Ace Attorney: Secrets beneath Secrets

The Explosive Turnabout, Part 7

 April 24

Prosecutor's Office

1:00 PM

Lily Shield

We didn't have to search long to find Prosecutor Wood. I suggested that the first place we officially check should be her office, and Yuri agreed without a second thought. We made our way to the room with her name on the plate outside it, and Yuri dashed up to it before knocking her hand firmly against the wood. The sound echoed in the small hallway, and I flinched, praying that nobody could hear us. Was the office always this eerily quiet?

The door opened to show Prosecutor Wood, but there was something different about her. I couldn't quite describe it, to be honest. She carried herself with more confidence than she had the last time we saw her. It was quite an impressive shift. She had gone from scurrying everywhere like a frightened animal to standing with her shoulders back and head high. She looked at us with a raised eyebrow. "What do you want?" she asked. Her voice was rougher, and if I hadn't been looking at her, I wouldn't have realized it was the same person at all.

"We were just going to ask you if we could talk more about what happened the day of the crime," Yuri replied, a small smile on her face. Even in the face of such drastic changes, she was undeterred, which shouldn't have surprised me, but it still did somehow. She had always been the type to have hope even in the strangest and darkest of times, which meant this was normal for her, but I guess part of my head, probably the instinct that was telling me something was wrong, thought that she would notice what had seemed odd to me.

Prosecutor Wood looked at us for a moment, and the gaze in her eyes made it look like she had never met us before. Even so, she turned and let us come into the office. She didn't show any other signs of not knowing us, instead sitting down behind her desk and letting her hands rest on her lap. "What do you want to know specifically?" she asked slowly, like she was almost afraid of what we were going to say in response.

I looked to Yuri for a moment. She was noticing what I had, thinking something odd was going on. "We were just wondering if you had remembered anything from the time of the crime. "You are kind of our key witness in this case, and if you can remember anything, then we'll be able to use it to free Victoria," she responded.

Prosecutor Wood seemed to realize exactly what we were saying, and she nodded suddenly and quickly/ "Oh, yeah... That. Anything in particular you want to know?"

I frowned. "What happened? Do you remember it at all?" She was frazzled now, but I couldn't figure out for the life of me. We hadn't done anything to go against her actively, but she was still getting paler and didn't seem to understand fully what was going on.

"Uh... Not really," Prosecutor Wood replied, though her voice didn't convince me at all. She was lying about something.

Just to prove this to myself, I reached one hand up and started to play with the Magatama hanging around my neck. Sure enough, Psyche-Locks clanged into place loudly, securing themselves with chains. I wasn't shocked to see Locks, but I was surprised at how many of them there were. There were five of them, all shining blood red back at me. It was eerie, to be perfectly honest, though I didn't know what they could be about.

Yuri seemed to be able to tell that Prosecutor Wood was lying, even without the help of a Magatama. She nudged me with her shoulder gently, and I looked to her briefly, praying that the message would get across. Something was happening behind the scenes here, but I couldn't figure out what it was.

Yesterday, she hadn't known anything. Prosecutor Wood had said that she was unconscious at the time of the crime after something made her pass out. Back then, there had been no Psyche-Locks, but now, there were five of them. Five was the greatest number of Locks that had ever been seen before, and it was a sign of a great secret that the owner never wanted to speak of. I swallowed nervously. Did we really want to confront something that had five Locks involved? It wasn't as if we had a choice, but it still gave me a bad feeling.