Scene Listing || Scene Schedule || Scene Schedule RSS
Owner Pose
Chat Noir     EARLIER TODAY, AT COLLEGE FRANCOISE DUPONT...

Last night had run on a little bit longer than Adrien had counted on, and it was a pretty long haul through pretty sketchy territory to get back to the gate /and/ still have to scamper home afterwards. He had a photoshoot before school the next morning, and he'd wanted to spend a little time talking with Plagg about everything that they'd seen in this last couple of days.

In all, he didn't get much sleep, didn't get much useful out of Plagg (who was equally exhausted and only occasionally disposed towards helpfulness even normally), and had mostly been fueling himself with energy drinks afterwards. A combination of make-up and determination had kept him together through the shoot, but by the time he'd gotten to school, Adrien was starting to droop a little. Fortunately, even with his shields up, displaying a little bit of tiredness really isn't the sort of thing he /can't/ afford to do in public.

"Hey man, what's wrong? You catch something?" Nino had asked him.

With his usual restrained smile and a dismissive wave he'd said, "Just an early morning and a bad night's sleep. Nothing to worry about."

    A SMALL WHILE AGO...

Shortly after getting home that afternoon, Adrien lightly barricaded his door and transformed. Then, wearily, he'd begun spamming Ladybug's inbox with text messages.

Chat Noir: Hey partner!
Chat Noir: No mission posting today.
Chat Noir: An Akuma not feline up to causing trouble is really weird.
Chat Noir: So are the breaks between quests.
Chat Noir: We should talk.
Chat Noir: Meet me on top of the arc in a couple hours.
Chat Noir: Bring food!!! >:3


At least today he isn't wandering off unattended.

True to his invitation, Chat Noir has set up on the top of the Arc de Triomphe with some snacks, but it's complete garbage food. A couple of comically huge bags of chips, an assortment of loose individually wrapped candies that he probably just stuffed his pockets with out of a bowl (hopefully his own), and some bottled water.

The dumb alleycat himself is sprawled out on his back with his hands behind his head, not... quite napping, but definitely not entirely awake either. He has all the demeanor of a passenger on a long road trip that /could/ be asleep, but is conscious enough to hear what's going on and remembering it. Either way he looks incredibly comfortable.
Ladybug     EARLIER

Marinette Dupain-Cheng was late. Again. She had overslept, her phone-alarm not set up to handle the morning - or her, really - and had to skip breakfest. It was a low-pitched whine that had escaped her, like a wail. "I'm going to be late again! And I thought I set my alarm, but I didn't, and and and...!"

That goes on for a while. Her mother hands her a lunch, and she jams it - and some cookies, surrepticiously - into her bag.

School is awful, and after sneaking into class and then turning in their biology project for the day, she dozes off at her desk. Not even the beatific sight of Adrian's back can keep her eyes open all day.

    A SMALL WHILE AGO
Ladybug: Hey.
Ladybug: Ughhhhh.
Ladybug: When's a couple of hours?
Ladybug: Don't just slack off and nap, we're superheroes!

At least today there doesn't seem to be any Akuma, or Chat-running-off related activites.

Ladybug's arrival is not precisely presaged, but given away by the soft rustle of cheesecloth and wrapping paper gently rustling inside a box, and the soft slosh of liquid in a thermos. Her actual footfalls are ghostlike, as usual.

"Hey, alleycat. I brought lunch." Laybug smirks - well, smiles - as she sets down a large hatbox and peels off the lid. "I brought tea, juice, sandwiches... You sure found the sunniest spot in Paris to nap in, didn't you?"
Chat Noir "Impossible. The sunniest spots in Paris weren't here until just now, My Lady."

Chat Noir cracks an eye open when Ladybug talks, looking towards her and what she's carrying. Aw, that is way more than snacks, why'd she bring a meal plus extras. He should've been more specific. Or more generous in his selection, but he'd been in a hurry to bail out. He really can't afford to be out late again tonight. Brilliantly green inhuman eyes slide from Ladybug to the box itself.

A... hatbox? Why a hatbox?

She can /see/ the question boiling underneath the surface, his eyes flicking up from the box to meet hers for a moment. But for today, it doesn't seem like he's in the mood to do a lot of probing about personal matters. Come to think of it, he looks a little droopy.

"I owe you some better snacks than this next time, if this is what you're going to be bringing me." He remarks, drawing himself up into a sitting position. A moment of awkward silence passes, Chat Noir clears his throat and asks, "What do you think about this gate business?"
Ladybug Ladybug gives a light, amused sigh and a shake of her head, her ribbons and hair swishing in their bobs. "You really don't change, do you?" She wonders, setting down with her hatbox, and looking at the spread he had prepared. "Snacks? Chips? This is all junk food and candy. I thought you were a romantic, but maybe the alley suits you." She jokes easily, setting down on the lip and pulling out cheesecloth wrapped fresh sandwiches, the bread still warm. It's painfully fresh, and delicious even ignoring the sandwhich ingredients - she clearly got the bread right as it was coming out of the oven.

She looks back into his eyes, her own searching, though her posture fairly relaxed. A state of overall comfort, conversationally primed to retort. Instead of the expected words, she simply meets his gaze, and then watches his eyes...

"Oh! Hah, why the hatbox. Well, it was the box I had on hand that fit the sandwiches." She shrugs easily. "It's the stuff I had around."

On the subject of the gate, though, she glances down, below her swinging feet. "I don't know. It's not... like the other Akuma. Nobody is /doing/ anything, nobody's making any moves. If it /is/ an Akuma... Nobody and nothing has made an attempt at our Miraculous."
Chat Noir "I cat bring myself to do things halfway, My Lady. I am completely committed to fine wordplay, and you gave me purr-fect material." Chat Noir chimes in answer, but when he looks towards /his/ spread of terrible food he actually starts to feel a little self conscious about it. He's tired and didn't really think about it very much, but she /is/ right. If he'd wanted to make a grand impression he would've brought a lot more than these slim pickings.

Mostly, he'd been focused on grabbing some quick-and-easy finger foods.

Her explanation causes him to stare blankly towards the hatbox for a moment. What sort of person...?

Immediately, images of Chloe's room and her abundance of shoe and hatboxes swims into his imagination. Nope. Nope nope nope. Ladybug can't be that kind of person. Especially not with the kinds of foods she /had/ in there. On the other hand though, she's got bakery-fresh hot sandwiches in her hatbox.

He picks one up to confirm this, but doesn't eat it yet because he's assessing it. It is definitely too warm to be anything but perfectly fresh, and this makes his self-consciousness grow exponentially. This is a very odd thing to observe, because Chat Noir usually doesn't falter at /anything/. He looks towards Ladybug again, "Surely you didn't go /cook/ for me?"

"I sup-pawse," Chat Noir sighs, pausing to take a bite of the sandwich before he continues, "I will simply have to step up my snack game."

Having made a huge deal out of all of this incredibly minor stuff, the black-clad teenager moves on to the gate / akuma issue very casually. "What bugs me is that they were killing the wildlife and expected us to do the same. Sometimes something like that happens with akuma, but not usually. I tried to use my Cataclysm to get rid of the gate after you left the other night, and it didn't really do anything. Had to waste it on a traffic cone to safely get rid of it."
Ladybug Ladybug attends to Chat's words, slowly whisks her head back and forth. Simple wonderment at his dedication to the tropes, jokes... wordplay that Chat Noir engaged in. Was it some part of the... suit? His eyes were /so/ green. It always made her curious. She got some ribbons and a mask and a suit, he got ears and... eye color, and all sorts of things.

Some part of her wondered on and off if the suit changed her in some ways, herself. Were the catpuns and cat-traits part of the suit? Why didn't she get any Ladybug Traits?

"Cook? It's hardly cooking. I was near a bakery when you sent me messages, so I got some fresh bread and sandwiches. I was just lucky that it was fresh from the oven! So I piled some stuff in a box." She replies, like it was the simplest thing in the world.

"Don't you sup-purrs?" She ripostes, before getting out her own sandwich.

"It felt like a game world, didn't it? Like we were inside one of those em-em-ohs?"

"You even got a quest, and no Akuma has actually sent messages to your communicator before. This whole thing doesn't have a cohesive theme, though. Pidgeon, Stone Heart, Climatika... Even Bubbler had a theme."
Chat Noir "Lucky break." Chat Noir says, and lets the matter of the sandwiches drop. Of /course/ Ladybug would walk into a bakery and find herself buying only the most fresh sandwiches available. Nothing to it. It's a lot more simple fare than he usually has at this hour, but it's really kind of refreshing. Practically inhaling the rest of the sandwich, he pops his baton off of his back and glances at the time. Pleeeenty of time to go to supper. No risk destroying his apetite, he decides.

He waves with the baton, "If it had kept the superhero theme, it would at least still make sense. As it is, I think we've got to conclude that we're dealing with something else. Which means..." Chat gestures around into the surroundings with his baton, aimlessly.

Then, he sighs exaggeratedly.

"I've got nya idea what it means. But I think we need... a plan, or some rules for going out there. That's why I wanted to talk." Here, Chat Noir looks at Ladybug pointedly. She's the thinker who reels him in by the tail and throws him at a better plan, surely she can't expect he actually has /ideas/.

Eventually he starts staring, intently into Ladybug's eyes, waiting for her to start talking again. He can't read minds, but Chat Noir suspects that she's going to lay down a ground rule that he can predict, so he /tries/ to predict it. The instant he sees her starting to speak he tries to sync up, "No going through the gate alone?"
Ladybug At 'lucky break', Ladybug laughs. This one, more than the rest, is crisp, alive, more than demure or merely amused, but genuinely 'you don't know how funny that is' bright laughter. Her whole face lights up. If only he knew that this was the sort of thing Marinette ate every day.

He didn't, of course.

"Before I got my powers, I would have never believed it, but... Well, we're proof that magic is real, aren't we? With that in mind, do you think it's... Alternate universes? It didn't /seem/ like Paris... Differnet places? A portal?"

She takes a moment to scarf down her sandwich, her own words muffled by bread and toppings. "No going thro-" The synch is perfect.

She laughs again. "Ok, you were /waiting/ for that one." She pushes a finger to doop him on the nose and push away. "Also, I was thinking on making sure we didn't... use our powers unless it was absolutely necessary. If we de-transform somewhere weird, we may not get a chance to transform back. I'm trying to think of others, but... ... Maybe our Kwami will have some advice, later?"

No they won't, they're useless.
Chat Noir Chat Noir doesn't know exactly what he's done right here that he hasn't done every other instance they've communicated with each other in any way whatsoever, but one look at him would tell the least perceptive person on the planet that he's pleased at Ladybug's reaction. Of course, he's /usually/ inordinately pleased with himself, in the manner that is a cat is wont to be, but it's a sharper difference than normal because of his previous droopiness.

There's not much time to dwell on it.

Spinning his baton idly in his hand, he answers, "None of those places has been even a little like Paris. Maybe the place with all of the capes from Caturday, but the whole place was really over the top. The city itself was indistinct, except for the parts with weird stuff like aliens."

He finds himself getting boop-pushed, and just kind of rolls with it, flopping over onto his side and propping himself up with one arm. By the time he successfully syncs up with her, Chat Noir is positively beaming.

"Well My Lady," He answers, "I think those are purrfectly reasonable rules, and I'll try to follow the first one better than I have been. The second works for me too, I don't want to get caught powerless in a place I'm not even sure is real or... whatever it is."

"My Kwami begs, steals, unravels my toilet paper all over my room, and lives in a trash bin by choice." Chat explains, looking quizzically at Ladybug. "I don't think he's really an advice kind of guy."

"We should probably take something to cover up with if we end up detransforming on the other side of the gate and need the other's help," He suggests, rolling a hand in Ladybug's direction, "like a white sheet or something, so we can take care of each other without blowing our identities wide open."
Ladybug Ladybug watches Chat, even as her laughter slows, seeming... Well, it's familiar. Friendly. Off-duty, like this, with nobody around, its easier for her to 'let down her hair' and not focus on the mission, the goals, the greater good of Paris. It's just... them.

"Caturday? What's next, Mewsday?" She teases lightly, before hearing the exploits of Plagg. "Really? You're... not..." Chat looks totally serious. Well, for him. "Mine is nice and helpful and supports me, though she does keep telling me to do stuff. Did you know, when I first met her, I thought she... well, I didn't know what she was, but I tried to stick her in a glass, upended."

Ladybug grins. "Then she just sort of phased through it when I started running away. They're... mysterious."

Chat's amazing plan, however, gets a squint. "You know, it's not a totally awful idea, but if its really different worlds we're going to, wouldn't people have magic powers like... seeing through a sheet? I may have an idea, but I thin we should just be careful for now. Closets and stuff have worked for now, thankfully."
Chat Noir Chat Noir doesn't seem to understand the difference between this and their other encounters. This is because he turns his brain off, and can't connect the fact that they're /on-duty/ at other times with the fact that they're /off-duty/ right now. This is the disadvantage of being a dumb tomcat in your superhero identity, but it doesn't matter much because he's enjoying this too much right now. He waves his free hand in a faux-dismissive way, "Don't purre-empt me, I'll get around to it eventually."

He wouldn't have, he hadn't thought about Mewsday yet.

The big ol' kitty grin fades briefly from his face when Ladybug explains her relationship with her kwami. Might be he feels a little bad putting Plagg down that way. Sitting up again, he raises both hands defensively and clarifies, "My kwami and I get along fine, but he's a cat-ghost and he does cat-ghost things."

Just like Chat Noir. At least he gets to experience it himself every now and again. Re-positioning himself, he sprawls out again so that he rests his head near where Ladybug is sitting and can look up at her comfortably without adjusting himself at all.

"I transformed immediately, ran off on a joyride with my baton, and ended up dangling upside down with you, 'Maladroit'." One of his knees rises, and he crosses his other leg over it, beginning to bob his foot to no particular rhythm. "Best day of all nine of my lives."

The black-clad teenager snorts a little, shaking his head ever-so-slightly. "My Lady, I can't imagine you freaking out about a ghost-ladybug. You're just too amazing for that. And if we're talking magic, I don't think claw-sets count for much more than sheets, but if you think we should just play it safe and wing it I'll go along with it.
Ladybug Ladybug's eyes narrow into a playful 'oh really?' look, one masked brow quirking with a sly smile. "Well, if you say so." A paws, as she watches him retrace some of the sort-of-insults he had laid upon his guardian spirit, nodding slowly. "Well, that makes sense. Does he also knock stuff of of shelves? I guess I got a little bit of the better deal... But still, tiny guardian spirits that live in magic items that give a costume and superpowers! It was so much to take in."

An embarrased flush takes her, but Chat is sprawling out again. "Oh, please, don't remind me!" She sighs, still overall amused. Her first response, and Chat just accepting, still made her laugh. "Miss Maladroit would have been an /awful/ hero name. Maybe if we had the other's costume. Still. I thought it was pretty scary - but we had a responsibility, to make sure Paris was safe."

"Claw-sets? Wing it? Are you branching into bug puns now? Is there no territory that's mine?" She wonders, fluffing his hair playfully with her fingers. God, his hair was perfect. Like a model's. Hers felt plain by comparison.
Chat Noir "A little," Chat Noir says, pinching two fingers together in the air to demonstrate exactly how little, "he likes napping and eating, so he only messes with stuff if he wants something or gets really bored. I'll probably get a bit of that when I go home since I've been rude to him, and bribe him with some nice food as apologies. Without him, my life would be..."

But she doesn't get to find out what his life would be like without Plagg, because she carries on flushing and laughing and why is she reaching towards me.

It is here where Chat Noir's confusion is abruptly and jarringly maximized from multiple directions. This is not how Ladybug acts around him normally, and mere moments before she'd booped him into a little more distance. His expression transitions rapidly from a dumb grin, to a vague sort of empty-headed (even for him, yes) contentedness, and then finally...

Pressing his lips into a thin line with the briefest flicker of his right eye twitching a quarter of the way closed involuntarily, Chat Noir sits upright. The pupils of those big, green kitty eyes are ballooning out in the manner that cat's eyes are wont to do, miniscule black holes filling most of the color of his eyes with their darkness.

"Chat Noir needs to go home now." He declares, before taking a flying leap off of the Arc de Triomphe, all of the junk food he brought completely forgotten.

    ABOUT HALF AN HOUR LATER, AT AGRESTE MANOR...

"Plagg..." A very flustered Adrien Agreste glares down at the spritely cat floating in front of him.

"It's not /my/ fault," Plagg replies, mouth half-full of a great hunk of cheese, "that you never bother to read the instruction manual."

With a long-suffering sigh, Adrien plucks another segment of the wheel out of its box and flicks it lazily at Plagg, before falling dramatically forward and burying himself face-first in his couch.
Ladybug Marinette - Ladybug - had begun to enjoy, or at least warm up to just a bit, the back and forth with Chat Noir. Especially since there was no Akuma in sight, Paris wasn't on fire, and they had junk food and sandwiches. It was...

It was like they were hanging out. He wasn't some beautiful boy in... surprisingly tight leather, he was her partner. Something just felt right about him. Chat Noir and Ladybug were a team, or so Tikki said, so it was only natural for them to pal around some... Right?

All of this, though, made her confused, and a little worried. He was so forward, and as she tried to relax into that, return the favor, he became... agitated? She was so confused.

Did she do something wrong?

As if she was dealing with a live bomb as a defusal expert, she carefully gathered up all the litter and junkfood in her hatbox, turning to see if Chat was coming back. He was, of course... not.

    LATER, AT THE DUPAIN BAKERY

Marinette groans face-down at her bed, as Tikki frets over her. "What did I do wrong? Was it something I said? Does he hate me now? I just... tried to be friendly! We're supposed to be partners, it was a good time to get to know each other..."

Unhelpfully, Tikki taps together her little hand-thingies. "Maybe it wasn't you! Believe in yourself! Chat Noir and Ladybug are partners - things will be fine!"

"Yeah, Tikki, but what if they aren't fine? What if I ruined the super destiny thing forever by being an idiot?!"

Tikki continues to fret over the awful ravages of Teenage Hormones and Self Doubt. It's OK. It's not like she was PARIS'S ONLY HOPE.