---
title: "Selected Excerpts from NaNoWriMo 2022"
date: 2024-09-24
tags:
  - nanowrimo
  - featured
---

Ganyu frowns as she pulls out a black leather straitjacket out of one of Yanfei's boxes. "Hey, Yanfei?" She holds it out in front of her. "What's this for?"

Yanfei looks up from organising her hats on the shelf. "What do you mean? Obviously, you wear it…?" Her expression is puzzled.

There's a small pause before the reply. "Never mind…"

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Xiao stifles a snort. "That's right, Ganyu. Use your imagination. What else could you possibly use it for?" The straitjacket flies toward his face. Chuckling, he catches it and tosses it back at Ganyu.

---

"Uh oh, Xiao. You might want to reconsider biting into Jolly Ranchers around Yanfei," she teases. "She'll roast you on a spit."

Yanfei laughs while pinning pictures to the board on her closet. "The gummies get stuck on your teeth\! But imagine chewing a hard — wait." Her eyes narrow as her expression suddenly stills. "You meant the soft ones, right?"

Xiao looks away and proceeds to hang up a Drake poster.

_"You meant the soft ones, right?"_

"It's like a nutcracker going off every few seconds," Ganyu supplies.

Yanfei stares at Xiao, who is decidedly not looking at her. "How have your teeth not fallen out?"

---

"Nope. University math is not real math. There are no numbers."

---

_"Pink team\!"_ The sudden shout startles them, and they turn to see a man in a pink rabbit suit holding a megaphone. Yanfei's jaw drops. She's amazed she missed him in the first place. The chatter in their team stops. "Give me your attention\! Excellent. Now," he says authoritatively, pacing back and forth, "during this orientation, I am responsible for you. You will not like me. But you will _learn_. And you will understand, freshmen, that I speak for the university. From now on, you will only speak when spoken to. _Is that clear?"_

---

The rabbit man's mouth twitches but makes no comment. "Now, we head to the opening presentation. Do not lose me, or you will be severely beaten."

---

Miko leans in, smirking. "Don't go around underestimating UTI, now," she winks. "You'll be in for quite a bit of pain if you do."

---

"With free food as motivation, who could lose?"

---

Yanfei blanches. "Uh…" She scooches back. "You do make…food."

"Does she?" Xingqiu mutters. Hu Tao chops him again. "Ow\!"

---

"Where. Are. The. Vegetables?" He shudders. "I only saw _boiled carrots_."

They all look down at their plates. "There's napa in my _gyoza_," Shinobu says.

"Tofu has beans." Yanfei offers. "Those are vegetables, right?"

"What's a vegetable?" Hu Tao asks innocently.

---

Yanfei empties her own bowl. It soon fills up again to accommodate the recent group of refugees from her body. "It's not the tofu," she insists weakly, squeezing her eyes shut. "It's _never_ the tofu." Tofu wouldn't cause her physical pain to stand up. Tofu would embrace her and tell her everything's okay, that her stomach isn't the one cramping out and vomiting in the wrong direction, that the mouth on her other end isn't retching gravy and spitting all over the bowl of chocolate soup.

---

It doesn't stop. A river is flowing through her body. She imagines all of the microbes going whitewater rafting to exit her system. Only the water is neither white nor water. And the raft has spikes on the outside, as if designed to cause her the most suffering possible.

---

She's ascended to a higher plane, she feels. It's freeing — until her stomach brings her back to reality with a cheerful _mrrgle_ as if taunting her.

---

"Why is there so much work\! I have. Three. Tests. Next. Monday."

"Yeah," Keqing nods. "It's always easiest the first two weeks." Ganyu elbows her. "Oh? I mean — it's really rough the first two weeks."

---

Ganyu chuckles, eyes unfocused. For some reason, Yanfei feels a sense of dread looming behind her — oh, that's just Xiao.

---

"That's too much, Keqing."

"Ganyu, I need it\!" Keqing wails. "Are you really going to deny your girlfriend the only thing she truly loves?"

---

"Sorry, Yanfei. Kazuha's high again."

---

Sliding on her glasses, Ganyu reads the question aloud. "As _n_ approaches infinity, evaluate the limit of the *n*th root of the sine of pi over two _n_ times the sine of two pi over two _n_, all the way up to _n_ minus one pi over two _n_…" she murmurs. "Okay. What don't you get?"

---

"No, you messed up again here, I'm not sure how you got that. Five plus two isn't seven, it's… Oh. Wait, it is seven."

---

Xiao continues to watch television. "Yes. Yanfei helped. Your recipe is quite based — there's more left in the fridge for you."

Ganyu pauses. "Huh. Thanks. Nothing burned down, I hope?" She peeks around as if searching for scorch marks.

"No. Yanfei almost tried to grind the almonds with an egg beater though. That was cringe and unbased."

A few seconds pass in silence. Xiao looks up. "Ganyu?"

Ganyu stares at him with an expression of unbridled horror. "W-what happened to you?"

"Is there something that is sus? Yanfei taught me some common slang used by university students. That was very poggers of her."

A quiet _thump_ resounds as Ganyu sits down heavily on the nearest chair she can drag over. Eyes unfocused, she gazes into empty space. "No — just —" She abruptly gets up. "I'm going to talk to Yanfei."

"Kek-double-U," Xiao states.

---

"Good decision," Yanfei nodded. "If you don't overflow on CRIT Rate, it's your best-in-slot in freeze teams. Second BiS in melt, too."

---

Evidently, the fish did not want to be a new member of Yanfei's family and splashed out of the chest right onto her face.

---

Yanfei nodded agreeably. "Yeah, Magikarp kinda sucks. The only thing it does is splash around. Magikarp," she declared, "you have disappointed me for the last time. By the power invested in me by myself, I sentence you…to exile\!"

---

She shudders, imagining the explosion in her gut if she had to live off of dorm food. Then the state of the communal bathrooms for everyone who has to live off of dorm food.

Nope. She's _very_ glad to be living off-campus, actually.

---

She can only imagine the level of flex Hu Tao has by having the ability to hand out _bubble tea_ to people who come over.

---

Yanfei's fake moustache falls off from how long her jaw has been stuck to the table. She pushes up her sunglasses, rubbing her eyes as if she can't believe what she's seeing.

---

"I mean, I totally get why," Hu Tao says dreamily. "Yun Jin's a real piece of eye candy. I just want to _bite_ into her pompoms\! It's too bad she doesn't lean that way."

---

"Here in my apartment, we've just got this new blender, so don't mind Ganyu being vegetarian over there. But you know what I like a lot more than materialistic things?"

Yanfei points at the television. "Knowledge. And where else can you find more knowledge than in appreciating art?" She claps her hands. "So that's why we're gonna play Mario Kart\! I read in a book somewhere that competition nurtures the mind."

Hu Tao nods along like it all makes perfect sense. "So if I win, I get smarter?"

"Damn," Shinobu says. "We're all gonna be geniuses by the end of this. Except for Hu Tao."

---

He knows her much better — she wouldn't get him something mortifying like a _Link body pillow_. Ganyu's box is smaller than Yanfei's, which is a strong sign that it doesn't contain a Link body pillow.

---

"I noticed that your Pikachu pyjamas were starting to wear out. You must have had them for _years_ now. So I got you another pair\!"

---

"By the way," Yanfei says as Xiao takes his very first bite, "we knew you didn't want something too unhealthy for breakfast, so we tried out spinach as the main ingredient this time. What do you think?"

---

A girl and a boy sit in a Meet Fresh booth, its logo prominently displayed on the wall behind them. "Have a shaved ice," the girl whispers to the boy in the movie. "It's delicious. Made out of 100% fresh fruit. Just like me."

---

Yanfei averts her eyes until the subtitles stop saying \*\*SLURP SLURP SLURP\*\*.

---

"Then don't you want to eat me out?" the girl says huskily, caressing his cheek. "Like you eat out Meet Fresh's watermelon shaved ice, only available here for $9.99?"

"But isn't that expensive?" The girl gives him a look of utmost concern like he's just said that he's about to die.

"Our love is worth it," he reassures her. "Just like how the taro red bean soup is worth the $5.99 at Meet Fresh." He pulls out the dish from behind him. It looks overly bright and shiny, almost exactly like the picture in the menu. "Wouldn't you like to try one?" The boy takes a sip, then holds it up to the girl, who lovingly meets his gaze as she eats the rest of the spoonful. Both of them sigh with joy in unison.

---

Instead of the usual beach boy masquerade, today Xiao's hairdo looks like Morax decided to play cat's cradle with it but got bored before he finished.

---

"Welcome to the fourth meeting of the Debate Club. May we recognise that we are nothing but pawns to the great…Debate Club." She holds out a spiked metal bat to the skies.

---

"Objection\!" Yanfei buzzes. "Chewbacca override."

"Sustained. Sumeru, please be aware that the club formally forbade use of the Chewbacca Defense effective the 21st of November."

---

Yanfei spreads her arms. "Respectfully, Fontaine requests that the opposing counsel consider the implications of curves on pancakes. In reality, the inherent lack of structure _inside_ the pancake must lead to highly undesirable flopping, just like Mondstadt's tiny pp when he sees one\!"

Chongyun slaps the table, standing up and pointing at Yanfei. "Objection\! Inadmissible evidence\! The counsel from Fontaine…has highly exaggerated the size…of my colleague's…" Xingqiu practically drags him back down beside him, mildly red.

---

"It's okay. It's not actually losing if you lose against Numeron."

---

"They are. For this question, you're supposed to apply IBP twice. See how you can rearrange it with _u_\-substitution to make negative _x_ squared with _e_ to the negative _x_? That leaves you with another integral of negative _e_ to the negative _x_ by two _x · dx_. Then by doing IBP again, you end up with this negative _e_ and a quadratic."

---

"Is this really life, though? Dogs chasing their tails in circles over and over again?"

Yanfei nods firmly. "It is the very pinnacle of life. The epitome of all we strive for."
