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Author's Chapter Notes:

(Welcome to another short Ace Attorney story! This was started off planned as a one-off with just a single chapter, but it's taken much longer to write than intended, so here's the first of what will be two parts instead. Enjoy!)

 

Frequently seeing Maya and Pearl Fey around the Wright Anything Agency day-to-day was something that had required a bit of adjustment time for half of its other occupants, while being totally everyday for the other half.

For defence attorney Phoenix Wright and his adopted daughter Trucy, it was perfectly normal. Both the twenty-nine year-old Maya and her nineteen year-old younger cousin had both known Phoenix for more than a decade, each acting as assistants to him early in his law career and sticking with him as close friends in the years since. Pearl in particular had become something of an older sister toward the young Trucy when Phoenix had taken it upon himself to adopt her, Trucy being only around a year younger than Pearl.

For the two younger attorneys in Phoenix’s employ, however, the regular presence of the two Fey Clan spirit mediums was quite the change. Athena Cykes and Apollo Justice had already been acquainted with Pearl for a fair while, but Pearl’s quiet, polite nature had been nothing compared to her older cousin. Maya’s exuberant and energetic attitude was on a scale rarely seen among anyone the pair knew. Athena herself was loud and full of life, as anyone could attest to, but even she found herself with genuine competition when it came to Maya Fey.

 

On this Thursday in particular, Maya and Pearl were both visiting the Wright Anything Agency and enjoying the chance to spend some time with their attorney friends. In addition to making one of their regular social visits, Pearl came along bearing the hope of demonstrating a new spiritual training technique she had been studying back home in Kurain Village.

According to the dusty training scroll she’d come across, this technique could allow her to sense and attune her mind with the innate spiritual energy of anyone nearby her position, and thanks to her practice sessions with her older cousin Maya, she had become confident in trying it out on a larger group. All of her friends in the Agency would do.

She wanted a few practice runs with the technique prior to gathering everyone around and trying it out, and so Pearl was currently seated on one of the Agency’s two couches, her hands clasped together and her eyes closed. It was easier to practice the technique in a quiet space, and so following her friendly greetings with her best friend Trucy and the three defence attorneys in the office, she had requested a bit of silence. Phoenix was upstairs in the apartment above the Agency at the moment, while Athena and Apollo were over at their work desks, busily engaged with some bit of paperwork or another. As it was a short while past noon, Trucy was busying herself with washing up the handful of dishes that the group had used for their lunch and discarding any loose bits of old food packaging. Maya, meanwhile, was out of the Agency on her own for the moment, having decided to visit a nearby burger stand to pick up a lunch of her own. She had been itching for her favourite meal for quite a while, and Pearl had encouraged her to splurge a bit, now that she was taking a few days’ break from her spiritual training and exercises. Pearl herself was so deep in concentration at the moment, however, that she had little awareness of anything happening around her. From her perspective, the Agency might as well have been one of the silent training rooms back home in peaceful Kurain Village. She had tuned out even the slightest noises in her space, focused solely on the well of spiritual energy built up inside her as she began to perform the technique she had been studying.

 

Over at his desk, Apollo paused, his pen lifting slightly off the page he’d been working through. He had been fixated on the small stack of paperwork still resting on his desk, doing his best to stay quiet and let Pearl practice... whatever she was doing, but he was suddenly getting a strange feeling somewhere in the vicinity of his chest.

“Uh...”

He moved his left hand, previously resting on the edge of his desk, but before he could make contact with his chest, he felt the sensation there rapidly tightening, as if his insides were being compressed. One second later, the feeling spread to his entire body, and he opened his mouth to react – before he could, he blacked out.

Behind him, at her own desk, the same had happened to Athena, and elsewhere in this room and the one above, both of the Wrights had experienced the very same simultaneously as well.

 

On the couch, Pearl had spent several seconds focusing her spiritual energy in just the same way as in her practices, trying to sense the presence of her friends in the office and on the floor above. Four energy sources, all of them warm and familiar. Once she could feel the connection, she moved her clasped hands slightly, her fingers shifting to a different position as she drew her friends’ energy nearer to her. This felt... a bit different from when she had done the same with Maya back in Kurain, but she supposed that made sense. Maya was a professional spirit medium with years of practice controlling her own spiritual energy, while Trucy and her lawyer friends were all completely untrained by comparison. If she could just draw her friends’ energy together all at once, pooling it with her own...

She gave a tiny grunt, her eyes fluttering open. Something hadn’t quite worked. Or had it...? She wasn’t really sure. One second, she’d been sensing everyone’s energy attuning with hers, but then it was gone. She blinked, then closed her eyes again, readjusting her hands. This was exactly why she’d wanted the practice. Getting into the right state of concentration would be a little harder after a disappointment, but she wanted to get this right.

 


 

 

“B-but we’re... h-how did...!?”

Athena’s baffled sputtering was appropriate, her friends all had to admit. None of them had so much as the faintest idea of how to explain what had just happened to them.

Just half a minute ago, things had been normal. Apollo and Athena had been fixated on their paperwork, Trucy had been nearly finished with the dishes, and Phoenix had been upstairs in the apartment to take a phone call. All at once, the four had experienced a momentary blackout before finding themselves in what had felt like a strange dream. For just a few short seconds, they had seemed weightless, hovering through pale-white space as they all came into view of one another, rapidly drifting closer together. Just before they could collide, the world suddenly rushed back into view and they all fell out of the open air, crashing down on some kind of soft fabric surface.

After a brief recovery from the landing, the group had been forced to realize a few things. First, while they all appeared physically unharmed, they had suddenly become very, very small. So small, in fact, that the sights of the office surrounding the couch had almost been unrecognizable. Second, they had all somehow been transported right to the couch, where Pearl was still sitting, meaning that the fabric floor beneath them was her usual channeling robes, right on top of her lap. Finally, third...

[This is super dangerous!!]

It was difficult to argue, even coming from the talkative little AI device hanging from Athena’s neck. This situation was indescribably bizarre, confusing, and above all terrifying to suddenly be dropped into, but they couldn’t just stand around in confusion or panic.

Trucy spoke up first, giving a nervous little laugh. “Wow, you’re a lot bigger now, Pearly... We’ve gotta do something. Daddy? Polly? Athena? Any ideas?”

She was certainly right – Pearl was normally very small for a young woman of her age, but now she looked to be so astoundingly huge that she easily would’ve surpassed even the tallest of the buildings in the city if she were outside. It was hard to believe she could even be a living thing; just taking in her unbelievable scale above them was enough to make any of the group feel about ready to faint. High above them, her hands were clasped in the same familiar pose she often used when performing a channeling or some other spiritual technique, and while they presently obscured her face from view, their incredible scale alone was shocking to take in. Pearl was already stronger than she looked to begin with, and at such a size, she could’ve torn entire buildings apart with her bare hands.

“Well, she’s… not moving for now, so that’s good.” Apollo remarked. “I don’t want to think about what’d happen to us if she hopped up right now.”

“Looks like she’s still practicing that... whatever it was she was talking about.” Phoenix said, craning his neck upward.

“... You don’t think that’s what made us all shrink, do you?” Trucy suddenly wondered aloud. “Not even I could’ve done that.”

Phoenix sighed. “Honestly, Trucy, I gave up trying to understand how all of their spiritual stuff works a long time- Wh-whoa!!”

The sudden interruption had come from Pearl’s gigantic body moving a bit beneath them, as if she’d been reacting to something. Her four speck-sized friends toppled to the soft surface of her robes.

“W-wait, is she...”

“G-GRAB ON, NOW!!”

 


 

 

Pearl had been feeling dismayed; she had closed her eyes and begun to concentrate again, but strangely, she had no longer been able to sense the spiritual energy of any of her friends even as her seconds of focus dragged onward. It was almost like they had vanished from the room.

Before she could think very much about this, however, she had heard the Agency’s front door opening and closing. Looking up, she turned around on the spot to see Maya entering the room, a large bag swinging from her arm. She smiled.

“Hey, Pearly! ... Guess I must’ve missed lunch, huh? Where is everyone?” her cousin asked.

Pearl blinked, taking another look around the room. Her smile drooped to a frown. Aside from herself and Maya, the room was suddenly vacant. Athena, Trucy, and Apollo had been here just a minute ago, and she hadn’t heard them leave...

She stood up, a confused look on her face. She briefly walked toward the other door that led upstairs to the apartment. Behind her, Maya was washing her hands.

“Sorry I took so long – there was a monster lineup today.” Maya said. “I’m starving.”

Pearl spent a moment wondering about heading upstairs to see if that was where her friends had gone, but decided against it. Sure, she’d been concentrating very hard, but she was still pretty sure they hadn’t gone out through the front door, so they had to be upstairs. They’d all be back down soon. It was still a bit strange for the whole group to head up to the Wrights’ apartment at once, though. If they didn’t come down soon, she supposed she could head up and see what was going on.

Maya had taken a seat in her place on one of the couches now, setting out the contents of her lunch bag on the glass table between the two. Pearl returned to the couches, stopping in front of them and looking down at her older cousin’s lunch. Maya was well past her teenage years now, but her appetite was still impressive.

 


 

 

The situation had gone from bad to worse in a hurry for Pearl’s shrunken friends, and now it escalated even further.

When she had gotten up from the couch, there had only just been time for all of them to react, grabbing whatever hold they could on the soft fabric of her pale-pink robes and clinging to them as she moved. They had felt their puny bodies being rushed through the air, suddenly much too high off the ground to even think about moving or letting go. Mixed screams had been faintly audible between them, though Pearl’s booming footsteps below were just as loud.

Now, however, the situation had reached a new peak of dangerous. Without much warning, Pearl had suddenly stopped moving. In that instant, most of the group lost their grip. Phoenix was shaken away from the fabric wall instantly, his eyes widening and his mouth dropping open as he suddenly found himself tossed helplessly away from the place he’d been holding onto. Apollo had been struggling already, and with Athena clinging to a spot right next to him, she had moved one hand to try and help him adjust himself, but in the few seconds she spent holding herself up with just her left hand, Pearl’s sudden stop sent them both hurtling away as well. The pair screamed, their voices drawing further and further from one another in the seconds that followed. Only Trucy managed to maintain her grip, looking backward in wide-eyed terror at the sight of her father and her two friends falling rapidly out of view, toward the glass table far below her.

 

Pearl had stopped right beside the short table, and in doing so, she unwittingly tossed three of her unnoticed friends away from her robes, sending them all on assorted trajectories hurtling toward the space in which Maya had just laid out her lunch. A large burger, a generous portion of fries, a plastic-cupped milkshake – it was a classic Maya spread, and unfortunately, it was about as far from a safe place as possible for three speck-sized defence attorneys to find themselves falling helplessly toward.

Maya was seated, a wide grin of anticipation on her face. One of her hands was holding the top bun of her freshly-unwrapped burger apart from the rest as she applied the top-quality sauce she always ordered from the vendor. Fixated on her meal and with little reason to pay attention to much else besides her younger cousin beside her, the Master of Kurain Village took no notice of three brightly-coloured but absolutely puny figures hurtling down to her lunch.

 


 

 

The world was a dizzying blur, and Apollo was getting more and more dazed by the second. He had no idea of where he was going to crash down, and his mind was too panicked to focus on anything more than his desperate hope to survive the landing, wherever he ended up.

-splut-

Stopping so suddenly was almost worse. He’d come down on – or rather in – something slick and warm, slowing from his death-defying speed to a complete halt in barely a second. His heart was still thundering wildly in his chest, and his head felt ready to spin right off of his neck. He closed his eyes, forcing himself to get back to some semblance of calm. Figuring out just where the hell he was had to be priority number one.

 

Phoenix had made his own landing barely a second earlier, similarly crashing down in something soft. He was suddenly feeling a chill, however. He found himself stuck fast in something thick, his body half-submerged in cold and all the space around him filled with what looked like fluffy cloud. He let out a few gasping breaths, still shuddering with adrenaline from the terrifying fall. What in the world had he fallen into…?

 

Athena’s situation hadn’t been any better – her dizzying arc had been accompanied by the discomfort of the massive ponytail on the side of her head whipping wildly around in the air and scattering red hair all over her face and upper body as she uncontrollably fell out of the sky, eventually crashing into something fairly solid and being painfully shaken to attention. Finding herself upside-down, she scrambled for a split second, blindly trying to grab onto anything she could. She couldn’t secure a grip anywhere, instead beginning to slide downward until she came to a stop, wedged between the object she’d crashed into and something else that struck her from the front. She let out a pained groan, Widget giving a simultaneous droning hum of distress from around her chest. If the object now pressing against her face hadn’t been blocking him, Widget would’ve dropped to land somewhere over her chin by now.

She felt warm. Hot, actually. What the heck had she landed on, anyway…?

 


 

 

Maya could practically hear her stomach crying out in anticipation. Walking back to the Agency with her lunch order and getting it all laid out like this before eating anything had been quite the test of her will, and it was finally time to dig in.

(Worry not, stomach, you will be appeased! Just need the finishing touches, aaand…)

Having squeezed every last drop of the burger sauce onto the lettuce leaf topping the contents of the sandwich before her, Maya set the packet aside and carefully pressed the bun back down, using the skills she’d honed through the preparation of hundreds if not thousands of burgers to place it perfectly dead-centre. At no point as she was preparing her burger did she notice that, just a few seconds ago, a tiny, tiny figure in red had fallen right down into the mire of burger sauce she’d just layered over the lettuce. Poor Apollo vanished completely from view the moment the top bun came down, sealing him inside of the burger with ease.

At last, Maya was ready to begin her lunch. Maybe a couple of fries to start off would be the best choice…

Chapter End Notes:

(They're all getting into real trouble, it appears. Please leave a review if you feel so inclined! It helps a lot.)

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