Fifty-Seven: Life Imitating Art
Author's Note: Team Miraculous plus one take on an what for all appearances seems like a bona fide akuma, one intent upon turning everything – and everyone – into an animated item that it can control.
You'd think that staying ahead of a small-sized office building as it strode purposefully down the streets of Santa Monica atop chicken legs would be a fairly easy task, but as it turns out, not so much. For each and every step it took transformed the very pavement it was walking upon into an animated version of the golden brick road; in fact, it seemed almost as if it were trailing a wave of that purple akuma-ish transformation energy, coating everything in its wake and shifting the landscape into a wildly outlandish color palette generally reserved for the movies. Transformed palm trees swayed and sang unintelligible gibberish; pedestrians became spectacularly diverse animated versions of themselves. Whole buildings were moving up and down in time with a soundtrack we couldn't yet hear. Even the poor pigeons who had been minding their own business eating scraps from empty park benches were getting caught up and transformed into clownish creatures, making me very thankful Monsieur Ramier was nowhere close at hand.
One akuma was bad enough.
If it's even an akuma, I thought as I hurled myself forward, trying to keep a few meters ahead of the building. It has all of the hallmarks of one, but I've never seen this sort of monster mash of an akuma and a sentimonster.
Flipping around a light post, I landed atop the bulb and tried to catch my breath. The effort involved had my chest heaving, and I as looked across to street, I could see Ladybug was similarly winded from her perch in a tall pine tree of some sort. But there was no time for a break, for the building was upon us once more. Leaping away, I zig-zagged and ping-ponged between trees, buildings and even a few delivery vans; Spider-Man was keeping pace with me in what appeared to be a nearly effortless glide through the skies on his webbing. Being just a tad bit competitive, I flung my feline body forward with a massive pogo-stick vault from my extended baton, and managed to sail past a very surprised spider; hitting the side of a building, I ran along the brick perpendicular to the ground, knowing it was a trick he could also do.
The extra burst of machismo put some significant distance between us and the akuma, something I blithely noted as I landed atop a stoplight twenty meters further down the street and perched. Chest heaving, I turned my masked visage toward our pursuer and was annoyed to see it had already halved the space and, in fact, seemed to have picked up the pace.
"I feel a bit like I am the mouse in this game," I muttered as I narrowed my eyes at the building.
Spider-Man appeared from nowhere and gracefully alighted on the cable holding up the stoplight that was now swaying beneath me. I tried to hide the fact that I was having trouble perching. "What game?" the bug asked me.
"Seriously?" I rolled my eyes. "Cat and mouse? It's not as funny when I have to explain the jokes…"
"Sorry," Spidey said with a chuckle. "You really get into this role-playing thing, don't you?"
Smiling, I turned back to the akuma-thing. "Who says I'm playing?" I asked before narrowing my masked eyes in growing frustration. The building-atop-chicken-legs had halved the distance again in those few short moments, giving us less time than I realized to come up with a plan.
"Uh oh," Spidey said as he somehow managed to work his way down the thin ribbon of cable toward me. The stoplight swayed dangerously beneath me again, though, and my feline hearing heard the groan as the mounting points strained under the added weight of two – albeit svelte – superheroes. "Is it me, or did that thing find another gear?"
"It's not you," Ladybug said over the earwig. "What do we assume it's going after?"
"So far, nothing specific," Spider-Man replied.
"Near as I can tell, it's simply following this street," I added as I popped open my baton to Map mode. "Though it's gonna need to make a choice at this intersection – it can only go north or south. South looks like it ends at a massive parking lot for the beach; north connects to a freeway and then seems to funnel into downtown Los Angeles."
"I'm from New York," Spidey said with a smile in his voice, "but I do know that if it goes north, it'll eventually end up in Hollywood and several of the largest movie studios in the world."
I frowned as my feline ears twitched at the growing cacophony heralding the approach of the sizzling transformation energy. "But that building housed a studio, essentially. Why would it want to go to Hollywood?"
"Dubois Brothers," Rena said suddenly. "Of course!"
"Of course what, exactly?" I asked.
"You don't read the trades, do you Chat?" Rena chuckled.
Only the modeling ones, I thought. "Just the Feline Times, fox. What did I miss?"
"It hit the internet last week. Dubois Brothers is one of the two oldest movie studios in Hollywood; they got their start in animated shorts back in the early twenties. They've not done much other than remakes of classic movies over the past decade, but announced last October they were going to produce a new superhero movie. It was their attempt to cash in on the sudden popularity of comic books."
"I'm still missing—"
"The two main characters are a cat-themed and bug-themed superhero duo. Gender reversed, of course."
I blinked. "Can they do that?"
"No, but the lawsuit is still pending."
The building was uncomfortably close now. "North then," I surmised, "to wreak vengeance on their competitor." I looked to Spidey. "We've got to slow it down. What did your analysis come up with?"
Spider-Man cocked his head and listened to a voice that was nearly too soft for my feline hearing to pick up. "Definitely a form of quantic energy," he said after a moment. "Similar wavelength to what we picked up when the four of you arrived, although many multitudes of order higher."
"The geography of this intersection might help us," I said thoughtfully. "Especially how narrow the streets are and the proximity of the buildings." I turned to Spidey. "Can you stop it with your webbing? Or at least slow it down?"
"Maybe," Spidey said as he looked over my shoulder. "I could run something back and forth across the street between the buildings. I've done something similar a few times, but I'll need a few minutes to spin up something," he added as he checked something on each wrist before putting a gloved hand to his waist and groaning. "Damn. I only have enough fluid to do it once, so if we can't stop it..."
"That should be enough for us to do our thing," I said with more confidence than I actually felt. "LB—"
"We'll back you up," she said quickly. "I'm almost ready to call for my Lucky Charm. I have a sense that we are looking at some sort of modified amok."
"With an akuma at the helm?" I asked.
"If I had to guess, it would be the producer that felt slighted by this other studio. What do you think?"
"Other than my concern that an akuma/sentimonster just happens to appear in Southern California while we're here…?"
"Exactly," she agreed. I heard the wind through the open microphone as she moved positions. "It's too much of a coincidence. I can't be sure without asking our mutual friend, but I don't believe Hawkmoth can control anything from this distance."
My masked feline eyes flicked up to the approaching building monstrosity. "All evidence to the contrary."
"There's a reason it's called 'magic,'" she laughed. "I'm in position."
I nodded at Spider-Man and the two of us leapt away from each other. I landed in a crouch just a handful of meters in front of the building, which actually stopped and leaned down at me.
"Hey," I said companionably as I heard Spidey start to shoot out multiple lines of webbing at the north end of the intersection. "You seem a bit lost…" I started and then ducked as Carapace's green shield sailed over my feline ears and hit one of the chicken legs.
I rolled sideways and landed next to Cap who caught the shield as it ricocheted back into his hands; in a blur, he heaved it again on a different line and then dove to catch it on its new return arc. I didn't wait to see if it had an effect before snapping my baton into threes and hurling one piece after another at the same spot.
Diving forward, I came up from a tumble paws outstretched to catch the returning baton. I, too, repeated the process, resulting in Carapace and I hopscotching around the intersection as if we were playing a mad version of dodgeball. The building creature had come to a stop just at the edge of the intersection; based on how the chicken legs were impatiently stomping up and down, it was clear the barrage was at the very least uncomfortable.
Cap regrouped with me in the middle of the intersection, and I glanced backwards to see that Spider-Man had managed to web over the north exit from the intersection and was nearly done with the south. "What if it backs up?" Carapace asked me.
I turned toward his worried expression. "It's already been there," I said. "I'm counting on it wanting to push forward, not backward."
"I hope you're right," he said as he loosed his shield once more.
To our surprise, the building picked up a leg and smashed a claw foot down atop the shield grinding it into the animated pavement. In mere seconds, it was enveloped in that purple wave and became a colorful manhole cover. "Damn," I breathed as the building took a triumphant step into the intersection.
Cap and I backflipped several times to land on the sidewalk behind us. I didn't need to turn around to know there was no way but up for us. Extending the baton, I started to reach for Carapace so we could head for the relative safety of the roof when Ladybug dropped down in front of us, carrying some sort of spray nozzle attached to a polka-dotted vat of liquid she'd slung over her back. My feline nose wrinkled at the acrid smell coming from the vat. "What on Earth-"
"Paint thinner," she said cheerfully. "Stand back, boys," she warned as she trained the nozzle toward the building and pulled the activation trigger on the device.
