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Ladybug couldn’t resist stopping on her way home to stare at the new ad featuring Adrien Agreste that had just gone up on the side of a subway entrance. Thin lighting strips built into the frame made the picture glow in the dim evening light. She sighed dreamily, “Ah, Aaadriiieeennn.”
The clink of Chat Noir’s baton on the pavement beside her gave her just enough warning to wipe the lovesick expression off her face before the cat himself slid down the pole to land beside her. “What are you doing, my Lady?” he asked curiously. When he saw what she was looking at he snorted, “Don’t tell me you’re a fan of Adrien Agreste?”
“I might be. A bit,” Ladybug said defensively. She hoped that the darkness covered her blush but then remembered that Chat Noir could see in the dark.
“I wouldn’t blame you if you are. After all, he’s gorgeous,” Chat Noir said smugly.
“Don’t tell me you’re a fan of Adrien Agreste?” Ladybug said with amusement.
Chat Noir shrugged and said carelessly, “Not really. He may be good looking but he’s kind of lame. I’m much more charming!”
“Adrien is not lame! He’s kind, brave and smart!”
“You really think so?” Chat Noir tried not to sound pleased at the praise and succeeded a little too well.
“Yes!” Ladybug said indignantly. “He’s so kind that he never has a mean word to say to anyone, not even bullies or annoying fans! He’s so brave that I’ve seen him run toward akumatized monsters rather than away from them. Would you be brave enough to do that without superpowers?”
“Yes! I am every bit as brave as Adrien Agreste, and just as kind and smart too.” Chat Noir pretended to pout but his eyes danced with laughter.
“Maybe,” Ladybug said doubtfully. “But he’s also dignified.”
“Dignity is overrated!”
“And you’re not more charming than he is. He’s gentle and modest. That’s much more charming than bad puns and shameless flirting!”
“Really?” Chat Noir asked meekly.
If Ladybug had been paying more attention, she might have noticed that the joking note had left his voice, but she was too focused on defending Adrien to notice such a subtle signal from Chat Noir. “Yes!” she said firmly.
Ladybug’s earrings and Chat Noir’s ring beeped simultaneously and insistently.
“We’re down to the last minute? Already?” She must have spent more time staring at Adrien’s poster than she’d realized. “See you later, Kitty!” Ladybug flung her yoyo around a chimney and leapt away.
Chat Noir shouted playfully at her retreating back. “If that’s what you like then fine! I can do dignified and modest! Just watch me!”
“Good morning, Ladybug. What have you figured out about our opponent so far?” Chat Noir greeted his partner with a sweet smile as he joined her in crouching down behind the raised edge of a rooftop to observe the building under attack.
“Her power seems to be replacing technology with older things that served the same purpose.” Ladybug shrugged. “She doesn’t seem all that dangerous, but I’ve been observing from a distance for now in case of surprises.”
“Yes, that’s probably wise,” Chat Noir agreed calmly.
“But now that you’re here, let’s go confront her before she turns the ceiling lights into candles and sets the whole building on fire.”
Chat Noir obediently vaulted over to the afflicted building. Ladybug lagged a second behind. She hadn’t expected him to follow her suggestion quite so quickly.
They landed near the cluster of people who were pouring out of the building’s front entrance. The nearest people were a young man who was tugging uncomfortably at his suit collar and a young woman in a 1970s-style dress who was clinging to his arm as she wobbled in her high heels. She was complaining, “How do people walk in these things?” before she saw the superheroes. “Ladybug! Chat Noir! Thank goodness you’re here!” she exclaimed.
“Do you know who was akumatized?” Ladybug asked.
“Yes,” the young man said. “She’s always hated computers but something must have pushed her over the edge today.”
“I think I heard her shout something about losing months of work,” the young woman added helpfully.
Ladybug winced. “That could do it. Thank you.” She started walking toward the building again but paused when Chat Noir didn’t immediately follow her.
Chat Noir gave the young woman a sympathetic smile. “The trick to walking in high heels is to keep your weight on the balls of your feet like you’re tiptoeing, and don’t be afraid to strut like a model on the catwalk.” When everyone gave him odd looks, he added. “The shoes Reflecta puts people in are much higher than those, and I eventually learned how to run and fight in them, so I’m sure you can manage to walk in these with a little practice.”
The young man tugged at his collar again. “Any tips for not being strangled by ties?”
“Just think about how good you look. The most stylish clothes are often a little uncomfortable but beauty is worth a little suffering, right?” Chat Noir smiled encouragingly. “You both look very nice.”
The office workers looked down at their old-fashioned clothes with new appreciation. “Thanks, Chat Noir!”
Ladybug started toward the building’s entrance again and this time Chat Noir came with her. Once they were alone in the building’s hallways, she asked, “Are you feeling okay?”
“Yes, I’m fine,” he replied cheerfully. “And you?”
“Fine,” she said cautiously.
There was definitely something off about him today. He had yet to make a single pun, and his voice seemed different somehow. Instead of being vibrant and gleeful as if he was constantly on the verge of bursting into laughter, he just sounded like a normal person. Cheerful and friendly, but not gleeful. There was nothing feline in his posture. His faint smile contained no trace of a smirk or a leer. None of those things were necessarily suspicious. He could just be in an unusually calm mood. Chat Noir had calm moments just like anyone else. However, her instincts were screaming at her that something was wrong.
Seemingly oblivious to her suspicious glare, he said, “I think I see a staircase over there.”
She continued to glare at him. He looked back with the open, innocent expression of someone with nothing to hide.
“Or do you think we should search this floor more first?” he asked.
Ladybug gave up. “This floor looks like it’s already been evacuated. Let’s go upstairs.”
After a brief search of the second floor, they found their target on the third floor. She looked like the caricature of an old-fashioned grandmother with green skin, white hair up in a tidy bun, and an unflattering purple dress. Her eyes were unevenly magnified by large, round, pink-tinted glasses with cracked lenses. She was cackling maniacally. “Yes, that’s a proper phone! Now do the next one, my pet!”
A large, wind-up, clockwork mouse ran along a desk and jumped onto the phone on the next desk. It had been a modern office phone with caller display and rows of buttons but, as the mouse’s feet touched it, it turned into a rotary phone. Then the mouse leapt onto the top of a computer and suddenly it was standing on a pile of thickly stuffed file folders instead. “Much better!” the supervillain chortled.
“I’ll go for her. You stop the mouse,” Ladybug ordered.
Chat Noir ran forward and tried to send the mouse flying by extending his baton at it, but the agile mouse dodged his attack and landed on an abandoned smartphone, transforming it into a cassette player and a pile of magazines.
Chat Noir swiped at the mouse like an inexperienced golfer trying to hit a golf ball. The mouse jumped over his swing, jumped down onto the office chair (which transformed from grey plastic with a mesh back to metal with orange upholstery), and then scuttled across the floor, leaving a trail of brown carpet in its wake.
“Why are you doing this?” Ladybug asked the deranged granny.
“Things were better in the old days. Everything today is so overcomplicated! People ignore each other in favour of staring at screens all day, and they dress like slobs! Can’t you see how much better I’m making things, Ladybug?”
“Personally, I like my computer and my smartphone,” Ladybug said.
Chat Noir poked his baton at the mouse’s hiding spot behind a wastepaper basket. The mouse ran up the baton, up his arm, and jumped off his shoulder onto another computer. Chat Noir’s startled cry was only slightly muffled by the mask that now covered the lower half of his face.
Ladybug abandoned her attempt to talk to the supervillain and grabbed her partner instead, dragging him into one of the offices that bordered the open concept part of the floor and slamming the door.
“You got hit! Did it affect anything other than your clothing?”
“I don’t think so.”
Ladybug relaxed and observed, “That looks like the costume worn by the last black cat miraculous wielder before you, back in the 18th century. Although he had black hair.”
The skin-tight faux-leather of his suit had been replaced by looser black silk. He wore a long-sleeved shirt tied with a thick belt over pants that ended just above slippers, all of them made from black silk. His black silk cat ears were attached to a band tied around his head. Over the middle of his forehead, the band was stamped with a bright green cat’s paw logo that matched his ring. A black silk mask covered the bottom half of his face instead of the top half. It was startling to see his slit-pupiled, bright green eyes framed by dark gold eyelashes and pale skin rather than by the black of his usual mask. He had nice eyebrows.
There was a mirror on the back of the office door. Chat Noir studied himself in it. “Not bad. I look like some kind of cat-ninja.”
“I like it,” Ladybug agreed.
Chat Noir turned back and forth to admire his new costume from more angles. He even struck a cat pose that showed off the knife blades attached to the fingertips of his black silk gloves.
“You know, for a cat, you’re not very good at catching mice,” Ladybug teased.
Chat Noir smiled appreciatively at her joke. “Sorry, Ladybug.”
“Why didn’t you just pounce on it?”
“That would have been undignified.”
Ladybug grabbed his shoulders. “Okay, that does it! Who are you and what have you done with Chat Noir?” She was only half joking.
“What do you mean? Of course, I’m still Chat Noir even if my costume changed,” he said innocently.
“I’m not talking about the costume,” Ladybug growled. “Since when do you care about dignity? Why have you not cracked a single joke since you got here? And why are you not acting like a cat? The Chat Noir I know would never have been able to resist the chance to chase a sentimonster mouse.”
“You don’t like my jokes. I thought it was time to give them a rest,” Chat Noir said sadly.
Ladybug was forcibly reminded of Adrien in the car back from the wax museum saying, “The girl I love doesn’t like my jokes either.”
“This is about last night, isn’t it?” Ladybug realized. “You’re mad that I complimented Adrien so now you’re doing an impression of him.”
Now that she’d put the pieces together, it was obvious. The smile he’d greeted her with had been Adrien’s sweet smile. The way he’d gestured with his hands while talking to the office workers outside, even the way he’d walked across the office floor, all had been pure Adrien. It was creepy how perfectly he’d captured the way Adrien moved.
“I’m not mad, but you did say you found dignity and modesty more charming than puns and flirting. I want you to like me so, if that’s what you like, then I can be that kind of person for you.” The look he gave her was exactly the same one Adrien had worn when he first asked her to be his friend: meltingly sweet and irresistibly vulnerable.
Except that she could resist it just fine coming from Chat Noir because it had to be a lot more calculated than it looked. “Quit that!” she snapped irritably.
“Quit what?”
“Pretending to be someone you’re not! It’s creepy!”
“What if I’m not pretending? What if this is the real me when I’m not trying to be a witty and charming superhero?”
“You’re not being yourself. You’re being Adrien Agreste, and I don’t like it.”
“Does that mean that you find the usual Chat Noir more charming after all?” he asked hopefully, with just a hint of his old mischief lighting up his eyes.
“It means that I don’t like it when people don’t act like themselves! It’s just as creepy when Adrien imitates you. You know he did your voice in the animated movie, right? Did you see the interview where Nadja talked him into doing a full impression of you and he even got your wink right? It felt so wrong! He’s him and you’re you and you should act like yourselves! When you start acting like each other, it’s…confusing.” Seeing two of her favorite boys combined into one gave her a lurching feeling in the pit of her stomach that she didn’t want to examine too closely.
“So you want the old Chat Noir back?” Chat Noir asked tentatively.
“Yes!”
“You like the puns and flirting?”
Ladybug ground a toe into the floor and muttered, “I don’t completely hate them.”
He waited.
“Okay, fine! I guess I like them. From you.”
Chat Noir grinned. “That’s a relief! Being Chat Noir is much more fun than being Adrien Agreste.” He winked at her.
He was himself again. She wanted to hug him out of sheer relief. Instead, she said, “Now that’s straightened out, go catch that mouse for me!”
“At your service, my Lady!” The glee was back in his voice as he flung the door open and ran back into the main room on all fours with a cat’s loping stride. “I’m ready for a game of cat and mouse! Come out, come out, wherever you are, little mouse!”
As it turned out, the mouse wasn’t making any effort to hide. It was back to turning computers into stacks of file folders, account ledgers, radios, photo albums or decks of cards and redecorating the office in the styles of the 1970s while the akumatized granny cheered it on. A butterfly outline appeared around her face and she said irritably, “Yes, of course I’ll get you their miraculouses. Just be patient, young man.”
Chat Noir pounced on the mouse but only succeeded in sending papers flying off the desk in all directions as the mouse jumped away before his claws could close on it. Undeterred, he leapt onto an office chair that went rattling across the carpet in the direction of the mouse with the cat-ninja perched on its back. As the chair slowed, he jumped up onto a desk and ran on all fours along the top of it, sending papers, rotary phones and other obsolete office paraphernalia flying with every bound. He was grinning like a manic the whole time.
Ladybug turned her attention to the evil granny. “It’s appropriate that your glasses are rose-tinted,” she commented, “because so is your view of the past. Was it really better to do paperwork by hand instead of on a computer?”
“I hate computers!” the old lady snarled. “They make everything more complicated! Paper never just vanishes while you’re in the middle of working on it!”
“Doesn’t it?” Ladybug asked. “Paper can get lost or damaged.”
Chat Noir crashed into the office printer a second behind the mouse. Ink from the broken mimeograph splattered half the room.
“Having fun?” Ladybug asked him with an indulgent smile.
“Just leaving my mark!” he replied. Sure enough, after running through the puddle of ink, he managed to leave a trail of paw prints on everything he touched, which was impressive given that he didn’t actually have paws.
“Control your pet!” the granny said peevishly. “He’s making a huge mess of my beautiful office! And tell him to leave my poor mouse alone! It isn’t doing any harm.”
“Your co-workers would disagree,” Ladybug said.
“If you won’t stop him, I will!” the evil granny declared.
She held her hands up in front of her face, making a rectangle like a picture frame with her pointer fingers and thumbs. Chat Noir and the mouse rapidly bounced backwards, unspilling ink, unscattering papers and turning 20th century office fixtures back into 21st century ones as they went. Before Ladybug could even react, Chat Noir vanished back through the door into the private office. The old lady lowered her hands and the cat-ninja and mouse sprang back into action. Ladybug noticed that there were still a few inky paw prints beyond the edges of the area she’d rewound.
Now that she knew the villain’s power, Ladybug called out, “Lucky Charm!” A wastepaper basket fell into her hands.
Apparently, Chat Noir had satisfied his desire to play around the first time through because this time he ran toward the mouse on two feet with a shout of, “Cataclysm!” As the mouse jumped across aisle from one desk to another, he hit it in midair and sent it flying across the room. It blackened and cracked as it flew but didn’t crumble to dust.
Instead, once it landed, it started running in deranged circles and jumping in random directions. The floor under its feet turned to rough boards in some places, stone in others, with occasional fragments of various rugs or carpets or dried out, trampled grasses. The chairs it touched became wood, sometimes delicately carved, sometimes rough stools. Papers became elegantly handwritten. A ballpoint pen became a quill pen. A desk lamp became a kerosene lamp and another became a candle.
“I knew that thing would prove to be a fire hazard,” Ladybug observed.
“My mouse! What have you done to my lovely mouse!” the villain shrieked. She tried to frame it in her fingers to rewind it back to before it was damaged but it moved too fast.
While the old lady was distracted, Ladybug bound her in yoyo coils and tossed the wastepaper basket to Chat Noir. He slammed it down over the deranged mouse. The container rapidly went through a dozen shapes and materials but all of them still held the mouse securely.
Ladybug took the glasses off the old woman’s face and snapped them in half. A feather floated out. Under the former wastepaper basket, the sentimonster abruptly went silent. Chat Noir lifted the container to reveal a pile of black dust and a black butterfly.
“He put the akuma in the sentimonster? That’s cheating!” Chat Noir complained.
Ladybug released the now ordinary looking elderly lady from her yoyo string and caught the akuma and feather. “No more evil-doing for you!” She said. “Bye bye!” The now-white feather and butterfly drifted out an open window. Ladybug took her Lucky Charm from Chat Noir and tossed it up in the air. “Miraculous Ladybug!”
The office was returned to its usual tidy, bland, 21st century appearance. The pile of dust became a computer mouse. Chat Noir picked it up and plugged it into the computer nearest the former villain. In a daze, she sat down in her desk chair and stared at the computer screen. “My project! It’s still here!”
Chat Noir patted her on the shoulder comfortingly. “I think our work here is done,” he said to Ladybug with a wink.
They pounded their fists together triumphantly.
As they walked out of the building, Ladybug warned him, “Now that I know you can turn them off when you want to, I’m going to cut you a lot less slack for the really terrible puns.”
Now that I know you secretly like my jokes, I’m going to use even more of them,” Chat Noir countered. “I’d say that was office-ially the worst day of that poor woman’s life but I project that she’ll be more carefully about saving her files in the future.”
Ladybug groaned.