"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."

"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."

"Yes, I can."

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?

"Floor space is free."

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.

"You should be doing your homework."

"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.

Wei Wuxian is so good.

In spite of himself Jiang Cheng inches closer to listen.

"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.

"Yep! Here you go."

"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. 

"Do you need a notebook? I've got an extra."

"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.

"Oh, yeah, I keep losing my pens! Thanks!"

Hm.  Can she get away with just handing him the one she's using, actually, see if he'll accept one pen = one notebook?  She passes it over and watches out of the corner of her eye as she digs through her bag for the second one, either to use herself or add to the swap depending.

He seems perfectly content with this swap.

Jiang Cheng, however, is full of seething anger.

Aaa?  Why is Angry Boy glaring again?  It wasn't that lopsided a trade, really, and enclavers get first pick of the good stuff, he's clearly rich enough to... not care what he gets in return...

Or... if he gets something in return.  Which.  Come to think of it.  Is apparently how it works in the Scholomance when a boy is asking you out.

Aaaaaaa.

Who asks someone out on the first day!  After knowing each other like barely half an hour- okay, half an hour of cool math talk, but still.  And she's just crushingly rejected him by acting like it was a swap and he just forgot the other half- or plausibly deniably rejected him?  ...or not rejected him, because she offered an obviously lopsided swap in return?  Or plausibly deniably not rejected him?  Does she want to have not rejected him?  He's fun to talk about math with and cute enough she probably wouldn't mind trying out Kissing And Stuff if they were outside the Scholomance where the stakes are lower, but they aren't, and two days ago she would have said obviously you want to date an enclaver if you have the option, but now that the option may or may not be here it's incredibly clear that enclavers come not only with the best stuff but with inscrutable social politics in her fourth language she is way underprepared to handle, such as for instance that boy there trying to burn a hole in one or both of them with his eyes-

Someone with the training and social graces to handle dating an enclaver would at this point figure out the perfect way of phrasing something to defuse the situation without offending Angry Boy further, while also not closing off the possibility of dating or hurting Wei Wuxian's feelings by stringing him along, and express it without a moment's hesitation in flawless Mandarin.  Connie is not that person.  She manages "Excuse me, please-" after a false start and then words close themselves off from her completely.

Wei Wuxian totally misses that any of this is happening and asks her a question about mana fluid dynamics.

It's a fascinating question, she will realize later, but right now she's not up to so much as 'oh hey, I think those girls over there are organizing a bathroom run, catch you later.'  She shoves her textbook in her bag and bolts.

She does take the notebook with her.  It's a good notebook.

Did Wei Wuxian just ask a girl out? He can't have asked a girl out. You don't date girls before you graduate. 

But you couldn't just accidentally give someone a notebook and accept a pen in exchange. Even for Wei Wuxian that's absurd.

It is against the rules of the Lan family to swear so Lan Wangji doesn't think what the fuck.

"You can't just give people notebooks because you like them! Notebooks are a scarce resource!"

"Chill out, Jiang Cheng, it'll be fine. I can write on both sides of the paper."

"You are going to get us all killed."