"Hi!  Mathematical Models for Artificing, I just came from there before lunch.  I'm Connie Donovan."  She gives him a distracted smile and eyes the bus station, looking for a free spot sufficiently far from the mortal flame. 

Wei Wuxian puts his plates in the bus station, heedless of personal safety.

"Cool! I'm alchemy track but I love math. What other math are you in? What kind of modeling are you doing? It seems hard to do a lot of complicated modeling without a calculator."

He spins his sliderule in circles between his fingers.

Connie spies an empty slot near the top of the rack and stands on tiptoe to slide her plate in and snatch her hands away.  "I'm artificing- I mean I guess that's obvious- I've got number theory too but that's not till Tuesday, I was hoping I might just have a free period but I've got three different Spanish lit classes, number theory's probably going to be cool though."  She pulls out a pocketwatch-sized object and flips it open to show off a circular slide rule.  "I brought this along, it was my dad's, and I mean we're only just getting started and I shouldn't jinx myself but they built the space shuttle without computers, right?"

"That's true! There should be a class teaching us how to build space shuttles." He starts heading to the library.

Library is also where Connie is heading!  She matches his pace.  "Oh, that'd be so cool, imagine what you could do with artificing- you'd have to have, like, a secret second space program, though, imagine if you put the rocket on TV and it suddenly stopped working-"

"Maybe it could teach us to build regular space shuttles! We can learn mundane things too."

"Well, sure, but you can also learn about regular space shuttles outside, and you'd need like wind tunnels and stuff that'd be hard to fit in here- actually, huh, I bet you could scale down a wind tunnel?  Imagine if it went bad, though- I guess they're not very mobile but it'd be just like, sucking in everything in the room probably."

"It would be pretty cool to fight an evil wind tunnel. I would rather fight an evil wind tunnel than a lot of things."

"Oh yeah, like on the scale of things to fight-" Worse than an amphisbaena, from this morning's lecture, better than- most other things in the graduation mural-

"Like, I would be way more likely to die, but at least it would be in a cool way, you know? I don't want to die disemboweled by a pair of scissors."

"Yeah, that would suck.  I guess the bright side is that if you got away in the first place it just becomes like an environmental hazard?  'Don't be the first one into the classroom, don't take food no one else has touched, don't go down that hallway there's an evil wind tunnel.'  Like even if it did grow legs, the whole school of students has got to override one artifice abput how wide the hallways are supposed to be."

"I always wonder about 'don't take food no one else has touched.' Like, someone has to be the first person to touch the food."

"I figured by the time we're seniors we'll have picked up the epicycles and don't have to rely on the rule of thumb anymore?  Either from each other or from class, I'm not sure which is faster, probably both now I say it.  Guess it'd be useful if you skipped your last class before lunch and got in early, though.  D'you think the school kicks you out somehow if you try to take food before your turn?"

"I dunno and now I want to figure it out."

"It might not even need to, honestly, seniors being mad at you is bad enough."  Oh no did that sound too wimpy, probably it did, there's practical and then there's scared... good thing she has this handy subject change in her backpack.  "No way I'm skipping mathematical models, anyway, I was looking ahead in the textbook and it looks like there's ways to model mana as a fluid-"

"That's awesome! But I heard fluid dynamics is really hard--" and so on and so forth until they get to the library.

"...so then- oh, you know, I wonder if that's why variable effect spells are so hard to write?  Or part of why, anyway?"

Should she ask if he wants to look for a carrel together?  Probably just talking on the way to the library isn't enough acquaintance to propose a study group, even if it was cool shop talk, but she doesn't really want to venture into the stacks alone and she doesn't know a lot of people yet, and it's not like studying together one time is a commitment, if she can remember how to phrase it so it doesn't accidentally sound like she means a long-term thing... she's following him out of habit while she considers this.

Jiang Cheng hands Wei Wuxian his powersharer. "If you lose this again I'm going to feed you to a maw-mouth."

"Thanks!"

Oh no.

If she keeps following her hallway buddy who is apparently a surprise enclaver, she's going to look like she's trying to suck up to Shanghai- which might be a pretty good option, the maintenance track kids seemed cool and more importantly not at maximum levels of either twitchy or exhausted, but she hadn't been planning on choosing anything to go for on the second day.  But if she turns around without saying anything she'll look like she's actively avoiding Shanghai, and she even less wants to offend an enclave on the second day, and if she just continues to stand here frozen she's going to look like she can't handle herself which is just as bad-

"This is my new friend! She has really cool thoughts on fluid dynamics. Her name is, uh--"

"What's your name?"

"Uh.  Connie.  Connie Donovan."  Aaa.  Mandarin?  Probably Mandarin time yeah.  "I'm from Cambridge- Massachusetts, not England." 

Another of her stock phrases.  She'd picked over the wording carefully in the month before induction- hopefully for people who know New England geography it conveys "from Boston but not with Boston" without having to say it out loud every single time she meets someone, and for people who don't, which is probably most of the school... just the second part.

"Connie from Cambridge Massachusetts not England!" Wei Wuxian says triumphantly.

"Welcome."