One Can Only Ring Twice (noir-style AU)

Filler

Flashback

"Mr and Mrs Duobi (Twenty and the Two's parents) found dead this afternoon."

The town buzzed with the recent news. Poor triplets, especially Twenty now that he has to take care of the triplets by himself. But who cares about family, but what about politics? Does Number-Land no longer have a government?

Twenty glanced out the window, numbers whispering to each other. Is it empathy? Is it apathy? A villager has made eye contact with Twenty and immediately ran away. 

Twenty glanced back at the triplets. All innocently playing with each other. How cute. Not knowing the deaths of their parents.

Twenty already started with a bad reputation of trying to steal the golden infinity, now everyone assumes he killed his own parents! 

"I am terribly sorry for what has happened to our recent mayor. It is also breaking my heart as much as everyone combined here. But do not worry! Father has been teaching about politics. I believe I have enough knowledge but I am still growing and learning. We can all work this out together as a town. As one!"

There were no cheers, only mutters. Everyone continued to stare at the poor kiddo. 

"I trust him."

...

It's not been a while since Ten and Nine have welcomed little One into their house. Fighting about whether they should bring kids into their house then suddenly "ding dong" there's a baby lying outside.

Currently, Nine has been rocking himself while feeding One with her baby bottle. 

"Are you sure, Ten?"

"I trust Twenty with all my heart!" Ten slide out underneath Thirteen's car. His tire has been popped again, plus some particles got into his engine. "Yeah, I know it's weird for Twenty to become mayor a few years after the Golden Infinity incident, but you know! Let the past be the past?"

Ten walked up to her counter and counted the change on her rex (or abacus, rockets and rekenreks ref.) "I believe that'll be another ten and three dollars!"

"Thanks, Ten... I know I can always rely on you... unlike Twenty," Thirteen pulled fifteen dollars out of his pockets. 

"Come on, Thirteen! Not you too."

"Ten, I can't help but agree with Ten and Three for once," Nine finally set down baby One, once cradled on his chest, now lying flat on her crib. "It's not been a far while, and I wouldn't trust him much."

"Is that your only defense?"

"Well... I guess so?"

"Nine, you just gotta trust me! Twenty is a responsible man. He knows what he's doing."

...

It started with a silly fight. Three different learning people. Just wanted to talk about their ego. But someone was too selfish, self-centered, and self-obsessed. The learning people screamed at each other, other people ran to stop the fight. More people came. Some weren't helping... but couldn't help themselves, but stared. 

The three different learning people had enough. Color-Land came to their decision to remove all their colors on all the other lands, Number-Land chose to get rid of all their math. There was nothing much that Alpha-Land could do, people can talk anyways, but they stole the other lands dictionaries, thesauruses, etc. The three land representatives all agreed upon themselves to cut out communications, until someone "surrenders" and apologize.

Many of the people begged to surrender to their representative:

"We need our colors backs!"

"We need to know why 87 - 42 is 45!"

"I forgot what a cat is!"

Fortunately One's thesaurus was safely hidden her brown Teddy.

"You didn't see that coming, didn't you, Ten?"

A/N: this was just random stuff that just came outta my mind. I haven't touched this story in a while. I might slowly come back to the story, I don't know to be honest ;-; I also left a little hint for the culprit. I think I made it too obvious though, I don't know