Adrien asks to see Plagg’s true form
My entry for Adrien AUGreste 2023: Plagg
Ao3 link, Series
“Hey, Plagg,” Adrien called, looking at a video on his computer. “This ghost thing kinda looks like you.”
Plagg peered over Adrien’s shoulder as he relished the taste of a particularly delicious wheel of camembert. Huh, that was a cat spirit, a decently strong one too, from the looks of it. It wasn’t quite as well formed as him. Its tiny black body was mostly a head with tiny little bat wings, and its eyes were purple instead of his ravishing green, but he could see the resemblance.
Then, having fed off enough fear from the civilians nearby, it transformed. Its wings grew to massive lengths and grew to four. Its face morphed from a simple fear to a pig nosed muzzle, and its main body became long and sleek like a panther’s.
“Puh-lease,” Plagg remarked, lifting his nose up away from that pathetic transformation, “my true form is much cooler than that.
Immediately, Adrien sat up straight, looking at Plagg in undisguised awe. “You have a true form?” Adrien asked.
“Of course I do,” Plagg said, grinning smugly as he revealed in the attention his chosen was giving him. He nonchalantly swallowed a roll of camembert whole as he smugly asked, “What, did you think those ghosts could be cooler than me? Trust me,” Plagg swept his paw through the air in a dismissive gesture, “compared to me, those ghosts are just the very beginnings of curdled milk. It would take them millenia to even be a fraction as smart or as powerful as I am.”
“Wait,” Adrien cocked his head, looking at Plagg in an adorable level of confusion, “why don’t you ever use it then?”
“Because it’s huge,” Plagg said, rolling his eyes. “And if you think my powers are tricky in this size, it’s nothing compared to my true self. Honestly, I could probably destroy the entire Milky Way on accident like that.”
“Oh,” Adrien said softly. “I guess that makes sense.”
Plagg hummed, eyeing Adrien carefully. It didn’t take a genius to see Adrien’s disappointment. His wielder wasn’t subtle about his emotions. How anyone could miss them was beyond Plagg, but showing someone his true form was a big deal. Most people only ever wanted to see it before they demanded that he fuse with Tikki to make reality bend to whatever stupid wish they wanted. Adrien though…
Plagg genuinely believed that Adrien might just want to see it. He was curious like that, always grabbing and reaching for whatever scraps of knowledge Plagg handed out to him, and his wielder was clever too.
At first, Plagg had given Adrien the tiniest scraps of information to tease him, offering only a small taste of information to see his tiny little human mind get blown, but after a month or so, Adrien would surprise him by casually mentioning things to Plagg that he’d never even said out loud before, had never even needed to.
For instance, after a few weeks of listening to Adrien drone on and on about his sickeningly sweet crush on Ladybug, Plagg had once again given his excellent cheese advice only for Adrien to counter that Plagg had never been in love. Or after Plagg had introduced the idea that he’d had many wielders before, it had only taken Adrien about 3 weeks to complain about how he couldn’t transform into a cat like Bast had.
From then on, it had become a game of sorts. Plagg would drop some little seed of information every so often, and Adrien would counter it by bringing up some surprisingly insightful tangential guesses about it with the surety of someone who’d known it for years. Sometimes he was wrong, hilariously wrong, like the time he’d thought Loki was a fox, but most of the time, his wielder was right on the money.
Plagg had let a lot of secrets go this way. He knew he’d dropped far too many hints for his own good, but it was so satisfying to watch his little human grow and figure out things so quickly and easily. In fact, for the first time in a long time, Plagg felt like he trusted his wielder. So maybe, he could try something.
“Do you want to see it?” Plagg asked cautiously. Immediately, Adrien lit up like a Christmas tree, but he hesitated.
Biting his lip, Adrien hesitantly asked, “But didn’t you say it was dangerous?”
Plagg gave him an easy grin and waved his paw dismissively. “Don’t worry about it,” he said. “We’ll just have to find someplace big enough to hold me without anyone seeing us, and I’ll just need to avoid using my powers. No big deal.” Then he paused before quickly adding, “But, just in case, I can’t stay in that form for too long.” As Adrien nodded, he quickly added, “and it’s just the one time.”
Adrien hummed, before he grinned. “I think I know a place. Plagg! Claws Out!”
~*~
As it turned out, Adrien’s place was one of the cisterns in the sewer. It was hardly conspicuous. Both Ladybug and Chat Noir had hidden near a number of these several times,but Plagg was a little worried he wouldn’t be able to fit.
Apparently, Adrien had the same idea, because he looked at it nervously as he asked, “Is it big enough?”
As Plagg listened to Adrien’s voice, he cursed his soft heart. As soon as he heard that tone in Adrien’s voice, Plagg knew, as clearly as he knew that pasteurized cheese was a crime against humanity, that if it wasn’t big enough, his wielder would blame himself. He was weirdly self-conscious like that: eager to blame himself at the slightest opportunity. Plagg blamed his stupid father for that, and Ladybug’s stupid obsession with secrets hadn’t been helping.
“Yeah, it’s big enough,” Plagg said, quickly to assuage Adrien’s doubt. For Adrien, Plagg would find a way for it to be big enough.
Quickly, he coached Adrien through the spell. “In order to do this,” Plagg told him, “you’re going to have to say, ‘Plagg, reveal yourself’. It’ll be a bit like transforming, but the magic’s not going towards you, it’s going away, so you’re going to have to be forceful, but not too forceful or we’ll bring this place down.”
Adrien nodded before following Plagg’s instructions to a tee. Feeling the bindings on his smaller form loosen, Plagg stretched his form out very carefully, making sure not to touch the ceiling or the water. He’d only be a fraction of his normal size like this, but he figured that Adrien would still be able to see all of his features.
As soon as he was finished, Plagg looked back at Adrien with all three of his eyes to find Adrien with eyes the size of dinner plates and beaming like the cat who caught the canary.
“You look so cool,” Adrien gushed. “And look at those wings! They look just like Astrocat’s. And that eye! Can I have an eye like that? Can you see out of it? What does it look like? Does it look like it does with only two eyes or can you see in other dimensions?”
Smiling, Plagg stretched and flexed, a strange feeling coming from his chest as Adrien oohed and awed at every new thing he noticed about Plagg, asking dozens and dozens of questions in barely contained glee. Adrien delighted in everything: from the realization that his body was covered in eyes, “can you see from all of them?” to Plagg’s disembodied joints “how far can they move?” to the giant hole in his chest, “can I touch it?”
Plagg had to admit, he let time slip away from them as Adrien admired Plagg. At first from the ground, but after Adrien asked to be picked up, from up close. There was something so simple, so joyful in being marveled at instead of being used as just half of a battery.
Together, he and Adrien spent a few hours down there until Adrien had started getting tired and -very reluctantly- suggested they go back. The next morning though, they paid for it. Adrien had come down with a cold, one of the nastiest that Nathalie had ever seen apparently, and Plagg had felt terrible.
As soon as Plagg apologized though, in his own way, Adrien shook his head.
“It was worth it,” Adrien insisted through a faceful of snot and mucus, and Plagg nuzzled him happily. He knew he must’ve been the luckiest kwami in the world.
I saw a Reddit post earlier about miraculous fusions and I made an extensive comment about what would happen if we fused other kwamis together. The following is an excerpt from the comment + other relevant stuff
We all know that if we merge Tikki and Plagg, we get the kwami of reality, Gimmi. Infamous for their sought-after wish granting powers.
Got me wondering if other kwamis can do that and here's what I thought:
I don't think that just 2 random Kwami's can fuse into new versions. I think, if you can merge the Kwami's that are arranged in a way that they are grouped together, you'll be able to create new Kwami's, or just unlock new powers!
Let's take the miraculouses surrounding the yin yang that represent the Chinese elements (fox 🦊, bee 🐝, turtle 🐢, butterfly 🦋.peacock 🦚.).
If you can merge these 5, you might be able to use the powers the miraculouses in the 12 in the zodiac through their assigned element, that being one of the five Miraculouses (and potentially the ladybug and black cat's).
You can also ofc gain new powers from the myriad of combinations at your disposal.
As for its kwami, I think it'll be some kind of jorogumo that changes color and patterns depending on which elemental miraculous it's using. 🤷♂️
Now let's try to combine the miraculouses that represent the Chinese Zodiac. (In order, Mouse 🐁, Ox 🐂, Tiger 🐅, Rabbit🐇, Dragon 🐉, Snake 🐍, Horse 🐎, Goat 🐐, Monkey 🐒, Rooster 🐓, Dog 🐕, Pig 🐖)
If you can manage to combine them, you might be able to infinitely use all their powers with absolutely no consequences, so long as you use them in order. (like the anime Demon Slayer's 13th form of sun breathing), No new kwami tho 😢
