Ephemeral 32 - *Alix at her Apartment

"Haha, suck it, loosers, we win again!" Alix said into her mic. She tried to keep her voice down. It was well past midnight, and while her father probably wouldn't mind that she was up late playing video games with her friends on a Friday night, she knew her brother would use her as an excuse for why he couldn't sleep and how she was ruining his thesis work by having fun.

"No fair," Max complained. "You have Marko on your team, he's programmed to be the best at this game! His processor can predict up to four-thousand-ninety-six possible futures."

"Yeah!" Kim chimed in, "I wanna be on Marko's team."

"If you wanted Marko to be on your team, boys, you should have tried not losing the coin toss," Alix mocked.

"We can hardly control a random variable with a bernoulli distribution across-"

Max's mic cut off the last bit of his nerdy explanation.

Alix tried to activate her mic to mock him for his technical difficulties, but she realized that she had been the one who was disconnected from the chat.

"Stupid internet router," she grumbled as she got up to reset it. She went out into the hallway, when she heard a commotion coming from outside the salon window. Alix moved over to the window and looked down, only to see a complete circus happening on her block. The traffic lights were rapidly changing, cars were stalled in the street and several had gotten stuck on the sidewalks as they tried to move around the stationary vehicles. People were screaming in the distance, but she couldn't see where.

Alix's brain kicked into gear. Was this an akuma attack? Maybe this could be the one. She thought hopefully. No, that was silly. She always got her hopes up during attacks, that this would be the one that Ladybug would come and return her miraculous to her, and she would become the awesome bad-ass superhero Bunnix she had met at the Louvre, when her future self had visited her.

"Probably just some random jerk, upset his life isn't perfect," she complained aloud, turning away from the window and bending down behind the cabinet to get at the wires of the Internet router. Just then, a large figure crashed through her window.

Alix shielded her eyes from the breaking glass, and luckily the cabinet had blocked most of the shrapnel. She peered over the top of the furniture piece, and instantly identified the intruder. It was The Pharaoh, her akumatized brother.

Alix grabbed the closest thing that looked like a weapon and jumped up from behind the cabinet, wielding a decorative bone knife of her father's that was not particularly sharp but that she hoped looked intimidating.

"Jalil you whiny baby!" She shouted at him. "You literally have one bad meeting with your thesis advisor and you go off to cry and get akumatized again?"

"I AM NOT JALIL. I AM THE PHARAOH," the large villain lumbered.

"Yeah, and maybe if you laid off the pharaoh-rochers, you wouldn't be so big fat and slow," Alix mocked him, dodging his fists as she vaulted over the couch and slipped back into the hallway, pulling a china cabinet filled with clay figurines and dishes down behind her and blocking the entrance. She winced as she heard the pieces shatter, hoping the miraculous ladybugs would fix that so she didn't have to hear it from her dad.

Her dad- she needed to find him so they could get out of the apartment before Jalil turned them into mummies…

She ran down the hallway to his room. Surely the noise had woken him up? She burst through the door, only to see an empty bed. Her heart stopped as she was grabbed from behind, a hand covering her mouth and muffling her scream. Alix was turned around and saw… Jalil?

He took his hand off her mouth and raised a single finger to his own, signaling for her to be quiet. But how was he here if he was in the salon breaking through windows? She saw behind Jalil was her father, looking utterly frightened. Alix rolled her eyes. She may not be a superhero yet, but she would still have to save the day for her family. The men in her family were useless when it came to anything involving action.

"Come on," she whispered. "We're going out the fire escape." They could try and figure out what was going on with the Pharaoh later, when they were safe.

She led her dad and brother down the set of wobbly ladders onto the street, which was still in chaos. There were others climbing out their windows and running into the street, only to find no safety there and no sign of Ladybug and Chat Noir.

Where are you, Ladybug? Alix thought desperately. And why can't I help?

She looked around for a place she could stash her family while she went to try and get help. From behind her, she heard the unmistakable sound of rollerblades coming down fast on smoothed cobblestone. She whipped around to see… herself? Timebreaker was tearing down the street, freezing bystanders in place as she stole their energy. But how was that possible? She was Timebreaker, that was her own akumatized form. But she wasn't akumatized? Was this some kind of imposter akuma?

"Get down!" she shouted as she pushed her dad and brother to the ground. Timebreaker saw her and clearly did a double-take. She was confused as well. The villain sped up, skating towards Alix, but Alix was ready for her. She counted, waiting for the exact right moment, and then kicked a small pebble in her doppelganger's path. Timebreaker's wheels caught on the unexpected obstruction and she tumbled to the ground.

Alix wasted no time. She reached for the infected pocket watch on Timebreaker's side and crushed it beneath her foot, releasing a large purple butterfly. But without Ladybug, how would she deal with that? She looked down at where Timebreaker had been laying on the ground, but when the akuma's magic had cleared, she realized she was staring at… herself?

"Hey, what's going on here!" the second Alix yelled from the ground. "How come you've got my face!"

Alix didn't have time to answer, because right before her eyes, the second Alix, the akuma, and the broken pocket watch all flickered out of existence.

"What the heck?" she voiced her confusion aloud, turning to her dad. "Did you just see that?"

"It looks like we might be facing some sort of time apparitions," her father said as he brushed himself off from Alix's push to the ground.

"Did you say time apparitions?" Alix asked earnestly. "What makes you say that?"

"Well," her father continued, adjusting his glasses like he was giving a lecture at the university. "I'm observing our surroundings, and I've not only seen several repeat victims of Papillon, but also warriors and artifacts from across at least 5000 years. There was a roman citizen not 10 meters behind you just now. Poor man looked around confused for a moment, only to flicker back out of existence.

Alix was thinking fast. If this was some kind of time catastrophe, maybe it really was her time to shine. Maybe this would be the day Ladybug finally brought her-

Alix's hopes were dashed by the sudden appearance of a swarm of magical ladybugs, which swept through the street, disappearing the anachronisms and cleaning up the damage they'd done. Ladybug had saved the day, it seemed.

Alix sighed. Maybe next time.