[Neo Zone] Population: 23 Kids

The Perfect...

Jeno came down to the basement with a tray of cookies in his hand, double chocolate this time, and set them on a crate for everyone to grab one.

"Did you make these?" Taeil asked, Jeno nodding.

"I needed a snack to go along with my story time, so listen up because this is a good one."

Those who were getting help from Doyoung and Jaehyun with their math homework happily stopped working, grabbing a cookie. Those not doing math homework were slightly more reluctant, but the cookie bribe was working its magic.

"Why does this feel familiar?" Haechan questioned before Jeno got into his story, and they paused for a moment.

"Didn't YangYang do a story time with cookies when he met Jaemin?" Taeyong's skeptical explanation for the feeling of deja vu was enough to satisfy those who were even around for the event, and Jeno was allowed to start.

"So I'm in my foreign language class and the teacher passes out the assignment, like teachers do, but when I look down it's an assignment for us to describe our perfect girlfriend or boyfriend. It's a dumb assignment, but it's like the teacher had no consideration to the kid next to me that looked like they wanted to die when they saw what we had to do. Apparently not everyone knows what the ace and aro flags look like and that some people get really uncomfortable with that."

Jeno paused and gave Ten a grateful smile for educating him so he could help this kid out.

"So because they were uncomfortable and I hate the teacher, I asked them if they'd like to confuse the teacher with me. So I described my perfect boyfriend and the kid described both alternating like the model showed."

"Don't you have that one really salty teacher that reports kids for everything?" Jaemin asked, and Jeno froze.

He forgot about that.

"If you get detention, drop out of school and then we'll go to Thailand and burn my old homophobic school."

Doyoung smacked Ten's hand when it was extended to shake on the deal with Jeno.

"You're not encouraging him to drop out."

"Fine, then we'll just burn both schools."

"Can I come?" Both Lucas and YangYang shouted, instantly calling jinx until Lucas won.

"No one's burning schools! There's probably a law against it or something." Kun interrupted.

"Wait, we're not making them randomly combust?!" Renjun genuinely looked like he had done something he shouldn't have, and the room unconsciously shifted away from him a little.

"Ren, what did you just do?" WinWin hesitantly spoke up.

"Nothing you can prove."

"This is why I said we should keep the tiny witch doctor around! And you guys were trying to keep only Xiaojun," Yuta scoffed, shaking his head.

"You guys tried to get rid of Renjun?" Sungchan asked with a gasp, and Jisung let out a tired sigh.

"It was a really strange and complicated situation. Renjun almost killed Xiaojun-"

"Sacrificed. Not killed."

"And I asked for it." Xiaojun pointed out, but that didn't make Sungchan any less flabergasted.

"It really was just a strange time." Jaehyun summed up, right before Mr. Suh came down the stairs with his phone in his hand.

"Ten, your Mom just called."

"What'd she want?"

Mr. Suh paused, looking back at the phone before answering. The poor man looked so distraught that Jungwoo handed him a cookie.

"She said your old school just burnt down and she wants to make sure you're still in Korea. Is it safe to tell her you had nothing to do with it?"

The group looked to Renjun and back to Mr. Suh with eerie synchronization.

"Yeah, let's go with that."