...An enclaver, huh. "Hello! What brings you here?"

"I'm Nie Huaisang and I have a proposition for you."

"Oh?" she says with a slight sideways grin.

"A little bird told me you're planning to be a trader! I'm running a shop, and I feel like we could work together."

"Well, not yet, I didn't bring anything that'd expire before Christmas." How does he know. She wants access to his spy network or whatever it is. "I thought maybe I'd wait for you to sell out first but if you have a different plan...?"

"Darling, I don't plan to sell out until six hours before graduation. But I don't see why we need to compete. We can both be on the same team, right? Serving our customers."

She raises an eyebrow. "And how would we do that?"

He snaps open his fan. "Well, right now I'm just trying to convince you of the benefits of me owing you a favor."

"I can see how that would be useful. What are you working up to asking me for?"

He points with his fan to Jiang Cheng over at the Shanghai table. "I want to study in the Shanghai reading room with Tomonori, another Japanese indie. He's very cute and I want to get to know him better. Except my enclavemate Jiang Cheng hates him for no obvious reason, and this is going to disrupt my studying. So I would be greatly appreciative if you could keep him out of the Shanghai reading room until, say, 3pm."

"Well," she says. She takes a bite to cover for needing a moment to think. There's an obvious strategy, here, if he's asking a girl specifically for help, and she's not sure what to do about it if she's being asked to seduce an enclaver... "What kinds of things interest him?"

Nie Huaisang, a victim of homonormativity, has no idea that he's suggested that Misaki do this.

"Alchemy, math, stabbing things, animals, pointless and arbitrary rage but his bark is worse than his bite I promise."

Oh, good, that is not a list of kinks. ...That is maybe someone's list of kinks, but.

"If I get him talking about alchemy or math or animals or stabbing things, will that work or will he be like 'what are you doing, why are you so interested in me, who even are you?'"

"He will be like 'who even are you' and then you ignore him and keep talking and he will simmer down into a low but consistent level of anger at the universe."

Right, okay, so the plan is that she should go antagonize an enclaver on purpose. "And how big a favor are you agreeing to owe me for this?"

"I promise you'll be satisfied afterward," he says, which is not an answer.

Given the affinities some of the Shanghai folks have, that's the worst answer. "Maybe I could pick out some stuff from your shop?"

"Sure!" Nie Huaisang says, with the boundless confidence of someone who's sure he can talk Misaki into thinking actually he benefited her by causing her to meet an enclaver.

"What've you got today?"

"Mana storage bracelets, perfume, preorders on makeup... but we can't decide the payment now. You don't know how pleasant or unpleasant Jiang Cheng is to interact with yet! I'm not going to stiff you, I value our future working relationship."

That would be reassuringly suggestive of confidence in Jiang Cheng's personality, if not for the mind control. Instead, it is suggestive of mind control plans. "I'm sure he's lovely but I really can't put that off till later. How much mana can the bracelets store?"

"Pretty normal amount for a freshman project."

"Oh, they're a freshman project, of course. Is the makeup enchanted?"

"No, but I can introduce you to an Anglo who does enchanted makeup."

"None of this is really impressing me but maybe for enough mana storage to store, oh, all the mana I can make in a month?"

"Are you kidding? To hang out for one perfectly nice"-- he reconsiders-- "reasonably unobjectionable enclaver for a day? What if he likes you? Then you got an intro from me and you want a month of mana storage about it?"

"I have it on the excellent authority of his own clavemate that his interests include pointless and arbitrary rage."

"You're not supposed to take me seriously! Incredibly unfair to be taken seriously!"

She raises an eyebrow.

"Everyone knows I'm the useless Shanghai enclaver! Not to be trusted!"

"Oh, okay, in that case I want payment up front."

"You have dibs on selling my first batch of alcohol and I'll throw in a drawing if you don't end up valuing the introduction to Jiang Cheng."

"Neither of those is up front - are the drawings and alcohol magic?"

"I don't sell magic!"

"...Maybe you could just trade me mana?"

"Fine." So much for their positive working relationship. He will crush Misaki's business under his heels. "Say when."

She says when, at an amount that isn't even unreasonable compensation for spending several hours antagonizing an enclaver.

He will destroy her with capitalism.

"Okay, I'll introduce you."

"Thank you!"

He flutters his fan and sits down next to Jiang Cheng. "Jiang Cheng!"

"What," he barks.

"Oh! I just thought you'd get along with my friend Sato Misaki."

"Is she as stupid as the rest of your friends."

"No! No. Very smart. You'll love her."

"He mentioned you like animals!" she says cheerfully.

"It's my affinity," he says grumpily.

"Wow, that's so good! I wish I could've had a pet in here but it'd be a waste and it'd make people think I was evil."

"You could come look at my brother's cockroaches," he says grumpily.

"Cockroaches! Because they're light and definitely not for maleficing?"

"And they can survive everything. Wei Wuxian kept threatening to bring tardigrades."

"If I know that word I don't know it in Mandarin."

"They're cute. You can't see them without a microscope, they live in pond water and have lots of legs. They can survive anything-- the Arctic, volcanoes, starvation, dehydration, the vacuum of space."

(He is noticeably less pissed off when talking about animals.)

"Oh, them! They're great. Much cuter than cockroaches, I think - I could give cockroaches another look, if they're someone's pets and they're clean but..."

"I don't know if they're clean? They haven't gotten dirty."

He snaps his fan closed. "See! You guys are getting along great. Bye!"

"Well, I mean, if they're not running around getting into trash and who knows what else, then they're not really vermin, are they? So I can take a look, if you want to show me."

"Sure, I guess, it's not like I have anything else to do," he says angrily.

"Sorry, did I say something wrong?"

"No. It's fine."

"Okay. What are they like, anyway?"

"They're mostly pretty quiet. They like to bury themselves in the soil most of the time."

"Huh! Like ants?"

"Yeah, but ants are more intelligent. Cockroaches are less likely to be stepped on, so they're better for the Scholomance, but they're really quite stupid." (Is that sentence affectionate?)

"Huh! Even though they have more room to fit brains in?"

"Actually, the size of an animal's brain scales up with the size of its body, so if you're estimating intelligence the ratio of brain size to body size is more important than the brain size itself."

"What? Wow. How can that work?"

"A lot of the brain is actually for coordinating motor behavior, which is more complicated if you're larger."

"It is? I thought, like - even if your limbs are bigger, shouldn't it be about how many of them you have?"

"I think so? I don't know how to look it up."

She almost suggests they go check the library. She catches herself. "I mean, I trust you, I just wouldn't have guessed."

"You can come look at them if you want, they're in my brother's room."

"Yeah, that sounds good!"

"What's your affinity?"

"Might be sound, or something like that. Never saw a diviner but going by what's easiest."

"Wen Ning is sound. Or would be if he could cast anything."

"Oh, excellent, we could swap spells."

"That's not going to be very useful because he can't fucking cast anything."

"What, nothing?"

"He stutters when he's nervous."

"Oh, wow. Is he art track?"

"Incantations because it has the fewest mals."

...Okay, well, that's idiotic of someone with a stutter. "Oh, okay. Well, I do have out-of-affinity stuff to swap, too, but anyway you were going to show me some cockroaches."

"Yeah. This way." He starts walking to his brother's room.

Which is not the library and therefore a good place for them to go. Also, this is genuinely pretty cool. She follows.

"So... what kinds of things... do you do," he says, and then immediately kicks himself for being an awkward idiot.

"Magically or for fun?"

"Either! I guess!"

"I really enjoy poetry. And I'm doing creative writing, but, like, it's also really cool, whether it gets you magic or not."

"Poetry is useless."

"When it's not spells I guess it is."

"People shouldn't waste time on things that won't help them stay alive."

"...I had to pass a test involving poetry to get here, and it's the same skill in spells or for fun."

"I guess. But now you're here."

"How about you, what do you do?"

"Alchemy. Math."

"Math is cool."

"Alchemy is also cool!"

"I know less about alchemy. What's cool about it?"

The world's prickliest enclaver has STRONG feelings about alchemy-related magical theory.

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."