Masozi, his head buzzing with Mandarin syllables and characters, lines up in the cafeteria and fills a tray with SO MUCH food and goes to sit at the Shanghai table.

"Masozi!" he says with delight.

Ayako-- who was paying attention to the Kyoto table at lunch, or at least, enough attention to know that Lan Xichen was there and to guess why-- would really, really like to talk to her upperclassmen right now.

She sits down at the Shanghai table anyway, because if said upperclassmen wanted to keep her closer they'd say so which means it'd be a personal conversation, and those can wait until they aren't in public. But. 

Masozi looks around the table. "Does anyone have books in Mandarin, I want to practice reading." 

Oh right she'd had that idea--

"The Maleficaria Studies textbooks are in everyone's native languages," she says around her fork, "so if someone lent you theirs-- not me, mine's in Japanese, but Wei Wuxian maybe-- then you'd have the same text in your native language and in Mandarin?" 

Wei Wuxian hears his name. "Hey! Are you guys saying I'm great?"

"Yes, I'm saying you're extremely excellent and infinitely generous and definitely going to lend Masozi your mal studies textbook so he can compare the Mandarin version to his version." 

"Oh, yeah, sure, I'll do that."

Masozi is so delighted! He opens up both textbooks side by side and stares very hard at the characters and tries to pronounce out loud the ones he recognizes. He can recognize a few dozen by this point.

Lan Xichen should do his job and not do a Mandarin lesson.

...

Okay, one very small Mandarin lesson.

Masozi is so eager to get more Mandarin lessons! When he manages to accurately recognize a character, his whole face lights up. The first time he deciphers a whole sentence, he BOUNCES.

Teaching, it turns out, is incredibly rewarding.

Masozi is an unusually quick learner and has a pretty good memory for any character he's seen before - and he's carefully been re-organizing his notebook of decoding-notes by similarity so he can more easily track down a character he vaguely recognizes - but his main advantage here is that he doesn't seem to get frustrated, at all, ever, by the fact that he is attempting to read a book which is still almost entirely incomprehensible code to him. Or that he's still requiring frequent correction on getting the tones exactly right, and fairly frequently mixing up which character corresponds to which spoken word. He seems to have a much better visual than auditory memory; he might actually be able to read and write sentences before he can reliably speak or understand them. 

Lan Xichen is so pleased in his investment here!

Reluctantly, he says "I should go talk with some of the freshmen, we can do more tomorrow morning?" and extricates himself from the conversation. 

That's totally fine. Masozi can continue making quite a lot of progress on his own, with the two books laid out side by side.

He's pretty enthralled, but can probably eventually be engaged in conversation if anyone else wishes to try. 

Meng Yao occasionally helps when he's not busy handling a dozen other conversations.

An American shows up out of the blue. Specifically the one who's been standing on tables shouting out gossip every week. He sits down with no regard to manners or seating charts.

"I am James Holden. I want to ask after your freshmen's wellbeing and be told if there is anything that they need."

His Mandarin is not terrible? It's not good and he has an obvious accent, but he's intelligible.

"He.......llo?" 

Ayako has, in fact, been warned about James Holden. Specifically, she has been warned not to tell him anything she doesn't want the entire school to hear about come Wednesday. (The obvious corollary about things she does want the whole school to hear about come Wednesday was left unspoken, but nonetheless understood perfectly well.)

"I want to make freshmen happy and alive!"

"Oh! That's good! I like alive!"

(Wei Wuxian has received absolutely no instructions about James Holden, on the principle that if he were told not to tell James Holden things he would do so immediately out of spite.)

Meng Yao casually monitors this situation while pretending to be interested in Jin Zixun's class schedule.

R.....ight. 

She looks at Holden. She looks over at the Kyoto table and makes eye contact with one of the seniors, Yoshida Rin, who gives her a very subtle nod. She looks back at Holden. She looks at Masozi, and then at Meng Yao.

"Is there a thing that would help you with that?" He looks at the black kid. He didn't think there were lots of black people in china? Whatever, no point being rude about it.

"What about you? Do you need an object?"

"I'm running a store out of my room," Nie Huaisang says, "selling a variety of items intended to make life in the Scholomance more pleasant! I think that's maybe the sort of thing you'd find interesting to share next Wednesday? --I'm fluent in English, you should tell everyone."

"Oh that idea is good! I will say it next time the week is quiet."

That's not great! Things keep happening! Song Lan is dead! They're adopting Masozi! Jiang Cheng threatened Nie Huaisang's boyfriend with a purple electricity whip at lunch! It's going to be months before his store is announced!

"Shanghai is rich, we don't need help." The 'fuck off' is unstated but obvious.

"I think morning announcements are a charming concept."

"OK! I am joyed your freshmen have many enough objects."

"What is your name, person who has a shop?"

Meng Yao please look at her or make stressed eyes or nod or something, she is very deliberately asking your permission before she tells this guy anything.

"Nie Huaisang! 278B."

...Yeah sure he'll see what she does with it.

He nods.

"Shanghai's adopted a freshman fairly early this year, that might be relevant? --not me, I'm from Kyoto, but Masozi, he made it to the Scholomance without learning a single spell from anyone else and he's learning Mandarin incredibly quickly." 

"Well, not quite adopted," he says with a smile, "we haven't decided to ally with him yet."

(The junior saying this doesn't have a powersharer.) 

"Oh that is unlikely! Very good luck of him!"

Masozi is probably the black kid - and if he doesn't have good mandarin yet he should not talk to him in Mandarin.

"Hi, I'm sorry, I didn't realize you'd just started learning Mandarin. I'm James Holden, is there anything that you need?"

Masozi has been quietly confused about this interaction and was planning to ask Wei Wuxian about it later. 

...In general there are lots of things he needs? He doesn't have the slightest idea why this random student is asking, though, or what kinds of things he has on offer, or what he would want in exchange. 

"I don't really have anything to trade," he explains. "Except lookout, I guess, my affinity is finding mals." 

Hopefully this wasn't completely the wrong thing to say? He tries to catch Lan Xichen's eye. 

Lan Xichen is over there not paying attention.

"I am trying to make sure all the freshmen are settling in well and have anything they need that it's easy to get them. And have friends and emotional support and won't go all maleficer when they are seniors."

"Shanghai has it taken care of," she says, in lightly accented English. "But it seemed interesting and relevant and I wanted to share the good news, since you're so concerned about all of the freshmen!" 

What does 'emotional support' even mean? 

"They gave me clothes," he says. "I think I'm doing fine." 

"Alright! I am glad you are helping him."

He stands up and goes to find some less fortunate freshmen.

"And I taught you the International Phonetic Alphabet!"

"Has it occurred to anyone that Masozi has concerningly low standards?"

Masozi has no idea what this is supposed to mean or imply, and says nothing. 

Would it literally kill Nie Huaisang to not say that in the actual cafeteria. 

....of course, it wouldn't literally kill Jiang Cheng not to threaten people with electricity whips either, and that doesn't seem to stop him. 

"- Everyone here is really nice?" Masozi says, uncertainly, because he's not sure if this is going to be weird or tense otherwise. 

"This is concerning! He's all like 'the Scholomance is very safe, Jiang Cheng is a nice person.'"

"Hey!"

"Apparently it gets more dangerous later, but it could get twenty times more dangerous than this and it'd still be better than Malawi!" 

"That's terrible!"

He dramatically closes his fan to punctuate his opinion. Man, this is great. He should do that all the time.

"Are other countries less dangerous than that? Or is it just that enclaves are better, like here, because they're in the void?" 

"I think mostly indies' parents kill the mals for them?"

"My parents tried, but they weren't good enough at being careful and they died and so did all my brothers and sisters except the one who's four." Masozi says this very matter-of-factly. 

"I'm... sorry."

It feels so inadequate. The concept of all of his family but one being dead opens a small dark pit in the center of his stomach and if he thinks about it too hard he'd fall in.

...Huh. That's - the most friendly or sympathetic interaction that Masozi has seen - what's that boy's name - has seen Jiang Cheng have with anyone. It's confusing. 

He ducks his head. "If I survive I'm going to go find my sister again. I - found a mundane family that'd look after her. They had money and they don't believe in magic and she's going to forget about magic soon and - maybe..." 

She'll have forgotten about him, too, by the time he makes it back. If he does. But that's fine, that was never the point, the point is for her to survive. 

Feelings, she reminds herself, are not for having where people can see them. 

"For what it's worth, most places are... not that dangerous. And most indies don't find the Scholomance to be relaxingly safe." 

"I'm sorry," he says again.

He can't stop thinking about Yanli giving him to some other family, hoping he'd forget her.

He wants to hit something with Zidian.

Masozi...feels like he wants to say something, like he should say something, but he has no idea what. 

"It's oka–" He stops himself. "- No, it's not. And it's - even less okay for a lot of people. I knew kids in Lilongwe who never had any chance to come here. But - if I, if we - if enough people survive then maybe we can make it okay. Someday." 

"Well, this is an incredibly depressing topic of conversation! How is everyone's classes?"

Masozi is pretty content to be distracted from depressing topics. "Wei Wuxian is teaching me the International Phonetic Alphabet! And I learned that the earth goes around the sun because the sun is bigger and so the earth falls toward it except it's falling so fast -" and he launches into a fumbling but very excited recounting of Wei Wuxian's explanation of gravity.