The moon filed its lawsuit through a cratered parchment that fell like a dying satellite, its impact cratering the pumpkin patch into a braille indictment. Ling unearthed the document at midnight, her gloves smoking where lunar regolith etched LUNA V. LING – GRAVITATIONAL HARASSMENT & TIDAL THEFT into her palms. Above, the scarecrow judge hung crucified across Orion's Belt, its straw limbs splayed in celestial custody arrangements.
"They've unionized the tides," Chu Feng said, hip-deep in a suddenly sentient wheat field that recoiled from his shadow. The photosynthesis probation had left his silhouette speckled with chloroplast handcuffs that glowed when he lied. "Neap faction wants backpay for every romantic metaphor."
Arbiter materialized from a moonbeam wearing a suit woven from expired eclipse permits and comet tail apologies. "I might've explained tidal rights to a harvest moon! But only to stop it flooding the arbitration clauses!"
A meteorite shattered the barn doors, vomiting forth:
A jury pool of asteroid belt refugees
A prosecutor shaped like a black hole's event horizon in pinstripes
The fossilized remains of every "moonlit stroll" cliché Ling had ever weaponized
The Cratered Courtroom
The Lunar Tribunal convened in the Sea of Tranquility's darkest mare. Judge Selene Lex presided as a shimmering mass of conflicting moon phases, her voice oscillating between crescent whisper and full-moon dogma:
"Defendant stands accused of:" Moon dust bullet-pointed the charges mid-vacuum. "(a) Unlicensed narrative extraction of maria formations; (b) Willful ignorance of gravitational consent protocols; and (c) Emotional piracy via…" A solar flare illuminated the addendum: "…comparing love to 'phases' in subsection 12(d)."
Ling hurled Jiang Yue's music box into Tycho Crater. Its gears chewed through lunar crust, playing a melody that made moon rocks vibrate confessionals: WE WERE ONCE PART OF EARTH.
"Objection!" Her spacesuit visor fogged with perjury frost. "Plaintiff lacks standing in any stable orbital model!"
Selene Lex's gavel—a shard of the Tunguska Event—slammed, birthing a meteor shower that annihilated the barn's remaining wall. "Sustained as astronomically irrelevant! Exhibit Gamma:" The crater vomited security footage of Chu Feng whistling during the 1999 Eclipse Massacre.
The Prosecution's Orbital Onslaught
The trial unfolded through cosmic absurdity. The prosecution's first witness condensed from solar wind—a solar flare wearing a perjury-proof corona.
"The defendant's ancestors weaponized moon phases during the 1789 Werewolf Panic!" It projected holograms of almanacs shaped like brass knuckles. "My client demands royalties for every 'once in a blue moon' uttered since Shakespeare!"
Chu Feng countered by releasing genetically modified sunflowers that devoured the testimony through photosynthesis. "Your honor, this evidence is clearly eclipsed by statute limitations!"
The scarecrow judge—now hosting a colony of litigious moon dust mites in its hollow chest—attempted to bang its asteroid gavel but triggered a chain reaction that erased three Apollo landing sites.
The Defense's Dark Side Gambit
During recess, Ling spelunked into Mare Imbrium's frozen screams. What she found would've cratered a lesser farmer:
Childhood nights selling moon phases as tarot predictions.
Arbiter teaching tides contract law during the Great Neap-Tide Rebellion of '12.
The moon plow's secret midnight ritual—carving apologies into crater walls for solar winds to erase.
She emerged clutching a neutron star USB extruded by a weeping pulsar. "Your honor, I move to introduce Exhibit Omega."
The drive contained:
The prosecution's deleted browser history (mostly Buzz Aldrin fan fiction)
A subpoenaed memory of Selene Lex binge-watching Moonfall on loop
Jiang Yue's original blueprints for Ethical Orbital Narratives buried under Hallmark Moon Card patents
The courtroom's oxygen filters hissed. For the first time in selenological history, a black hole blushed.
The Climactic Eclipse
Ling's closing argument involved a stolen Mars rover, three pounds of dark matter guilt, and a theremin tuned to the key of cosmic remorse.
"You want pure selenography?" She crashed the rover into the trial's asteroid belt, unleashing meteorites of ancestral star charts. "Let's discuss the Native lunar calendars you paved for cheese commercials! The colonialist tide charts! The—"
A moonquake swallowed the prosecution's podium whole.
Selene Lex's phases destabilized. "The tribunal… acknowledges systemic celestial appropriation."
The Gravitational Settlement
The verdict reshaped the cosmos:
The Pumpkin Patch became a sovereign maria nation with voting rights for rogue moon rocks.
Chu Feng's Shadow was sentenced to 30,000 hours of community dark matter collection.
All Moonlight received backpay in photon royalties and dental craters.
The Scarecrow Judge entered witness protection as a Lagrange Point janitor.
As Selene Lex retreated to binge-drink solar plasma, Ling found Chu Feng reprogramming the moon plow's guilt algorithms with a laser level.
"Next crisis?" he asked, dodging a radioactive tide chart.
She watched Arbiter mediate between warring constellations. "The asteroid belt's suing for emotional asteroidism damages."
The Silence Between Orbits
Twilight fell like a vacuum-sealed plea deal. The cosmos hummed with encrypted pulsar apologies as fireflies calibrated new gravitational constants above the irradiated wheat. The music box played on—its melody merging with the scarecrow's cosmic background radiation therapy and the moon plow's contented hum as it tilled stellar guilt into fallow event horizons.
Somewhere beyond the Kármán line, February 30th curated a museum of pardoned perihelions, its walls papered with retired comet names and supernova cease-and-desist orders. The audits, as ever, continued—but here, in the quantum foam between apogee and perigee, the balance felt…
Well.
Orbital.