Masozi is INCREDIBLY HAPPY about this! ...Also stressed. But nonetheless incredibly happy! And he's very good at finding mals and even better at noticing people sneaking up on them, so with Wei Wuxian's help they can probably dodge any threats? 

He reads the instruction sheet. "All right, wax casting! I've been doing this since I was seven years old."

"I don't know what that is," Masozi confesses. He doesn't know what almost any of the things in the shop are, actually! It all looks incredibly complicated and he's now kind of intimidated. 

"Don't worry about it! A seven-year-old can do it." He considers. "Well, they're not supposed to do it, but I kept all my fingers and a medical spell fixed it right up."

This is not a reassuring fact about the safety of this project at all!!!! Masozi gives Wei Wuxian an alarmed look!!! 

"And we're twice as old as that so we'll be twice as careful!"

"Okay." Masozi will be so careful. And try to make sure Wei Wuxian is also careful, because probably he won't be. 

His instruction sheet is in English. He reads through it very carefully. That....mostly sounds like things he can do? 

"Can I see your instructions too?" he asks Wei Wuxian. "For practicing Mandarin." 

"Sure thing."

He takes the opportunity to scan for mals. There is so much stuff in here he can cheat with.

Masozi recognizes a lot of the characters on Wei Wuxian's sheet! (Well, for a definition of 'recognizes' that includes hunting through his notes.) He aaaaalmost knows enough of them to figure out the rest from the process of elimination and the English instructions plus what they sort of look like pictures of. He can't quite manage this, though, and has to ask Wei Wuxian what about half of them mean so he can add them to his notebook.

And then he's willing to actually start the assignment! ...The instructions are actually still kind of confusing, for someone who has never done any kind of shop work before. So maybe he'll watch what Wei Wuxian does and then do the same things after him? 

"To the shop cabinet!"

Can they please please go to the shop cabinet carefully? With Masozi checking for mals? Inconveniently, if he has to keep a lookout for Wei Wuxian during the whole shop period then this is going to end up taking most of the mana he accumulated via breakfast being terrifying. 

"I think we need - wood to make a frame, and sand or plastic, and wax, and - I guess something to carve wax with? And then bronze. How do we melt the bronze?" 

Wei Ying is not capable of reading minds so he goes without looking where he's going at ALL and almost runs into a New Yorker.

"This thingie," Wei Wuxian says. "--ooh, some of this stuff is cool."

Aaaaaaaaaaah did the New York student notice him? Masozi tried to dive behind Wei Wuxian but he's not sure he did it in time! 

"Be careful!" he hisses, since apparently Wei Wuxian is, in fact, not going to think of that on his own. "The - the thing that looks like rope isn't a rope. Can you kill it." 

Other than whatever kind of mal that is, the cabinet seems clear, and it is in fact full of so much stuff. There are, like, eight different kinds of string, from fine silk thread on a spool to a braided cord. There's a spool of barbed wire for some reason. There's a corrugated plastic signboard bigger than Masozi is tall. There's a box of small flat pieces of wood, which Wei Wuxian might recognize as popsicle sticks. There are a number of ball bearings. There's a bunch of wire mesh and three brass doorknobs and a bag of cotton fluff. 

"Yeah, sure." He explodes it, leaving little bits of mal guts over half the shop. 

(Behind him, someone yells 'fuck' as half their knife inexplicably disintegrates.)

Oh wow. Masozi wishes he had an exploding-mals spell. The void seems incredibly reluctant to give him that, though. 

"Think it's safe now," he says. "Wei Wuxian, please wait for me to check for mals before you touch things, okay?" 

"Okay, I will." He grabs some ball bearings and wire mesh. "I bet I could make something really cool with this."

Masozi pockets the thread - Nie Huaisang probably wants nice thread? - and considers the corrugated plastic thing. "We slept under one of those," he says thoughtfully. "In Lilongwe. It was waterproof. I guess that's not as useful here, since it doesn't rain inside." 

"I bet we could use something waterproof at some point." He collects it.

"I think we need to look in more cabinets. None of this is actually the stuff we need, unless the doorknobs are bronze? I don't actually know what bronze is." 

"I don't think so, they're brass. --You should open the cabinets."

Masozi lowers his voice. "...Can I have some mana from your power sharer? I promise I won't take any more than what I put in this morning, I just want to be able to use my spell that paralyzes mals." 

"Sure thing." He passes it over.

It's still weird how casual Wei Wuxian is about this, but Masozi isn't going to complain. He pulls just enough mana for the spell and gives the power-sharer back. 

...The next cabinet seems to be clear of mals, though. It's also clearly already been gone over by New York. It is inexplicably full of pinecones, and everything else is gone. 

He picks up a pinecone. "Do you think we could do something cool with this?"

"We could...use it to light a fire? I don't know what sort of magic thing you could do with it." 

"Maybe we could put glitter on it and use it to decorate our rooms."

"....Why?"

"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. 

"Copper's useful, we can just take it."

"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?" 

"Ooh, yeah, these are." He separates them out.

"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?" 

"Sounds good." He does that.

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." 

"They might change the melting point of the wax."

"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.