Ace Attorney: Secrets beneath Secrets

Turnabout Below, Part 1

"Finally... I think I might have found an answer. It took far longer than I would have liked, but it's better late than never... Here goes."

CREEEEEEAK...

"It worked! Color me impressed... Ms. Fence? Are you in here? ... A fridge? I never heard anything about there being an appliance down here... Might as well get into it... Wait... Is that...?! No way!!"

May 29

Morix Law Offices

10:25 AM

Cotoli Morix

It had been some time since the last case the agency had taken on. The harm done by Cormous was still present, but the wounds were finally starting to fade away. For one, everyone who had stopped coming by the agency due to the threat of a traitor had returned. Life at the agency was falling into the same routine it had been in back before the Emsthorpe case. At long last, I thought the universe might be tipping toward a state of normality after what felt like ages of tumultuous chaos.

I was sitting on the couch in the main collaborative workspace of the agency, doing some paperwork on a clipboard. As much as I liked being in my office, I needed a change of scenery every once in a while, and this seemed to be one of those times. The sound of the pen scratching was all I needed to hear, and it was the only noise piercing the silence. The scrawling of the ink on the paper could get a bit irritating to some people, but to me, it was comforting in a way I couldn't describe.

I wasn't looking forward to doing anything out of the ordinary when Victoria came out into the main space. She sat down beside me and frowned. "Mr. Morix, have you heard anything about a case involving somebody going missing as of late?" she asked.

I looked up from my work and nodded slowly. "Which one are you talking about?" Disappearances were unfortunately much more common than they should have been, and after a while of constantly hearing about a million different cases, it was hard to tell them all apart.

"A lawyer by the name of Dee Fence went missing a few months ago. She was apparently the lead attorney at an agency called Blocker Law. It's been quite some time since she has been seen, and I still get notifications every once in a while that the search is continuing for her. I was planning on talking about it after the Emsthorpe case ended, but... We all know how that turned out," Victoria said with an awkward laugh.

"And after we came back together, you got busy focusing on other things given that we missed out on so much as a group," I continued. "That's why you haven't brought it up until just now."

Victoria smiled and nodded. "You got it. I know it's a bit late to mention now, especially given that she went missing around the time of the nature preserve case all that time ago, but it's better to bring it up late rather than never," she told me.

"I agree... I hope the search for her is going well though. It's horrible when someone goes missing. Oftentimes, part of me fears they're gone because they have died... I don't like that my thought process works in this way, but I guess I've become jaded after so many years of working in the legal world," I frowned, shaking my head.

Part of me thought briefly of Pieter as I said these things. He had gone missing a few years ago, and nobody had seen him in ages. I didn't want to say for sure that he had died when there was still a question mark surrounding his current location, but my fears were catching up to me with each day that he was still gone. I didn't want to believe that something bad had happened to him, but it was hard to keep such thoughts at bay as the seconds, minutes, and hours ticked by. I knew Chrysalis didn't want to admit such was the case either, but I could tell that her hope was diminishing slowly as well.