"Yeah, that's a good point. Zaizai."

"....My older sister had a nickname for me once? She called me Nyenyezi, because I would always swim out really far in the lake so I could float and look at the stars." 

"Oh, poor Wen Ning is never going to be able to pronounce that. --We could translate it? So you could be Nyenyezi and some Chinese name both."

"What would it translate to?" 

"I don't know what Nyenyezi means."

"It just means stars, pretty much. Sometimes people use it - loosely?" There's totally a word for the thing he means here but he can't remember it in English either. "To mean something that's...really important to them." 

"Xingxing is stars but it just means, like, stars in the sky."

Masozi repeats it after him. "....I think I like that?" It's even one of the syllables that he can mostly pronounce without mucking it up in some way where he can hear that it's wrong but not how to fix it. 

"Well, now you have a birth name that none of us will call you because we don't know you well enough yet."

"Mn."

"And Lan Wangji will never call you because he has a life-threatening allergy to informality."

"- I guess I need to not die so you can get to know me well enough to call me that, then?" 

"You're not allowed to die!"

- what? That was a weirdly strong reaction and it almost looks like Jiang Cheng is mad at him???

Masozi huddles up a bit against Wei Wuxian. "I - I'll try to be careful? But I did almost die because I was stupid so I - I don't think it's the sort of thing where saying I'm not allowed makes it not happen." 

"Well, you'll just have to try harder!"

"Chill, Jiang Cheng, you're terrifying him."

"Jiang Cheng just does that sometimes," she tells Masozi, "as far as I can tell it means he likes you." 

"Fuck off."

"Oh." That's confusing but he can try to remember it and not be scared. 

...It's taking a lot of willpower to not be scared, today. Which is fine. It's mana-building. 

She's, like, eighty percent sure at this point that that also means he likes someone. He sure seems to snipe at people more when they're people he likes.

"Absolutely not, I refuse utterly," she says cheerily around a forkful of extremely rubbery scrambled eggs. 

"We can't start giving you an easy time, Jiang Cheng. Then you'd have no way to build mana."

....What's even happening here. This is an unfairly confusing social interaction. 

Someone is crossing the cafeteria toward their table! The someone is wearing somewhat stained and worse-for-wear blue scrubs, and holding an enchanted ivory dagger out in front of her. 

"Uh, is Wen Qing here? I wanted to ask her some things." 

"Yes, Marian-laoshi, what do you need?"