Theme song for this chapter

Act I, Scene VIII: Amor Musicae
Gangnam-gu, Seoul, South Korea - 1945 hours

“How the BLINK do they keep dividing?” Baekhyun screams, writhing under a cackling Jeno. “What the Shawol?!”

Kyungsoo bangs his head experimentally against the fridge. He already gave up on fighting the rapidly reproducing Jenos ten minutes ago, and now there isn’t anything to do but calculate how fast and at what angle he needs to fling his head into the fridge to knock himself out. If I include a vertical component to my head-flinging force, he thinks, then I can take advantage of acceleration due to gravity and make it that much more likely I’ll pass out on first contact. Faster head speed means deeper nap, right?

“I told you, it’s mitosis!” Yixing chirps from up in a neighboring tree, and the entire battlefield collectively freezes and looks up to where he’s perched.

“Yixing,” Junmyeon says slowly, “why are you in a tree? And how long have you been up there?”

The dancer shrugs. “A while. I spotted a cloud that I thought was a great abstract representation of Baekhyun screaming and just knew I had to get closer for the sake of *Bleep*struck. So I climbed a tree.”

“And you couldn’t have bothered to help us out here instead?” asks Chanyeol from his position under three Jenos, one of which still has his teeth embedded in Chanyeol’s calf.

“Yeah,” Sehun adds, a whiny note entering his voice, “where’s the loyalty?”

Yixing thinks for a second. “I’ll split the royalties from *Bleep*struck with you?”

Sehun chews on his lip, conflicted, then nods. “That’s fair.”

Squirming on the ground, Kyungsoo takes advantage of the momentary distraction and uses his toe to start sketching a free-body diagram of his head in relation to the fridge in the dirt. His head, ironically, is already aching, and he can’t calculate the necessary head velocity required for unconsciousness without a pencil and paper. The Jeno on top of him takes one look at the diagram, yelps in horror, then slaps him upside the head.

“Stop it, sunbaenim,” the Jeno says irritably, “I hate physics.”

Kyungsoo almost cries. Great. There goes my hope for a blunt force trauma-induced nap.

“Hey Yixing,” Baekhyun interrupts, “now that you’ve had time to observe the scream-cloud, any chance you want to help us out here?”

Yixing frowns. “But they keep dividing,” he points out just as another round of Jenos pops into existence. “I won’t be of any help. I had thought the NCTzen stans were on a 24-hour reproduction cycle, but it’s clearly been sped along by some other force.”

A Jeno at the trunk of Yixing’s tree confirms this with a nod. “Thanks to our one and only otter Neem,” he says, eyes gleaming with absolute devotion, “we’ve reduced the duration of our reproduction cycle by twenty times.”

Kyungsoo physically convulses at the mention of Neem. Another way he’s destroyed nap time, he rages. Curse that otter Neem!

“He injected us with a cocktail of mitogens, substances that induce cell division,” another Jeno pitches in. “Lipopolysaccharide, wheat germ agglutinin, phytohemagglutinin galore!”

“Wouldn’t that only work for individual cells, and not entire humans?” Junmyeon wonders. The two Jenos sitting on his back whip around and glare at him in unison.

“Sh