The Roomba had been an impulse buy. Marinette had been complaining about what a pain it was to vacuum under their bed and their couches just that morning, and then Adrien had seen the advertisement an hour later. He trotted out to the store over his lunch break and returned with a Roomba thirty minutes later.

And now it was roaming around in the middle of their living room.

"I mean, I suppose it could be useful," Marinette managed as they watched the little machine putter around the room. It seemed to not be cleaning in any particular order, instead zig-zagging to and fro as it bumped off of walls and furniture alike. As she spoke, it vanished under the couch and bumped around under there for several minutes before emerging again and heading across the living room towards a lamp.

"Well, it's fun to watch at least," Tikki offered. The kwami floated along after the Roomba almost absentmindedly as it bumped its way off the lamp and headed down the hallway, seemingly intent on getting somewhere. Plagg floated along after her, green eyes focused on the Roomba as it went.

"Maybe we can program it so it's a little more efficient," Adrien suggested as they shuffled over to watch the Roomba bump its way into their bedroom. "It really isn't very methodical at all, is it? Funny, they don't say that in any of their ads."

"I'm sure it would cover almost everything if you let it run for long enough," Marinette said as the Roomba rounded the corner and vanished. There was a thump as it presumably bumped into the legs of their dresser. "...it could take a while."

Adrien looked a bit sheepish, rubbing the back of his neck. "I'll go look at the instructions booklet. There's bound to be something in there about how to program it."

Adrien sat in their bedroom, searching for jobs on his computer as he waited until it was time for him to leave for a photoshoot. He wasn't finding a whole lot- not for his field and his level of experience, at least- but Adrien wasn't about to give up. He was about to search another site when he heard a thump in the living room. Adrien paused, puzzled, and turned partway towards the sound. Marinette wasn't supposed to be back until the evening and she was meant to be in a meeting right now. Tikki would be with Marinette, and Plagg was napping away on the bedside table, using a half-eaten slice of Camembert as a pillow. There shouldn't have been anyone in the other room.

There was another thud, closer this time.

Adrien set his computer aside and rolled out of the bed quietly. His eyes flicked around the room for a second, looking for something he could use to defend himself if someone really had broken in. There really wasn't much of anything in the bedroom- his fencing sabre was too flimsy to cause any real damage to a potentially dangerous opponent, his computer was too expensive to fling around, and everything else was either too small or too unwieldy to use- but maybe he wouldn't need it, maybe he was just hearing things or it was their upstairs neighbor being a bit louder than usual-

There was another thump. In a panic, Adrien grabbed his fencing sabre, figuring that even if it couldn't really do much damage, he could maybe at least startle the thief enough to get an advantage.

Taking a deep breath, Adrien gripped the sabre, flung the bedroom door wide, and leapt out into the hallway with a savage yell, holding the sabre aloft.

The Roomba bumped into the wall, turned, then rattled through the doorway into the bathroom.

"Very scary," Plagg said dryly as Adrien stared after the little machine, sabre still held half-up and jaw hanging open. "I'm sure you intimidated that Roomba good."

"What is it even doing out of its charging station?" Adrien asked blankly as the Roomba banged around the base of the toilet. "Did it just up and...decide to clean the place?"

Plagg sniggered, clearly still very amused. "It appears so. Maybe it thought there was too much dirt on the carpets."

Adrien groaned and trotted after the Roomba as it trailed along the wall. Scooping it up, he carried the protesting machine back to its charging station. He set it down and this time, it stayed put.

Marinette found the whole thing hilarious, of course.

"You must have accidentally set some timer when you were fiddling around with it a few days ago," she said with another laugh as she stood alongside Adrien, watching the Roomba sitting innocently at its charging station that night. "Oh, I wish I could have seen it. The look on your face must have been hilarious."

"It was," said Plagg, who had been the one to tell Marinette exactly how Adrien had acted, complete with reenactment with a toothpick as a prop. Adrien hadn't been pleased to have Plagg chime in with the retelling; he had been completely content to tell Marinette that the Roomba had gotten loose and startled him without mentioning all of the extra dramatics. Still, he couldn't be too angry at Plagg, not after the way Marinette had laughed and laughed, nose scrunching up with glee as stress from her earlier meeting melted off of her shoulders.

"I still can't make head or tail out of these instructions," Adrien said, snagging the instruction booklet off of the counter he had left it on earlier. He had come to the same conclusion Marinette had and had spent most of his downtime during the photoshoot paging through it, trying to figure out what the instructions were talking about. Maybe it would have been easier to figure out with the Roomba actually in hand, but Adrien sort of doubted it.

"Let me try," Marinette said, holding out a hand for the booklet. "Maybe I can figure it out."

"Or maybe you'll accidentally set it to go off this Thursday at three in the morning," Adrien joked, but he handed the booklet over anyway. "God, imagine our reactions to that, if we heard thumping around in the middle of the night."

Marinette snickered as she flipped through the pages. "I would get to see you leaping from your bed and challenging the Roomba to a duel."

Adrien stuck his tongue out at her.

The Roomba behaved for all of two weeks. They had figured out how to turn off the timer on it after that first day and they had managed to program in a few so-called 'invisible walls' so that it wouldn't waste time aimlessly crisscrossing the open part of the living room that wasn't hard to vacuum normally. They really didn't need it coming out often- dust didn't exactly build up particularly fast under the bed, couches, and dresser, and they were hardly throwing regular large parties requiring intensive cleanup- but it needed to be kept at its charging station, so there it stayed.

And then, at three-thirty on the dot Friday morning, it whirred to life, thunked out of its charging station, and puttered out of its pantry home. From the top of the counter, a pair of glowing green eyes watched it go with no small amount of anticipation.

The Roomba explored the kitchen, sucking up a few spare crumbs before bumping its way back out. It made an attempt at cleaning under the dining room table but had to give up after bumping into a few too many chair legs. Instead it moved on to the couch, edging strangely around the room as it avoided the imaginary walls Adrien and Marinette had entered in. It let out a particularly large thunk as it hit the wall behind the couch.

In the bedroom both Adrien and Marinette sat up blearily, looking around in confusion.

The Roomba managed to extract itself from the couch without further clatter and, like it had before, rolled along towards the hallway. It bumped and scraped lightly against the wall as it went.

"Robbers," Adrien suggested with a hiss. He was scowling blearily at the door. "Wait here, I'll take care of it."

"I'm not staying back," Marinette hissed back hotly. She tugged a hoodie on over her pajamas and followed Adrien towards the door. They both paused at the door, listening.

Bzzzzz. Thunk, the Roomba went. Marinette and Adrien breathed out a simultaneous sigh of relief.

"How did it get loose again?" Adrien asked, puzzled. He pushed open the door- peering out carefully in case they had misheard, of course- and went out to catch the Roomba before it could push its way into the hall closet. "We haven't even touched it in ages."

"Maybe it's buggy," Marinette suggested around a yawn as Adrien scooped the Roomba up. "If it does this again, maybe we should return it and get a replacement."

"I think it's catty," Tikki said sleepily, floating lazily out into the hallway behind them. She landed on Marinette's shoulder with a plop. "I can sense Plagg all over it."

There was a pause as Adrien and Marinette froze and exchanged a look. Plagg hadn't come out with the rest of them to investigate and come to think of it, the cat kwami hadn't really been hanging around before bed. It had been strange, since Plagg usually tried to beg an evening bite of Camembert before bed. A glance into the bedroom showed Plagg's normal sleeping spot empty.

Tikki, suddenly more awake, let out a very angry-sounding string of syllables and sped off to the pantry. Seconds later, there was an annoyed squeal clearly identifiable as Plagg's as Tikki pounced, intent on punishing Plagg for his prank. Both Adrien and Marinette sighed.

"I don't really feel like breaking up a kwami fight right now," Adrien said as they headed cautiously towards the kitchen. They dodged around the squabbling kwamis and deposited the Roomba back at its station. "Think we can just ignore them?"

"Let's just do that."

It had been three months, two weeks, and a day since their last Roomba-related incident, though it wasn't thanks to any lack of effort on Plagg's part. Adrien and Marinette had decided to turn the Roomba off and separate it from its charging station. For good measure, each went in their own closet and the Roomba was packed into a box and placed under another box that was too heavy for Plagg to move.

Plagg had pouted, disappointed that he hadn't gotten a longer run of pranks out of the Roomba. He had sworn up and down that he wouldn't set it off at three-thirty in the morning (but he hadn't said anything about two or three or three-oh-three, for that matter), but Adrien and Marinette refused to reconsider their decision.

But now the Roomba was being brought out again for a day of cleaning. It reunited with its station for a quick charge-up beforehand (still held captive under the heavy box, just in case Plagg got any funny ideas) and then was set loose, with Plagg perched proudly on top.

"I don't understand how obsessed he is with that thing," Adrien said to Marinette quietly as Plagg and the Roomba puttered past. "It's just cleaning, and slowly at that. It's hardly causing havoc or anything."

"I've heard that it interests a lot of cats," Marinette whispered back as Plagg and his vacuum steed vanished under the couch. "It wakes up their hunting instincts or something."

"I've heard that too but he's sitting on it, not stalking it!" The Roomba and Plagg reappeared briefly, hit the couch leg, rotated, and vanished again. "It's just strange."

Unseen by anyone, Plagg smirked.

The Roomba's path slowly started to turn very odd. It circled the couch leg several times and then went out into the middle of the dining room, ignoring all of the imaginary wall boundaries that Adrien and Marinette had entered in. It bumped against Adrien and Marinette's feet repetitively, sucking at their toes and circling them several times before puttering off innocently to duck under the living room cabinets. Twice more it made the venture into the middle of the room, bumping against Adrien and Marinette each time, even as they moved absently out of the way. Plagg was smirking openly at that point and Tikki was eying him suspiciously. Before she could say anything, though, Plagg and the Roomba were puttering away down the hallway, looking the picture of innocence.

"I'll get the real vacuum out and get the main floor areas," Marinette said. There was a gentle thump from the other room as the Roomba bumped into something. It was ignored. "Should we give the Roomba another five minutes? It can't possibly take it that long for it to get under the dresser and the bed-"

The rest of her sentence was cut off by the sudden roar of a motor in the next room over. Both adults whipped around in the direction of the noise, startled. A second later, the Roomba positively whipped around the corner and shot down the hall towards them like a racecar. Plagg's wild cackling filled the air as he clung to the machine, steering it with little tugs as it raced around the room.

Marinette yelped and dove for the safety of the couch before it could clip her toes, Tikki clinging to her shoulder even as she shouted at Plagg. Adrien dancing around, trying to avoid the Roomba's wild swoops while simultaneously trying to catch both Roomba and the cheering Plagg. Adrien tripped and cursed as the careening Roomba clipped his ankles and Plagg only laughed louder.

"That's enough," Adrien growled as Plagg swung around for another hit. He looked irritated now, all surprise gone now. "Plagg, transform me!"

One thoroughly destroyed Roomba ended up in the dumpster ten minutes later.

A/N: Partly based on a true story...my grandparents got a Roomba last Christmas and it got loose one day and started roaming the house on its own. It scared my grandpa just a bit :D

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