Fanfic / Miraculous Escalation

"When Skitter is tossed into another world in the aftermath of the battle with Noelle, how will she get back. And how will the light and fluffy world of Miraculous Ladybug deal with Warlord Skitter? the world—and innocent bystanders, want to know."

— Spacebattles summary.

Miraculous Escalation is a Miraculous Ladybug/Worm crossover written by cg99.

Skitter gets tossed into an alternate world's Paris due to the effects of a Tinker-tech bomb and almost immediately gets mistaken for an akuma by local heroes Ladybug and Chat Noir. She stakes out on her own to find out what this strange place is and how to get home, and the Miraculous heroes must stop her from doing too much damage in the process and attempt to reconcile their differences.

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Miraculous Escalation provides examples of:

• Abomination Accusation Attack: Ladybug attempts to compare Skitter's scare tactics in their universe to the Simurgh's tactics in hers. This later prompts Chloé to give Ladybug a What the Hell, Hero? speech.
• Adaptational Badass: The miraculous holders' (and akumas') Rule of Cool powers are preserved in the Worm-style setting as real powers, making them upper-level threats when compared to parahumans. Taylor has a hard time during akuma fights due to her inability to keep up with the speed of the battle and the fact that, compared to everyone else, she's a One-Hit-Point Wonder. The author has stated that Ryuko's power level, in particular, nears that of Legend.
• Adaptational Heroism:
  • Skitter starts considering less confrontational methods of dealing with authority once it is explained to her that the Miraculous universe runs on a more trusting system, especially since her usual tactics make her a potential source and therefore target of akumatized villains she can't handle by herself. This winds up bleeding into her actions when she returns to her own universe.
  • Chloé remains a hero, implicitly because visiting Earth-Bet put her various issues into context. She even refrains from using the full extent of her power during the final battle with Scion, precisely because she realizes how susceptible she is to letting said power go to her head.
  • Unlike in canon, Hawkmoth proves that he cares more about his wife and son than he does besting Ladybug and Cat Noir, and willingly relinquishes the Butterfly Miraculous to give Taylor the power to save Adrien.
• Adaptational Intelligence: Most major players in the Wormverse are given upgrades in competence. Director Tagg in particular proves his usefulness, at least once he's convinced not to escalate with Skitter the way he did in canon.
• Aloof Big Brother: Of all the conceptual beings to gain a Kwami avatar, the only one not to do so was the eldest of them. While most see them as their eldest sibling, and Plagg enjoys blaming them when he accidentally destroys anything, Tikki has nothing but disdain for them. The concept in question? Destiny.
• Anthropomorphic Personification: The Kwami are revealed to be the avatars of living concepts. While their true forms are all-powerful and all-knowing, they wanted to create limited versions of themselves in order to be able to make limited changes. Plagg learned this the hard way.
  • Tikki is the embodiment of creation.
  • Plagg is the embodiment of destruction.
  • Trixx is the embodiment of illusion and stories.
  • Lonng is the embodiment of civilization and good governance.
  • Pollen is the embodiment of domination and subjugation.
• Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking: Subverted. During the meeting with Quinn Calle where he lists Taylor's numerous charges by the PRT, Ladybug asks at the end if she also double-parked, finding the possibility of this trope very amusing. Taylor just says no, because she doesn't have a driver's license.
• Ascended Extra: Kagami, and by extension Longg since she continues to use the Dragon Miraculous, joins the Season 2 main cast as an equal member of the team. The other Season 3 heroes aren't even mentioned, with only a few sparse references to their civilian forms and not in relation to their use of a miraculous.
• Attack Hello: Skitter's introduction to the Miraculous world is getting accused of being an akuma and attacked on sight by Ladybug and Chat Noir. Naturally, she fights back with her full power, nearly killing Ladybug in the process. This gets them off on the wrong foot for a decent portion of Taylor's stay until they sort it out.
• Badass Boast: Ladybug gives one to Legend, Chevalier, Tattletale, and a crowd of Capes when Hawkmoth accidentally sets Echidna loose in Paris:
  Chevalier: Who is in charge here?
  Ladybug: I am.
  Chevalier: You— You look—
  Ladybug: I’m the person who has been defending this city for the last two years. I’m the person who is watching my people get killed, and I am the person who you are going to tell how we are going to stop this monster!
• Beat: Calle pauses for a moment when Ladybug casually mentions that Chat Noir is going to be breaking Gray Boy loops in response to where their funding will come from.^note There are thousands of Gray Boy victims, and each bubble popped with a person in it has a $10,000 payout from the PRT.
• Be Careful What You Wish For: As Tikki and Plagg state. Wishes are granted with their true power as incarnations of creation and destruction. Because of their grand scale, the smaller and more personal a wish is, the harder it is for them to grant it without generating Butterflies Of Doom. Their power is so strong that even the last wish they granted, to re-write history so that World War III never came to be, has consequences still in motion decades later. Adrien compares it to fishing with dynamite. Explaining this to Hawkmoth is part of the reason he is willing to listen to the heroes' alternatives.
  • Mama Mathers spends the entirety of Arc 15 trying to get Ladybug to come to her. Once the heroine actually shows up, she only waits to ascertain that the Fallen won't surrender before killing Mathers, while calling for an air strike.
• Berserk Button: Skitter threatening to harm a child to coerce his crime lord father (resulting in the kid's akumatization) does not sit well with Ladybug. She even notes that she almost never gets that angry. Her first reaction when confronting Taylor afterward is to punch her in the face.
  Taylor: You didn't telegraph that at all.
• Beware the Nice Ones: Tikki. Sweet, kind Tikki. She utterly breaks Mama Mathers in the moments before the villain's death.
  • Her Chosen is exactly the same as she was the one to kill Mama Mathers in a particularly painful way.
• Big Damn Heroes: Several times during the Fallen arc:
  • Khepri's Champion for the Brockton Bay Hospital and the PRT troops defending it.
  • Defiant, Chat Noir and Queen Bee for the forces fighting the Butcher.
  • Former Grey Boy loop victims for various heroes all over the town.
  • And lastly, Khepri herself for Arcadia High.
• Bilingual Bonus: The transportation set up by the Mayor for Skitter to use to get to akuma fights is a Vespa; Vespa is Italian for wasp. Since Queen Bee has the theming already and they're in France and not Italy, it might be a shout-out to her use of one in Cenotaph.
• Blue-and-Orange Morality: The alien nature of the entities is put on full display when Scion discovers the Ladybug Miraculous. In the exploitation of the Miraculous, the entity sees a future without a need for the cycles. More than that, it sees a future without the need for experimentation, or even learning. Nothing but endless reproduction and growth.
• Bring My Brown Pants: When the child that Skitter gets akumatized is de-evilized, he's so scared of her that he loses control of his bladder. Even a passing butterfly gives him a screaming fit.
• Comes Great Responsibility: An interesting variant. In the final battle against Scion, Chloé refuses to use the deepest powers of Pollen (which would have made her a Hive Queen capable of uniting the entire defending force under her control) because she didn't trust herself to use such power without being corrupted by it.
• Crouching Moron, Hidden Badass: What Taylor believes Mr. Pigeon might be, because of how often he gets akumatized despite being so ineffective.
  Skitter: Maybe he just likes birds, but on the other hand, don’t lower your guard. Hawkmoth could be waiting to show a side of Mr. Pigeon you’ve never seen before.
  Chat Noir: That’s what I like about you. No matter the conversation, you always find a way things can be worse.
• Curb-Stomp Battle: The minor villain Bloodspear exists mostly to get outwitted by Accord and then thoroughly trounced by Ryuko.
• Darker and Edgier: When Taylor and the Wormverse are involved, this is inevitable. However, this depiction of the Miraculous setting has elements of this on its own. The miraculous holders take their protection duties more seriously, such as holding akuma scrimmages, and Paris is shown to have a criminal underworld that Hawkmoth has connections in. Additionally, Taylor brings up a very valid concern about the damage their enforced secret identities can and do cause in their civilian lives because they can't be credited for the time and effort spent as Paris' heroes that disrupts their short- and long-term plans.
  • Also, the Miraculous characters have no problem swearing.
• Demographic-Dissonant Crossover: Miraculous Ladybug is a Magical Girl show aimed toward kids while Worm is an extremely dark Deconstruction of the Cape Punk setting aimed toward adults and older teens. Much of the story shows how the mixing of these two leads to a grayer morality for both sides.
• Determinator: During the city-wide battle against the Fallen, Rena Rouge keeps playing her flute to block Mama Mathers' power even as she bleeds out of her ears, eyes, mouth, and nose, and her fingers can barely move because of the second degree burns she's suffering.
• Dude, Not Funny!: In-Universe, Ladybug's furious insinuation that the fear Skitter instills makes her similar to Simurgh Bombs (in that Hawkmoth can easily target these afraid people in the future) is treated as this, with everyone else asking her What the Hell, Hero? at how massively insensitive this is.
  “The Simurgh appears to be a powerful pre-cog. Not only are those exposed to her scream turned into Simurgh bombs, they often appear, even if by coincidence, in places where they can do the most damage, such as the Tinker formerly known as Sphere, now widely known as Mannequin of the Slaughterhouse Nine. For this reason, heroes fighting the Simurgh are required to wear trackers with suicide charges in them, and cities are quarantined if they are exposed for too long.” She looked up at Ladybug, then went back to reading. “However, the high number of suicides and other mental issues among quarantine zone troops opens the question: are they part of a Simurgh plot?” Chloé tossed the papers down. “I don’t know if they’re right, but you sort of told a Jewish person that you bet they were onboard with Team Nazi.”
• Dropped a Bridge on Him: All of the Slaughterhouse Nine except Bonesaw.
• Emergency Transformation: Unable to restore Emilie in any other way, Cauldron decides to give her a high-end vial in the hopes that the regenerative effects of a vial trigger will counteract the damage from the Peacock. With Marinette using the Miraculous cure in conjunction, it works.
• Entropy and Chaos Magic: Plagg's power is said to be this.
• Even Evil Has Standards:
  • Not that Hawkmoth sees his actions as evil, but part of that is because he deliberately chooses "jilted teens, depressed bird enthusiasts, and others" who aren't so intentionally inflicting real harm that they might cause damage the miraculous cure wouldn't be able to fix. Plus, they're less likely to turn on him.
  • He is genuinely insulted and angered when Skitter asks him if he wants to use the Wish to bring back the Third Reich.
  • Overlapping with My God, What Have I Done?, Hawkmoth's absolutely horrified to realize that he's been repeatedly endangering his own son due to the latter being Chat Noir.
• Evil Is Petty: Valefor more or less gives a teenage girl anorexia for selling t-shirts commemorating Leviathan's defeat.
• Evil Only Has to Win Once: Taylor brings up the fact that Hawkmoth can keep trying and will continue to disrupt Paris until he gets lucky.
• Exact Words: Ladybug promises to meet Mama Mathers in person and then reveal her civilian persona. That didn't preclude her from covering herself in cloth head-to-toes before costuming up so Mama couldn't use her power on her when she did as she was asked.
• Fanon Discontinuity: The author's extreme disappointment with the Miraculous season three finale led to him denouncing the whole season from the setting, after a five-month hiatus debating to cancel the fic.
• Fate Worse than Death: While Mama Mathers still dies, Tikki makes sure to show her how utterly insignificant she and her "gods" are in the greater scheme of things. The woman is completely broken before she expires.
  • How many people in the PRT view Gray Boy victims. Their reasoning is that even if they die after being released, it'll at least be an end.
• Five-Second Foreshadowing: At the Arcadia fight, Nino begins to hear a loud buzzing - and turns to see a veritable cloud of insects, marking Skitter's entrance into the battle.
• Flat "What": Skitter's reaction to learning that the police in Paris aren't allowed to investigate akuma attacks.
• Glamour: All Miraculous holders have one that protects their identities and can only be broken by undeniable proof such as seeing the transformation. Since this isn't true of Skitter, who is completely undocumented in the Miraculous universe as Taylor, she eventually gets tracked down by Hawkmoth using mundane means.
• The Gloves Come Off: The Fallen's all-out attack on Brockton Bay earns every member of the faction - powered and unpowered alike - a kill order, allowing the defenders in the city to fight back with full force and resulting in the obliteration of not only the members taking part in the attack but in every single stronghold the authorities can locate worldwide.
• Godzilla Threshold:
  • Skitter's intervention causes Hawkmoth to consider negotiating in person with Ladybug and Chat Noir rather than sending out Akumas.
  • Echidna's rampage through Paris drives Chat Noir to use his power on a living person. Adrien is understandably broken up having to do so.
  • Later, when Gold Morning begins, Taylor reaches two at once: She resorts to using an akuma, rather than calling a Champion, and she uses it on the Simurgh, as a means of controlling all of the other Endbringers. That's technically twenty-one Godzillas responding to the threshold.
  • Notably Defied by Chloé, who even at the moment of uttermost need refuses to call on the deeper power of Pollen (which would have made her a Hive Queen capable of uniting the entire defending force under her control) because she doesn't trust herself to use that power without being corrupted by it.
• Gone Horribly Right: Skitter attempts to get home as quickly as possible with Hawkmoth's help. Cue Echidna rampaging through the streets of Paris as her portal opens up to a point in time right after she left.
• Good Counterpart: Nooroo convinces Taylor to use Champions instead of evilizing with akumas. The powers given are the same, and most of them directly parallel an akuma used in canon Miraculous:
  • Knight of the Unbroken City matches Darkblade, an akuma Taylor makes note of in her early research;
  • Trumpeter/Rescue is stated to be The Bubbler;
  • An unnamed Champion during Gold Morning has a power much like The Evillustrator;
  • Stoneheart, Stormy Weather, and Catalyst all simply use the same names.
• Gratuitous Japanese: Ryuko speaks Japanese while insulting the Asian villains from Worm.
• Happily Adopted: Missy moves in with Danny and Taylor at Kagami's insistence, and it turns out pretty okay.
• Heel Realization:
  • Hawkmoth ends up having one when Chat Noir accuses him of kidnapping his mother Emilie Agreste as this unintentionally tells Hawkmoth that one of his worst enemies is his own son.
  • Seeing the general state of Earth-Bet causes Chloé to realize how petty her issues are compared to everyone else's.
  • Similarly, the vision Taylor experiences when connecting to her first Champion really puts the Locker situation into perspective on the trauma scale.
• Heroic BSoD:
  • After killing Echidna/Noelle, Adrien has one and Plagg tries to help him through it.
    Plagg:You spared her worse pain, you spared others pain. And I know it hurts, because someone who doesn’t care is the last person who should wield me. You care, you hurt, but you’re still one of the best to ever bear my ring.
  • Chloé is brought along when Chat Noir starts popping Grey Boy bubbles mostly to stop it from happening again. She has trouble not having one of her own, which is where the PRT-mandated psychologist OC Marcie comes in to watch out for both of them.
• Hope Bringer: Chat Noir becomes one once it is realized that he can destroy Grey Boy's bubbles, saving thousands of people and ending the suffering of not only them but all their loved ones. Rena Rouge gains a more... fervent following after countering Mama Mathers' power and inspiring all of Brockton Bay with Mirage.
  • Doubled down on after he Cataclysms Khonsu, one-shotting an Endbringer and stopping a rampage that had gone from one end of the world to the other.
• If I Do Not Return: Hawkmoth, of all people, attempts this after giving Taylor the Butterfly Miraculous. Taylor, however, tells him to shove it, and that he will have this conversation with his son after they get through this.
  • Marinette writes a note to Kagami, telling her to recover Tikki and the earrings if she dies and return them to Master Fu, which she leaves with Imp before going to confront Mama Mathers.
• Innocence Lost: The entire Miraculous team has this after being sent to Earth Bet, with Adrien in particular taking things hard due to having to use his powers to kill Echidna to stop her rampage.
• Innocent Inaccurate: Fairy Princess holds onto the promise that her parents will return after disappearing during Leviathan, and no one has the heart to tell her otherwise. She does come to terms with it by the end, though.
• Irony:
  • Mama Mathers, a Master worshipping the Simurgh, is completely thwarted by Rena Rouge, a hero using flute songs that fill everyone with hope. Something which was mercilessly lampshaded by readers.
  • When Team Ladybug unmasks in front of each other after defeating Echidna, Marinette finally finds out that Chat Noir is Adrien. Her own thoughts lampshade how it took getting stranded in another world to learn that Adrien likes her the same way she likes him.
• The Last Dance: A dying pastor gets empowered by Khepri to become the Knight of the Unbroken City, enabling him to fight the Fallen and the Teeth on his last day of life.
• Lighter and Softer: This is to be expected when much of the setting is in the Miraculous universe. However, it remains even after returning to Earth Bet. Part of this is because of adaptational competence upgrades of many of Worm's major players. Another part is because the hopeful miraculous wielders are there to reach more peaceful solutions. The rest is because most of the darkest elements in Worm were eliminated one by one as the story progressed: The Slaughterhouse Nine, the Gray Boy loops they're responsible for, the Fallen, Khonsu, Scion himself, and finally the Entities' entire parasitic power-granting system.
• Loophole Abuse: Defiant notes that, since Alexandria is no longer the head of Protectorate or the PRT, she technically cannot stop the Dragoncraft full of heroes freed from Gray Boy loops from ignoring the Simurgh protocol forbidding entry to Brockton Bay during the Fallen's attack.
• Killed Offscreen: The Slaughterhouse Nine. It's what happens when you get on the wrong side of Cauldron.
• Make a Wish: The Wish is discussed heavily later in the story as a solution to Scion and the Entities, despite the potential of Be Careful What You Wish For. When it's actually made, it isn't twisted at all, due to Destiny being impressed by the purity of the wish and their accepting whatever cost will come to them for it.
  Destiny: “It’s not a punishment, or a monkey’s paw, you know. The power you gained was encoded by men and women, flawed and glorious as only mortals can be. But it was there for the simplest reason—it’s your creation, as much as it is ours, and sometimes the best person to fix a car is the person who has been driving it all their lives, not an external mechanic, however skilled.”
  “And few wishes were as selfless as yours. ‘Save the universe, save all those we will not know. Save our friends... and now the cost will fall upon us?’ I daresay even a Monkey’s Paw would find it hard to warp such a wish. That was part of the reason you have been doing what you did.”
• Memorial for the Antagonist: Chat Noir is impacted so much by Cataclysming Noelle that, by the time of the epilogue, he has a physical memorial statue of her set up at her grave in Paris, and he names one of his kids after her.
• My God, What Have I Done?: Subtly done with Hawkmoth when Chat Noir learns that Emilie Agreste is the one he has in his custody. He accuses the villain of abducting his mother, letting Hawkmoth know who exactly wears the mask.
• Mythology Gag: What's the name Taylor chooses when she is given the Butterfly Miraculous and learns how to create controlled clones of parahumans? Khepri.
• Narrative Profanity Filter: Ryuko launches herself into a Japanese rant regarding the ABB's actions and how it actually hurt the Asian community. Chat refuses to give Ladybug a translation, only revealing it was several "really not nice things".
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero:
  • Skitter's usual methods result in a boy getting Akumatized.
  • Skitter cooperating with Hawkmoth to get home results in Echidna rampaging through Paris.
• Nightmare Fuel: In-Universe. Pretty much everything they learn about Earth Bet ends up being this for the Miraculous characters, which does lead to a few moments where the heroes lose their lunches.
• No-Sell: Twice with Mama Mathers:
  • First, Rena Rouge is able to disturb her control over people and prevent her from influencing them.
  • Second, she cannot control Imp since Imp's power makes her forget she exists to control her.
  • It's mentioned that Khonsu, the new Endbringer, may have appeared to counter Rescue's power.
• Noodle Incident: Several original Akumas are mentioned but not much detail is given.
• Nuclear Option: One actual and one proposed, at the exact same time no less. When the Fallen begin their attack on Brockton Bay, Tagg goes straight to a Simurgh-tier quarantine to prevent their escape, with the specific reasoning of it being worse than the alternatives. The second one is actual intercity missiles, in case the first plan doesn't work.
  • Article 5 gets invoked when Echidna attacks Paris, so the heroes have to finish the fight before the military finishes its preparations to launch actual nuclear weapons.
  • Real nukes are used again, alongside a colorful variety of Tinkertech bombs, to kill Eden as part of the plan to drive Scion to desperation.
• Oh, Crap!: The Earth-Bet residents have a collective one when they find out that Skitter has been akumatised into Gatekeeper, giving her the ability to summon portals within 20 miles and control bugs through them. She summons enough of them to block out the sun like a biblical plague.
  • The Butcher has one when Chat Noir destroys her Shard.
  • Everyone's reaction to the countdown to Gold Morning being cut down to six months.
  • The debut appearance of Khonsu elicits this reaction both in-universe and out.
• O.O.C. Is Serious Business: Hawkmoth, who has gone to frankly absurd lengths to gather the Ladybug and Black Cat Miraculouses, willingly gives up the Butterfly Miraculous to Taylor. Why? Adrien is in danger, and he knows that he isn't in the right state of mind to protect him.
• Offscreen Karma: A fitting end for the Slaughterhouse Nine.
• Outside-Context Problem: Each universe's superpower systems are this to the other.
  • Miraculous-verse Paris only has to deal with Hawkmoth and Akumas. Ladybug and Chat Noir are unprepared to face an opponent who reacts rationally, in self-defense, and with lethal force.
  • Skitter is caught off-guard when a child is akumatized as a result of her usual methods of gathering information.
  • Echidna rampaging through Paris was much more destructive than the average Akuma incident, the large force fighting against her was well beyond Ladybug's usual team management, Chat Noir finds himself forced over a Godzilla Threshold, and Ladybug exhausts herself trying to clean up the mess.
  • Whatever the Fallen and the Teeth were expecting in Brockton Bay, Miraculouses weren't it. The Protectorate and PRT find themselves in a similar situation, diplomatically speaking, in the aftermath.
• Passing the Torch: A rare villainous example by Hawkmoth, to Taylor herself.
• Poor Communication Kills: Skitter doesn't have a good intro to the world of Miraculous Ladybug. For starters, she doesn't speak the native tongue, and with her costume and powers getting her mistaken for an Akuma, Chat and Ladybug attack her, so she responds by attacking them back.
  • When she does try to communicate peacefully, Skitter's usual coercion techniques terrify Alya by implying that she's holding Alya's family hostage- she wasn't, for the record, she's just really bad at not being terrifying.
• Powers That Be: The kwami are specified as being universe-scale embodiments of their concepts that are channeled into the Miraculouses to become their limited forms that we see, rather than existing as those forms and being materialized to humans by the jewelry. Plagg jokes about even them being subservient to the power of Destiny, for which there is no miraculous. When Destiny appears to grant the Wish in the ending, it is implied to be God, having created the universe and existing outside of it.
• Properly Paranoid: Skitter is running through burner phones and keeping her head down just as she would on Earth Bet, even though Paris only has one supervillain. Then Hawkmoth manages to track her civilian identity down.
• Psychosomatic Superpower Outage: Khepri cannot empower her bug clones with her friends' powersets because she considers the clones expendable and her friends are not. She also cannot use any Tinkers due to her dislike of them.
• Ret-Gone: The apparent cost of a Wish by the holder of the Ladybug Miraculous in 1983, to undo and prevent World War III.
• Rule 34: Brought up in-universe, for the Miraculous Ladybug universe, when Alya is not surprised that people have written Slash Fic between Rena Rouge and Alexandria. Nino mentions having to use safe search while Googling his superhero identity.
• Rules Lawyer: Taylor's first thought on learning that the miraculous wish has a price is wondering if it can be gamed. When Tikki and Plagg later explain how it really works, she immediately drops the idea.
  Chat Noir: "I have friends who play RPGs and I’m never letting you near them. You’d come up with the most broken character in the history of games."
• The Sheriff: Sheriff Steel, an akuma caused by a young boy being scared senseless by who else but Skitter.
• Spanner in the Works:
  • Skitter is this for Hawkmoth.
  • A child getting akumatized is this for Skitter's first attempt to track down Hawkmoth.
  • Echidna is this for Skitter's first attempt to get back home.
  • Ladybug and Chat Noir are this for the Fallen and the Teeth.
• Super-Empowering:
  • Hawkmoth, like usual. He turns Taylor into Gatekeeper with the power to open portals to other worlds. He then goes one step further and gives her the Butterfly Miraculous when he realizes that she will need much more power to defend against Echidna.
  • Khepri can use the Butterfly to empower her bug clones, turning them into copies of various capes.
  • Once the Fallen start their offensive on the portal, Khepri empowers a proper Champion to help protect people - the Knight of Unbroken City. He, in turn, can empower more people to help with the defence, in a similar fashion as Darkblade.
  • When Behemoth attacks L.A., Khepri empowers a young woman with the ability to transport people in bubbles, noted to be very similar to the Bubbler from Miraculous Ladybug canon. She evacuates the entire civilian population of L.A. (minus those who want to stay behind for a chance to loot in the confusion), and during the actual fight medevacs out severely injured heroes, keeping the cape casualties under a dozen.
• Spared by the Adaptation: Due to willingly giving up the Butterfly Miraculous to Taylor and retiring as Hawkmoth, Gabriel never gets hit with Cataclysm and makes it to the end of the story, where he is able to reunite with his wife after Bonesaw heals her.
• Superpowered Alter Ego: While Marinette/Ladybug has a certain degree of this anyway, the nature of the miraculouses makes all of the miraculous transformations be considered as separate individuals by Worm powers. This is exploited to make Marinette immune to Mama Mathers' power, allowing Ladybug to experience it and then de-transform to report the information.
• Take a Third Option: As usual, Hawkmoth wants to use the power of the Ladybug and Black Cat Miraculouses to grant a wish to save his wife, who he was unable to save with normal medicine. The heroes won't let him do this because they think he's going to use it for evil, and also because of the Butterfly of Doom effect. Skitter suggests that if Hawkmoth gives her the power to go home she can bring one of the powered healers of her earth back to cure his wife.
• Teleport Spam: Khonsu is called, as in canon Worm, but this time it's believed to be specifically because his ability to teleport lets him circumvent Rescue's evacuation power and Chat Noir's Cataclysm, which can kill him.
• Terror Hero: Skitter's attempt to do her thing in Miraculous-verse Paris results in an akumatized child who, after being de-evilized, is traumatized by bugs.
• This Is a Work of Fiction: Earth Bet TV does not feature real Parahumans as characters, ever since the Soap Opera Days Of Our Capes ran a Slaughterhouse Nine arc that Jack Slash "took exception" to.
• Touch of Death: Chat Noir finally uses his power on a living person. He is horrified by it afterwards.
• Trapped in Another World: Skitter ends up trapped in the Miraculous world. Part 1 ends when the story flips and Ladybug, Chat Noir, Rena Rouge, Carapace, Queen Bee, and Ryuko return with her to Brockton Bay to help their world.
• Traumatic Superpower Awakening: Discussed, as Miraculous-verse Akumatization is compared to Worm-verse Trigger Events.
• Trauma Button: Skitter's usual tactics cause a child- one that was briefly Akumatized as a result of her actions- to become violently afraid of insects, to the point that Marinette had "never seen a little child so scared".
• Two out of Three Ain't Bad: Tikki's take on Taylor gaining control of the Butterfly Miraculous.
  Marinette: “A good holder. Brave, strong, and gentle?”
  Tikki: “Er… the first two, certainly.”
• Unwanted False Faith: After Alya calls on the deeper powers of the Fox Miraculous to counteract Mama Mathers' influence, people start worshipping her as an angel. Needless, to say, Alya freaks when she discovers this. It only gets worse when she does it again during Gold Morning.
• Villainous Breakdown:
  • Echidna breaks down into an angry and spiteful tirade when Chat Noir Cataclysms her.
  • Mama Mathers has a long one as the heroes route her at every turn. Rena Rogue successfully opposes her powers, Khepri's champion creates reinforcements, and the Butcher shard is destroyed permanently. Ladybug takes her out, and it all ends with Tikki snuffing out the woman's last remnants of faith by showing her a real god with a glimpse of her true form.
• Vomit Discretion Shot: Ladybug's reaction after viewing Taylor's flash drive of information regarding Earth-Bet.
  • Queen Bee also suffers this when visiting the site of one of Gray Boy's atrocities.
• Wham Episode:
  • When Echidna breaks into Miraculous-verse Paris.
  • When Khonsu makes his appearance.
• What the Hell, Hero?: Ladybug's reaction to Skitter defaulting to escalation and intimidation, which resulted in herself getting almost killed and a young boy getting Akumatized. She understands why Taylor behaves the way she does when she learns what Earth Bet is like.
• Why Did It Have to Be Snakes?: Insects, for a young boy who Skitter inadvertently intimidated into getting akumatized. After getting de-akumatized, he has a panic attack whenever he sees a bug.
• Wrong Genre Savvy: Skitter does not quite get at the start that she's been teleported to a straight example of a superhero universe and is not still in a grimdark deconstruction of one. It takes her some time to realize she can do good here by being the hero she wanted to be at the start of her career, rather than the villain she was forced to be to get any actual good done.
• Year Inside, Hour Outside: Despite several weeks passing in the Miraculous universe, when a portal is finally opened back to Earth Bet, only seconds have passed. This is because the power that Hawkmoth gives Taylor to return home is based on her subconscious desire to return as quickly as possible.
• You Are in Command Now: Ladybug takes over the fight against Echidna when it spills over into Paris.
• You Cannot Grasp the True Form:
  • Tikki shows Mama Mathers exactly what she truly is in her last moments and the woman is only able to grasp how vast the force behind the polka-dotted creature is.
  • Worm Thinker powers in general have this problem around the kwami and the miraculouses, up to and including Contessa, the Simurgh, and Scion. Tattletale's shard completely checks out when Ladybug and Chat Noir make the miraculous wish and become the embodiments of creation and entropy.
  • Even regular powers consider a transformed wielder to be a completely different person in regards to their effects. Most of the human characters refer to anything and everything they can do as, quote, "bullshit magic".
  • It's also the reason Destiny doesn't have a kwami. The word destiny means so many different things to everyone across existence that it simply cannot take such a defined form.

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