Chapter Text
“What happened?” Adrien woke up, utterly confused as to where he was.
The sky above him was pink — which was unusual enough — but he was sitting in the middle of an amalgamation of oversized curiosities: He noticed highlighters and tea bags, fabric pins and cookies that were nearly as big as he was.
Many of the things around him were red with black polka dots and he wondered- No. That couldn’t be.
That the car and scooter, the bouncy ball, fork, spoon, and all the other things were Ladybug’s colours surely had nothing to do with her per se.
With a groan he forced himself to stand. Where was he?
Adrien turned around only to find Alya and Nino lying on the ground, still unconscious.
He hurried over to them, checking on them to see their chests softly rising and sinking as if they were only asleep.
“Plagg?” he whispered, lifting one side of his shirt. “Plagg, are you here?”
Adrien was only met with silence which probably meant his Kwami wasn’t anywhere near him.
With a sigh he turned around to his friends again, deciding it was better to try and wake them up. Maybe Nino and Alya could make sense of what happened and where they were now.
“Nino, hey,” he called his best friend, gently shaking his shoulder. “Wake up.”
When he only groaned and turned to face his girlfriend, Adrien decided that, maybe, waking up Alya was the safer bet.
“Hey, Alya, can you hear me?” he tried again, shaking her shoulder as well.
Her eyes actually fluttered open and she frowned. “Adrien? What are you-” She seemed to recognise that she wasn’t where she thought she should be. “Where are we?”
Adrien sighed. “I had hoped you might know,” he admitted, helping her to sit up.
“Babe,” she shook Nino far less carefully as soon as she sat upright. “Babe wake up.”
Nino grumbles some more but his eyes open too. “What?”
Alya shot him a quick smile before she turned to Adrien. “Do you have any idea how we got here?” she asked in lieu of replying to Nino.
Adrien shrugged. “Not really,” he admitted. “But what else than an Akuma could it be? Or do you know any places in and around Paris with a pink sky?”
“Not really, now,” she agreed.
Now Nino was awake as well, slowly getting up to take a look around. He bowed down to look through the windows of the car, grinning. “Wherever we are, they sure do love Ladybug. Makes me wonder if this could be another room in your mansion, bro,” he joked.
“Hey!” Adrien protested. “That could also be Alya with all the Ladybug merch.”
While Nino laughed about his teasing, Alya’s brows wrinkled in concentration as she looked around the area. She picked up polka-dotted boxing gloves turning them around in her hands to watch them from all sides.
“Hey, guys,” she called them over from the car. “Do you remember those?”
Adrien did but he still shook his head.
Nino nodded though. “Yeah, didn’t Ladybug have some of those when she fought Anansi?” he asked, picking up a record. “And that kinda looks like the one she used fighting the Bubbler.” His shoulders tensed as he sat the vinyl disk back down.
Adrien looked around and— Most of the items around them he recognised as something Ladybug received as lucky charms during one of their fights. Some he didn’t but then again sometimes, he wasn’t there to see her use her special power because he was elsewhere keeping the Akuma occupied or had been hit himself.
Which he couldn’t tell his friends; for most of those attacks they were sure Adrien had been at home or somewhere else entirely; somewhere safe, probably hidden away and protected by the Gorilla.
But of course Chat Noir had been there, fighting alongside Ladybug.
He was just about to wander off, trying again to find Plagg when a blinding pink light appeared in the middle of the pile of old lucky charms. The three of them shielded their eyes until the light faded, giving way to-
Tikki?
Adrien’s eyes widened in horror.
Sure, this looked like Ladybug’s kwami who he had met once during his brief stint as Mister Bug, but it was at least as tall as he was, if not more.
Tikki’s eyes opened, and she looked just horrified to see him here. She opened her mouth as if to speak when Alya and Nino behind her squeaked in surprise.
The kwami spun around, raising her arms as she backed up. “You don’t need to be afraid,” she told the others. “But it’s good to see you here.”
“Where are we exactly?” Alya asked, always the journalist. “I assume, this is Hawkmoth’s doing?”
The kwami that didn’t appear so little right now nodded. “Yes. You are caught in my owner's purse, I’m afraid. I have created a little home here for myself and-”
Before Tikki could finish her sentence, she just zapped away.
“Where did it go?” Nino called out, staring at the spot where Tikki had been just a moment ago. “It can’t just leave us here. And what does that mean?” he asked. “That we’re caught in her owner’s purse?”
“Babe, would you mind helping me for a moment?” Alya asked, tugging at Nino’s shirtsleeve. “Let’s go look if we can find a way to get out of here. Or something to eat,” she added. “I’m hungry and I don’t know if the big cookie over there is edible.”
Adrien nodded. “I’ll check the other side,” he offered, happy for the few minutes alone this would give him as he wandered off.
Ladybug must have called Tikki, Adrien thought. She was probably out there, transformed, fighting whatever Akuma Hawkmoth was throwing at her.
Without him.
Adrien swallowed hard. He absolutely hated this. He despised not being there to make sure his lady was safe.
He needed to find a way out of here or at least hope that Tikki would tell Ladybug that he was in here. Or rather, that some people were in here since Tikki couldn’t reveal his identity, not even to the guardian.
With a sigh he made his way through the lucky charms, hoping if he removed some of them, there would be a magical exit somewhere.
“Why are you so happy?” Nino whispered to Alya, allowing her to tug him behind her as she made his way to one side of the pile of lucky charms.
“Don’t you get it?” she asked, nearly vibrating out of her skin. “Don’t you know what the thing back there was just now?”
Nino tilted his head, looking at her as if she had lost her mind. “What do you mean? It was big and looked kind of cute with its round, squishy face, but-”
“A kwami, Nino. That thing,” she reminded him, “was a kwami.”
Alya watched as his eyes grew wide. “You don’t-”
“Think about it,” she told him. “It said we were in her owner’s purse or something, which means we were shrunk or something.”
Nino didn’t look convinced but nodded and pushed his glasses up his nose. “Crazy,” he commented.
But Alya was too thrilled to reward this with a comment. “It did look a little like Trixx, more like Wayzz, if I’m being honest, just red.”
“So this was Ladybug’s kwami?” he asked, slowly following where his girlfriend was going with this.
Alya nodded, her hair flying around her shoulder.
“And when it vanished-” Nino started.
“-Ladybug must have called on it to transform her,” Alya finished the sentence for him.
This was better than Disney Land, she decided as she started to rummage through the pile of old lucky charms. She prided herself on providing the world with the most accurate information about the Parisian superheroes and their fights, including which and how lucky charms were used each time, but sometimes she couldn’t get the footage.
Some fights were just somewhere she couldn’t go, even if she had the police warning to show that she was willing to go anywhere.
She picked up a spoon that had nearly been folded in half, wondering what this had been used for.
Back there she had seen a radiator too, some hairspray, and the key to a car.
“And if this was Ladybug’s kwami and we are in its owner’s purse that means?” she prompted her boyfriend, a little bit too happy about all of this.
“We’re in Ladybug’s purse.”
“Yes,” she squealed. “Isn’t this amazing?”
Nino raised an eyebrow. “We were caught by an Akuma, shrunk to the size of a credit card and somehow teleported to a pocket dimension,” he listed. “How is this amazing?”
“Just imagine if Ladybug tried to get us out of here!” she reminded him. “And the things I can post about this on the blog and-”
“Okay, babe, you need to calm down,” he told her with that indulgent smile he always got when she went crazy over the spotted heroine. “We’re technically still caught and trying to look for a way out.”
Alya forced herself to take a deep breath. “Yes, of course, you’re right,” she admitted, briefly closing her eyes.
“Okay, let’s look at what else we can identify. I think I saw the fake earrings that were used to beat Pharaon.”