"Yet as her blue belled eyes caught sight of all her designs sprawled out, her anger spiked into a blind fury." –thatwritersdream, "Bug Bites"

"The nerve of her!" Marinette fumed, her eyestalks quivering with rage. "Breaking into my private den, tearing up my sketches and strewing them all over the riverbed… all because she's jealous of me getting to design the banners for the Mazon Creek Gala? How can anyone be that petty?"

Since Luka, as usual when Marinette was around, was too busy gazing into her iridescent blue eyes to respond, it was left to his sister to say mildly, "Well, it is Lila, you know. Even for a Bandringa, she can be a little on the vindictive side. But why are you sitting here talking to us about it, Marinette? Shouldn't you be busy reconstructing the designs she spoiled? The Gala's only a week away, you know; you don't have that much time."

Marinette took a deep breath. "Yeah, you're right, Juleka," she said. "I just needed someone to vent to for a bit, I guess. Thanks for listening."

She turned and swam away through the Carboniferous marsh, and Luka heaved a wistful sigh. "She's beautiful when she's angry, isn't she?" he said. "The way those little red bells of hers jingle on her eyestalks…"

Juleka rolled her eyes, and slapped her brother with her tail. "Luka," she said, "for the hundredth time, there's no sense in an Amphibamus like you falling for a Tullimonstrum like Marinette. She's probably not even in the same phylum as you are; it's just wrong."

"Oh, I know, I know," said Luka. "But an amphibian can dream, can't he?"

"Oh, sure," said Juleka. "Dream all you like – but, even if you dream for 300 million years, you still won't be the one for her."

"'Fine, some things call for despite, and funny measures[,]' Plagg said." –Lonewolf2007, "Truth or Dare"

"And this new villain is one of those things, is she?" said Adrien.

"Absolutely," said Plagg. "Listen, kid, here's how you and Ladybug play it. Stand at opposite ends of a crosswalk, or something else that has a legally defined length – something that Yardstickler should be able to bring under her control without even thinking, except that you demand that she calculate the distance between the two of you, not in meters, but in rods. The way her power seems to work, she won't be able to refuse – and then, while she's working that out, you rush to the nearest fire hydrant and demand that distance in cubits, or versts, or ri, or whatever other weird measure of distance comes into your head. And, all the while, you're just sneering at her like one of your Notre-Dame gargoyles, right? The despite's just dripping from your faces, like you've never had more contempt for anybody than you do for her. It'll make her so mad she won't be able to see straight, and you'll be able to snatch that ruler out of her hand and get at the akuma before she even knows what hit her."

Adrien considered. "Yeah, that could work," he said. "Thanks, Plagg."

"Oh, don't thank me," said his kwami. "I'm just here to help uphold the right; to all the tributes and plaudits of men, I am sublimely indifferent. –Unless, of course, they involve stopping by the nearest cheese shop to refresh the Camembert supply…"

"Maybe later," said Adrien, and raised his ring. "Right now: claws out!"

"She hadn't walked into something. It was someone. Someone that she was currently laying on." –ProudGeek4Ever, "A Robin and His Lady"*

Marinette Agreste took a deep breath, and felt her face and arms to make sure there was no trace of chitin left on her skin. "Thank you, Master Fu," she said earnestly. "I can't tell you what a pleasure it is to have my own body back again."

Master Fu frowned, and stared down at her waist. "Your own body, yes," he said. "But missing, it would seem, one of that body's rightful inhabitants."

Marinette blinked, and looked down herself at the perfectly smooth midriff where her sixth-month baby bump ought to have been. Her face paled, and she clapped a hand to her mouth. "Oh, no," she murmured. "I'd forgotten about that."

"About what?" said Wayzz.

"About the unconscious wino on the Rue Plumaire whose shirt I crawled up onto a few hours ago," said Marinette. "I didn't even realize it was a person at first; all I knew was that the hard pavement had changed into some kind of soft, warm organic matter. And then my body decided it was already past time – which, by ladybug standards, I guess it was – so I started… well… laying on him."

Master Fu's eyes widened. "Laying?" he repeated. "You mean you left your child as an egg on this man?"

"More like a hundred eggs, actually," said Marinette in a tiny voice. "Ladybugs don't usually lay just one, do they?"

A heavy silence fell on the room, which Tikki eventually took it upon herself to break. "Well," she said as brightly as she could manage, "now all we have to do, in between hunting down the alley cat that's actually Marinette's husband, is identify a random drunkard whose face we don't know from among all the citizens of Paris, hunt down the miniscule egg sac that should be attached to his clothes – unless he's changed or brushed it off since then, of course – and figure out whether the heir to the Agreste fortune is now a hundred ladybugs with human minds or one human mind inhabiting an entire swarm of ladybugs at once." She sighed. "Isn't it wonderful to be a kwami, Wayzz? I hear other people's lives are actually boring sometimes."

"Hair flowing down to her shoulders with a vale held in by a tiara." –ShazDogg, "Long Gone & Moved On"

"Masterful, M. Kurtzberg!" said Arnold Mirabeau, the senior art critic for Le Monde. "You are a breath of fresh air in a sadly moribund French art world; your Belle de France en Angleterre was like a glass of fine brandy to this cynical old connoisseur's all but comatose heart."

Nathaniel grinned shyly. "Yes, that was one of my better ones, I think," he said. "Marinette really is lovely with her hair down, isn't she?"

"Oh, yes, no doubt," said Mirabeau, waving his hand dismissively. "But tell me, young man, how did you conceive so deliciously surrealistic a touch as having the vale behind the model enclosed by an enormous diamond tiara? I had thought the spirit of Magritte wholly dead in this generation…"

"Oh, that wasn't an artistic choice," said Nathaniel. "The Vale of Crownmarch really is held in like that – some whim of the nobleman who enclosed it, back in the 1700s." He shrugged. "What can I say? It's the English; they're nuts."

*Crossover with Batman. (And, yes, I know I've already used the lay/lie confusion in the Avengers series, but, given how appallingly endemic it is - it even shows up in the 1998 Cats, for crying out loud, and they had T. S. Eliot to show them better - and given, also, that the verb "to lay" doesn't mean quite the same thing when it lacks an explicit object, I thought it was good for one more outing.)