Ten – The gentle father figure of the group. He watches over the family from a firm position of authority, but is often on the patriarchal side and can be condescending. He’s often accused of favoring Five, and his close relationship with One Hundred and his popularity in general leads to some affluenza on his part–Ten is often blind to the problems of other numbers or dismissive of them.
Nine – Jealous and scheming, Nine openly covets Ten’s position. She is energetic and bold, often enlisting Eighteen and Twenty-Seven in her schemes, but often fails to realize how toxic her desire to supplant Ten really is to the others. She is always quick to point (and harp on) out the relatively rare instances in popular culture where she is prominent, and penned a long and fawning letter to J.R.R. Tolkien because of it. She is also keenly aware that she is the only non-prime odd in the first ten, which feeds her sense of inadequacy even more.
Eight – Eight is Ten’s unofficial second-in-command, a position formally accorded to Nine but rarely acted upon because of the latter’s jealousy. This has caused a rift and much animosity between the two, which pains Eight, but he sees his duty to support Ten as paramount. Eight is also a mentor for Four and Two to a much greater extent than Ten, who prefers to remain aloof. He and Five are close, though Five cares more for organization for its own sake than loyalty, and Eight is quietly aggrieved by the seemingly unearned favoritism Ten shows Five.
Seven – Happy-go-lucky and without a care in the world, Seven trusts to luck rather than skill and doesn’t concern herself with personal advancement or worry about setbacks. This easy personability, and the esteem with which she is held by gamblers, causes her more uptight neighbors considerable consternation. Officially the leader of the Prime Club, Seven is content to delegate the real work to Five in favor of a life of leisure and luck. The more fastidious numbers are consistently irritated by this outlook and Seven’s easy relationship with the popular Twenty-One and Forty-Nine.
Six – Six is matronly and motherly, often doing her best to smother the others, especially Three and Two, in adulation. This causes some friction between her and some of her more practical neighbors, who see her as mollycoddling and intrusive, but Six is simply compelled to love and care for the others as best she can. She is deeply enamored of Ten, who remains (willfully or not) oblivious to her affections.
Five – Five is fastidious and detail-oriented, a born technocrat and firm believer in a regimented lifestyle. This attitude is often misunderstood as bossiness by Seven and Nine, but Five simply prefers a businesslike relationship to the world. She is exasperated by disorder and messiness, and is the unofficial leader of the Prime Club because of this. Fifteen and especially Twenty-Five often aid her in attempts to bring order to chaos.
Four – Much as Eight is Ten’s shadow and lieutenant, Four is inseparable from Five in the latter’s quest for order, structure, and organization. Four would deny it, and Five is oblivious to it, but there is a strong romantic undercurrent to this service. Four does his best to communicate Five’s schemes to the others and make her unreasonable demands reasonable, but often fails and is disparaged as a toady or lackey on top of that. Banned from Prime Club meetings, he often resorts to sneaky trick to try and infiltrate their meetings, usually without any success.
Three and Two – Three and Two are romantically linked to an extent that many of their neighbors find unhealthy and showy, constantly mooning over each other with grandiose declarations of devotion and extravagant gifts. Their every move is taken jointly as a statement of high drama, and their constant breakups, reconciliations, and attempts to make the other jealous are a constant source of annoyance. They have taken One under their wing and are often blamed for enabling the latter’s learned helplessness and other problems. Secretly, Three and Two fear that they are not ultimately as compatible or in love as they claim, which is a constant source of annoyance to everyone except One, Six, and Ten.
One – Immature and infantile, One has difficulty breaking out of the comfortable pattern of being the baby and mollycoddled. She’s well-liked by the others, but is often exasperating in her refusal to take any responsibility seriously and the lengths to which the others often have to go in order to make up for her lack of engagement and preference for having others do work. She participates in the Prime Club despite not officially being a member, which the Primes resent, but they find it easier to just let her in than to listen to her constant whining.
Zero – A mysterious figure, Zero comes and goes as he pleases and prefers not to talk or engage with any of the others. His air of detachment conceals a deep need to be accepted and an intense feeling of inadequacy, which he tries to offset by putting on airs. His unnerving ability to sneak around has earned him the enmity of more skittish neighbors, but he has the support of the powerful 100 and the even more mysterious i and e.
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