Act I, Scene IX: Scribimus Indocti Doctique Poemata Passim

Gangnam-gu, Seoul, South Korea - 2000 hours

With Yixing finally coaxed down from his tree, the boys tie Jeno up and pat him down for anything remotely resembling Neem’s magic mitogen concoction.

“Nada,” Jongin reports, digging in Jeno’s pockets. “Just his phone.”

Shoving Jongin aside, Kyungsoo staggers over. His head is pounding, his wrists are rubbed raw from the Jenos’ rope, one of his contacts got dislodged in the scuffle, and he just had to do physics for the first time in nearly a decade, for crying out loud. Do Kyungsoo is not a happy camper at this moment in time. Well, he never really is, he reflects, unless he’s napping.

“Tell me,” he rasps, glaring down Jeno, “tell me right now or I swear to Lee Sooman, I’ll have Yixing sing you out of existence too: where is your precious otter Neem?”

Pupils shaking, Jeno shakes his head frantically. “I don’t know! I don’t know!”

“You’re going to have to do better than that,” Yixing says from behind Kyungsoo, brandishing his air guitar threateningly. “Give up that flaming son of a radish!”

Kyungsoo sighs. “Carat, Yixing. Carat.”

“Same diff.”

“I really don’t know!” Jeno wails. “We only met in person the one time! Otherwise we just communicate via an app!”

Junmyeon yanks Jeno’s phone out of his pocket and holds it up to him. “Show us,” he says grimly. Kyungsoo crosses his arms in a vague attempt to look threatening. It probably doesn’t work, he realizes. The rings under his eyes tend to make him look like a grumpy raccoon these days. Or really just today.

Sniffling, Jeno unlocks his phone and clicks on a blue-and-white app. “It’s this app.”

“Which app is that?” Jongin tilts his head to the side. “I thought I knew just about every social media app out there, but I don’t recognize it.”

Jeno shrugs. “It’s just called APP. See?” He points out the white letters against the blue background. “It probably stands for something. I dunno what for.”

“Well, what do you do on the app?” Junmyeon demands, impatient. “It’s got to have some sort of use.”

“Neem uses it to share his poetry.” Jeno taps on a very familiar profile picture of an otter eating a mangosteen. Kyungsoo shudders in horror at the reminder of the untimely destruction of his bed. I never want to think about that horrible, horrible day again.

“My name is NEEM,” Junmyeon reads off the screen, “My whiskers GLEAM as I eat mangoSTEEN. I mentored Shel SilverSTEIN. You wish you were as cool as MOI.”

Kyungsoo actually feels a tear physically squeeze itself out of his eye in response to Neem’s poetry. Inconceivable, he thinks, stunned. Everyone very well knows it takes two nanograms of giving-a- to generate a tear, and I only have the one.

The tear-that-should-not-be travels down his cheek, taking its merry time and basking in the paradox of its existence. Get out of here! Kyungsoo thinks firmly, trying his best to will it back into his eye. He doesn’t want any more giving-a- than he already has - the world enough with the nanogram currently loitering around in his moral compass! ! Skedaddle! Scram!

Ignoring him (like everything else in this nap-forsaken world, Kyungsoo grumbles to himself), the tear-that-should-not-be crawls leisurely along his chin, flips him the bird, and hops off, landing neatly on the phone screen.

“Sunbaenim,” Jeno says, awed, “are you crying?”

Kyungs