Orla Shipley

Orla Shipley

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Orla Shipley V · T · F
Occupation	Aquarium orca
Biological information
Last known status	Alive (July 2027)
Eye color	Black
Hair color	N/A* (black and white skin)
Height (the metric (cm) values are sourced from official guidebooks and may not reflect the relative sizes of characters as depicted in-game or in other official media)	9'10"; 300 cm
Associates
Family	Ora Shipley (older sister)
Friends	Jack Shipley (aquarium owner; deceased) Sasha Buckler (trainer) Rifle (aquarium penguin)
Affiliates	Shipshape Aquarium (home) Herman Crab (aquarium vet) Marlon Rimes (aquarium animal keeper) Phoenix Wright (defense attorney)
Aliases/nicknames
Ora Shipley* (sister's name) Cap'n Orla* (equivalent of Orla) "The killer whale"* (by Norma DePlume)
Names in other languages
Japanese (romanization written with the given name first)	エール (Ale)* (equivalent of Orla) 荒船 エル (Elle Arafune)* (equivalent of Ora Shipley)
Actors
English	?
Japanese (romanization written with the given name first)	?
Miscellaneous
Debut episode	Turnabout Reclaimed
Musical theme	"Cap'n Orla's Swashbucklers ~ Adventures Across the Seven Seas"

"Ora Shipley" redirects here; for this orca's sister, see Ora Shipley the First.

Phoenix Wright

A punk-rock pirate killer whale? *groan* It's official -- society's on the road to ruin.

— Turnabout Reclaimed

Orla Shipley (also previously known as Ora "Orla" Shipley) is an orca or killer whale living at the Shipshape Aquarium that is the "lead" in the aquarium's pirate-themed show. After the aquarium's owner, Jack Shipley, was found dead by Orla's pool, she was suspected of having killed him. Her trainer, Sasha Buckler, believed that Orla was innocent, and so requested a newly-reinstated Phoenix Wright to defend the orca in court.

Ora and Orla

The elder Ora Shipley with Marlon Rimes and Azura Summers.

Orla and her sister Ora were both found beached on a shore when they were young orca calves by Jack Shipley. They were cared for by Dr. Herman Crab and Jack (with Orla being in worse condition) until they deemed well enough to return to the wild. However, when it was time for the pair to leave, they both refused. They had both become fond of Jack, and so he decided to bring them to his aquarium instead.

Jack Shipley's death

Main article: Turnabout Reclaimed

Orla on trial

Orla and Jack on a flyer for the Swashbuckler Spectacular show.

In the time in which Ora and Orla were both at the aquarium, the aquarium had a stage show, in which Azura Summers and Ora both performed. Summers suffered from a heart condition, but she did not tell anyone and performed in the show anyway. During one show, Summers suddenly suffered a heart attack and keeled over into the water. Ora, of her own accord, used her newly learned "lifesaver" trick to bring Summers to the surface, but to onlookers, it seemed as if Ora had bitten Summers to death. The Center for Dangerous Animal Control (CDAC) demanded that both orcas be put down. Jack Shipley and resident vet Herman Crab secretly transferred Ora to the larger Supermarine Aquarium, telling the CDAC that they had put her down, and negotiated to let Orla live. Norma DePlume wrote a nonfiction book called "The Killer Killer Whale" about the incident.

Soon, feisty Sasha Buckler and Orla (posing as the original Ora) had taken over Summers and Ora's respective roles. Meanwhile, DePlume had been doing further snooping and learned that Shipley and Crab were making large payments each month to an unknown organization. She thought they were paying off the CDAC to not euthanize Ora, but in reality, they were simply paying the Supermarine Aquarium for Ora's care.

Carrying Jack's body.

A year after Summers' death, Orla heard the command whistle for the "lifesaver" trick whilst still in her tank. She responded by searching for the dummy prop she normally used, eventually finding something in the skull-rock prop and pulling it out, injuring herself in the process after ramming it. However, the body turned out to be that of Jack Shipley. Orla quickly grabbed him in her mouth and bought him to the surface. She then pulled on a tarpaulin just outside her tank, which in turn knocked over several crates used as props, in order to get the attention of the other employers. However, her actions were witnessed by DePlume, who thought she had attacked and killed Shipley.

DePlume rushed off to call the police, who quarantined the orca pool (along with Orla), and planned to euthanize her. Sasha Buckler raced to the office of former law legend Phoenix Wright, who had just re-earned his attorney's badge. Without letting on that his soon-to-be-client was an orca, Buckler persuaded him to take the case. Wright investigated the aquarium and bumped into noisy detective Bobby Fulbright, to whom he then presented several pieces of evidence proving it could have been a human murder. However, the only one willing to take the case to court was the somewhat samurai-centric convict prosecutor Simon Blackquill.

In trial the next day, Wright quickly used the testimony of animal keeper Marlon Rimes to prove that Orla could not have committed the crime, earning yet another "not guilty" verdict with his clever tactics.

A new suspect

However, Blackquill wasted no time in putting Sasha Buckler in the defendant's chair in Orla's place. Wright realized he had been backing himself into a corner all along; he had insinuated that the culprit had struck the victim over the head with a bag of coins, then threw the body in the water and made Orla perform tricks to fool DePlume into thinking Orla had done it. Blackquill quickly brought to light the fact that Buckler was the only one who could have done either of those things, as she possessed just one of two keycards allowing access to the orca pool room (the other belonging to Shipley), and she knew all of Orla's tricks. However, Wright turned the case on its head by introducing the theory that the actual killing had taken place, not in the orca pool room, but in the show pool room. By that time, an updated autopsy report had confirmed that cause of death was actually a 65-foot fall, which could be accomplished in the show pool room just as well as in the orca pool room. At the approximate time of death, the orca pool had been being cleaned, which meant that all the water was drained. During that time, Orla had been relocated to the show pool room. However, this now placed a high degree of suspicion on Marlon Rimes, as he had been watching Orla in the show pool room during that time. Rimes was subsequently called to give testimony as a witness.

During his cross-examination, Wright uncovered Rimes' whole truth. Rimes harbored a deep grudge against Orla, believing her to be the same orca who had killed his lover, Azura Summers. While Rimes was watching over Orla in the show pool room, he had drained the water to kill the orca. Jack Shipley had walked into the room and rushed to fill the pool again, but slipped and fell into the empty pool. Rimes tried to save him, but to no avail, and he fell to his death. Rimes took advantage of a seperate plot of Sasha Buckler's to dispose of the body. Buckler was not going to be performing in the latest stage show, and she plotted to force them to revert to the old one by stealing a key prop-the skull rock. Rimes stuffed Shipley's body inside the rock and then gave Buckler the go-ahead to haul it into the orca pool room using a lift. Later, Orla's head-butting of the skull rock jarred Shipley's body loose, at which point Rimes played a recording of Summers blowing a whistle in order to get Orla to perform the lifesaver trick for DePlume. He also piped in year-old stage show music through a hallway speaker. By doing this, he planned to kill two birds with one stone; he would clear himself of suspicion and Orla would be euthanized, getting him his "vengeance" once and for all. However, Wright exposed all his plans and cleared both Buckler and Orla's names. Rimes became even more dejected when Wright revealed that neither orca had killed anybody at all, meaning his supposed vengeance would have been fruitless even if it had succeeded. However, Wright was able to help him escape the death penalty or even a jail sentence by revealing how he had tried to save Shipley. Rimes went into rehabilitation for a few months and then returned to his usual job at the aquarium.

Personality

Orla Shipley

Fwe fwe fweet. Fwe fwe fwe fweeet! Fwe fwe fwe fweet fwe fwe fweet!

— Turnabout Reclaimed

Orla's mugshot.

Orla is a playful and intelligent orca who has learnt several "tricks" for communicating with humans, including trying to cheer Buckler up with a volleyball and revealing the body of Jack Shipley.

Name

• "Arafune", her Japanese surname, means "wild boat".
• Her Japanese name "Ale" (エール) comes from "whale" (ホエール).
• "Orla" (which means "golden princess") and "Ora" are both derived from "orca".
• "Shipley" is a play on the word "ship."

Development

• Orla is the second non-human animal (after Polly the parrot in Turnabout Goodbyes) to be called as a witness in the main Ace Attorney series, as well as the second character to give their testimony remotely (the first being Shelly de Killer in Farewell, My Turnabout). She is, however, the first witness to not speak any English at all during their testimony (excluding Machi Tobaye's testimony, which is in Borginian and translated into English by Lamiroir).
• She is the first, and currently only, non-human character in the series to be accused of a crime and defended in court.