Okay, so, technically. Technically. Masozi was supposed to stay in his room and study Mandarin, and definitely under no circumstances was he allowed to go to Monday morning shop where people might try to assassinate him.
But Wei Wuxian is very good at fighting and there are a lot of very heavy objects in shop and they can sit in the Sinosphere part of the workshop, far the fuck away from any Anglos with ideas, so he thinks this is about as safe as you can get.
"Maybe we could put glitter on it and use it to decorate our rooms."
"A lot of people function better in rooms with pretty things." He puts the pinecone back sadly. Probably he does not have a use for pinecone. Even though that sounds like a challenge.
In the next few cabinets they check, they find a bundle of wooden poles and a crate of sand and some mysterious lumps of metal and, eventually, a spool of wire which has a plastic coating but proves to be copper inside.
"I think we needed copper for the knife?" Masozi says uncertainly to Wei Wuxian. He's lugging the wooden poles and the sand around with him, now, he doesn't want to set them down unattended where another student will just grab them.
"Sure. ...Oh! There's glitter. Did you want glitter?" There's also a very lot string of sparkly tinsel, which looks sort of room-decoration-y?
"Yes!" He collects the glitter and tinsel.
(He has a very large pile of things almost none of which is useful for making a knife.)
The next cabinet has an entire enormous fishing net in it! Which Masozi is super going to take even though he's not sure he can think of anything specific he needs it for. And it's got a bunch of metal ingots!
Masozi shows them to Wei Wuxian. "Are any of these the right kind for the knife?"
"Great! I think maybe that's everything we need for the knife except wax? I haven't seen any wax yet."
"Maybe it'll be in the next one? Or maybe we can borrow some from someone else."
"I want to carry the sand and stuff back to our workstation, it's really heavy, and then we can maybe look in more cupboards or for someone to trade?"
Masozi's arms are really tired by the time he finally gets the wood and the box of sand lugged to their workstation.
The next cupboard they check has a box of crayons! Masozi examines it. "I think crayons are made of wax? We'd have to melt them and turn them into a block, though. But there's a lot of them, I think it'd be enough to make two blocks for two knives?"
"That seems like it ought to work? I wonder if the pigments will do anything interesting."
"Like, magical interesting? I don't think they'd make the knife be colors, I think metal doesn't work that way."
"Huh. Would they? I don't know how wax melting works. ...Also doesn't wax burn, that's how candles work?"
Wei Wuxian thinks it is time for Masozi to learn about wax melting versus wax burning!
They probably need a container to melt the wax in? Masozi can't remember if he saw any containers that would actually be heatproof enough for that. Or can Wei Wuxian do the melting with magic?
Lab goes...fine? Neither of them gets hurt, although Masozi does at one point have to shout to warn Wei Wuxian about a mal - not a very dangerous one, it's a tiny wiggly thing that seems more scared of them than they are of it - but still.
Masozi manages to keep Wei Wuxian mostly on task until they've melted and re-solidified the crayons into a mass of swirly multicolored wax. It's very pretty! Honestly it feels kind of tragic to have to eventually burn it away when they make the knives. At this point, Masozi focuses very diligently on carving his. He's seen knives before and knows what shape he's going for but it turns out carving wax is fiddly.
He's able to get this mostly to his satisfaction during the class period. With Masozi occupied and no longer bottlenecked on Wei Wuxian's instructions or efforts, though, Wei Wuxian gets much more distracted and very much does not finish carving the wax for his knife.
A tall, pale girl has just been circling the room, looking at the students in it. She walks fairly close to Wei Wuxian and Masozi, and stops, leaning against a bench, looking almost directly at Masozi.
(If he's reading her thoughts, he'll notice she is studying him more intently than she's acting. Specifically, at his maleficer aura, which she is seeing in more detail than usual, probably via a spell.)
Masozi notices her, because even when he's focused on a shop project he's still tracking all his surroundings. He doesn't have nearly enough spell control to read her thoughts, and wouldn't be anyway because apparently that sort of thing is what scares people, but he's nonetheless pretty sure that she's paying a lot of attention to him. And it's not hard to guess at why.
His aura is fairly strong - more like someone who's drained a rat daily for a while than weekly or monthly - but still subtly different from the average for a maleficer at that presumed-level. It's - sharp, a jagged edge of danger, but somehow cleaner? And there are some hints against recent use; it doesn't look like he's carrying around any malia right now, and certainly not four kids' worth.
Oria sees... most of that. Regular use, more than she expected, but nowhere near what she'd expect for a murderer, and subtly off from normal. The last couple days don't really register, it hasn't started recovering yet.
She tries to focus in on the way it's off, but can't get a sense for what is different. After ten, maybe twenty, seconds, she gives up. He's interesting, but now is not the time.
She nods to the two of them and smiles, then heads back to the door and the other waiting seniors.
View Flat HTML
View Metadata
Search Post
