"Good morning, Mister... High Inquisitor? Is there anything I can get to make you more comfortable?"

  The young man sits across from the significantly less golden than seen in footage alien prisoner. The alien rolls his eyes and snips back,

  "I guess I shall allow you to only call me Lord High Inquisitor. At this point, I'll just drive myself crazy trying to get you humans to use my full names and titles, and yes, can I please get something to eat, preferably with meat? Possibly a local cuisine since I seem to finally be on a planet... also, who are you? You aren't a normal guard."

  The young man nods, replying,

  "I am Peter Logan. Just call me Peter or Pete. I am your legal counsel for this trial since you requested a lawyer to be provided to you during your transit."

  The Alien raises his eyebrow, correcting,

  "It may have sounded as such, but I was reading from the lawbook my captors graciously allowed me access to, I was simply stating out loud that odd little piece of rules. I haven't heard of it. It makes no sense for a captor to offer legal representation for a criminal."

  The lawyer chuckles, answering,

  "Well, it's good you did, since that meant they could no longer question you or even use anything you say until you meet with me. The best part is, we cannot be recorded since I am in the room with you. Client confidentiality and all that. Think of this option as a safety rope; it protects you from any misunderstandings of the law, which you saw is quite complex in some cases."

  The Inquisitor nods, responding,

  "Yes, very much so. Apparently, my reading was only over the laws that I supposedly broke, and the specifics of those laws were far more expansive than the entirety of Kingdom law, but at the same time, for people with actual privilege, it does seem to offer ways out of punishment."

  Pete finishes ordering food on his smart device and corrects,

  "It's not getting out of trouble; it's proving you did not actually commit a certain crime, or there were circumstances that somewhat tied your hands, meaning the punishment is lesser. Overall, my job, and the job of our entire law system, is to prove you actually did the crime; if they cannot prove it beyond a doubt, then you can probably walk free, and we ship you back home. Unfortunately for both of us, they are throwing everything at you and hoping something sticks, so we have our work cut out for us."

  The Inquisitor can't help but laugh at the absurdity, and he asks,

  "So, what you're telling me is that your legal system is based on the assumption that the enforcement bodies are the ones that have to prove guilt? The one who committed the crime doesn't have to prove their own innocence? How does one actually make the law work in this system?"

  Pete responds in a jovial tone,

  "Because of people like me, we spend much of our lives researching the law, like for your case, when I was assigned to you months ago, I've been researching every single law you are being accused of breaking. I read every word, every past case, and reviewed what little evidence I was able to get my hands on before you got here, and information was made more readily available. In fact, I spent all of last night poring over the footage of any importance that the Navy gave us.

  People like me are dedicated to our trade, we want justice to reign supreme, and many of us, including my mentor, believe we are the first and last line of defense against tyranny."

  The Inquisitor cocks his head, responding before asking,

  "I can appreciate someone so inquisitive; in fact, it would be wonderful to be able to have people as dedicated to legal affairs as you on my retinue. I definitely have my concerns about the speed of your trials if this is the case. I do question what the word Tyranny means. It sounds almost like a proper name, and whatever artifice or magic you humans use to speak our tongue did not translate at all, or did you mispeak?"

  The Inquisitor does find the humans interesting, their most interesting technology, and the one the Inquisitor wants most is their automatic communication artifice. He had always noticed the humans spoke oddly. When they had helmets on, he couldn't hear their actual language, but their mouths moved wrong, yet his tongue came through. Being a smart man, he easily figured out they were speaking their own language into something, and out came his. It was a novel invention that he could definitely see use for even in the Eternal Kingdom, especially with newer races.

  He had assumed the translator was attached to the helmets the humans wore, but now he can see it can be made more portable, a small device hooked up to Pete's shoulder and a small strap around his neck with some metal studs on it that sit just below the collar of his shirt so as not to look like he is collared like a pet. The Inquisitor really wants that one, but painted or plated in gold, of course. Despite the incredible discomfort of being almost entirely drained of mana, he does find it nice to speak to a human without a helmet on. He can hear their bass-heavy voices and their crude, yet still beautiful language. While different from the Eternal Tongue, it still shares a similar grace, but with less flowery words, its more direct. Yet, there he is, confused by a word the human spoke, like it was not a specific name, but a common concept, and that concept is one that the Inquisitor and obviously the translator cannot figure out common ground on between the human and the golden being.

  Pete answers,

  "I guess that word did come from a proper name... so... hmmmm... okay...

  Tyranny is a state of being within government where the people in power wage war on those under them. That's the main definition, but culturally it means any time a leader rules a nation through force, fear, or any other means where the people aren't free to speak their minds or pursue happiness. In the minds of the people of my nation, the United States, we consider tyranny where a president, our leader, goes around all legal procedures and goes beyond their authority granted by the people to serve their own interests, or if they use their power to oppress or otherwise treat the people below them badly.

  The law, which I am a scholar of, helps prevent this as a sort of barrier that limits the steps our leaders can take until they reach tyranny, because we found through history it rarely comes quickly. It's a slow process where more and more rights and freedoms are taken away by the day, but if there are those in law who protect everyone equally, it is difficult for someone with tyrannical aspirations to reach their end goal because they were unable to do step one while they were still limited in power.

  As an example, a bad leader wants to have a massive personal army so he can arrest or kill all the others in government he doesn't like. At first, all he has is the title, so he has to request funds for the army, and then he has to request the equipment and training for the army. First, to get funds since they are taxpayer funds, he has to file a request or attempt to push an executive order, depending on the man's station. Any order or request must be reviewed by an independently elected review board. If it's a bad enough order, then legal professionals review it and dig through all the hidden meanings to either block or let the order pass. Then, once the man has the money he wants, there is the problem of misappropriation because no one in their right mind would openly admit they wish to kill or arrest everyone else when asking for money. If that man uses that money for anything other than the reason he gave during his request, an inquiry will be launched on him and his closest friends to figure out where the money is going and what it is doing. This can result in legal sanctions because that leader, being bound by the same laws as everyone else in the USA, can be arrested or sanctioned for fraudulent money spending.

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  Then the final step, the one that's most controversial, only happens after everything else has failed. If the system somehow fails to the extent that this bad leader manages to hide all of his actions successfully, there is what we call the Damocles Protocol, which is a legal provision that is still debated to this day and has been used once before against the governor of a solar system. It is not just an allowance, but the duty of any sufficiently ranked military officer to either order the arrest or execution of that bad leader with extreme prejudice. This is because not all military members are sworn to serve the government or any person; they are sworn entirely to the populace and the Constitution. While the Damocles Protocol has very limited use cases, it grants any military officer some form of inquisitive capability to bring up problems to the rest of the US when it comes to those in leadership. Our military is a shield for the people, and the noose tied around all politicians' necks.

  All of this, of course, is an extreme case, but it stops tyranny, and most of all, stops potential civil wars from breaking out. There are control methods for the military men, mainly the Damocles Protocol goes for them too, with even fewer restrictions. So everyone in the government keeps each other in check so no one can become too overwhelmingly powerful and become a tyrant."

  The Inquisitor cannot believe his ears, but does see the overall reasoning. As horrible as it sounds for there to be a government system that would limit those in charge, and in his experience, they are usually divinely appointed, but it has more safety measures built in than he can comprehend. He comes to the realization that the reason why he wasn't respected very much by Admiral Hollander is because of his position as what Pete had pretty much described as a private army for a leader, or he is a private officer of that army, depending on one's perspective. He can see it now, how mad he would be himself if he were bound by law and met someone with unlimited authority and could disregard laws or any appropriation measures for resources. To these humans, the Inquisitor can see they would see him as this "tyrant" or maybe the King himself, and he understands now. The reason why the word couldn't be translated is that there is no word for it in the Eternal Tongue, because there has never been anything else for a word to exist to differentiate how they run government.

  Then another realization hits, and the Inquisitor understands that if they have a word for it, that in two syllables describes the entire way government can be run, the humans must've at some point had a government that was "tyranny". This means in the Inquisitor's mind, that it's not that the humans couldn't understand how the Eternal Kingdom works, like he had assumed before, it's that they must've never been under an enlightened and ascended ruler before, and thus see this tyranny as a total negative. It makes sense to him now, the humans are not demons from the void, who exist as the anathema to all civilization and wish to damn all the souls of those faithful; the humans are more like runaway children who found their own way to live in chaos because they had either a neglectful or abusive parent that got so bad, starving in the wild would've been prefferable.

  The Inquisitor now feels terrible, only for not understanding this before. He feels he should've been more inquisitive, asking about their history and how they govern themselves, rather than assuming they were like the rest of the species in the Eternal Kingdom. They developed so far away in the darkness of space they couldn't see His Majesty's radiance, and they grew up in the wild, as a chaotic mess developing in a way that was incredibly different from that of the Eternal Kingdom he mistook this difference for pure weakness and he showed his superiority and power over them as is normal, when as an enlightened mind he should've looked deeper into their eyes and understood he should've opened his arms in embrace rather than in display.

  He looks his legal counsel in the eyes and tries to understand the alien thoughts in the human mind. He had been looking at the man like a useful tool, or a novel concept; now he understands this man is almost just like him, in his own mind. The humans may have more laws, but that doesn't mean they aren't more strict or lax than the Eternal Kingdom; they simply were forced to develop legal code without divine inspiration or enlightened thinkers to decide verdicts and punishments. They had to write down every conceivable part of a law or crime just to make sure proper justice would be served in the absence of an enlightened thinker being able to make a judgment based on the will of the divine. In fact, looking back, the Inquisitor is massively impressed that the humans could develop such a legal code through trial and error without divine inspiration, and it's all thanks to those scholars like the man Pete across from him.

  Everything about the humans makes sense in his mind based on this point of view. In the absence of proper guidance, they went their own ways, developed multiple languages, apparently, where translators were needed, they even reached the stars and developed a unique form of civilization. It makes the Inquisitor's heart both flutter and weep for the humans, he is insanely proud of them, people able to do this much with the whole universe against them, and saddened because they haven't been able to achieve proper enlightenment, and with his failure it may be another thousand years before they can reach the pinnacle of civilization like the Eternal Kingdom.

  He understands his duty now, not one of authority, but one of true inquisition. He will learn about these humans, everything about them, and help educate them when possible. He now knows they can understand proper governance; he simply has to bring them onto his side. He decides right here, in this room with his legal counsel, he will follow through with his trial and will answer them truthfully and with absolute conviction so he can open his arms to embrace them once he shows repentance for his past mistake, his mistake of not understanding humanity for what they were, for his failure as an Inquisitor...

  Three weeks later, the Inquisitor stands before the panel of judges who sit above him. Along one wall is a group of people known as a Jury who came from many different human nations, the same as the judges, to help pass judgment upon him. He sees the merit of this jury, as the judges, while educated, are not divinely inspired, so by asking for help from many other people, a form of consensus about the law can be made, and hopefully, the right decision.

  His lawyer had told him his case was falling apart and that he openly admitted to many of the crimes he was accused of. The Inquisitor doesn't fret it as much as the human. He is practically immortal when it comes to lifespan, and members of leadership are useful as long-term prisoners. Plus, it's bad faith to execute anyone in a leadership role, and plus, he's cooperating and being friendly, so the judges and jury shouldn't be mad enough to do anything harmful, especially since humans do not believe in torture. He can always live out his sentence peacefully, learning as he goes.

  Although he has some concerns about the regular populace. He has heard from his lawyer that the people on the outside have really started to hate him for his actions and the many presses of the humans really played up his actions as "Genocidal" and "Religiously Motivated Mass Murder", but he is sure these humans, as they grow more enlightened and his overall magnetic presence, they will understand his actions were practically an accident based on his wrong initial judgement. Today, though, is a good day, all because he will finally be granted his wrist-slap and be sent on his merry way.

  "Do you have any final statements before judgment is passed?"

  The central judge asks in a booming voice. The inquisitor nods and states concisely,

  "I made a mistake, I know, and I plan to repent for it and one day, I and humanity shall leave the darkness of ignorance behind and into the loving light of his Majesty."

  He then ends and sits in his chair. He sees his lawyer cradle his head in his hands, a clear sign that he was overtaken by awe and reverence by the Inquisitor. He believes they have become good friends over these weeks. He smiles at the jury who seemingly shy away before the Judges have a muttered conversation before his judgment is read...

  "In accordance with international law and with our duty as international union enforcement officials, we have been granted the terrible task of ridding this world of a genocidal maniac."

  The red-helmeted officer from the UEG speaks to his line of riflemen, all his soldiers being from different human nations. They all nod in silence as before them, chained to a wall, is the Inquisitor, wearing an orange jumpsuit and with a bag over his head. The Officer raises his arm and all the men chamber a single round into the bolts of their .50 caliber rifles, the minimum caliber to be considered humane for any execution after international law found all other forms of execution as too painful. The men all aim, and with his hand dropping,g the roll of thunder fills the execution yard as eight fifty-caliber rounds kill the Inquisitor in a matter of seconds. Fulfilling his task to the end, the officer approaches the shattered corpse and drives a long, thin spear through the head of the body, making sure no more life remains. Upon death, morticians collect the body in order to piece it back together so it may be sent back home for proper burial.

  Elsewhere, across human space, there is solemn celebration as another terrible tyrant has been erased from the universe, but all hearts are too heavy with the news of the official war declaration made by the UEG against the USA. An all-out war between two human powers, heralded by the execution of a monster from distant space.