Kagami stared at Taylor Hebert.

How do we get rid of the Akuma? They could wait until Ladybug was awake, but it was friendly…

"Ah, I see you have the Butterfly Miraculous," Lonng, her kwami said.

"What?" Rena asked.

"The gateway between our universes is closed. You're not maintaining it, and so…"

"I closed the gateway—Tattletale had a plan to open a Gateway to an uninhabited earth, but that involved two other parahumans so we… Made use of my power. There's a permanent gateway to that world, but Paris—your world, is safe." Taylor said. She held out the brooch. "As for this, can it help me?

"Yes!" Another kwami appeared. "I am Nooroo, the Kwami of Transmission. My former holder granted me to you."

"And I can use you?"

"Yes. My previous master did not akumaize you in the normal sense."

"What does that mean?"

"Our power is granted to those with desire, but an Akuma feeds off of that desire, turning it to obsession."

Kagami frowned.

"He's right," Rena said. "When I was an Akuma, nothing else mattered."

"I wanted to come home."

"You did, but my master did not attempt to impose his desire upon you. He left you far more freedom."

"Well, I guess he was honest. So what do I do?"

"Say, Dark Wings Rise, to wield me and Dark Wings Fall to surrender my power."

Taylor paused. "Okay. But how do I use an Akuma to empower people?"

"You will know how," Nooroo said. "There are advanced techniques, but we cannot tell them to you…"

"Security," Taylor murmured. "Makes sense. Fine. Nooroo, Dark Wings Rise!"

The form of the Akuma shifted, changing as colors ran up Taylor's body. Kagami tensed, then blinked.

The form wasn't at all like the few times she'd seen Hawkmoth. The form was armored, flexible scales like those of Ladybug's armor, while the arms were armored with what looked like carapace shells. Her helmet left her mouth and nose exposed, the eyes covered with the same style of armored lenses as Skitter's helmet. Right below the butterfly miraculous, there was an image of a golden beetle

A single gleaming butterfly fluttered around her head.

"That's… Odd."

"Hawkmoth… Or should it be Skitter?"

"Neither," Taylor said. "I can feel… Khepri. Yes. I'm Khepri." She shook her head. "I can feel… My connection with the butterfly… and more. Vastly more…" She shook her head again. "Dark Wings Fall."

Moments later, she was Skitter, with no Akuma form. She reached up and removed her face mask.

Kagami blinked. She'd expected Skitter to be…

Well, inhuman, driven. She didn't expect someone who looked… ordinary. A wide, expressive mouth, curly black hair, large eyes. Taylor reached down and pulled a pair of glasses from a pocket, sticking them on her face and blinking.

Behind her, Kagami heard the sound of people detransforming.

"Well, it's not exactly like we have a civilian identity here," Carapace said. "Nino Lahiffe."

"Alya Césaire."

"Chloé Bourgeois, the best of them all," Chloe said. Kagami noticed a sudden…

No, whatever the expression Taylor had shown had passed too fast for her to understand what it meant.

"Mistress, you are well suited to the Butterfly," Nooroo said. "I sensed… the ability to see from many different places, and something like I've never felt before, but…" The kwami put its hands together, a pleading tone entering it's words. "But could I… Would you allow me to speak with my fellow kwami?"

"Yes," Taylor said. "If I need you, I can call you, but go talk to your friends." Nooroo practically squealed and went into a huddle with the other Kwami, save for Plagg and Tikki, who were still with their chosen.

"Ladybug is asleep and Chat Noir is…"

"He's never killed someone before," Taylor said. "It can be hard. But sometimes you have to. I…" Once again, a fleeting expression. "I don't know how I feel about it. But I need to tell you how things operate in the Bay."

"Could I have saved her?" Adrien asked. "If I was faster?" Plagg was simply hovering in front of him, not begging for cheese. Not joking.

The kwami said nothing for a moment. "No." The embodiment of destruction paused. "I can sense when something's Ending is upon it. And it was upon her. Maybe she'd have lived, a few days, a week, longer, but she would have been in pain and the ending was the same. The… thing, whatever it was that was in her, had been eating away at her for a very long time."

"What was it?"

"I… I don't know, kid." Plagg looked up at him. "I mean, I might have have known, but the me that became part of the miraculous isn't the me that covers the universes."

Adrien blinked, shook his head. "I guess, everything goes away…" He said, shook his head. "But it was wrong."

"Adrien," Plagg said. "You have one of the hardest kwami to bear. Everything ends. Tikki will end, and after that, after there's nothing else, I will end. We'll be reborn, but not as we are now. I had hoped that there would have been more time before you had to discover this, but well. Noelle ended. You spared her worse pain, you spared others pain. And I know it hurts, because someone who doesn't care is the last person who should wield me. You care, you hurt, but you're still one of the best to ever bear my ring." The kwami nuzzled at Adrien's cheek. "Now, let's go talk to the new butterfly."

"I should—"

"Why? Everyone else let their kwamis loose, and I wanna talk to Nooroo. Hey, Nooroo!" Plagg shouted as he vanished through the door.

Adrien shook his head, took a deep breath, wiped the moisture from his eyes, and followed Plagg.

The tea cup almost fell over when she reached out to grab it. The sound of the ceramic skidding along the surface of the table and a ticking timer were the only sounds in the cafeteria.

Path to—Contessa smothered the thought. This was her time. The hardest time of the day.

When they'd first started, everything was easy. Path to founding the PRT. Path to silencing opposition. Nearly everything started with the words "path."

Then things got harder. Her paths were, with the exception of her blindspots, invincible, but there was only so much time. A path with ten thousand steps could be done, at the cost of every other path.

When she'd complained. Alexandria had sarcastically congratulated her on knowing how people who didn't have her power felt.

Contessa had, in a sudden off the cuff decision, decided to spend a day without her path, without relying on it.

It had lasted twenty minutes. Twenty minutes of horror, feeling like she was falling. She couldn't even read the street signs.

After all, you didn't need to read English when you had 'path to being understood'. People looked at her strangely, the multitude of steps she took to create her presence lost.

She doored back to Cauldron at the end of twenty minutes, then called a meeting. They'd thought she was running her path, but her paths had been running her. But they needed the paths. And so, the long, difficult process had begun, untangling her paths, figuring out how they worked, finding out when two, perfectly obvious paths combined to make things work much harder—and incidentally required even more pathing to fix that.

Contessa's power wasn't hostile. It wasn't trying to sabotage them. It was simply inhuman.

And in the aftermath of that, the nice, neat train line that Cauldron had thought they were on started looking much more like a train loaded with dynamite careening down rickety tracks.

And now, in the aftermath of the Battle of Paris, the train was bouncing more than ever, sticks of dynamite flying from every window.

A bell dinged.

Contessa reached out, took the teacup, the path filling her as she allowed it to work, or rather, simply stopped fighting it. Almost as if she had been waiting for the timer, Doctor Mother entered the cafeteria.

"Are you certain?" Doctor Mother asked.

Contessa nodded. "Yes." In front of her was a page. Path to best result in Brockton Bay. "The presence of the off worlders is still interfering with direct pathing. Anything we could do has a chance to go disastrously wrong. We should assist them, as much as we can, in coming to an agreement with the PRT and other groups, but other than that… hands off. Also, I'm running a path to securing… Assistance with the woman." Because a simple cure to her injuries is covered by a blindspot.

Doctor Mother looked annoyed. "And the portals?"

"The method Skitter used was similar to what Tattletale had deduced would work with Labyrinth and Scrub. We've been arranging for anonymous buyers to contract with Faultline's Crew. We could do it directly but…"

"But the Case 53 issue."

"Yes. But our buyers will put the portals to uninhabited worlds in regions where we can quickly move a large number of people."

"The revelations regarding Alexandria were unfortunate," Doctor Mother said. "But Accord is working on plans for high-speed mass evacuations." She looked up at the date on the wall. "It sounds odd, but I hope Dinah's predictions are right, because, well."

Because we'll be broke, all of our subverted politicians will be outed and every last bit of our influence will be spent. If it was the end of the world, after all, there was no sense in holding back for later. Contessa paused. Path to not panicking, one step. She took a sip of tea. Path to making a joke. "Well, if Scion changes his mind, in six months we'll have a wide selection of wilderness worlds to hide out on."