Oh, good, maybe if she just asks occasional questions he'll talk about alchemy until three.

Eventually they get to Wei Wuxian's room. 

"Wei Ying! Dumbass! Open up! I want to see my cockroaches!"

A head and shirtless torso pokes out of the door. "They're not your cockroaches, they're my cockroaches. I carried them in in my own weight allowance. --Oh! You have a friend! I should probably put on clothes."

"Yes! You should put on clothes!"

She's just going to wait and not say anything to make this more awkward. Why are these people like this. Well, she's being paid to entertain them.

The head and torso re-emerge, now in a shirt. "I'm going to the library, see you."

He is not the person she was paid to distract and seems like a completely different flavor of disaster. He can go to the library. "Nice meeting you."

"They might not be awake and if they're not awake I don't want to bother them."

"Of course. Does it bother them to just look?"

"No." He looks at the terrarium. "Oh, they're awake."

He removes the cockroach very gingerly and lets it crawl along his arm. When he's around the cockroach Jiang Cheng seems to instantly relax.

Jiang Cheng should spend more time with his cockroaches. But she's being paid to distract him, not to try to convince him to be less of a disaster as a person.

"They're sort of beetley. Are they beetles?"

"No, they're more closely related to termites."

"Huh! But they don't eat wood, right?"

"They can! They can eat anything."

"Anything anything? Mals?"

"Spiders can eat mal grubs. That's why Masozi was collecting them earlier, some Anglo wanted to feed her spiders mal grubs. So probably cockroaches can eat mal grubs too?"

"Can you - okay, this is probably just how you get mals, but could you breed giant extremely tough mal-hunting cockroaches?"

"Yeah, that's just how you get mals."