The early lunch of a breakfast was made by Chanyeol and Baekhyun, under D.O.'s guidance and with Tao's quick assistance in getting out everything they'd need from higher shelves, before he returned to bed. Knowing Tao wouldn't come out until he was called to the meal, Suho got Lay, Kai, and even Sehun's assistance in quickly scrubbing sauce out of the crevices (even though the oldest of the four made it known that he was now "owed one" by the ones who had made the mess in the first place.) All remnants of the earlier mess were gone by the time Lay went to call Tao to the meal.

After they ate, Tao presented the boys with the clothes he'd bought, and they went to pick out appropriately-sized clothing from the pile Tao had brought home while Tao cleared his own place from the table. If there were one thing Tao could do while sick (other than be a total nuisance,) it was choosing stylish clothes, Sehun picked out a white and black raglan shirt with some unknown Japanese katakana characters printed diagonally on it and a pair of khaki shorts, and Kai found a pair of yellow jeans he paired with a plain white T-shirt and a leather jacket (one of the few items Tao hadn't gotten from the sale rack, and one that Kai snatched up within two seconds of digging.) Being the first ones done, Tao chose them for chore duty.

“Sehun, Kai, come and help with the dishes.”

Unlike Suho and Lay, who they were willing (if only barely) to help out, Tao had nearly zero leverage with them.

The youngest-turned-second-oldest turned around while sticking his arms through the black sleeves of his shirt, with his lips twisted into a pout. “Why do I have to do it!?”

“Yeah,” Kai—who was somewhere around fifth in the new age order—agreed, “why me, too?”

Tao frowned. He hadn't been expecting the backlash “I’m your hyung and I say so, that’s why.”

“You’re everyone’s hyung now,” Kai tried to reason. “Make Baekhyun, Chen, Chanyeol, or D.O. do it; they were the ones who made the mess in the kitchen earlier.”

“Hey!” an aggravated shout came from the first on the list. “We said we wouldn’t tell!”

“Too bad, so sad.”

“Guys, I asked you to do something.”

“But that’s not fair!” Sehun whined. “We were good earlier, and they were naughty!”

“Well, unless you guys want to be the naughty ones, you'd better do what I asked."

“No!” the two upset voices came at the same time.

“"No"?“ Tao sputtered, looking at the obstinate kids, eyes getting wilder by the moment.

"Why don't you clean the dishes?" Sehun shot at him. "You didn't help cook or anything!"

"I bought the food. I got the stuff down from the cabinets and cleared my own place, and I'm sick! Whatever happened to having a little sympathy?"

Suho, who was still shirtless as everyone had stopped rummaging through the pile in order to watch the confrontation, laughed incredulously. "Really? You, of all people, are asking for sympathy?" Tao shot him a look, immediately shutting him up, but Sehun and Kai were not to be defeated by such looks.

"You're the reason we're kids," Kai said, picking up where Suho left off. "That's what happened to your sympathy."

"Okay, if that's the way you feel, you and Sehun can give me back those clothes I bought you and wear your normal shirts as dresses until this is over, because you're acting like little girls."

“Ooooh, Tao just called you a girl,” Chen mocked, purely to fan the flames.

It worked. “Shut up!” Sehun said, face turning red.

“Nyah-nyah-nya-nyah-nyahhh!” Chanyeol joined in, as he, Chen, and Baekhyun stuck out their tongues at Kai and Sehun.

“I said shut up!”

“Make us!”

“That’s it!” Tao roared. “ Sehun, Kai, Chanyeol, Chen, Baekhyun, time out, now!”

Five high-pitched and extremely loud "What!?"s sounded at once.

“Go to your rooms! And, and think about what you’ve done!” Tao said, trying to sound as authoritative as possible. He failed, but they did as they were told anyway. As five very angry little boys stormed out of the room, he rethought his choices on who to call in for dish duty.

“As for you, Suho, you and your smart mouth can wash the dishes by yourself."
 

“Stupid meanieface Tao and his dumb dummy dishes…” Sehun seethed as he kneeled on his bed by himself. “I wish he would die!” he added as he continued to punch his pillow, as he had been on-and-off for the past ten minutes.

Suddenly, he heard the doorknob jiggle and he looked over to see Chen sneaking through the doorway. Sehun sat up andopened his mouth to speak, but the boy coming in pressed a silent finger to his lips before speaking himself.

“Wanna get out of here?” he whispered.

Sehun only looked on in confusion.

“Chanyeol says we’re busting out of here!” Chen said, devious grin on his face. “Come on, through the fire escape!”

"You're leaving?" He raised a single eyebrow, partially out of concern, but mostly out of curiosity. "Isn't that pretty risky? I mean, if you get caught?"

Chen chuckled slightly before replying, with a roll of his eyes, "Even if someone does somehow recognize us from our baby photos, who's going to believe it's actually us? An incredible coincidence, or a hidden camera look-alike stunt, maybe, but actually us? They don't think our powers are real."

Sehun's eyes went half-lidded. "Do you not remember how delusional some of our fans are?"

"Wait... don't tell me you're chicken."

His lips tightened and he puffed his chest out before replying. "I'm not chicken, I just think it's kind of a stupid idea. You're putting too much faith in all our fans to not be idiots."

"Alright, look." Chen slithered through the crack in the door, closing it gently behind him and taking a seat on Chanyeol's bed. When they'd been sent back to their rooms, Tao hadn't bothered to check to make sure that they actually did, and therefore hadn't noticed when Chanyeol and Baekhyun had tiptoed along with Chen to his room, wanting to leave Sehun out of any of their discussions until they were sure what they were going to do. "Firstly, even if we run into ten fans stupid enough to think our powers are real and in action, no one will believe them. Secondly, you know just as well as I do that Tao asking you to do the dishes was unfair, right? We're on the same page with that, right?"

Sehun nodded.

"Chanyeol can offer you a level of... protection. A shot at getting what's right. A voice of reason that Tao, or not even our -up leader, is willing to offer. Join us, and you won't have to go it alone against them."

Sehun replied, unimpressed face unmoving, "To me it looks like we're all in the same time-out."

"Yeah, because Kai ratted us out. We could have had your back, and we're offering you an opportunity for the next time. You're a smart kid, a smooth talker, and Tao's quicker to forgive you than anyone else. Tone down the sass for awhile and get back on his good side, and we could use someone like you. And you could use someone like us. Come on, just come out with us for the day, and see what you think."

"And if we get more time-out?"

"There's no guarantee that we won't. But Rome wasn't built in a day. That's just a risk we'll all have to take for establishing our independence. Plus, if you like what you see, there's plenty more benefits of hanging with us."

Sehun rolled his eyes at the poor use of the quote. He wasn't really at all interested in joining the silly little "opposing party" Chanyeol was trying to create, but sticking a final big one to Tao after how unfair he'd been sounded better than punching his pillow for the next hour, so he followed Chen out the door. The racket three-year-old Suho was causing as he futzed around with the dishes was more than loud enough to cover up the sound of little feet tiptoeing their way across the hall and into the room Suho shared with Xiumin, the room that held the exit window to the dorm's fire escape. The other three were already standing there, and Chanyeol, who nodded at Sehun with a pleased look in his eyes, had already pulled open the window. They all looked excited with the exception of Kai.

“This still seems like a bad idea…” he mumbled, shying away from the open window. He was much meeker than he'd been ten minutes prior, as if something in him had suddenly shifted. The aura of the quiet yet assertive person that was Kim Jongin had disappeared.

“Okay, then you stay back and explain to Tao that we all ran away. We can't cover you if you do that, by the way,” Baekhyun proposed. “Sound good to you?”

Kai shook his head and didn’t protest further.

“So what are we waiting for? Let’s get out of here!” Chanyeol said with pure glee on his face before he stepped through the window, quickly followed by the four others.
 

“Do you think we’ll be like this until he gets over his cold?” Lay whispered to Suho. He stood by Suho, rinsing the dishes and placing them on the drying rack as Suho handed the soap-covered pieces to him. Tao had ordered Suho to wash the dishes by himself. He hadn't mentioned anything about rinsing. Lay wouldn't have mentioned it even to Suho, but as well as helping out his friend, this was his way of sticking it to Tao for his unfairness. Tao had finally fallen asleep on the sofa after a sneezing fit that had gone on for at least a minute anf a half after he'd sent the kids to time-out. He wouldn't notice.

“I don’t know, but probably,” Suho sighed back. "Even worse, I think our brains are changing too. I have to physically try to not talk like a child."

The sick man was barely able to reach over the arm of the sofa, grab a tissue from the box on the end table, and get it over his mouth before he sneezed one last time, explosively, and groaned at the sudden pressure flux in his head. Lay squeaked, roughly dropping a handful of forks and chopsticks into the utensil holder of the drying rack, and dropping to the floor to sit. It was too dangerous to help while Tao was, actually, not asleep.

He poked at his knees, which were raised to his chin, for a hesitant few moments before asking, “What about our schedules? No, what about when our other manager comes tonigh?? What are we gonna tell him?”

Suho looked out to where Tao was turning over, trying to get comfortable. The TV softly played cartoons, this time geared toward middle school kids rather than preschoolers. In front of it, D.O. sat entertaining baby Xiumin with the toys that had been brought back earlier.

“Should one of us call a manager before they come back?”

“Look, I don’t know,” Suho snapped, rinsing one last chopstick that had missed detection until he had drained the water,  along with the soap on his hands. "It's all I can do right now to bear doing what Tao tells me; I don't need you asking all these questions, too." Lay shrunk back, hurt transparent in his eyes. “Sorry, I’m just a little…” He yawned, looking at the clock as he did so. It boldly read 11:43 a.m. “I think I’ll go take a nap."

“It's okay, me too,” Lay said, standing up and brushing non-existent dust from his blue and white shorts. “Let’s take one together,” he added, taking Suho’s hand in his. The now third-to-youngest nodded his approval, and the two went off to Suho’s room.

Where they were greeted with a stack of papers that had been blown off Suho’s desk by the wind coming through the wide-open window.

“Who opened the window?” Suho said, frowning as he walked up to it, put one knee on the windowsill, and used his entire body weight to pull it shut.

Lay shrugged in silence, a silence that allowed him to realize that something was missing. A noisy something. And that that something was actually a someone.

“Does it sound quiet to you?” Lay asked. Suho was baffled by the question until the implication hit him.

The two went to the rooms of Chen, Kai, and the one shared by the remaining three, all of which were devoid of human life.

“Tao!” they both shouted, causing the sick man to rise with a start. “Tao, they (Suho said 'ran', but Lay piped up with 'runned') away!”

“Wha…?” he said, in the fog that is the state of being half-asleep.

“Sehun and Kai and Baekhyun and Chen and Chanyeol! They’re gone!” Lay yelled.

Disbelief hit Tao before reality. “What do you mean "gone"?”

“Gone gone! They runned away out the fire escape!” His choice to use "runned" for a second time resulted in him being met with a strange look from Suho, but Lay was too concerned with their missing members to worry about grammar.

“No…” Tao said, jumping to his feet and scurrying to the rooms he’d sent the troublesome five to, just as Lay and Suho had done. “No, no, no, no no no no no! Guys, if this is a joke, tell me now.”

“We’re serious!” Suho insisted. “The window in my room was open and everything!”

Tao’s face took on an extremely pained look before he let it fall into his hands. “I can’t believe this! Are they idiots!?” Grunting, he whipped his phone out from his pocket and dialed the first number that came to mind: Sehun’s.

The ringtone could just barely be heard from inside Sehun’s room.

The same result came from the other four phones: Some of them were on vibrate, but they were all very much in the rooms of their owners. It took all of Tao’s willpower to keep from slamming his own phone to the floor.

“This is literally the worst. I have to go find them.”

“If you find them, what do?” D.O. asked. “You get in twouble.”

Lay's incorrect past tense had been lost in the moment, but the very clear deterioration in D.O.'s quality of speech in the twenty minutes since breakfast had ended was pronounced enough to cause all of them to freeze.

"D.O.," Tao said slowly, "Why are you talking like that?" The kid had been sitting right in front of him for at least ten minutes, and he'd been so busy trying to tune him out that he hadn't noticed the change.

The littlest shook his head. "I dunno. But I don't want you get in twouble."

“Trouble?" Tao asked, letting the issue of the voice go for the moment. There were more pressing issues.

“I think I get it,” Lay said. Unlike Xiumin, D.O. wasn't that far behind Suho and himself in terms of age, and they understood the argument. "Even if no one notices you by yourself—"

"Every camera in a five kilometer radius will be on me once they realize I'm with little versions of EXO members. Ah, I’ll figure it out on the way, but I have to go find them before they get too far. Where do you think they went?”

Lay, Suho, and D.O. all looked up at Tao as if he were dumb.

“What?”

“Where do they always go when they want to have fun?” Suho asked.

Then, it dawned on him.

They were so dead.

Important A/N: I'm working on improving this story, and everything up to D.O.'s lines in this chapter has been touched up. Chapter 5 will go very differently when I'm done.