After a glance from Lan Xichen, a couple of junior and senior artificers are very interested in this!

They have detailed questions about specs that make them sound more like engineering graduate students than like high schoolers.

Marian perches at one end of the table to discuss. 

These kids are honestly incredibly cool! It sucks that, like, probably half of them will die at graduation! 

In the meantime, though, Marian wants a monitor that can show an ECG tracing - ideally some sort of display, not paper printouts - and can check blood pressure regularly, and it would be amazing if it could also include an O2 sat measurement, they can maybe trade to get the spell from Ribo? And she wants something that will serve as an IV pump, it's pretty obnoxious to give pressors by IV push. And as an epic stretch goal, it would be really cool to have a ventilator? That might have saved Sophie and it could be really lifesaving for a kid with severe injuries affecting their breathing. Marian is aware that she can't count on keeping anyone alive for days in critical condition, in the death school, but if she can eke out minutes or hours then that might be long enough to scrape together magic healing, so that's what she's aiming for. 

After some rapid discussion in Mandarin, the artificers think that this should all be possible! (The one English speaker seems to have appointed herself the spokesperson.) They are happy to accept lots of nutrient paste in trade.

Marian is going to be a hardass in the negotiation on quantities to trade! She ends up settling on two boxes if they can get her everything, one box for just the monitoring and IV delivery. 

A few minutes into this, Masozi is curious enough to poke his head around Wei Wuxian and listen in. 

Marian is too distracted to notice this immediately, but eventually she looks around, and then makes a very confused face. 

"- Wait, aren't you -" Damn it it would be incredibly rude to say 'malnourished-looking kid', and he can no longer be accurately described as 'garbage dump kid', he's acquired new albeit questionably-fitting clothes. (Oh, right, didn't alcohol kid mention something about working on clothes for someone...) 

She looks helplessly at Wen Qing instead. "I thought he was accused of murdering people? Why, uh, is he - sitting with you guys -?" She didn't think that was how enclave politics worked at ALL. 

She snaps, "he didn't murder anyone. They just accused him because he doesn't understand the social rules."

"Oh. I - sorry - I didn't mean to say anything offensive?"

She's just SO CONFUSED, wasn't he known to be a maleficer? And don't enclaves hate that passionately? ...It would sure explain some of the weird subtext going on between Wen Qing and New York, yesterday. 

"Is he, uh," what's the polite term for 'one of those enclave hanger's-on, "is he with Shanghai, um, longer term?" Because Wen Qing isn't the only one looking fiercely protective, right now. 

"He's our ally."

She's...not sure exactly what that means, but it sounds probably more serious than the 'maintenance track' thing - wait, she's pretty sure she's only heard that word about graduation. 

Also it feels awkward to be talking about the kid like he's not there, but he's gone back to hiding behind one of the other freshmen. He looks really skittish, today. She doesn't remember him giving off such an abused-traumatized-puppy sense before. 

"- Uh, I don't know how someone being allies works, but I have a medical recommendation for him? Maybe more than one, actually. Uh, assuming Shanghai shares supplies with allies and stuff." 

"We share supplies with our allies" in a tone that implies that some people don't and she does not think very much of them.

Huh. That's also got subtext and Marian is not feeling fully up to date on all that. 

"I recommend you make sure he gets at least one of the malnutrition food packets every day for a while? On top of the cafeteria meals. He looks really underweight. Probably he should also get, like, vitamin pills? I have some, I traded for them early on." 

"Masozi, did you catch that?"

He thinks he heard the words but he's confused. "I don't think I need extra food? There's lots of food here." 

Marian, who has been subjected to the cafeteria food, DISAGREES. There is a just-barely-this-side-of-adequate quantity of calories that can technically be put in your mouth, and half of it is, in her opinion, only very dubiously food. 

...The fact that Masozi disagrees kind of says a lot about what his previous circumstances must have been like. 

"It's important," she says. "Your body and especially your brain need fuel, and you're probably still growing right now, so even more so." He's pretty tall, she noticed, which is a hint that he probably had enough to eat in early childhood, and his current concerning thinness is probably recent. She wonders what the story is, there. 

Masozi looks uncertainly at Wen Qing. 

"She's right. You need to eat enough food."

One of the seniors talks to the spokesperson, and then she says, "if Masozi is getting food packets to treat his malnutrition, then technically that's medical so we should get them for free."

Marian needs to be a hardass and not a sucker and not get walked all over - 

- she looks at Masozi. He's got a notebook open in front of him full of meticulously hand-copied Mandarin characters and less-tidy notes in - she has to assume that's some sort of African language, she can't make any sense of it, and - wow, is that IPA? There are math-looking doodles in the margins. He's not looking at it right now, though; he's sort of trying to hide behind the kid next to him, who has a protective arm around Masozi's shoulders. He seems to be ignoring the rest of his half-eaten tray of food, for which she cannot blame him at all, she tried those ""eggs"" and they managed to be WORSE than hospital food and don't even come with ketchup. 

"....Yeah. That's fair." It's not really for free, she reminds herself. It's for goodwill with Shanghai, a major enclave that has some of the best artificers and alchemists in the world and also her apprentice. "He can have, uh, two weeks' worth to keep in his room." 

"Is that going to be sufficient?"

"I don't know, we can reassess then and if he hasn't gained enough weight and I've got stock left I can give him more, and if not, hopefully you'll still have some of your two entire boxes for him. I - he's one of, like, thousands and thousands of kids in this school. I can justify some amount of 'he medically needs it a lot more than average' but not, like, that much, everyone here is kind of food-insecure." 

"That's reasonable." She kind of thinks that Marian has the only access to the infinite void of supplies but they can talk about that in two weeks. She turns to Masozi. "I want you to eat normal-sized meals, and your malnutrition packets, and your vitamins for the next two weeks. Can you do that?"

Masozi thinks that everyone is suddenly making an inexplicably and unreasonably big deal about this! "I - sure, okay? ...I don't know what you think is a normal sized meal." 

Wei Wuxian steals other people's food, Wen Ning has his food stolen, Nie Huaisang might decide to go on a diet... "Jiang Cheng eats a normal sized meal."

Masozi cranes to look at Jiang Cheng's plate. This is less than entirely helpful, because Jiang Cheng seems to have already eaten most of his food. 

"- Can you look at my food at lunch and tell me if it's a normal sized meal?" he asks Jiang Cheng.