Huh, a teleport strike-team! He hasn't eaten any of these recently.

Excuse me HOW did he just teleport inside the Worldwound and on top of A BALOR AND HIS ENTIRE ELITE BODYGUARD UNIT Teleport is supposed to put you in a 'similar area' and this shouldn't be similar to anywhere in Kenabres -

(he's trying to manage a third teleport very fast - so's Felip with his scroll -)

First priority is to murder the scarier wizard.

Khorramzadeh has a whip, vorpal sword, natural weapons, and is also about halfway from turning from an ordinary balor into a demon lord.

It wasn't much of a fight.

The protean lawyer, Ssathaa, thinks this is an open-and-shut case. Works poorly in every group he isn't literally in charge of, check. Devoted his life towards rebelling against his native government, check. Devoted his life towards rebelling against his native government out of a sense of revenge, which is one of Calistria's primary areas of concern, check. Rescued some slaves and also tortured a bunch of people so it's impossible to tell if he's bad or not, check.

This opinion lasts until the protean arrives in open court and counts eight lawyers including faeself. 

Clarence Darrow was briefly wrongfooted when he discovered, after a lifetime of agnosticism, that gods and afterlives (not to mention ontologically basic Goodness) really existed, but Clarence could never really be uncomfortable as long as he was in a courtroom. Quickly catching on to the nature of the legal system, he made Chaotic Good by the skin of his teeth after delivering a passionate two-hour improvised speech about civil liberties as mankind's last line of defense against an oppressive government, the right of all people no matter how evil to a vigorous legal defense, the death penalty as a violation of sapient dignity, and the role of trade unionism in checking the rapacious greed of large corporations.  

Since then, Clarence has quickly become one of the mainstays of Elysium's (excellent) legal team. It turns out that the single most important thing anyone can do to improve the world is to make disingenuous arguments at trials defending unconscionably evil people.  

He is very possibly the most self-actualized person in Pharasma's Creation. 

Kalpana was created to be one one of Shelyn's servitors, the dapsaras, devoted to dance and poetry and song. She spent many thousands of years entertaining the people of Nirvana, but over time she grew discontent. There were problems in the world, and she wanted to help! Providing respite for people recovering or doing more direct work was important, she knew, but it wasn't enough. She wanted to be someone serious! Someone lawyerly! Someone who wears black when nobody's dead!

So she applied to Nirvana's lawyer training program. She did very well in all her classes and got a certification. She's handled a few small cases-- Good artists and poets, mostly, where Nirvana's participation was mostly a formality. But she's very excited to be working on her first real case! A case where her actions can save someone from Hell or the Abyss!

She's very scared to have someone's eternal fate in her hands, but at least Clarence is there to head the legal team. All she has to do is watch the master at work, develop more real-world experience, and try to avoid saying something so stupid that he gets tortured for eternity.

Easy, right? 

Meanwhile--

"The King in Irons is dead."

For many reasons, Norgorber can't delegate as much as other gods, and so it isn't exactly surprising for Norgorber to make a personal visit to his Axis defense lawyer firm. Lozsar has even had a visit from him before. It still scares her shitless. 

"Yes, sir."

"In life the man couldn't take a shit without sending off a Commune to me about it, so I suppose I ought to send a lawyer."

"Yes, sir."

This is much less terrifying than it could be!

"You know, I think this is what our friend Abadar would call an incentives problem. Someone bothers me constantly when I'm alive, what do I do, I help them out when they're dead. Doesn't exactly get people to leave me alone, does it."

How is she supposed to respond to this.

"No... sir?" she hazards.

"Why are you so deferential. I'm not Asmodeus, you know," Norgorber complains. "I haven't ever tortured anyone for thousands of years for not calling me 'sir.' Or even hundreds. People don't need to be sucking up to me every time I tell them to do some lawyering."

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

"I'm really very merciful," Norgorber says. "Like how I'm treating the King in Irons! He wouldn't stop annoying me his whole life, and what do I do? I send someone to take care of his afterlife situation! Not"-- Norgorber hastens to clarify-- "in a 'take care of this man's afterlife situation' 'this is a very nice afterlife you have there, shame if something happened to it' sort of way. Take care of it in the normal way. Go to this man's trial and give him the full Norgorber follower treatment."

"It is my highest priority."

"Excellent. Oh, and Lozsar?"

"Yes?"

"I like the King in Irons. It would be a waste for him to spend his eternity as a torch without even a chance to better himself. And I don't like it when my lawyers' incompetence means people I like wind up getting wasted. And you know what happens to people who do things I don't like?"

"Torture?"

"Of course not. Because we're in Axis, and that would be illegal. And I'd never do something illegal. So you should feel perfectly safe."

Meanwhile, the prediction markets in the plane of Axis have suggested that the triallawyer* best placed to win the bounty provided by various interested parties to the chief instrument of the plane's obtaining of the soul of the King-In-Irons, in the event that this obtaining takes place as the result of a successful trial**, of those lawyers interested in the bounty, is The-Sound-Of-The-First-Peal-Of-A-Cathedral-Skyscraper-Bell-Raised-To-The-Glory-Of-Aroden-When-He-Lived***, or Peal for short. Peal is exceptionally interested, and highly trained at the vitally important art of Interacting With Chaotic Entities, and has a six percent above par**** win record. Nonetheless, Peal will be keeping in mind the secondary bounties available for those who fulfil the mortal's preferences (the mortal has an excellent history of repayment of debts, positive and negative) and for depriving hostile entities in the Evil alignments of the soul in question (most placed, of course, by a variety of Good entities and Axis charitable associations), should this be impossible. Peal has spent the time the soul of the King-In-Irons spent traversing the River of Souls loading the new case information and refreshing key case laws, and is wholly prepared to attempt to maximize its own utility via this trial in full accordance with all appropriate Law.

(*: You cannot seriously be proposing that this is the same profession as drawing up contracts anywhere in the multiverse, can you?)

(**: Two syllables***** in Utopian.)

(***: Five syllables! Utopians are fine with long names, see?!)

(****: This is a cultural translation of dubious precision.)

(*****: It's really sort of arguable whether Utopian has syllables that really correspond to human syllables, but, you know, by analogy?)

The Abyss hasn't sent a lawyer. The Abyss doesn't send lawyers. Sending lawyers is doing things, and the Abyss doesn't do things, entities within the Abyss do things.

Instead a four-armed, dragon-scaled and -winged, Abyssal lawyer has... shown up. Still covered in blood, from the demons crying out for FLESH that he had to shred to get to the court. Few in the Abyss will gainsay a tyranny demon's right to go where they will, but there's always someone willing to push it.

It'd be boring if there wasn't, after all.

The armies of Heaven are long on paladins, very long on people who wanted to be paladins, and even longer on people who spent their entire life following the rules and looking after their neighbors and being kind to their children. They have really a lot of those - which isn't to say they don't want more, of course, but they have a lot. What they're short on is people who grew up Evil and loudly declare themselves to be Evil while donating fortunes to the Church of Iomedae because it is the most efficient way to accomplish their goals. There's comparative advantage things, here. 

Adjudicator Telthenor is highly experienced, which does not mean he always wins, it means he always gives Asmodeus a hell of fight. Nobody always wins.

(Which, as Iomedae would say, is one of the reasons they really want the King-In-Irons. There's people who can get good results by being convinced that's bullshit. Well, for a while.)