The prosecutor apparently wanted to go right for the throat, and so called Kaldalis up first. There was no witness stand, so he was led up to stand at the front of the room and address the judge.

It made Kaldalis realize some of the larger differences between his expectation and the reality of the Zaran justice system. Obviously, there was no jury. He assumed that Monsoon had decided that this was going to be the Judge Judy system, where a sassy older woman was going to make the decision at the end, though this judge seemed less inclined to make fun of everyone the whole time.

There also was no oath. They didn’t make him put his hands on a bible or malachite idol or whatever. The Bailiff - a wiry-looking Talsar with emerald-green scales - walked him up to the middle of the room before the judge and had a quiet exchange of words well within earshot of the judge.

“Is this your first time standing witness in Zaran Court?” the Bailiff asked.

“Yes,” Kaldalis said, unsure of where this was going.

“Alright, sir, here’s how it works,” the Bailiff said. “The representatives will ask you questions. You give your answers to the judge. Don’t worry about all those other people out there. They don’t matter. Only the judge has to hear you, so you can act like it’s just you and her. If you feel self-conscious or scared, you can step forward a little and nobody else is going to walk into your line of sight.”

Kaldalis was unconvinced that the Suyon lawyer was going to be polite and quiet during his story, and was especially sure that Onirioago was going to have some objections. Especially since the parts burned into his brain the hardest were the parts least relevant to the case.

“What you say here becomes a matter of public record,” the Bailiff continued, gesturing at the scribe. “Though I promise you, there’s a hundred cases just like this one every day, with five, ten, even more witnesses. Nobody is going to comb through the court records and read your testimony. The odds are a hundred to one anyone outside this room hears it. Do you understand so far?”

“Yeah,” Kaldalis said tentatively. The Bailiff’s words were getting more casual, and he wasn’t sure what his expectations were here.

“Just don’t try to lie,” he said at last before stepping away. “She hates that.”

“Alright,” Kaldalis said, even more confused.

Did judges have a way to detect lies? Or was Monsoon so lazy in their worldbuilding here that the court system didn’t account for lying? All that was here was a half-assed effort by the Bailiff that amounted to a meaningful look accompanied by a stern ‘don’t.’

With that done, it was time for the Finnian prosecutor to get to work.

It began with an introduction. The prosecutor guided Kaldalis, question by question, through introducing himself - his name, his profession, his relationship to Onirioago and the expedition she was leading. His counterpart, the Suyon defender, obviously had something to say about Kaldalis being an adventurer, and tiptoed clumsily around the idea of him being one of Those Types - capital letters implied by his tone. The Finnian was quick to add that Kaldalis’s testimony would be corroborated by subsequent testimony. Kaldalis’s story was not the foundation of the prosecution’s case, but only the frame it was going to be built around.

As the prosecutor continued the questioning, Kaldalis felt a bit like he was being interrogated. The bailiff’s words helped to block out the rest of the courtroom. He tried to ignore that Onirioago was in the room - which was surprisingly easy, since she was letting her lawyer do all the noisy nitpicking - but it was challenging in other ways.

Considering the Suyon lawyer’s constant disputes, Kaldalis stuck explicitly to the facts. Even when the Finnian prosecutor asked him to conjecture about something - like what Onirioago could have been directing the group of followers when she sent them into the jungle after dark - he tried not to say anything objectionable. It suited him just fine to stick to answering the questions clearly and truthfully, without volunteering anything until prompted. It meant that Dalgaard was only mentioned to connect the group of followers with Kaldalis’s fishing trip. Ara was entirely excluded.

He was surprised that the questioning included all the stuff he thought they’d ask Bangen, so as to turn the story into a continuous narrative like they would do on a cop procedural TV show, but he was urged to describe how he went to Bangen to get an explanation for the mysterious fish, and how they hatched a plan to talk her into a confession.

The discussion of the confession itself was very clinical. The prosecutor didn’t ask about his end of the bargain - nor about her state of undress - instead sticking to how she directly asked him for more of the Deacon Tetra, how she asked for not just more, but more on a regular schedule.

The whole time, the Judge said nothing, just staring him down, nodding as he spoke, listening with obvious intent, but in unnerving silence.

He found himself wondering if she was actually a person, or just some kind of stand-in for a computerized judgment dispenser.

He realized the idea was stupid before his brain finished producing it. Even if she was a “person” she was still an NPC. Literally she was a computerized person, and her job meant that she was here to dispense judgment.

Kaldalis expected the discussion of the confession to be it, but the questioning continued, including her threats of revenge explicitly mentioning Geas Venom, and the struggle of her attempted escapes - including taking Bangen hostage. The Finnian prosecutor tried to guide Kaldalis into discussing how much her threat weighed on him the entire time she was imprisoned in Cotanaku, but he was reluctant to get into it with more than a nod and a few terse words - both for fear that the Suyon lawyer would find it a point of contention, and that it would give Onirioago some satisfaction.

To his surprise, the questioning didn’t end there, either. The Finnian prompted him to discuss how Onirioago had used the opportunity offered by the monster attacks on the town to engineer her own escape. The emphasis here wasn’t on her as a mastermind, or even as a threat to law and order, but instead focused on her methods. The use of poison in overcoming her pursuers. The rest of her recapture went unmentioned - which suited Kaldalis just fine. The whole time, he kept an eye on the scribe who was diligently writing down his words. The last thing he wanted was for her immortality to be entered into public records.

Kaldalis expected an uncomfortable cross-examination, where the Suyon lawyer would pick apart his story. He didn’t want to be asked what he’d requested to get Onirioago to ask for Deacon Tetra in turn. He didn’t want to be asked about Ara. He didn’t want to be asked about Kaia’s Flicker and the Paths Between Paths.

He especially didn’t want to be asked about recapturing Onirioago by killing her. At best, it would have him laughed out of the courtroom as a crazy person, making his whole testimony garbage. At worst, he could be on trial for murder in this same courtroom in a few days, even though his murder victim was alive and well.

But there was no cross-examination. Not now, at least.

With his story told, Kaldalis was dismissed back to his seat. He wondered if the defense could call him up during the defense in order to question him then. Or if they simply weren’t allowed to poke holes in his story directly. It seemed like a flawed system, but then again, Kaldalis was just trying to get through this.

He wasn’t a law student who needed to make sense of it. Kaldalis only needed to understand it enough to be sure Onirioago wasn’t going to be back on the street by the end of the hour.

As he sat back down, he felt… unburdened. The whole questioning had only taken a few minutes, but he felt a bit of a weight off of himself. It wasn’t as calming as it had been to confess the whole story to Heluna that night on the beach, but it did feel like he was closing the book on his shady encounter with Onirioago.

He was never going to have to tell that story again if he didn’t want to.

Next was Bangen, who reiterated his whole story about Onirioago’s confession. It made Kaldalis feel a bit superfluous, since she was just repeating his story with slightly less detail, but the Judge had seemed impressed with her credentials as a researcher at the beginning of the testimony, so it seemed it was just to give him credibility.

Once Bangen repeated the story, Gavinkim was brought to the front.

To Kaldalis’s surprise, he was the emotional gutpunch for the prosecution.

Kaldalis knew that Gavinkim had taken Onirioago’s imprisonment very seriously, but he hadn’t known why, and when Gavinkim was called, he’d expected another recounting of Onirioago’s escape.

Instead, the prosecutor asked about Gavinkim’s father. The bulky Bhogad spoke in a wavering voice about how his uncle was his hero. The reason he got into law enforcement was to follow in his uncle’s footsteps.

He’d been killed by a criminal syndicate. Using Geas Venom, they tried to make him their pawn. He refused, and they made an example of him by withholding the drug. The proud and noble guardsman Gavinkim looked up to was brought low within days. He lost all his muscle mass at an almost visible rate.

And then his will started to fray. He took his own life to end the pain before he no longer had the strength to do so.

Gavinkim’s words were firm and clinical, just like Kaldalis had tried to make his own, but that only underlined how badly this affected him. It was a reminder that all of the NPCs Kaldalis knew had rich inner lives. They had histories and stories that he might never know if he didn’t ask. He’d just thought Gavinkim was a hard ass, not that he had a history with Onirioago’s specific crime.

Kaldalis decided once this was over, he would try and reach out to Gavinkim on the boat ride back. It was possible that after facing his past here, he’d need a friend.

Kaldalis expected the prosecutor to keep questioning Gavinkim - to turn the topic to Onirioago - but he didn’t, instead dismissing him and resting his case. Kaldalis was confused for a moment, but again, he wasn’t a law student in this world. He didn’t know what was going on in this courtroom any more than one of these NPCs would know what was going on in an Earth courtroom.

Of course, Kaldalis dreaded this next part. The Finnian sat down, and now the Suyon stood. It was time for the defense. If Onirioago was going to swoop in with a grand plan to get off on a technicality, it was coming now.