Puppet Master floated in the air, tilting her head as she looked down at her transformed hands, her new silhouette, the faint threads trailing from her fingertips like silk in a breeze.
"Hehehe..."
The laugh that escaped her was small and bell-like, and somehow hollow — the laugh of a child who had gotten exactly what she wanted and wasn't sure yet what to do with it.
*This* was what a real princess looked like.
She was certain of that.
But a princess without her prince was only half a fairy tale.
Her gaze drifted upward. Pigeons and sparrows cut lazy arcs across the pale sky, free and unhurried and completely unaware of her.
A thought formed.
She raised one finger and tugged — just slightly, just once — at the invisible threads extending from her hand.
*Go. Find my prince.*
The nearest pigeon lurched mid-glide as though something had seized it by the spine. Its eyes, bright a moment ago, went flat and glassy. It wheeled in a tight, mechanical circle — and then another pigeon stiffened, and another, and another, until hundreds of birds moved in perfect, eerie unison across the rooftops of the 13th arrondissement, their wings beating in the same rhythm, their hollow eyes scanning every street and alley below.
A living surveillance net, stitched together from feathers and stolen will.
Satisfied, Puppet Master descended to street level.
She walked unhurriedly out of the quiet residential lane and onto a busier street, her tutu drifting around her like dark smoke. A young man on a bicycle came rolling past, humming something cheerful under his breath.
She didn't spare him a glance. One finger, one thread — silent as a thought.
The humming cut off. The smile froze. His eyes went the same dull, vacant grey as the birds overhead. He dismounted his bicycle, turned stiffly, and fell into step behind her without a word.
After that it happened quickly, almost casually. A woman walking a poodle. An elderly man balancing a baguette under one arm. A couple mid-argument, their voices rising — cut short in the same instant, as if someone had pressed mute. Every person who wandered within range of Puppet Master's trailing threads stopped, stiffened, and turned.
None of them spoke. None of them struggled. They simply followed, in growing numbers, their faces wearing that identical empty smile — a procession of beautiful, lifeless dolls stretching back down the street behind their master.
It didn't take long for the cameras to arrive.
Parisians, seasoned by now in the particular art of Akumatized Person survival, had already begun filming from a safe distance before the news vans even screeched around the corner. A telephoto lens tracked the expanding crowd of puppet-citizens from behind a garden wall. Someone's phone livestream, shaky but determined, caught the moment a controlled police officer turned around and walked calmly in the wrong direction.
Nadja Chamack climbed out of the news van with the expression she reserved for category-five situations — professional composure stretched thin over very genuine fear — and positioned herself in front of the camera with her back to the growing procession.
"Viewers, we are currently in the 13th arrondissement, where an Akumatized Person has appeared without warning." Her voice was steady. Her hands were not. "She appears to possess the ability to override the will of others and is actively expanding her sphere of control. Her motive remains unclear, but citizens are urged to—"
She stopped.
Her eyes had found Puppet Master's.
Puppet Master was looking directly at the camera lens.
A single thread leapt from her fingertip.
Nadja's body went rigid. The careful professionalism drained from her face in an instant, replaced by the same sweet, unfocused smile all the others wore. Beside her, the cameraman took one instinctive step forward — and found that his legs had stopped belonging to him.
The controlled Nadja raised the microphone to her lips. When she spoke again, her voice had taken on a singsong quality that had nothing to do with news reporting.
"My prince... come find your princess." A pause. A smile that didn't reach her eyes. "The princess is waiting for you."
She reached out and, still smiling, severed the broadcast signal.
The screen went dark.
---
Inside the Agreste Mansion, Adrien and Alternate Adrien were seated side by side on the wide living room sofa, surrounded by the particular kind of silence that settles between two people who share a face and very little else.
Alternate Adrien was the one who broke it.
"Don't you think Ladybug has been acting a bit... strange lately?" He looked sideways at Adrien, something uncertain in his expression.
"Strange?" Adrien shrugged. "Isn't she always a little unpredictable?"
"I mean beyond the usual. She's not responding to anything. Even when I try to joke around, she just..." Alternate Adrien trailed off, searching for the right word. "She looks at me like I'm a colleague."
"Aren't you?"
"You know what I mean."
Adrien said nothing. He kept his expression neutral and his gaze fixed forward, which required more effort than it should have. A faint bitterness settled somewhere in the back of his chest — a feeling he'd had enough practice with to recognize and ignore. He changed the subject before it could develop into anything worse.
"Speaking of the past few days — how did the perfume commercial shoot go? I haven't seen the final cut yet."
The transformation on Alternate Adrien's face was immediate and catastrophic. All expression collapsed. He slid several inches down the sofa cushion as though gravity had personally decided to make an example of him.
"How did it go," he repeated flatly.
"That bad?"
"I'll say this: your father's creative team has genuinely broken new ground in advertising." He stared at the ceiling. "I just wish I hadn't been the one standing in front of the camera when they did it."
Intrigued — and somewhat alarmed — Adrien reached for the tablet on the coffee table. Nathalie had sent over the sample footage that morning. He hadn't opened it yet.
He opened it now.
Soft, dreamy music floated out of the speakers. The footage opened on Alternate Adrien — white casual outfit, morning light, the Paris rooftops stretching gold and hazy behind him — jogging with the kind of effortless grace that looked like it had been choreographed by someone who'd never actually jogged. The camera caught his profile in a close-up so precisely lit it belonged in a gallery. He turned, smiled — a wide, luminous, slightly implausible smile — and made a small leaping motion over some unseen obstacle.
A voice, low and warm and rich as velvet, began to speak.
*"Radiant... Dreamlike..."*
*"Adrien... your next fragrance."*
The image held on the smile. Then faded.
Neither of them said anything for a long moment.
Alternate Adrien turned his head slowly and looked at Adrien with the expression of a man who has just witnessed his own trial and found the verdict guilty on all counts.
Adrien pressed two fingers to his forehead. "You smiled like that on purpose?"
"I did what the director told me to do!" Alternate Adrien sat up, gesturing with great urgency. "Run naturally. Jump naturally. Smile naturally. I had no idea they were going to edit it into — *that.*"
"You look like you're about to float away."
"I *know.*"
Adrien could already hear it. The cafeteria. Kim's voice. *Dreamlike... Adrien, your next fragrance...* He was fairly certain it would follow him for at least a semester, possibly longer if the commercial ran internationally.
He was still constructing his mental model of future social suffering when the tablet screen was interrupted by a red emergency alert banner pushing up from the bottom of the display.
He sat up straighter. Alternate Adrien leaned over.
The alert, assembled from dozens of citizen videos and social media clips following the abrupt end of Nadja's broadcast, was concise: an Akumatized Person identifying herself as "Puppet Master" was moving through the 13th arrondissement. She appeared capable of seizing control of both people and animals. She was reportedly searching for a "prince." Authorities were advising all citizens to shelter in place immediately.
Alternate Adrien stared at the footage of the controlled crowds — their stiff postures, their blank smiles — and the lines of his face went tight with reluctant professional assessment. "The control looks total. No resistance at all once the thread connects."
Then he exhaled, deeply and deliberately, and dropped backward onto the sofa in a full horizontal sprawl, arms and legs extended. The posture of a man who has made a decision and is fully at peace with it.
"I'm not going."
Adrien blinked. "What?"
"I am *exhausted,*" Alternate Adrien announced to the ceiling. "Three days of your father's filming schedule. I have muscle groups I didn't know existed and now they all hurt simultaneously." He draped one arm over his eyes. "And Ladybug won't even banter with me. I'll just be in the way. Let me have this one."
Adrien looked at him — the dramatic sprawl, the arm over the eyes — and found he didn't have the heart to argue with someone who genuinely looked like they needed a week of sleep.
"Fine." He stood. "Stay. Rest."
He turned toward the corner of the room. "Plagg — we have an emergency."
The corner of the room immediately erupted.
From behind an ornate display cabinet came the sounds of fierce scuffling, high-pitched accusations, and what appeared to be a small cheese avalanche. Plagg and Alternate Plagg had each other by the ears, spinning in midair with the intensity of two creatures who had been storing this grievance for days and had finally found the moment to unleash it.
"You *thief!*" Plagg's voice had gone shrill. "You absolute shameless cheese thief! I let the camembert go — I said nothing about the brie, nothing about the aged gouda — but my *Roquefort?* My specially aged, weeks-in-the-making, *perfect* Roquefort?"
"Can you blame me?" Alternate Plagg shot back, not releasing so much as a millimeter of grip. "That smell! That deeply aged, magnificently pungent smell — what was I supposed to do, *ignore* it? Besides, if anything, you should be thanking me. It was getting dangerously ripe."
"*Thanking you—*"
"Plagg."
No response. The brawl intensified.
"*Plagg.*"
"One moment, Adrien, I am in the middle of something *important—*"
There was no more time for this. Adrien raised his ring and spoke clearly: "Plagg, transform me."
"What — wait — I'm not finished — we had a *whole thing* going—"
The ring flared. Plagg let out a noise of profound injustice as the transformation pulled him in mid-grapple, still reaching for Alternate Plagg's ears.
"I'll settle this when I get back!" he announced, with great dignity, to no one in particular, before vanishing entirely.
The transformation swept through the room — light, movement, the familiar crackle of magic reorganizing itself — and Cat Noir stood where Adrien had been. He cast one last look at Alternate Adrien, who had not moved a single inch from his horizontal sprawl and showed no signs of doing so.
Then he turned, crossed the room in three strides, and vaulted through the window into the open air.
---
Alternate Adrien waited until the black figure had fully disappeared between the rooftops.
Then he sat up.
All the exhausted looseness left his posture the moment he was alone. He looked across the room at Alternate Plagg, who was drifting out from behind the cabinet with a distinctly self-satisfied expression and a small fragment of aged cheese still tucked under one arm.
"These past few days," Alternate Adrien said quietly. "What did you actually find?"
Alternate Plagg considered this with the air of someone preparing to deliver a great revelation. "The version of me in this world," it began, "has amassed a cheese collection of truly historic proportions. Varieties I've never encountered. Aging techniques that suggest genuine dedication. There was one — I believe it was labeled something like 'Époisses, Cave-Aged' — the smell alone nearly made me—"
"Stop."
Alternate Plagg blinked.
"I'm not asking about cheese." Alternate Adrien's voice was patient but precise. "I'm asking what you noticed about *him.* About what he's keeping from me."
"Keeping from you?"
"He lied." Alternate Adrien stood and moved to the desk in the corner — Adrien's desk, in Adrien's room, which he had been quietly, methodically studying for three days. "He told me his relationship with Ladybug is close. That they have real chemistry, real understanding. But I've watched them. I've seen the footage. She treats him like a colleague she respects but has no particular feelings for." He settled into the chair. "There's distance there. Deliberate distance. He knew that, and he told me otherwise."
"Maybe he was just optimistic," Alternate Plagg offered.
"People don't hide optimism." He turned on the computer, typed the password from memory — not Adrien's password, he didn't know that one, but he'd watched long enough to observe the keystrokes — and began navigating through the file structure with calm efficiency. "He hid something specific. And whatever it is, it scared him enough that he chose to lie to *himself* about it rather than explain it."
He moved through three layers of nested folders, each one labeled with the kind of deliberately boring names — *Academic Resources, Supplementary Notes, Reference Documents* — designed to attract no attention whatsoever.
At the center of the last folder was a single encrypted file.
The filename was one word: *Wood.*
Alternate Plagg drifted over his shoulder and peered at the password input box blinking patiently on the screen. "You can't open it."
"I know. I've tried everything I can think of. Birthdates, significant names, obvious combinations." He leaned back in the chair, looking at the filename. "Nothing."
"So you're stuck."
"No." A corner of his mouth curved slightly. "I know someone who isn't."
He turned away from the screen.
"The most competent person in this household — the one who has managed every aspect of this family for years, who is loyal to the point of instinct, and who, critically, has every reason to want to understand what Adrien might be keeping hidden." He paused. "And who will handle whatever she finds with absolute discretion."
Alternate Plagg looked at him for a long moment.
"Nathalie," it said flatly.
"Nathalie."
Alternate Plagg let out a long, cheese-scented sigh. "I hope you know what you're doing."
Alternate Adrien was already standing, straightening his jacket, his expression composed and certain.
"I know myself," he said simply. "And that's enough to start."