[Neo Zone] Population: 23 Kids

Letters

Carrying a bag overflowing with letters, the grandparents entered the cafe through the back door without knocking. The cafe had just locked up for the night, so Ten, Johnny, Kun, Jaehyun and Jaemin were cleaning up.

"Grandma!" Johnny dropped what he was doing and ran up to hug her, hugging his grandpa right afterwards before he could make a comment about favoritism.

"Why are you kids still working? Come hug your grandparents!" She opened her arms and waited for the rest to come hug her.

Mrs. Suh came down from the kitchen upstairs where she was finishing the dinner Doyoung had started, brushing her hands on her jeans. "Mom? Dad? What are you doing here?"

"Well somehow all these letters came to the house addressed for the kiddos, and we thought we'd bring them over personally and say hi." She held up the bag to prove she did have reason for coming over without notice.

"We got mail?!" Jaemin's eyes lit up, and Grandpa ruffled his pink hair.

"Yes sir, lots of it. Why don't you go get everyone upstairs and we can open them up there together?"

Jaemin ran downstairs to get the others who quickly came running upstairs to where the grandparents and those cleaning the cafe had sat down. This way Mrs. Suh could keep working on dinner without being excluded.

All twenty-seven of them sat either at the table, on the counters, or on each other, eyeing the bag full of letters in front of them.

"How did we get so much mail?" Jisung whispered in awe, having never gotten mail before.

"Let's go in age order! We can each open it and read it out loud." Taeyong suggested, so Taeil reached into the bag and started sifting through to find one addressed to him.

Lucas dumped the bag out onto the table when he decided he was taking too long, helping Taeil find his letters.

"Do I read who it's from?"

"Nah, that'll take too long."

Taeil shrugged at Haechan's words, opening his first of four letters.

"On a scale of 1 to 10 how much do you wanna smother WinWin in your love? Should I be concerned that these strangers know who we are?"

"Just go with it, hun." Grandma waved her hand in the air, motioning for him to continue.

"Then 10, but I won't because he doesn't like that. Next one says Doyoung or Sicheng.... Sicheng. Always. Ummm..." He fumbled with the next letter a bit. "You gonna let Jisung take your bear aren't you. Yeah, that's his bear now."

Jisung smiled cheekily which Taeil returned.

"And last question, how does it feel to have so many people in the cult who's younger than you?" He sighed. "It's weird because one day I'm going to be an adult and they'll still be in school. So I just hope no one charges me for pedophilia. But it's fun. I like it."

Johnny then grabbed his letters from the piles Lucas was sorting out to make it go faster, ripping open the envelope without caring if he ripped what was inside.

"How does it feel from being an only child to becoming the father of all of them except your fellow parents? Feels like Christmas. How does it feel not being the favourite? Ooh, they used the fancy spelling. But I was never the favorite, so nothing's changed."

"Oh you know that's not true. I love all my kids equally." Mrs. Suh argued, the boys now snickering.

"Yeah, sure. How does it feel to be the cofounder of a 23 member cult? Not sure why I'm the cofounder, but it also feels like Christmas. And lastly, who do you think is the most likely to fry toilet paper...? Probably either Jungwoo or Lucas because they'd be genuinely curious. Next."