Athena

Athena has long, orange hair tied into a ponytail tied with a blue ribbon on the right side of her head, while her bangs resemble a heartbeat reading in electrocardiography. She typically wears a yellow jacket that has a blue line on each cuff, a matching skirt, a white shirt, a blue tie, black tights, and white boots with a thick blue line around the top, a line in the middle and gray soles. On her right hand is a three-fingered black glove that wraps around her thumb, index, and middle fingers. The glove has pads on the fingertips that interface with the holograms projected from Widget, which is worn around her neck. Athena wears moon-shaped earrings. 18-years-old.

Athena Cykes is a defense attorney working under Phoenix Wright at the Wright Anything Agency. She is a specialist in analytical psychology, which she studied in Europe. She has highly sensitive hearing and has the special ability to pick up subtle emotions from witnesses' voices, which she can then examine using a program called the "Mood Matrix". The Mood Matrix is linked to her AI partner Widget, who hangs around her neck and changes color with her emotions.

Athena is good-spirited, well-meaning and highly motivated as a person. She has strong emotions and a powerful drive to win, which can sometimes cause her to be reckless. Widget occasionally picks up on her emotions and blurts out what she's really thinking, much to her chagrin. She likes orange juice after a good workout and gratuitously peppers her speech with French, German, Spanish, and Italian, languages that she apparently picked up while studying in Europe. Athena also seems to have the habits of getting lost easily and falling asleep just about anywhere. In court, she uses Widget's holographic capabilities extensively; whereas her co-workers bring hard copies of notes and evidence to read and reference, Athena prefers to store and retrieve information digitally via Widget. Ironically, as a child, Athena was quiet and subdued, and had trouble grasping the difference between robots and humans due to her isolation. It was only after she grew up and was able to socialize more that she became the energetic presence that her colleagues and clients would come to know her for.

Beneath her external cheerfulness was a deep-seated childhood trauma that threatened to overpower her during two of her trials. Although she would sometimes put on a brave face, Widget's expression would give an insight into her true feelings. When she was extensively ignored in court, especially when the case was going very badly for her, Athena would be reminded of her mother's murder and being ignored during Simon Blackquill's trial, causing her to shut down. In this state, her eyes would become blank, while Widget would go black to mirror Athena's emotional state. After the retrial of UR-1, she began to move on from her past trauma, no longer shutting down completely when things began to go badly for her in court. However, her self-confidence can still be fragile, as shown by her doubting herself during Bucky Whet's trial, although a few guiding (though harsh) words from Simon Blackquill put her back on track again.

Athena cares greatly for Simon, with his unjust incarceration being her primary drive to become a defense attorney in the hopes of being able to free him. She cried in relief after his release, releasing years of bottled-up feelings. The feelings are mutual as Simon was more than willing to be executed for Athena's sake. Otherwise, the two frequently exchange snark, teasing and poking fun at each other both in private and in the courtroom where they are rivals. Although Athena is inexperienced, Simon doesn't hold back and prefers to let her work her way in as a form of tough love. However, he will step in to help her if he deems such intervention necessary, with his aid proving instrumental to give Athena the necessary push to solve her cases. Simon believes that Athena is full of weak points and needs to analyze herself objectively, something she begrudgingly agrees to. Nonetheless, she honestly tries her best to improve herself as a lawyer and build more confidence.

Because of her ability to read people's emotions, Athena has shown herself to be empathic of others. Whenever using her Mood Matrix and detecting overloaded emotions, Athena does her best to find the cause of distress, not just as a means to aid her case but also to help relieve her patients of their anxiety. For example, when treating Owen, she tried to navigate as carefully as possible as she was dealing with a frightened five-year-old boy alter. When treating Armie Buff, she gave her the necessary encouragement to overcome her traumas and come out of her self-imposed seclusion. She also asked Bucky to give a bowl of udon to Geiru on behalf of her master, as a means of passing down Teifu's message and give Geiru closure.

Along with her mother, Dr. Metis Cykes, Athena lived at the Cosmos Space Center as a child. The employees there affectionately referred to her as "princess", and she in turn viewed them as family. However, she was very withdrawn, mostly due to her strengthened hearing ability being so pronounced that it gave her sensory overload when around large groups of people. Due to this, Athena often avoided others and missed many days of school. Athena did manage to bond with a schoolmate named Juniper Woods, who would also often miss school due to her poor health. Metis spent much of her time working. She and her research partner, Aura Blackquill, made specialized headphones for Athena to wear, particularly when she had to go out in public. Athena hated having to wear them because they were heavy and uncomfortable, and they seemingly gave her horrible headaches. Unable to grasp her mother's explanation of the headphones, Athena felt that she was being seen as a mere test subject. Seven years would pass before Athena found out that the headphones were actually sound-dampening; they emitted sound frequencies that nullified emotional inputs, and that their long-term effect was to rein in her sensitive hearing enough so that she could lead a more normal life. Athena also grew close to the facility robots Clonco and Ponco that Metis had created, with the young Athena considering them part of her extended family. However, her sheltered upbringing left her oblivious to the finer differences between humans and robots. If one of the robots suffered from a malfunction, she would try and treat it like she would a human, by wrapping it in bandages. Conversely, when Metis would repair the robots using the disassembly table located in the robotics lab, Athena believed it would work on humans too, and often asked her mother if she could be "fixed" there when she was hurt, although her requests were always denied.

On October 7, 2020, Athena went to see her mother in the robotics lab in order to show her a drawing she had recently finished. When she arrived, however, she stumbled upon an intruder dressed in Metis's Noh mask and space center jacket, with the bloody body of her recently murdered mother beside him. In a panic, Athena grabbed a utility knife and stabbed the man in the right hand. The masked man's blood splattered onto a moon rock. The intruder retaliated by kicking her, knocking her unconscious, before fleeing the scene. After she came to, Athena tried to wake her mother. In her childlike state of denial and still not quite understanding the difference between humans and robots, she had Ponco move Metis to the robot disassembly table, thinking the machinery would be able to "fix" her like it did the robots. At that moment, Prosecutor Simon Blackquill, Metis's student and Aura's brother, arrived. Athena, covered in blood from the ordeal, explained to him — with a smile and a "far-off look in her eyes," as Prosecutor Blackquill would later recall — what she intended to do. Prosecutor Blackquill, thinking that Athena had killed her own mother, used the murder weapon, Metis's katana, to forcibly dismantle Ponco, before removing Athena and the pieces of the robot from the lab, accidentally leaving a headphone-shaped blood imprint on his clothes. By the time Athena had returned to the Center, Prosecutor Blackquill had been arrested for Metis's murder. Prosecutor Blackquill's trial was held soon afterwards. Athena tried to speak out in his defense, saying "his heart is screaming that he didn't kill her," but was ignored because no one understood what she meant. Prosecutor Blackquill pleaded guilty and was soon convicted, leaving Athena traumatized by the ordeal and causing her to repress many of her memories of that day. After the incident, Athena stopped going to school; she lost touch with Juniper Woods as well, though the two would later start exchanging letters. At this point, she had stopped wearing the headphones, being seen without them while testifying on Prosecutor Blackquill's behalf, presumably because they had been submitted to the police as evidence. After the trial, Athena went to Europe to live with her relatives, taking with her two gifts that her mother had given her: Widget and a small piece of moon rock made into a necklace. She later came to wear Widget around her neck instead, and fashioned the moon rock pendant into an earring. She wanted to save Prosecutor Blackquill someday, but did not know how.