Okay, fine, that would be stupid. "Maybe I can find some other people who want to go too and have better combat spells? ...I could ask Lan Wangji and Wei Wuxian if they wanted to go, and I can do all the checking for mals." 

Masozi really wants mana storage. He hadn't quite known the right questions to ask about it, before, and everything was so overwhelming, but now that he has the beginnings of a plan he's so impatient. 

"Oh, they'd both be excited to do that. Wei Wuxian loves danger and Lan Wangji loves stabbing things."

"I should ask them after. ...Is there anything else I need to do for the clothes now?" 

"No, but I've decided that your life is horrible and you need some more nice things and you're going to have to sit here while I give them to you. --Normally when people give you gifts they're asking you out but I'm not asking you out, I'm just taking pity on an ongoing tragedy."

"My life isn't horrible!" Masozi protests. "Today was amazing." 

He sits down, though. And puzzles over what 'asking out' means. Is it an idiom he's not familiar with? Taken literally it obviously makes no sense, you can't go outside when you're at the Scholomance, that's the entire point. 

"Right. And now it's going to be more amazing." He takes out a cup and pours some water into it, then sets it heating over a Bunsen burner. "Properly this should be a full tea service with a Yixing teapot and snifter cup and a brush and looseleaf, I can't believe I'm going four years using teabags, but needs must." 

"I don't know what any of those things mean! ...Um, I know what tea is, just not the other things. What does a brush have to do with making tea?" 

"You use the brush to spread the wasted tea evenly over the tea tray, so that the stain creates a pleasing color."

"...That seems not really about the tea?" He's confused. "Why does it matter what the tray looks like." 

"Because it's part of the whole experience. Everything involved is beautiful." The water is hot enough and he puts in the tea to steep.

Masozi still doesn't really get it but he's content to watch, and try to notice the apparent visual appeal of the process. 

Nie Huaisang gives him the cup of tea. "I don't think this is new, the tea I can get in the Scholomance is really quite bad. --I should show you perfume."

Masozi sips the tea. It...is kind of nice, actually, having something genuinely hot to drink. It doesn't in his opinion taste like very much. 

"What's perfume for?" 

"In theory you put it on your body so it smells nice but in the Scholomance I just sniff it, I don't want to run out."

"What does smelling nice...do? Does it give you mana? Is it - like the thing where I need to shower so I don't smell bad, except more?" 

"It makes you happy." He flips through his scents. "L’Air des Alpes Suisses, YSL Y, Bengale Rouge, Hyde... Oh! Tobacco Rose. This will do nicely."

A small bottle, barely wider than a piece of string, is uncapped near Masozi's nose. "Breathe in." 

Masozi breathes in, and then goes very still, looking startled and then thoughtful. 

"...How does it smell like flowers?" he asks eventually. "I don't see any flowers in there." 

"They extracted the chemicals that make roses smell the way they do and put their concentrated essence in the bottle."

"That's so interesting! And then you can - smell flowers even when you're in here and not going to see the outside for years? ...Is there anything that smells like lakes. I miss the way the lake smelled." 

"Oh, you want Cool Water-- I don't normally like it, aquatics are so simple and cheerful and I prefer a more complex scent, but I thought it would be popular in here?" He carefully caps the Tobacco Rose and opens the Cool Water. "You want to take a big sniff of the air between them to clear out your nose so you can appreciate it."

Masozi obediently follows these instructions, and then leans in to sniff the 'Cool Water' smell. 

...He closes his eyes. Breathes in again. It's not exactly what Lake Malawi smelled like, but it - somehow holds a same sort of essence in it? He smells it and it's like he can feel the expanse of water, stretching out to the horizon, the bright line where it meets the sky - if he closes his eyes then he can, for a moment, imagine that it's right there - 

- for some reason this automatically comes along with imagining that he's a small child, again. Small enough that he hadn't, yet, realized that his parents were inevitably going to die. 

(Masozi has now been holding very still for quite a long time.) 

Nie Huaisang wouldn't be sure whether this is a good still or a bad still but, like, it's perfume, how could it go wrong. So he holds the bottle, his hands steady as if it contains a liquid more precious than gold, until Masozi seems to be done.

There are certain memories and emotions that, on reflection, are not actually pleasant or a good idea to dwell on in the Scholomance, and Masozi - with some effort - tries to fold and shove them away, to the quiet corner in the back of his mind along with all his pointless loneliness and pointless regrets. 

"That - was nice," he says, his voice only very slightly shaky. 

"Anytime!" Nie Huaisang says cheerily. Probably Masozi is shaky because of how wonderful perfume is. He very carefully caps it and puts it away, then says, "Hm... what do I want to show you next... porn!"

Oh good a distraction. “What is porn?”