He glances for half a second at Meng Yao, who fully understands every single one of his current emotions. Sworn brotherhood is great. 

"--okay, so, you take off all your clothes, and then there's a machine called a shower that sprays water on you, and then you soap yourself up and rinse it off concentrating especially on the parts that are most likely to be smelly. And then you dry off with a clean towel."

".....I don't have a clean towel," Masozi admits, after a long pause. "And I - don't know what parts of me smell - or where the soap is....?" 

"We got you a towel and soap."

"We're planning to ally with you because everyone is underestimating you because you don't understand hygiene or etiquette, and so you're very cheap to ally with given how talented you are. But you have to learn about hygiene and etiquette or all of Shanghai enclave is going to lose face."

"Oh." 

Masozi stops for a moment. 

"......Am I 'talented'? What does that - mean -?" 

(Masozi is aware that he's more careful than most of the other freshman, and better at spotting mals, but he doesn't expect that to play into any kind of general skill and so he's very confused.) 

"Maybe one in a hundred people in your position would have survived, which suggests you're one of the sixteen most talented people in the freshmen year. Let's say ten speak Mandarin. Of those, most will already be in enclaves. So you're really quite valuable." 

.....Masozi is trying to back out the equation that Meng Yao must have used to reach those numbers and it's SO CONCERNING and also confusing??? 

"....I - think it'd be weird if I were that good? - Guess it doesn't matter. I want to not die and I want to help other people not die and if you want to help me with that because I'm 'talented' then okay." 

See, this is how Shanghai can pick him up for the cost of bathing lessons.

"So the first thing you need to do to shower is undress."

"....Sure."

Masozi strips off his new outfit, and then waits. 

Lan Xichen opens up the shower door and demonstrates the use of the hot and cold water. "You can adjust it until it's a temperature you like."

He's not looking at Naked Masozi but this is, it turns out, remarkably hard. 

Masozi is used to washing himself in rivers and really doesn’t care much about the temperature. He steps into the shower and then stands there.

”…Now what?”

He is not going to have to get in the shower with Masozi to demonstrate how bathing works. He refuses.

"You make sure your entire body is wet and then take the soap and rub it all over your body?"

“…Okay?”

Masozi finds the soap, and - does his best to rub it all over his body. This is somewhat nontrivial since, one, it’s SLIPPERY, and two, he keeps getting distracted by looking for mals.

...he's going to have to get in the shower with Masozi to demonstrate how bathing works. Fuck.

Meng Yao is laughing internally.

"...do you mind if I show you?"

- why is that possibly a thing he would mind. 

"No?" 

Lan Xichen strips out of his clothes, neatly folds them, and puts them on the sink.

"a-Yao, do you have guard duty covered?" he says to procrastinate.

"Yes."

Then he's going to-- step into the water. 

Wow. There is really not a lot of space in this shower. He is suddenly acutely conscious of this fact.

Masozi steps out of the shower so he can give Lan Xichen space to demonstrate. 

(He does not seem at all self-conscious about his own nakedness, and is watching with curiosity and no sign of any other feelings.) 

Lan Xichen tries to demonstrate showering without:

(a) dying of embarrassment about the fact that Masozi is looking at him
(b) worrying a lot about whether Masozi thinks he looks cute, the years of mana-building have done wonders for his abs and ass but what do people even look like in Malawi, he has no idea, what if they're one of those countries that has weird beauty standards
(c) thinking about how pretty Masozi is and how gracefully he moves
(d) thinking about how beautiful the contrast would be between his pale skin and Masozi's darker skin
(e) fantasizing about Masozi still not getting it and then Lan Xichen has to demonstrate it in a more thorough and hands-on sort of way
(f) having any sort of embarrassing physical signs of the above thoughts

"See, you want to work up a lather like this," he says. "In the outside world we have special face cleanser but here you just use soap, you can make acne medication by the time you're a junior if you're vain. I-- don't know how hair care works for black people, you should probably keep your head shaved? If not we can ask some of the Anglos. You want to clean under your armpits because those get smelly." And so on and so forth.

Masozi is deeply oblivious to all of this. 

"....Okay. I can do that." And he waits for Lan Xichen to have rinsed off all the soap - still watching this process - so that he can step back into the shower and repeat it for himself. 

Is Lan Xichen going to have to demonstrate cleaning his genitals in front of the cute boy.

...He absolutely is.

Fuck.

The things he does for this enclave. 

At least he's not American, Lan Xichen hears Americans do very weird things to their penises and he has no idea about appropriate care for those.

He is going to die inside while maintaining a calm, cheerful smile on the outside like absolutely nothing unusual is happening. 

Masozi does not think that anything unusual is happening! .

..Well, aside from the part where people here care a weird amount about him putting enough soap on all the parts of his body? That's kind of baffling? It seems weird that his genitals could possibly smell in an offensive way when they're very covered up by clothing most of the time? 

(Masozi's sense of smell is, perhaps, very much adjusted to the environment he's spent most of his life in, which is different from this one.) 

He waits his turn, and then soaps and washes himself, genitals included. While keeping a lookout for mals, because Lan Xichen seems kind of distracted or something. He doesn't see any, though, so that's good. 

And now Masozi is clean and smells much better. 

"Here's the towel to dry yourself off with," Meng Yao says, "Xichen can help you if you have trouble."

Traitor.

Masozi feels like drying himself with the towel should not be complicated! 

...However, he can't seem to figure out how to get his back dry without either doing very awkward contortions or dropping the towel on the wet floor. 

Fine. Okay. Lan Xichen is going to dry his back for him.

...it's a very nice back. 

He is scrupulously careful about not touching any parts that aren't strictly necessary to dry Masozi off.

Masozi appreciates the help! 

He puts his clothes back on promptly, once he's dry. No point in sitting around with more mal-vulnerable uncovered skin for any longer than he has to. 

"Thank you," he says, very politely. "....Do I smell better now?" 

He breathes in and does not think those thoughts. "Yes, you do."

"You should wear new clothes every day. You'll learn a laundry spell soon in lab, until then one of the Shanghai allies does everyone's laundry. Tonight you're going to Nie Huaisang's room to get your clothes tailored so they fit. Jiang Cheng will make sure you know about the next freshman shower trip. --If you stick around with Shanghai, people are going to judge us based on what you look like. It's unfair but it's the way that it is. So we need to make sure you look presentable."

“- No, that makes sense. I talked to the girl with the hat affinity and she explained it all.”

Masozi stops. Frowns. 

“…I don’t have any other clothes than this to wear tomorrow though. Except my old clothes but I was going to make some of them into a bag for the mal grubs so I can give back the container.” 

"I collected all of Song Lan's clothes from the indie who was carrying them in. Luckily for you, his clothes weren't in his pack." He hands Masozi the bag. 

Subtext: we're investing in you, don't fuck this up.

Masozi is not missing that this is a huge resource investment! He’s still very confused about why they’re bothering but he’ll do his best to make it a good decision on their part. 

“Are we going to lunch now?" he asks after a moment. (He did not eat anything at breakfast and he could totally make it through until dinner if he had to, but also there's SO MUCH food here and it's so varied and good and he's looking forward to it.) 

"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?"

"You know, I don't know. Nie Mingjue was built like a brick house and Meng Yao is one of the most beautiful boys in our entire year, I would previously have assumed a weakness for a pretty face. But Masozi's not exceptional and he's quite stupid about him. "

"Well, he is incredibly smart."

"If Lan Xichen was going to be into boys who are incredibly smart and kind of creepy why couldn't he have developed a convenient interest in, say, you."

"You don't know he doesn't. I'm very charming."

"Of course you are, a-Xian."

"But no, I think that Lan Xichen likes him because he's a literal goddamn genius and if we don't snap him up we'll regret it ten years from now if not at graduation."

"A genius maleficer who runs around with a bag of mal grubs."

"Nobody's perfect."