AN: All the characters in here are from "The Hound and the Maiden." Bri (short for Bridgette) is the eponymous (Iron) Maiden from that story, while the Hound is Felix. Anne is Bri's flatmate at King's College.

To yellow 14: It's amazing how much less tense Kagami gets when her mother isn't around! And while she doesn't neglect any of her clients (some, like Tom and Sabine, don't expect or require a ton in terms of "client management"), she is a little more motivated when it comes to Kitty Section! I love how simple and uncomplicated Ivan and Mylène's relationship is.

To Butterfly: I think I understand what you mean: the kind of event you would attend if you were in the Miraculous universe.

It was Friday afternoon, and the day's classes were finished. Bri had spent all day working indoors, and she absolutely needed this break, walking alongside the Thames in the warm sunshine. Bri took a deep breath of the riverside air, a welcome change from the stuffy library where she had spent half the morning researching a paper. And for as many improvements as she had made to her Iron Maiden suit, she still hadn't found a good filtration system to prevent it from smelling like a strange mix of the industrial lubricant she used on the joints and the jetpack's exhaust. "It's so nice down here by the river," she commented, smiling.

Her companion let out a snort. "You must be mad if you think this is nice!" Anne laughed. "Paris must be a complete haymes in that case…"

Bri gave her a playful glare. "Paris isn't that bad; the Seine is pretty nice most of the time. But after spending so much time inside the last couple months, I almost forgot what fresh air smells like."

"Spending time 'inside', you say?" asked Anne in a singsong voice. "Your 'special project'?" She elbowed Bri in the ribs. "You still haven't introduced me to this fella of yours yet, girl!"

Bri rolled her eyes affectionately. "And you're not going to meet him – if he even exists," she added quickly, when Anne's eyes lit up in excitement.

"If you say so…" Anne replied dubiously. "You sure are spending a lot of time with him – whoever he is."

Bri nodded ruefully. With the Hound off at school now – Eton if she read him right – she was going out to patrol around London almost every night. A couple weekends ago, not long after the Hound had left for school, Pegasus had brought her to Heroes of Paris' Headquarters via portal for a few hours. He had presented her with an alien energy device to test out for her own projects and added her into the Heroes of Paris' contact system. She in turn had given him a copy of her jetpack's schematic since the Heroes were working on their own version. Before she'd left, he had mentioned the Heroes' portal system and that he was working on a compact version of the portal rings. Unfortunately, he hadn't finished it just yet. For now, the Hound could only be in London on weekends, leaving her to take up the slack in looking for the Stripper Ripper and making sure her father really had returned to Paris. So, ironically, she actually wasn't spending a lot of time with her "fella"!

Anne eyed her carefully and sighed. "Well, whoever he is, I hope he's worth it." She picked up a tree branch and lobbed it out into the river. "One of these weekends I'll have to bring you home. Then you'll see what real green is! None of this London smog."

Bri smiled easily. "A weekend away would be nice… but probably not too soon. Midterms?" she explained, seeing the confused look in her flatmate's face.

Anne nodded in realization and opened her mouth to add something else when they heard a colossal screech. Bri winced and brought her hands up to cover her ears, spinning around to find the source of the noise. Suddenly there was a crash a couple blocks away, coming from around the corner. Bri took off at a dead sprint in that direction.

"Wait… Bri!" Anne's footsteps pounded on the sidewalk behind Bri as she glanced in both directions before darting out across the street. Tires screeched as the car coming from the right braked. Bri flicked her wrist, and the control for her right bracelet sprang out and into her hand. Before she could do anything, the car pulled to an abrupt stop, less than a meter away. Bri didn't slow down, running across with Anne following hard on her heels.

They rounded the corner where the car crash – it had to have been a car crash – had happened, to see a minivan had slammed into a streetlamp. The pole had sheared off and fallen over on top of the vehicle, whose front had compacted in the impact. The electrical wires had snapped, and electricity arced across the wires. Inside, Bri could see a woman in the driver's seat, three children in the back. The children all wore identical expressions of terror, but their seatbelts had kept them safe. The mother, however, was coughing weakly, one of her arms at an odd angle. There was a small pool of gasoline forming under the van.

"Call 999!" Bri shouted at Anne, who stared wide-eyed. She shook her head abruptly and pulled out her cell phone. Bri ran over to the car and pounded frantically on the driver's door. "Hey! Ma'am! Can you open the door? You need to get out!"

The woman, however, continued staring at her broken arm, blinking in confusion. Turning to the back seat, Bri looked for whichever child was the oldest, a girl who looked to be about six. "Sweetheart," she called urgently, "are you okay in there?"

"M–mommy's hurt!" The girl sniffed and rubbed her eye.

Bri put on her most soothing voice. "I know, sweetie, and I need to help her. Can you help me?"

"I–I…"

Bri grimaced and closed her eyes in frustration. Opening them she smiled calmly. "Okay, I need you to be a big girl; can you do that? I need you to cover your brothers' eyes and close your eyes, okay? This is going to get really bright…"

The little girl nodded, and Bri pulled a pair of glasses from her pocket – she'd accidentally taken them from the Engineering building after class. Settling them on her nose she quickly adjusted a couple settings on her right bracelet and pulled a leather sheath out of the top. The leather covered her clenched fist, and she squeezed, deploying the small energy pistol barrel built into the side of the bracelet. Lowering the power level to the lowest setting, she placed the barrel as close to the door hinge as she could and turned it on. Sweat sprang to her brow the moment the heat from the energy beam reflected off the door and hit her face. She wiped her forehead with her shoulder as the top hinge disconnected and she moved on to the bottom one. Less than thirty seconds later she felt the hinge snap and smacked the door. It fell out with a thud. The children's seatbelts stuck tight, and Bri groaned. Someone punched her shoulder, and she looked to find Anne holding up a small pocketknife. Bri nodded and moved to work on the driver's door while Anne cut through the seatbelts and pulled the kids out. Gasoline was continuing to pool around Bri's feet. But a fire truck pulled up just as she helped the mother out of the van, having already retracted the energy barrel and sheath back into her bracelet. She let out a sigh of relief as the fire-fighters doused the gasoline with fire suppressant and disconnected the sparking wires.

A paramedic came over to check out the driver, who seemed dazed. He hummed. "Lacerations, compound fracture, possible concussion… Still, it could have been so much worse. Thank you both," he told Bri and Anne.

Bri nodded and stood up. A fire-fighter came over with a confused look in his eyes. "How did you get them out of the vehicle so quickly?"

Bri tried not to let her nervousness show and shrugged noncommittally. "We just… happened to be in the right place at the right time. Sometimes a problem just has an engineering solution."

Anne put a hand on Bri's shoulder. "My friend's an Engineering major at King's," she supplied quickly. "The girl's got a knack for this kind of thing."

"Can I take your names for follow-up?"

Bri frowned. "I'd… prefer to stay anonymous. Just a good Samaritan in the right place at the right time."

When the fire-fighter acquiesced with a shrug, Anne carefully guided them away from the crash scene, down to the river, and a couple blocks back toward the college before directing Bri to sit on a bench. She sat down next to her and folded her arms, brows furrowed. "Okay, girl, I didn't say anything back there, but… what was that?"

Bri looked down at her bracelet and shrugged. "It's just a new feature I'm trying out on my bracelet."

Anne arched an eyebrow dubiously. "A wrist-mounted energy weapon," she deadpanned.

"Some days you just need a handheld plasma torch!" joked Bri, laughing evasively. "Today just happened to be one of those days."

"Uh huh." Anne shook her head. "Just promise me I won't come home to find my bed on fire?"

Bri tapped her chin thoughtfully. "That depends."

"On?"

She smirked. "On whether you steal my clothes!"

With a laugh, they both stood up and turned back toward the college. "Well, I think that's enough fun for one day," Anne observed.

That evening, Bri was in her workshop, tweaking the circuitry in her bracelet where a connection had melted that afternoon, when her phone rang. She hit the speakerphone on her other bracelet without looking away from her work. "What's up, Dog?"

The Hound chuckled on the other end of the line. "I just thought I would give my Fer Maiden a ring and see how you are doing," he replied. "After all, I heard about what you did for that family this afternoon."

Bri frowned in confusion. "Who told you that was me?"

He laughed. "You did, just now, mon cher."

She rolled her eyes. "You Mangy Mutt. You just assumed."

"And clearly I assumed correctly. So…?"

She sighed in resignation. "I'm good. I didn't give them my name. But my flatmate was there and I think she suspects something."

"Do you trust her?"

"I mean, I've only known her a couple months, but yes."

He hummed. "My housemates think I must be hiding a hamster in my room, what with all the food that keeps disappearing."

She giggled and raised an eyebrow. "There are worse things you could be hiding in your room, I suppose. Are you in London yet?"

"En route. I will take tonight and tomorrow, of course, but I'll be returning to school Sunday afternoon."

"That's fine."

"Oh! Before I forget, Pegasus asked you to give him a call, if that really was you. The Ladyblog picked up the rescue – no pictures of you but a description of what you did," he assured her. "If you're interested, the Heroes will help you manufacture and sell a commercial version of the 'Beam of Life.'"

She stopped what she was doing and stared at the bracelet dubiously. "They do realize this is a wrist-mounted, military-grade energy weapon, right? And they want to sell it? To people? Have they lost their minds?"

"I assume if you sell it, it won't be a military-grade energy weapon anymore. And that you and Pegasus can figure out how to modify it so it can't be reverse-engineered into a weapon," the Hound pointed out. "And I think they're most interested in providing it to fire and emergency, not your average Joe-on-the-street."

"What's the catch?"

"You mean other than the fact that this is guaranteed to make you stupid-rich? Rich enough to make your next suit out of pure gold?" he asked wryly. "None that they told me: they'll take care of manufacturing and distributing, keep your identity secret as long as you wish, give you half the profits, and use part of the other half to fund a portal system so you're not out on your own during the week."

Bri hummed in contemplation. When her father had asked the same question about the original bracelet design, she had blown him off – and for good reason, she still thought. But now? With the Heroes of Paris? She shrugged. "I'll talk to Pegasus about it. But I make no promises."

"That's all they ask."

"Oh?" She smirked. "And what about you, Pup?"

He chuckled. "I mean, if you're half as smart as you pretend to be, you know it would be stupid not to consider it – this kind of opportunity doesn't come around all that often." He was quiet for a moment. "But it's entirely up to you. I understand, what with… yeah. I understand your reluctance. But it can save lives – and make you rich in the process. But it's your device, so it's not my call."

"Thanks." Bri resealed her bracelet's shell and snapped it back on her wrist before running the built-in diagnostic and testing its functions. Looking at the time, it was getting late; the sun would be down sooner than she would like to be out walking alone. "Well, have a good patrol, Hound."

"Enjoy your weekend off, mon Fer," he replied. "I'd say you more than earned it!"