"Tik", the nickname used by Marinette, is pronounced with a long 'e' sound, like "teakwood", not like "tic" :)
Tikki sighed again, lying on her stomach and slowly coloring in the lines of the page in front of her. Marinette, sewing on the desk beside her, looked up. At her kwami's fourth sigh in 60 seconds, she was slightly concerned that the small creature was going to hyperventilate.
"Is something wrong?" At this, Tikki flipped onto her back dramatically, letting her paws flop to the desk beside her and sending her purple crayon rolling across the page.
"I'm bored, Marinette. Coloring is fun during school, but here is just seems silly. I don't have to worry about being so quiet here, so being quiet all the time is no fun." She tried to look at Marinette without lifting her head, and had to tip her head backward a fair bit to do it.
"Well…" Marinette leaned back in her chair, trying to think. "What do you have in mind? I know you color a lot when you are in my bag all day, and I can understand how that could get dull after a while. Do you want to read something? Watch something?"
"Like what?" Tikki squeaked, floating over to sit on Marinette's sewing machine. She looked curiously at the fabric that was being worked on, careful to avoid the shiny needle.
"We have Netflix and Hulu if you want a movie or a T.V. show, or YouTube if you want to watch someone do their makeup or something."
"Makeup?"
Marinette smiled at the kwami's interest. As much as she loved Tikki, the flying ball of energy was hard to keep up with some days, especially when there wasn't an akuma to help wear her out. The off-duty superheroine rolled her chair to the right and pulled up the YouTube home screen on her computer. Being alone and mostly silent most of the day meant that after school Tikki was usually ready for interaction, whereas Marinette, having dealt with people all day, was ready for some calm. Showing Tikki how to use the search bar and keyboard (the kwami had to sit on each key to move them, but quickly figured out that she could roll across the keyboard to type faster), Marinette moved back to her work, humming softly as she heard a tutorial on eyeshadow start up quietly beside her. The blue-haired girl quickly tuned out the words coming from the computer, using them as a soft background to help her concentrate on the line of complicated stitching in front of her.
An hour or so later, Marinette unclipped the needle from her sewing matching and carefully pulled out the dress to hold it up in front of her. A birthday gift for Rose (who was turning 16 this week), it had tank-top sleeves, and the light-blue fabric had swirling pink flowers decorating the bottom hem. When worn, it would reach just above Rose's knees and flare out when she spun (which she knew that Rose did quite often and on a daily basis). Satisfied, Marinette hung up the dress in her closet for safe keeping just as she heard a call from downstairs.
"Marinette, dinner!"
"Coming, Papa!" The designer looked back at her desk to find her kwami now engaged in a video about finding the right color of foundation for your skin tone. Shaking her head and laughing silently, Marinette left the small red creature to the video and headed downstairs to the kitchen.
Awhile later, the trapdoor opened and Tikki, startled, dove behind the computer and out of sight.
"Tikki? It's alright, it's just me."
The kwami popped up to sit on top of the monitor. "Did you enjoy your dinner?"
"I did," Marinette replied, flicking on the lamp beside her settee before joining the kwami at the computer. Evening was setting in, and Marinette dimmed the computer's brightness to match the setting sun out the window before moving away to let the kwami back to the desk. The kwami might be old and wise, but the teen was not about to risk her eyesight with the brightness up so high all the time. "I see you found the nail polish videos," she said, reaching up to pull her pajamas out of her loft. "Do you need anything before I go get ready for bed?"
"Nope! Have fun!" Tikki called, waving as Marinette disappeared back downstairs. She settled back onto the keyboard, content to watch the teenaged artist on the screen carefully paint her fingernails with black and red polish, transforming the end of each finger into miniature ladybugs.
The next afternoon, Tikki once again found herself drawn towards Marinette's computer, who happily helped her find what she was looking for. Just as Marinette was finishing her homework for the afternoon, the kwami spoke up.
"Marinette, how do you save videos? I really like this one and want to be able to find it again."
"Well," said Marinette, packing up her books and moving over to the computer. "We can make you an account, if you want, and that way you can save videos, follow people that you like, leave comments, and stuff like that." Tikki clapped her paws and Marinette helped her find the "create new account" link. She hovered the mouse over the email box, thinking.
"Are you okay if we put my email, or do you want one of your own? I don't mind if you use mine, but you'll need to post things anonymously keep yourself secret, and so that people don't wonder why I suddenly watch YouTube so much when I never have before."
"We can use yours," Tikki squeaked, not quite sure what an email even was (she was not, however, about to admit it). Several minutes later, the account was created, and Tikki went to work looking up her favorite channels and figuring out how to subscribe to them. Marinette, thinking ahead, had turned off most of the email notifications to avoid getting a thousand notifications a day from whoever it is the kwami decided to subscribe to.
Over the course of the next week, Tikki had learned to navigate the video site incredibly well, figuring out how like and comment on videos, as well as message her favorite creators. One had even messaged back, thanking her for her suggestion for a video and looking to follow through on it several days later. When the Youtuber responded back to ask if she could give a shout-out to the person that gave her the idea for the video, Tikki turned to Marinette.
"What do I tell her, Marinette? I think she likes me, but I don't want to give her your name in case someone asks you about it later." Marinette sat back in her chair and tapped her pen on her chin. "Hawkmoth doesn't know your name, does he?"
The kwami shook her head. "Only Master Fu, the other kwamis, and our Chosen know our true names. Even though Hawkmoth has Nooroo, he doesn't know about any of the other Miraculous kwamis without being told by Master Fu or a kwami themselves, and kwamis can't give information like that unless Master Fu specifically tells them that they can."
"In that case, I think you can go ahead and use your own name if you want. Thanks to the security software my parents installed, no one can trace the account back to my computer. If one of the other kwamis hears it, they might know, but no one else will." Tikki still looked uncertain.
"Would it make you feel better if we asked Master Fu?" Marinette asked, sensing her partner's uneasiness. Looking relieved, Tikki nodded and flew after Marinette as the designer stood up in search of her shoes.
"I don't see how it would be a problem," Wayzz responded as Tikki buzzed in excitement. "No one else knows you name, and even then, it could be the name of a pet, or even a person, for that matter."
Master Fu nodded in agreement. "As long as you never reveal who or what you are, I see no problem. If you create a channel, will you tell me the name of it so that I can watch it? For suspicious activity, of course?" Laughing at his teasing, the small red kwami nodded and flew out the door with a squeal to find Marinette, who was window shopping at a craft store nearby. As soon as Marinette spotted the small kwami hiding around the corner of the window, she hurried for home.
"So…what did he say?"
"He agreed with you, Marinette, and said it would be fine as long as I never showed myself!"
"In that case," said the young heroine, turning on her computer, "you'd better respond to her right away!"
When the Youtuber's video came out a few days later (featuring ladybug-inspired eye makeup, including small jewels on the wings of the eyeliner), the effect was instantons. Almost a third of the comments in the video's description wanted to know if this 'Tikki' had a channel of her own and where she got the idea for the makeup design. Tikki was thrilled, and it was all she would talk about for almost a week afterward.
The kwami, unknown to her Chosen, decided to take up Master Fu on his suggestion and create her own channel, featuring something that she had come across on one of her searches and fallen in love with. She had come to really like putting on soft music in the background when she did do things like color at home, and had stumbled across the most relaxing video she had ever seen in her life. After doing some research, Tikki learned that these types of videos were huge across the Internet, and that some creators focused on their voice and sound recordings and just used stock images and footage for the actual video. Making videos like that would give her a chance to make videos without actually showing herself, and it wasn't until almost two months later that Marinette realized what was going on. She opened her email one day to find more than a hundred messages from YouTube, all of which had to do with hit counts.
"Tikki, what is this?" The kwami flew across the room to sit on the desk, playing innocent.
"What is what?"
Marinette, still scrolling through emails, pulled up the video platform in a new tab. "How can you have subscribers without a channel? Unless…" The page finally loaded, pulling up a YouTube creator's homepage – a page decorated in red and black. She turned to the kwami with her arms crossed and one eyebrow raised, hiding a smile. The kwami blushed pink on top of scarlet, wringing her paws in front of her as she hovered and explained hersellf.
"People started asking who I was after that Ladybug makeup video and I…I made a channel!" Tikki darted forward toward the computer, jabbering on as she scrolled through her home page for Marinette.
"I only have a few videos so far, of course, and I can only film them when no one else is around, but I have all day at school to plan then out, and when your family goes to sleep I can record.."
"Record what, exactly?" Marinette had to admit that the work the kwami had already done was quiet impressive, and it showed in her hit counts; three videos and already almost 200 subscribers.
"Autonomous sensory meridian response!"
"Autonomous sensory what now?" The designer, for once, had absolutely no clue as to what her kwami was talking about.
"People usually just call it ASMR," Tikki explained, clicking on one of her own videos to reveal a calming video of the ocean with what sounded like crinkling plastic in the background. "It basically means that certain sounds make some people's brains feel really good, and some people get a tingling sensation down their spine that helps them sleep! There are endless triggers, because pretty much everyone likes something different based on what helps them relax."
"I'll…have to take your word on that one, Tik. For now," said Marinette, opening a new window and pulling up her email, "I think it's time you learn what an email is so that you can have your own, because mine is getting full!"
"It's not that full, Marinette," grinned the kwami, laughing as another YouTube email landed in Marinette's open inbox, this one labeled "Month in Review". When the new email was created, she shifted her chair to the side so that the kwami could take her place on the keyboard. "So how have you been recording videos this whole time, anyway? I get hiding it from my parents, but how have I not noticed what you were doing?"
"I record at night," Tikki said, gesturing to the built-in microphone near the computer's camera. "It needs to be really quiet in the background so that the person listening can focus on the actual trigger sounds, so I wait until you are all asleep and work then. The sounds are so soft and I can work in the dark since I'm not actually filming anything, just recording sound, so I don't think you've ever even noticed I'm doing it. Sometimes when I work on it all night, I end up sleeping in your bag the next day because I'm so tired."
Marinette sat back, smiling at the tiny red spot floating in front of the computer screen. She was really and truly impressed not just at the kwami's dedication to the project, but also her knowledge behind everything. She had clearly done some research before starting the channel because, as always, she knew what she was talking about (after all, Tikki never did anything halfway).
"You know, I could've already been helping you record and stuff like that if you had told me." Marinette was pretty sure the kwami was blushing again, this time out of actual embarrassment.
"Well, I didn't want to bother you or anything…"
"Tikki, come on. When have you ever bothered me?" The kwami crossed her arms and raised her eyebrows, doing her best impression of the blue-haired designer. The teen in question threw up her arms dramatically, rolling her eyes and smiling. She turned back toward the computer and wiggled the mouse to wake it back up, scrolling one again through the homepage. "So…what can I do to help?" The bug-like creature squealed and burst forward, talking a thousand miles a minute as though she had been rehearsing and only had a minute to say everything, from thumbnail image designs to captioning the videos with words (as Tikki simply didn't have the time to go through hitting one key at a time).
Needless to say, Marinette's parents were very confused the next day when she took an empty cereal box up to her room and went to bed almost an hour earlier than usual, her room dark not long after dinner. (Thank goodness they didn't notice when she bought a microphone to attach to her computer three weeks later, when Tikki hit 10,000 subscribers and asked for an actual microphone to make her recordings better quality. She also managed to sneak up a set of short-handled makeup brushes, so the kwami would have better luck at brushing the microphone with them and Marinette could have her own brushes back). At this point, the pair figured out how to enable ads on the videos and set the account settings so that the money they made was sent to Master Fu, who was finally able to redo the flooring of his shop; a couple of months later, he put in a skylight.
When Tikki passed 100,000 subscribers four months later, Marinette had to sneak the silver YouTube plaque up the stairs before her parents saw it and asked where it came from.
"Tikki…how many subscribers do you have, exactly?"
When her parents left for a short weekend away with some friends that November (now about eight months since Tikki had started posting a new ASMR video every week), Marinette took the opportunity to throw the kwami a party, going to the nearby party store and coming back with a pair of huge gold balloons – a "1" and an "M". She shook her head and laughed as Tikki raced around them, in love with the reflective color that matched her newest YouTube plaque that was hung proudly inside the closet door (where they could see it but her parents could not). Only Tikki, Marinette thought as they talked to Master Fu later that week so that Tikki could tell him the news, would get a million subscribers on YouTube in less than a year almost totally by herself. Needless to say, Tikki no longer had problems with being bored after school – or, ever. The superheroine just hoped that Tikki didn't realize just how many people a million really was – Marinette herself could barely picture it, and the numbers only kept growing from there.
Hey guys! For those wondering (if you don't know what it is), ASMR is an actual thing, and it is huge on YouTube these days. Everything Tikki says about it is true, including what the letters stand for. Her channel does not actually exist (wouldn't that be cool?), but the concept does. Have you heard of it before? Thanks for reading!