Author's Note: Hey, everybody! I just need to clear up a few things about timelines before we get this started.
Phoenix Wright Fans – I'm aware that the games canonically take place in the late 2010s. However, that obviously doesn't fit with a story about the Teen Titans. This story is set in December of 2008, and assumes that the original game took place in 2006 and that the second took place in 2007. In other words, take the year it happened in the games and subtract ten, and everything works out. This takes place between cases two and three of Trials and Tribulations.
Teen Titans Fans – The story of this case takes place shortly after the events of season four but before those of season five. There is some continuity with my previous stories Legacy of the Tamaranian and Colors, but I will make sure this story can be understood on its own.
Previous Legacyverse Readers – This happens after the 'Blight' arc of Colors.
Now on to the story.
Turnabout Titan
Chapter One: Murderer!
The wind was chilly in the dark December night. Not that Frank Newitt hadn't expected the cold. What he hadn't expected was the need to be out in it this late at night. But circumstances beyond his control had forced his hand and he had no choice but to run away from the life he'd come to know.
He feared the door to his flat was being watched, so he climbed out his window, all the possession he dared bring with him in a folder cradled in his arms, pressed against his chest…
All because he'd made that deal—all because of that blasted superhero. He should never have gotten involved in any of it. Metahumans, super criminals—it was all out of his league…
Suddenly, a soft quite voice called out his name.
"Frank," said the whisper. "What are you running from?"
No! Not now! Frank didn't respond. He just kept running towards the edge of the building. He could climb down the fire escape and rent a car. He'd be gone before sunrise—back to where he belonged.
"Fraaaank…" came the voice again.. And suddenly a flash of red and black filled his vision and he was on his rear before the pain registered in his head. The world was spinning and his vision swam all over the place, and when he finally was able to focus, his heart sank at what he saw. A young male, no older than twenty, was standing over him. In the darkness of night, only the figure's eyes, his spiky hair, and his shiny white teeth were visible. The clock that topped the sign of the Time Warp Theatre across the street cast an eerie glow on the silhouetted character before him.
Though Frank Newitt knew all to well who the young man was.
"Get away from me!" he cried, crawling backwards.
"You know too much, Frank," said the boy. "My father can't have his secrets being exposed—especially now." The grinning assailant drew a small cylinder from his belt, and with a twirl the item expanded into a five-foot long bo-staff. Frank Newitt shuddered, crawling back… but unable to do so fast enough. His elbow slammed into a something sharp and metallic, and spasms of pain shot up his arm. Something warm and viscous ran down his forehead and Frank realized that he was bleeding from his attacker's earlier blow.
And to his horror, Frank realized that the attacker was standing over him.
"It's really not anything personal. Rest well in hell, Mr. Newitt." The young man drew the bo-staff back and plunged it forward with incredible strength—directly through Frank Newitt's chest.
The life left Frank Newitt's eyes as his life's blood drained away.
Shadows were the Boy Wonder's friend—Batman had taught him that back when the young hero known as Robin lived in Wayne Manor and fought crime along side the Dark Knight and the red-haired bombshell Batgirl.
Robin was nowhere near Batman, but the lessons still remained. He felt strangely naked now, standing in the glow of the red light from the theatre across the street, and the lights on the building to his right. The latter had just come on at 10 PM as he had arrived on the roof. It made him feel vulnerable. Even after more than two years of defending Jump City, California, in broad daylight as leader of the Teen Titans, he still preferred to work under the cover of darkness. Maybe living in Gotham City for so long had instilled it in his blood.
Robin reached down and took hold of the bo-staff—his own weapon—that had been plunged through the chest of the man in front of him. Or rather, the corpse in front of him. He pulled the murder weapon and examined it—only to suddenly be bombarded by the flash of a camera. Robin gasped, turning to his right and drawing a birdarang. And to his surprise, thirty feet away he saw the cameraman. Or rather, the camera boy—a child no older than twelve, staring down at the murder scene, mouth agape.
Instincts kicked in, and the Boy Wonder vanished back into the comfort of the shadows...with the murder weapon in hand
It took him only a second to realize what he had just inadvertently done.
Then dread for what the next day would hold was his only thought, as he mounted the R-Cycle and headed back towards Titans Tower.
Chaltab Presents
The Teen Titans
and
Wright and Co Law Offices
..in..
PHOENIX WRIGHT- TURNABOUT TITAN
Dawn broke on a gloriously bright December morning, blinding the early-to-rise Raven when she teleported out onto the roof of the Tower for her daily mediation. The brightness actually forced her to turn her back to the sun for a change. The air was chilly, but the sun's rays more than made up for it.
"Up with the sun, huh?" a soft, reserved voice commented to her.
Raven's eyes snapped open to see a young man clad in a heavy coat sitting against the entrance to the Tower from the roof. His dark skin and spiky blond hair reflecting the sun's rays towards the darkest Teen Titan.
" Davis." Raven's voice betrayed very little emotion. Maybe the faintest hint of surprise. Raven couldn't afford to let her emotions get the better of her—her telekinetic powers tended to cause things to explode when that happened.
The ' Davis' she greeted strode across the roof and sat down in front of her. His codename was Yin, and he'd only joined the Titans a few short weeks ago, and really only to keep him from getting killed. Yin, who had the ability to stretch similar to Plastic Man and Elongated Man, wanted to use his powers to help. Unfortunately, the first time he'd tried to fight crime, it had ended with the young teen getting a knife through the belly. For this reason, Robin had agreed to take him in as a Titan and give him mentorship in exchange for him promising not to do any hero work on weeknights.
But for some very painful reasons, Yin's part-time status hadn't worked out, so he moved into the Tower. And Raven had a hunch that this was why he was there in the first place.
"Why are you up on the roof of the Tower this early?" she asked.
Yin sighed. "I couldn't sleep. I kept thinking about my parents. Worrying."
" Davis, you can't blame yourself. Your parents' inability to get along is not your fault."
"They were fine before I started helping you guys on the weekends," Davis said. "I know they hated each other long before that, but at least they tried to make it work."
Raven scowled. " Davis, your parents don't hate each other. But sometimes humans are foolish and let things come between them and rational decisions. Your father simply didn't want to see you harmed, and your mother understood that you would put yourself in harm's way no matter what. It's not up to you to reconcile their differences."
Davis just stared out over the ocean for a few minutes before answering.
"You're human," Davis said. "Did you ever make that mistake?"
"I'm half human," Raven corrected, "And yes. I most certainly have made that mistake." Raven thought back to her encounters with an evil manipulative dragon named Malchior and a young bigoted columnist named Trevor Washington—both relationships had ended in pain.
"I see." Davis moved over and sat beside Raven. "So. Batman. If he's not Thomas Elliot, then who is he?"
Raven frowned. "You're still trying to figure out who Batman is?"
"Yup. Do you know? Please tell me! I've run it through my head so many times, I don't know where I made my mistake."
"Even assuming that I know," Raven said, not wanting to reveal anything, "what makes you think I'd tell you?"
"Because I know you don't liked to be bothered," Yin replied. "That'd be reason enough for me. You tell me, no more bothering."
"You're almost as incorrigible as Beast Boy." Raven allowed herself a smirk and then decided she'd be better off meditating in her room. She left Davis Jefferson on the roof, alone with his thoughts once again.
"Can't you even try it?" Cyborg, the heroic alias of one Victor Stone, asked. "If you can make a platform of rock to fly on like Terra used to, then you won't have to throw yourself across the room like a mad man. And I won't have to drive you to the mainland in the T-Car."
The young man Cyborg was speaking to shrugged his shoulders, the blue armor that adorned them rubbing against the green breastplate of his ancient Tamaranian battle suit. Though the guy inside the armor certainly wasn't Tamaranian. "I'm telling you, Vic, it won't work." The speaker was Ragnarök, the sixth young person to join the Titans West on a full time basis—not counting Terra, who had been a spy.
Ragnarök's ability wasn't unique even among the Titans; he could move earth just like Terra. Well, not exactly. His power was not genetic, but rather was derived from the Tamaranian armor he wore. He also couldn't move earth with as much power as Terra, though he had much finer control over the shapes he made. Terra had never managed something more complicated than a human hand; Ragnarok could form a scale model of Lady Gotham with but a thought.
Ragnarök obeyed Cyborg's request, attempting to make for himself a rock platform on which to fly. Rock exploded from the ground in a cloud of dust and flew skyward, and Cyborg followed it up with his eyes—only to widen them when he realized that the rock platform wasn't so much a platform as it was a donut. There was a human-sized hole in the dead middle.
He glanced down to see Ragnarok in his blue and green armor, standing where he had been just a moment ago, though now covered in dust. "I told you it wouldn't work."
The armor that enabled Ragnarök—also known as Collin Roberts—to move earth had been an indirect gift from his grandfather on his fifteenth birthday—Alexander Roberts had dealt in black market antiquities for ages, and had encountered the ancient relic in Egypt in the 1940s. How the device made it to Earth was a persistent mystery.
Though ultimately, Ragnarök's only truly unique attribute came not from what he could do, but from where he was from, though that is a story in and of itself. Suffice it to say his vocabulary isn't exactly the same as that of his allies.
"Glomp!" Ragnarök swore—a grievous expletive in his own universe. "Come on, Vic, your pep talk almost made me think I could do it for a change. Maybe we could try and tweak my armor some more."
Cyborg walked over and tapped Ragnarök on the shoulder. "Come on, man. I've made every adjustment I can think of. Messing with anything else might cause the armor to explode on you or something. I guess I was wrong about the flaw being psychological."
"Eh, you gave it your best shot. Now let's go get some food. I'm starving."
Garfield Mark Logan, better known as Beast Boy, slammed his foot down into the final button on the dance pad, and then threw his arms up in victory. "WIN!" he cried. "Finally, I creamed Starfire at Dance Dance Revolution. Even if I had to transform into a squid to make it happen on three separate occasions!"
The green-skinned teenager's celebration was cut short when he opened his eyes to see the look on Starfire's face.
"What's wrong, Star?"
The orange-skinned Tamaranian princess looked at the ground and shook her head. "I do not know, Gar. It is Robin." Her red mane fell across her shoulders. "He has been acting strange all day. Especially strange, even stranger than his normal strange actions."
"You expect any less from Robin?" Beast Boy asked. "He was out on patrol late last night. He probably saw some really messed up stuff and is angsting about it. Sometimes I think Batman beat the guy."
"I think something else is up," came a familiar rasping voice. Beast Boy and Starfire turned to see Raven hovering towards them. "Robin has been upset over something all morning. I've felt it even through the locked doors of the crime lab. And last night I had a premonition that something bad is about to go down."
"Something bad!?" Starfire blurted. "No! This is horrible! Something bad 'went the down' just last week. Something bad will 'go the down' next week! Why can this week not have nothing bad going the down?"
"If that sentence meant what I think it does, then it's 'cause we're never that lucky," Beast Boy sighed.
About that time, Cyborg, Ragnarök, and Yin filed into the kitchen/operations room of Titans Tower and everyone moved towards the refridgerator. After a few moments, Robin showed up, and for a change, the Titans all ate lunch together.
"What's going on?" Robin asked them. He clearly had something else on his mind, but he was trying to be sociable.
"Not much." Ragnarök's answer came first. "I once again proved that I can't ride on rock platforms. Otherwise, been a dull morning."
"I beat your girlfriend at DDR," Beast Boy said, grinning and taking another bite of his tofu burger.
Robin scowled at Garfield's description of Starfire as his 'girlfriend'…
Yin shrugged. "I didn't sleep much. If we get a villain attack today, I'd be best off staying at the Tower."
"Hold that thought—" Raven said. "Someone is here."
"Huh?" Beast Boy asked with a full mouth.
Suddenly, the Tower proximity alarm went off and a klaxon began wailing that intruders were present on the property, but that they did not seem to be a threat.
The Titans immediately darted towards the elevator—though Robin and Starfire took the stairs and Raven teleported, beating everyone down—and to the Tower's front door.
Robin pressed a button on his belt, causing a screen by the door to turn on. Outside, a line of police cars blocked the bridge to the mainland of Jump City, and a swath of SWAT team members and uniformed officers stood outside the tower. At their lead, a young female detective with a megaphone stood looking up at the tower.
"Whoa…" Beast Boy gasped. "Who called the army?"
"I'll handle this," Robin said. He stepped forward and opened the door, then walked outside with his hands spread apart and empty. "I guess I know why you are here," he told the detective.
"Robin," she said. "I'm detective Regina Simmons. I'm placing you under arrest for the murder of Frank Newitt. I hate to do this son, but the case is pretty tight."
"I understand," Miss Simmons. Robin turned and glanced at Raven. "Rae. The murder weapon is in my room in a box underneath my bed. Bring it to the precinct."
At that statement all the cops gasped and all the Titans facevaulted.
"Are you admitting to the murder?" Simmons asked him, incredulously.
Robin turned and shook his head. "Of course not. I didn't kill anybody. But I am obviously guilty of tampering with evidence, and the murder weapon belongs to me. Resisting arrest will only bring me more trouble."
The crowd of cops holstered their weapons, though the SWAT team didn't; nevertheless, Robin was led to the back of the car without incident.
And the Teen Titans were left standing at their front door, confused and dumbfounded.
Fifty miles south, Los Angeles traffic was at its mid-day zenith, and a young woman of nineteen pulled her car into the lot of the building that housed Wright and Co Law offices.
"Nick!" called the young Spirit Medium Maya Fey as she knocked on the door to his office. "I got those burgers you and Pearl Wanted."
Maya strode into the office with a big smile on her face and placed the burgers on the desk. "Nick?"
"In here, Maya," came the reply.
Maya Fey walked into the break room to see Phoenix Wright, Ace Attorney and her nine-year-old cousin Pearl Fey glaring at each other intently over a small card table.
"B-Five," called Pearl.
"What!? No! Pearls, you just sunk my battleship!" Phoenix Wright muttered a few words about his luck. Even little kids beat him at board games—Pearl Fey had found that she was almost supernaturally good at both Battleship and Sudoku over the past year, and creamed 'Mr. Nick' in it every chance she got.
"Oh boy, burgers!" Pearl called, and ran off. "By the way, I beat you again, Mr. Nick! You're out of practice!"
Wright sighed as Maya took the seat next to him. "Why the long face, Nick?" She leaned forward with her characteristic big goofy smirk. "Am I wanted for another murder?"
"Not this time, Maya." Wright stood and strode across the room. "I just need a case. Preferably someone who can actually pay me for a change."
"Oh. I'm sorry," Maya said, hanging her head. "I can't think of anyone who has been accused of murder lately."
"Well, hopefully we'll get a break soon." Wright sat up and his eyes widened when he realized what he'd said. "Not that I want anyone to be wrongly accused of murder, of course!"
"It's okay," Maya said. "Still, there's no point in being emo on an empty stomach." She was suddenly exuberant again. "Let's eat before your burger gets cold!"
But as Wright strode into the front room, the phone at his desk rang. "Hm? Maybe a client. Or maybe Larry's just calling again to ask me to bum him some money." He put his mouth next to the receiver. "Wright and Co law offices, Phoenix Wright speaking."
"Hello, Mr. Wright," came a deep male voice on the other end. "This may sound strange, but—how would you like to defend a superhero…?"