1200 to 1300 (Paris Time)
The overwhelming sense of immense space was my first impression, followed closely by the observation that the obsidian flooring I was standing upon absorbed what little light appeared to be shining down on me. There was no horizon, only darkness beyond the ring of illumination I appeared to be in the exact center of. It felt uncomfortably like Hawkmoth's lair, so I slightly crouched with my baton in one hand, expecting the worst, especially since there was no trace of Marinette.
"Princess?" I called out. My voice echoed and reverberated across the emptiness. "Are you here?"
I tried several more times but failed to get any response. I wasn't sure if I could count on her being safe; with no evidence either way, I crouched a bit lower and found myself lowly growling. Slowly, I rotated around, extending my feline senses as much as I could into the dark space. There was no trace of my partner, making my blood pressure inch ever higher.
"Marinette!" I yelled as loud as I could, and was rewarded once again with my voice reverberating endlessly through the space. I was about to yell again when a stone-like grinding noise began. I dropped into my protection stance, twirling the baton, and watched as twelve obsidian pillars rose from the floor in unison around me; they halted about a meter and a half from the floor.
It was an answer, I suppose. Just not quite the one I'd hoped for.
Nine of the pillars exploded with a mini-fireworks show in the space above their flat top. Once the light faded, the Keys we had collected were revealed, slowly turning as if on an unseen mechanism. It wasn't lost on me that three were empty.
I stepped close to the Bastille Key, and saw a tiny plaque was embedded in the face of the pillar, just below the rotating object. My claw traced the description of the date, time, and location we'd collected the object – almost the exact line of data I'd seen on the baton's display.
Am I in the portal, or the special vault storing the Keys? I wondered. They use the same magic, maybe I've crossed over somehow. But why would I be here now? So far, the portal has helpfully placed us close to each Key save for Hawkmoth's last little surprise.
I looked around the pillars, frowning at the first empty one that would have been the Channel award. But then my masked eyebrow shot upward: the little plaque noted exactly where the award had been, even though I didn't currently possess it.
The portal works in conjunction with my Miraculous, right? I thought. And one of them knows the path… wait, Master Fu said if I de-transformed, I'd lose the path. So my ring must actually already know where each of these Keys are. That must mean my ring is generating the portals in the first place – that explains the colors. Am I inside my ring?! Is that even possible?
I looked at my ring hand and had a meta-moment as I saw the green pawprint illuminated on my finger. It was hard to comprehend being in it while wearing it, kind of like contemplating your reflection in an endlessly repeating series of mirrors.
And if it knows, maybe the portal is trying to prevent Hawkmoth from thwarting us again.
Quickly, I spun to the final two empty pillars. The first's plaque said, simply:
Bifocals, B. Franklin. Grand Palais.
"B. Franklin," I murmured to no one in particular. The name felt familiar, though I couldn't immediately see how it connected to Paris or a set of glasses. At least I did know where the Grand Palais was, so that was something. There was no time on the plaque, though, so I wondered if that was the next Key or the last one.
I slid over to the final plaque and bent down to read the inscription. It said:
Pencil, G. E. Tower.
"Who is G. E. Tower?" I said aloud. That was also all I managed to get out before the world around me dissolved back into swirls of green-black energy.
The portal re-opened at a severe angle over the clear rooftop of the Grand Palais. We rolled out together, and in short order were tumbling down the side of the dome. I managed to twist slightly and curl my feline form around Marinette, using my body to protect her from the irregular surface we were bouncing over. Each rotation brought us closer to the edge and a delightful plunge to street level.
My baton was still in a paw; whether from our last stop or my waypoint in the portal, I wasn't entirely certain. I curled myself tighter around Marinette, tried to take a deep breath, and counted down to the edge of the roofline. Our momentum threw us upward at an angle, and I used an extra rotation to orient us in order to extend the baton. It shushed itself toward the street and hit home, allowing me to arc gently out of the sky and into the park just outside the Palais.
Two steps after landing, I spun Marinette out as if we'd been ballroom dancing and shrunk the baton. "That, Princess, is what I call a Grand Entrance."
"Nicely done, Chat," she said. "We've exited the portal in some strange places, but this has to be the oddest." She scanned the skyline. "Do you suppose the portal sustained some sort of permanent damage from whatever Hawkmoth did to try and pen us up?"
My masked eyes crinkled with my smile. "That's the sort of question I would normally ask you, Milady. But yes, I do think we're experiencing aftereffects of whatever he did. We have to assume it might not have put us down where it should have, too."
Marinette laughed. "Like atop the Grand Palais?"
"Exactly." I slid the baton in place at the small of my back. "But it seems to have wanted to give us a head start, too. In that brief moment we didn't exist, I saw the Keys we'd collected, plus the next two we need to get."
"Really?" Marinette's eyes widened.
"I wasn't sure which of the two was next, but since we're here at the Palais, I think we are looking for a pair of bifocals from a B. Franklin." It was the start of the lunch hour, so the manicured spaces around the Palais were full of people enjoying the weather with their meal. I was a little obvious in my feline ears and mask – not to mention skintight costume – so we nonchalantly started walking through the crowd while I scouted for an unobtrusive entrance into the Palais. "Let's get clear of these people and then we'll head for—"
"The Bakery," Marinette said firmly.
I blinked. "That's clear on the other side of the city," I replied. "Why?"
Marinette looked uncomfortable as she considered her answer. "Uh…"
Why would she want to go to the Bakery right now? I thought. It's not like she left something—
But maybe she had, I suddenly realized. "Ah," I said, nodding slowly. "That explains a lot."
"Sorry?" she said, nonplussed.
I leaned down a bit so only she could hear me. "You don't have your kwami, do you?" I asked, seeing the answer immediately in the blush that appeared on her cheeks. "Why didn't you say something sooner?"
Marinette swallowed. "I've only been separated from Tikki a few times, Chat, and each time it's happened, I'm completely terrified. This was multiples worse, given that we were nowhere close to Paris initially." She looked at me. "Initially it was easy to hide the fact since you didn't know I was Ladybug; after the mansion, though, it became a bit tricky. And you are right – it would have been handy to have been transformed." Marinette looked at her feet. "I'm sorry, Chat. I should have said something sooner."
I popped open the phone on my baton: 1213. "Then there is no time to waste reuniting you with your kwami," I said, grabbing her around the waist without waiting for her permission. I continued the conversation as I vaulted from the crowd into the air and ran up the side of the first building I came to. "You should have told me as soon as we realized we were back in Paris, Marinette. Certainly once I'd figured out your identity."
"Yes," she agreed. "Look, Chat, I'm—"
"I'm not angry, Milady," I said as I leapt across an alleyway and ran as fast as I could across another building. "It's been a long day, full of revelations neither of us have fully adjusted to." I smiled a bit as we leapt to the final set of buildings that wrapped around to the Bakery. "I think I can let this slide."
"Chat," she said quietly, "you really are a most amazing man. How did I ever not see it?"
I laughed as I made the final leap and landed on the tiles of her rooftop patio. "My charisma was blinding you to the obvious?" I offered.
"Maybe," she said as she unwound herself from me. "Wait here. I'm going to have to bring Tikki up to speed and she's not likely to be happy with me." Marinette paused. "Or us, for that matter."
I looked at the baton again. 1223. "Hurry, Princess."
She scurried through the skylight and was gone for a few precious minutes. I started pacing the balcony, a space I'd spent quite a bit of time in over the past few years. It occurred to me how much we had shared with each other during those late evenings, and yet neither of us had connected the dots. What I'd not considered up to then was the awkward position I had put Marinette into; I'd see her as Ladybug, and in the early days, would make every attempt to win over her heart. Then I'd pour out my soul to Marinette a few hours later, never realizing they were one and the same.
Of course, as I'd slowly shifted my attentions to Marinette, I'd let go of my pursuit of Ladybug and instead spent increasing amounts of time on this very rooftop with someone who'd become more than just a friend to me. It was weird knowing I'd been wooing her all along. Part of me felt like I should be seriously pissed off with Marinette, but when I looked deeper, I knew I couldn't be. She'd acted as she thought best in order to protect both of us. The pursuit of the Keys had been the proverbial x-factor and had brought it all out into the open, and I was pretty sure we were both comfortable with where things now stood.
More than comfortable.
My feline ears heard Marinette coming through the skylight. I pivoted and instead saw Ladybug standing there, grinning sheepishly. "It's an understatement to say Tikki is unhappy," she said. "So I thought it best to transform and deal with the music later."
I drew her into me and a hug. "I suspect I will be having my own long conversation with Plagg. What does Tikki eat?" I asked. "Plagg is into very stinky, very smelly cheese. Maybe we can ply them with their favorite foods in a thinly veiled ploy to gain their acceptance."
Ladybug laughed, and I mentally noted I had automatically shifted the persona I was working with. "Tikki is all about sweets," she said, "so cheese is definitely out."
I cracked open the baton. 1231. "I'll keep that in mind, Milady." I paused. "Good to have you back."
She touched my arm. "I never left, exactly," she said.
"True. Let's get back to the Palais, shall we? Maybe on the way you can decipher who this Franklin guy is."
"That's easy," she said as I leapt into the air with my helicopter move, and she followed with her yo-yo equivalent. "It's Benjamin Franklin, one of the Americans who worked on the Declaration of Independence and was the first American Ambassador to France."
We dropped onto a rooftop and ran side-by-side. "He's also the inventor, essentially, of the bifocal," she continued.
"Oh," I said as we vaulted over an alleyway together and continued to run across the rooftops. "You really did pay attention in World History, didn't you?"
"Actually, that was something I picked up at the optometrist," Ladybug laughed. "I don't know why a pair of his glasses are at the Palais, though. Are you sure that's what you saw?"
"Yeah," I said as we vaulted off the last rooftop with easy access to the Palais. I pole-vaulted my way across the space and landed on the glass dome, perching carefully to prevent a repeat of our earlier slide. Ladybug dropped next to me. "If I had to guess, I'd assume there's a special exhibit here somewhere."
I tried to peer through the glass roof. Even with my enhanced feline vision, other than seeing a mass of humanity milling about inside, there were few indicators of anything extraordinary going on inside. I turned to say as much and found Ladybug working her bug phone. "Yeah, there's a tiny retrospective of United States Ambassadors in the far wing. According to their website, they have a small token from every ambassador."
Narrowing my masked eyes, I flattened out my ears a bit as I said: "So what you're telling me is we now need to steal another public exhibit? In broad daylight?" I frowned. "This will do wonders for my image."
"You're not alone now," she reminded me. "C'mon, we can drop through the roof access over there."
She danced her way across the glass with a particular grace, second only to my own. I scampered behind her, cat-like, and pulled up when she stopped at a roof access panel. Deftly she pulled it open and without a second thought, tumbled into it. I hated when she did that, and immediately plunged after her.
We dropped side-by-side into a fairly petite exhibition hall ringed with lit glass display cases. From my pounce-crouch, I could tell that the objects on display ranged from the ordinary (there was a mug to my left) to the extraordinary (some sort of hand-carved roll top desk across from me). "Are these in chronological order?" I asked as I skulked close to the desk.
"No," she said, and I could hear the frown in her voice.
"You start there, then," I said, "and I'll start here. Hopefully we'll find it before we meet."
I ignored the small crowd of Parisians we'd split when we'd dropped into the space. They were murmuring to each other as we started to scan the display cases, and I made the mental calculation that some of Paris's Finest would soon be on the scene. "We need to hurry, Milady," I said.
"Nothing here." She moved to the next cabinet.
"Ditto," I said and slid sideways. My feline hearing picked up sirens in the distance.
"Here!" Ladybug suddenly cried. I immediately vaulted over the perplexed crowd and landed in a three-point crouch next to her, baton already in a paw. I followed her gloved finder and saw a small set of moon-shaped glasses sitting next to a placard.
Unfortunately, they were behind an inch of glass. I sighed. With my normal Cataclysm, I would have been able to fry the lock and retrieve the object without much damage to the case. Not today, though. "Stand back," I said, more to the crowd than Ladybug, as I extended the baton into bat mode.
"Wait!" Ladybug suddenly said. "Try a claw instead."
I raised a masked eyebrow. "All right," I said, handing her my baton. Carefully, I used both paws to scribe out a rough square in the glass in front of the pair of glasses, working as quickly as I dared. The sirens were louder – we only had a few minutes before we'd have guests. One pass, then two; on the third, I felt the glass give slightly, enough that I poked a claw into the center and cleanly pulled my square out.
I heard the pounding of boots heading in our direction as I put the square carefully down on the tile. "Cataclysm!" I cried as I turned back to the case, and immediately pushed my paw in and gently touched the wire rims of the antique pair of glasses.
They lit up with the brilliant white light and floated upward slightly before poofing! into my storage area in a burst of green-black fireworks. The portal seemed to know we were in need of a quick exit, however, and opened directly below us much as it had on Marinette's balcony all those hours ago.
As I fell through the floor, the last thing I saw was Officer Roger's perplexed expression as he watched us disappear into the ether.
Author's Note: Apologies! While I was on vacation, I ran into a little hiccup returning home and it has thrown my schedule off quite a bit. This week will be a bit rough as I get back to normal, but hopefully my regular schedule will resume by the weekend. -ep
