The One Where Max Discovers He's From Another Reality (And Everything Gets Complicated)

Featuring: One very confused teenager, multiverse revelations, a 176-year-old guardian, and way too many questions about reality

Here's the third chapter, which helps to set the scene for the next chapters to come. Fun fact, this was origianlly longer, but I seperated the chapters thinking it was a bit to long. I like to have a certain amount of words in a chapter, for easer pacing.

Hope you like it!

I saw myself - but older and taller - lying on the floor of an antique shop, bleeding out. Dying. In a flash of light Nooroo appeared from the brooch barely grasped in my limp hand.

"Huh? What's happening?"

His big purple eyes got huge when he saw what was going on. "Oh no!" Nooroo flew closer to my face. "Are you okay? Can you hear me?" He floated near my eyes, tapping my cheek with his tiny arms. "Please, open your eyes! You need to stay awake!"

When I didn't move, his face changed from surprised to really worried. "Oh no... This is bad, very bad!"

His wings beat faster as he looked around, probably for help. Thats when he saw it, a white butterfly sitting on a window, its wings slowly opening and closing.

Nooroo's eyes lit up like he had an idea, but he looked uncertain. "Wait! Maybe I could...!" He stopped, looking torn. "I... I shouldn't do this without an owner, but..." He looked back and forth between me and the butterfly. "There's no choice. I have to try!"

Looking more determined now, he zipped over to the butterfly, glowing purple. He put his hands together and made a small ball of shimmering light.

"I hope this works," Nooroo whispered shakily. He blew gently on the light ball, sending it toward the butterfly. The light wrapped around it, changing it. The white wings turned black with purple patterns all over them. The butterfly, now glowing slightly purple, fluttered back to me.

"Please work, please work," Nooroo whispered nervously.

The butterfly landed on my glasses, merging with them and turning them pitch black. Dark purple ether appeared, almost like smoke, spread from the glasses and covered my whole body like a black cocoon.

Nooroo's voice echoed around me, full of hope and fear: "I'm giving you the power to rewind your time, to restore yourself to the way you were before! Please live!" He got super close to my head, almost touching the cocoon. "Please," he whispered, "let this work..."

Nooroo saved me?

The scene changed, getting blurry before turning into a grassy hill with this huge pine tree on top. I felt like I should know this place, but I couldn't figure out why. There were two people up there - a guy in a wheelchair and a kid with messy dark hair. I couldn't see their faces clearly or hear them well, but something about them seemed familiar.

Why do I feel like I've seen this before?

I tried really hard to hear what they were saying, but only bits and pieces came through:

"...When you say... there was a time before...?"

"...Four ages before...The Time of the...Golden Age..."

"...what was it like ...?"

"...a time of darkness and savagery..."

What are they saying?

"... can't die now, right? I mean, as long as... they're alive..."

"...No one knows...Percy..."

Percy?

That name triggered something in my brain. Who were these people? What were they talking about? But before I could figure it out, the dream started fading away. The kid turned around, and I almost saw his face clearly.

"...M̶̢̻̩̻̈́å̴̠̜̲̖̅́x̷͉͎̯͙͖̉̈͗..M̸̧̮͇̯͛͆̿ą̸̛͕̪͙̮͋̀̿̑x̷̮͊...!"

What...who is...?

"...remember, you may...prevent the biggest war in...history."

War...what is he-?

"̷̪̃̚M̶̬̃̐Á̷̙̽͜X̶̝́͂!̷̥̈́̓"̵͎̹̌

– o – o – o – o – o – o – o –

"Max?! Max, can you hear me? Maximillian?!"

I shot up, my heart racing, and found Mr. Chan hovering over me with worry all over his face. Nooroo was floating nearby looking just as concerned, and... wait, was that another kwami?

Next to him was this tiny creature that looked like Nooroo but more turtle-like, with yellow-green eyes and an antenna. A dim memory flashed in my head. It was Wayzz, the turtle kwami. He was floating by Mr. Chan's shoulder with the same worried look.

"You're awake!" Nooroo said, clearly relieved. "We were so worried!"

I blinked, trying to get my bearings. The room was spinning, and my stomach felt like it wanted to turn inside out. "What... what happened?"

Mr. Chan helped me sit up and handed me my glasses. "You collapsed after opening the Miracle Box. How are you feeling?"

"Like my brain's been put through a freaking blender," I groaned, putting on my glasses and rubbing my temples. I could see better, but my head was still pounding.

"Why did you open the box in the first place?" Mr. Chan asked gently, though I could tell he was worried. "How did you even find it?"

My throat went dry as he looked at me. "I... I remember things. Things I shouldn't know."

"What kind of things?"

I stopped, realizing how insane I was about to sound. But I couldn't lie to him, not after everything. The truth felt like it was crushing me. "The...Miracle Box. The kwamis." I pointed at Mr. Chan with a shaky hand. "You... you're not really Mr. Chan, are you? You're…Wang Fu, the Guardian."

Mr. Chan - no, Wang Fu - shared a shocked look with Wayzz. You could cut the tension with a knife. "How do you know my name?" he whispered.

"I... I'm not sure," I admitted, fidgeting with my glasses as I tried to sort through my scrambled memories. It was like trying to put together a puzzle after someone had thrown half the pieces in a blender. "It's all mixed up in my head. But I remember... stories. Legends about the Miraculous. And..." I paused, realizing how crazy this would sound, "...a TV show?"

Then it hit me like a truck.

"Wait," I barely breathed, "if all of this is real here, but it was just fiction where I'm from..." My mouth felt like the Sahara Desert. "Does that mean I'm from another world entirely?"

It was coming back to me, it was no wonder he looked so familiar. My eyes bounced between Nooroo, Wayzz, and Master Fu - characters I'd only ever seen (at least I think I've seen, still processing here,) as cartoons - now somehow real and right in front of me. Every familiar face I saw made it harder to believe. The fact that they were here, in this room, in this reality, hit me like a tidal wave.

Here I was, on the floor, talking to creatures and a person I'd only seen animated. Reality and fiction hadn't just mixed - they'd exploded.

Oh my god, was I freaking ISEKAID?!

"Oh, you have got to be kidding me." Great, just what I needed! I thought sarcastically. To star in my own anime adventure, every kid's dream!

"A...TV show?" Wayzz said, sounding confused.

"Another world?" Fu asked with narrow eyes, sounding both doubtful and curious.

I nodded and instantly regretted it as pain shot through my head. "In my world – or, I guess, the world I remember – all of this," I waved at the Miracle Box, "was fiction. It wasn't real. It was a cartoon called 'Miraculous: Tales of Ladybug and Cat Noir.'"

I sounded like I either needed a straitjacket or was losing my mind faster than Alice's Cheshire Cat on an Acid trip. I was sure Fu would think I was sick or kick me out, which scared me to death.

But instead, Fu leaned in close, staring at me like he could see through steel. "Tell me everything you remember."

So I spilled it all. About Ladybug, Cat Noir, and Hawk Moth. About how the Order of Guardians fell, watching Fu go pale as I talked about his mistake with the Peacock Miraculous and the sentimonster. As I talked, memories came flooding back like someone had opened a fire hydrant in my brain.

"Oh! In the show," I rambled on, caught up in remembering, "Gabriel Agreste, this famous fashion designer – think if Tim Gunn had a love child with Cruella de Vil, and overall, a TOTAL prick – got hold of the Butterfly and Peacock Miraculous, along with the grimoire. He used the Butterfly to create supervillains, trying to get the Ladybug and Black Cat Miraculous to save his wife. She'd died from using the broken Peacock Miraculous, and he thought combining Ladybug and Cat Noir's powers could bring her back and-!"

I stopped, suddenly noticing how quiet it had gotten. Fu was staring at me with shock and... was that fear? The weight of what I'd just dumped on him hit me, and I started sweating.

Oh god, did I break him?

"I'm sorry," I whispered. "I know it sounds crazy. Like, 'I see dead people' levels of crazy, but I swear I'm telling the truth!"

Fu held up his hand, speaking gently. "I believe you, Max." That made me feel better. "In my one hundred and seventy-six years, I've never encountered anything quite like this, but I can sense you're not lying."

I blinked.

"Wait, you're one hundred and SEVENTY SIX?!" I blurted out, then turned red as I quickly covered my mouth. I kind of remembered him being old, but not that old. This guy made Dumbledore look like a little kid.

Fu's mouth twitched into a small smile. "And I don't look a day over eighty," he said with a wink that would put the old wizard to shame.

The realization hit me like a truck - I was talking to someone who'd lived through almost two hundred years of history. As if this whole situation wasn't weird enough already.

Wayzz floated closer, looking super curious. "Max, you said this was all fiction in your world. But if it's all true, then how did you end up here?"

"I don't know," I said, frustrated. "The last thing I remember clearly is getting mugged, and then... nothing. Until I woke up here." Trying to remember anything between those two points was like trying to grab smoke. It frustrated me to no end.

"Perhaps I can shed some light on that," Nooroo said quietly, drifting over. "When I saw you were dying, I used my power to save your life." Fu and Wayzz gasped like he'd just admitted to blowing up a building. "It seems that in doing so, I may have... brought you here to this reality."

"Nooroo, you used your power without an owner?" Fu's voice was somewhere between shocked and horrified. "That's incredibly dangerous!"

Wayzz nodded, shaking a little. "The consequences could be catastrophic! Kwamis aren't meant to wield their abilities directly like that. Remember when Plagg caused the Leaning Tower of Pisa? And the destruction of Atlantis?" He paused, his eyes going wide. "And let's not forget..." He shuddered. "...what happened in Thera."

Fu and the kwamis all cringed and groaned like someone had mentioned their most embarrassing and frightening moment ever.

"Thera?" I asked Fu.

"Don't ask," he whispered. "Some stories are better left untold."

The silence that followed was so awkward you could cut it with a knife. I cleared my throat. "So, uh, about Nooroo using his powers...?"

Nooroo's wings drooped. "I... I know. But if I hadn't, Max would have died. I couldn't just stand by and let that happen, so I empowered him to save him."

And possibly made me younger, I thought. I remembered how I looked in the dream and what Nooroo had said. Did he... rewind me? Just how old was I originally? Eighteen? Nineteen?

I shook my head, trying to stay focused. "But if Nooroo was in my world, how is he here now?" My voice got higher with confusion. "And how the heck did he get there in the first place? How did I get here?"

I stared at my hands. "I'm from another world. I'm actually from another world. Holy crap." I fell back onto the floor, throwing my arm over my eyes. "What does all of this even mean?"

Wayzz cleared his throat like a tiny professor about to start class. "It's... complicated. You see, multiple realities exist at the same time, and we kwamis exist across all of them. Some are really similar, while others are totally different."

"You mean... multiverse theory?" I looked at the tiny turtle. "Like in comics? Or that Spider-Man movie where they all point at each other?"

"...I don't know who that is, but yes," he said, looking kind of impressed. "Though we don't usually tell our holders about this stuff - humans don't live long enough to even start understanding how the multiverse works. It's incredibly complicated."

Fu stroked his beard thoughtfully. "When I was training with the Order of the Guardians, there were ancient texts that talked about parallel worlds," he said, sounding like he was reciting from some dusty old book. "But we didn't focus on that stuff. The Order thought protecting our own world was hard enough without worrying about others."

Translation: It gave them too much of a headache.

My head felt like it was spinning as I sat back up. "So, what? I'm actually from another universe? This is really happening?"

"Looks that way," Fu said, hands folded in his lap. "Though this brings up a worrying question - how did Nooroo and the Butterfly Miraculous show up in your world? Even after the temple fell, jumping between worlds shouldn't have been possible."

Nooroo and Wayzz shared this look that definitely meant something. "Master, our spiritual essence shows that both this Nooroo and the Butterfly Miraculous are from our reality," Wayzz explained, sounding worried. "Which means..."

"Which means this is way more complicated than we thought," Fu finished seriously. He got quiet for a moment, looking like he had the weight of the world on his shoulders. "Max, what you told us about this Gabriel Agreste and the missing Miraculouses... if that's happening here too, we're in big trouble. I need to look into this right away."

"What do you mean?" I asked, feeling my stomach tie itself in knots.

Fu looked super serious. "A Miraculous being used by someone evil is incredibly dangerous, and a damaged one could make the situation even worse. If what you say is true, we're facing something that could potentially destroy everything we Guardians are supposed to protect."

He stood up way more smoothly than you'd expect from someone his age. He picked up the butterfly brooch I'd dropped and walked over to the gramophone. As he put the jewel back in the Miracle Box, Nooroo waved goodbye before disappearing in a purple flash.

"I need to see if your story matches what's happening here," Fu said grimly as he closed the box and put it away. "There's only one way to know for sure."

I had a feeling I knew what was coming. Fu confirmed it a second later, looking at me with total determination.

"I must return to Paris."

Heres the third chapter, I hoped you like it! This will be the last one till after Christmas, I hope you understand!

Take care and stay safe!