Miraculous Salt

You Don't Get Anywhere If You Never Check Your Sources

draph91 said to trickstermiraculous: I do have an idea on my tumblr but I'm not sure if I can post links in asks as someone who loves the Villain/Jerkass Has a Point trope basically my idea is after she's exposed Lila calls out the class (Adrien and Bustier included) and Damocles on their stupidity (and throws Alya's words: "a good reporter always checks her sources" back in her face) and she asks Marinette if she can even call the class her friends if they believed Lila over her and Mari (and Chloe) admit she has a point

Answer

It took longer than expected for this group to figure it out, about a year. You would think a class with a person who built an actual working AI would be smart than this. Sure there was Marinette who figured it out in a day but that was probably due to knowing the people I lied about, contrary to popular belief I did do research on my classmates although it was until Marinette called me out that I decide to research her more in-dept.

When I realised my mistake, I did what I always do and threaten her but, of course, she was confident I wouldn't win until I got her expelled and I know it was wrong and I went too far especially when Adrien went out of his way to get her back into school by making a deal with me, so I back off but it seems that her friends had already left her, they constantly trashed talked her while hanging out with me or making sure she was excluded from activities they did as a class even when she was the one who organised it due to being class president. Did the teacher care, fuck no, she was more focused on making the rich bullies were happy.

Ladybug also made me well aware of how dangerous it was to be allied with hawkmoth. I had told him to not to make Akumas go after my mother but sure enough, a co-worker who was jealous of her got akumatised and went after her. Luckily, Ladybug was there to save my mother when the Akuma decide to drop her from the highest point of the Eiffel tower. I wasn't paying attention when I was yelling at hawkmoth through the phone when I got home to notice Ladybug come in through the window. It was an awkward situation, to say the least, but after coming clean, ladybug had admitted that her parents had been in danger several times and it's scary but the one thing most people don't do is work with the people putting her in danger.

I did admit to her that she had a point and told her that I know who Hawkmoth was. "Then do one thing for me while I keep my eye on your mother when I can," she asked,

"why should I?" I asked,

"Because what's to say he won't go after her again?" Ladybug responded raising an eyebrow,

"Fine, what do you want me to do?" I asked,

"Collect evidence, Hawkmoth will most likely be someone who had enough power to not get caught so only having your account, won't be enough because while your class might believe your lies a quick google search and the police will most likely think you're lying for attention" she answered, "Fine, you have a deal" I stated.

It took about half a year to collect enough evidence and Ladybug was right about Hawkmoth not caring about making sure her family were nowhere near Akuma attacks, in fact, two Akumas went after her mother again and her father was trapped under rubble after an Akuma had gone storming through multiple buildings. When the evidence had been revealed to the public and Adrien's father had been arrested, the class group chat had been a shit storm and was worse in class the next day.

Adrien wasn't in the class, Marinette who happened to be early informed me that he was staying at her house since he was quite close with them after he refused to believe my lies and started hanging out with Marinette more much to my annoyance. "You do realise, Alya's going to want to rip your head off right" Marinette stated while she doodled in her sketchbook,

"Why is that?" I questioned.

After Marinette had stopped trying to call me out on my lies and started to ignore me, we had made an agreement to act like reasonable people so like if we had to work on a project together, we would not make any moves to piss each other off or we just need an answer to a simple question, we would be polite about it.

"Because according to Chloe, who is still in the class group chat, Alya decided to do checks on all of us to see if we are who we say we are and she just no finally check to see if anything you said is true and apparently she was not happy with what she found" Marinette answered and speak of the devil, Alya entered looking depressed but as soon as her eyes landed on me, her face changed to anger.

"You are a liar" she growled as the rest of the class entered, looking angry but not as much as Alya,

"Like that's news" I replied staring right back at her, "Marinette told you that for months, ye you stubbornly refused to listen or do any kind of research to see if I was speaking the truth",

"Don't you dare blame this on us" she retorted, "you allowed me to ruin my reputation as a reporter with your lies",

"Because you didn't do the simplest thing a reporter does, fact checks everything, you were going to go nowhere in the news world if you continued to not fact check" I stated while I started to scroll through twitter.

"She is right, Alya while you are good at writing articles and getting information, you are downright terrible at fact-checking instead you just take the information that will make your theories seem like the actual truth and ignore other information that disproves it" responded Marinette cutting Alya off before she could reply to me,

"Why are you defending her? I thought you hated her," asked Alix confused,

"Oh I do but that does make what she just said wrong" answered Marinette.

"You all believed me even Miss Bustier and Mr Damocles and that's because no one decided to fact check and at this point, I don't think Marinette can call you her friends because of that," I said looking at Marinette with a smirk,

"I stopped calling them friends after I got a block from the group chat, stopped hanging out with me but still demanded stuff off me" Marinette admitted in a deadpan tone, putting her pencil down, "Now can we please start the lesson, Miss Bustier", said women who had been watching this happen, nodded as she opened up today's PowerPoint.