Wei Wuxian is not sure where his power-sharer is. He's pretty sure he took it off this morning but he's not, like, confident? It might be in his calculus classroom. He should probably go look for-- ooh, is that a mathematical modeling textbook?
"Hi!" Wei Wuxian says in English. "I'm Wei Wuxian. What class is that for?"
"Thank you." Is she sitting with Shanghai now? Okay. That can be what's happening.
Connie does know better than to take one of the empty armchairs; she finds an unoccupied patch of floor on the fringes of the cluster and does not make herself as small as possible, you want to look like you have options, but settles down with her back to the wall and makes sure neither her legs nor her bookbag are anyplace people would obviously want to walk.
"We're enclavers! You can't just adopt every random indie with a math book."
Oh no. Maybe she is not sitting with Shanghai actually. Except now that she's sat down already leaving would be weird, and offering to leave would be worse. Unless having to be told to leave is worse?
Apparently outvoted, Jiang Cheng settles into a low simmer of anger.
Okay. This is probably fine. She should maybe figure out something nice to do for the angry boy later? Unless that's too obvious?
Well, she knows at least one thing at least one of them likes. She tugs her textbook out of her bag and finds the diagram of a mana sink in the process of being primed, cut away at three levels of detail and apparently hand-colored. "This here is the picture I said about before?" She's addressing Wei Wuxian but angles the book so all three of them can see if they're interested.
"Oh wow it's super cool-- but wouldn't it work better if you put this over here--"
"Oh, huh, would it?" She squints at the diagram, moving her hands above the page for placeholders as she tries to visualize it in three dimensions. "Faster, maybe? But- they choose to make it this way, so they have a reason?"
Wei Wuxian is going to be absorbed in mana fluid dynamics until something interesting interrupts him.
Connie is noticeably less chattery in Mandarin and has to circumlocute around technical terms rather a lot, but she forges away at it, glancing up every so often to keep track of what the other two are up to.
"Oh- I should do my homework also. Sorry about that." She pulls a sheet of paper out of her backpack and flips back to the end of the first chapter, where there are questions like "What are the features of a model?" and "How can we tell whether a given model is an appropriate one for the situation?"
...unless that was a hint that she should leave, in which case she's just bulldozed straight through it. Dammit. Why didn't she spend more time on enclave social politics and less on calculus.
"Oooh, how do you tell if a model is appropriate for a situation?"
"You want your model to- expect an answer that is close to the actual answer, and to be not always wrong in the same direction, and to not include things that affect the things you want to know not very much, so you don't do more math for the same- being close... hm, there were other things..." She leafs back a few pages.
"Right, here: um, I don't know the Mandarin, you want to choose whether you describe a thing that is the same always, or a thing that changes, because you use different ways for those. And then also whether a thing is exactly the same every time you do it the same way, or if it changes a little bit each time. But the first one happens less because a thing is the same but your measurement is not perfect, so it changes still. Third is whether a thing likes you measuring it or does not like. Fourth is-" She gives up and tries to convey "continuous" and "discrete" via mime.
"Oh, I think the words you want there are 'continuous' and 'discrete,'" he says.
"Continuuuuous. Continuous. And- discrete. Is that right? Could you show me how to write it?" She hands her sheet of paper over to him and digs around in her bag for a pen.
"Thank you." She copies the characters a couple of times for practice, as small as she can manage, then draws a box around them and starts numbering her paper for homework at the top. "Continuous and discrete also are things when your model is maybe more useful to not match the real thing. For instance if your ruler has only millimeters- no. That is backwards." She frowns at the book and flips another couple of pages.
"Oh- yes, thank you. What do you want? I have... uh. Pens?" Specifically she has two pens and a tiny eraserless pencil stub, and she's not sure what the current pen-to-notebook exchange rate is but it's probably not one to one. They're the most tradeable thing she has on her at the moment, though, she can make do with the pencil until she gets another chance to swap.
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