by cocopi
Ace Attorney-inspired comedic legal drama meets Otome Isekai meets slow-burn rivals to lovers romance. Clara Casewell is an ambitious up-and-coming associate at an international corporate law firm. On the surface, Clara has everything: a promising future, a prestigious career, a fancy apartment, and more money than she knows what to do with. Yet underneath, she’s hiding something not quite-so-lawyerly: she loves reading villainess stories. It doesn’t matter how trashy or badly written they are; as long as it’s got a haughty girl and a brooding duke, Clara will devour it like popcorn! She only has one pet peeve: she can’t stand it when those stories have legal drama, because their badly designed legal systems invariably piss her off. After putting in thousands of billable hours and closing a deal the papers called ‘the merger of the decade’, Clara ekes out a promotion to Senior Counsel over her longstanding rival, the cocky Warren Righton. The firm flies her out to Boston to celebrate, but when a nasty bout of turbulence sends her plane spiraling down, everything goes dark. When Clara wakes up, she’s wearing a… maid’s uniform? She finds herself in a world of nobles and magic, not social media and corporate grind. Not ideal, but better than being dead—if not for one little problem: Clara’s master is the notorious Iris von Rhenia, the villainess of one of the stories she’d read. And Iris and Clara are about to be put on trial for poisoning the heroine. A trial based on truth magic, where the accused get no defense. Join Clara as she learns the ins-and-outs of the unfair, convoluted, and often fantastical courts of the Holy Kingdom of Arcadia, meeting a colorful cast of characters including the heir to the Duke of the North™—but why does he look eerily like her annoying rival Warren? Surely fantasy law can’t be harder than modern cross-border taxation, right? Join us on our Villainess Discord to discuss this and other Villainess stories on RR! Access advance chapters with Patreon! Cover art by Kisielec. Header art by 00chovo. Updates Mondays and Fridays for now. This story is only posted on Royal Road, ScribbleHub, and my Patreon. If you see it anywhere else, please message me.
