#lutiasgithub

[lutiaslayton]

Hey everyone! Just thought I'd make a quick post to let you know that...

The complete, definite, will-not-be-edited-again-in-the-future, FINAL translation of London Holiday, is finally here for your enjoyment!

AND it comes this time with an in-character fan-translation that DOESN'T read like Google Translate!

For those who didn't know, Professor Layton and the London Holiday is an official prologue to Diabolical Box; it's a short slice-of-life story in which Luke and Layton are just having some good time solving puzzles, and at the end, they receive the letter from Schrader which starts the events of DB. This game is not really lost content per se, but it's still part of the more obscure Layton media, since we non-Japanese fans have no legal way of playing it ourselves unless we buy the Japanese version of DB.

This isn't really some breaking news or anything, but I still thought it was worth warning you that this is it -- if you wanted a fancy in-character translation, you finally have it!

I will make a small shoutout to @call-me-rucy who helped every now and then with the more accurate translation when I had doubts on how a few idioms here and there were meant to be interpreted. Thanks again for your help, and sorry for using you like this xD I do wish I could send you DMs for reasons other than just asking for your Japanese knowledge hahaha

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When I say that this won't be edited again, I mean that the only way this web page will ever be further edited in the future is if someone else shows up at some point and asks me to change something. Perhaps I took too many liberties in the fancy fan-translation compared to the original text in one or two specific occurrences, or perhaps someone will want to translate this transcript into another language that isn't English, in which case I would absolutely accept to add it! (and you would be credited for that additional translation, obviously)

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I heavily suggest you take a look at it if you haven't already, because it provides quite a bit of lore and funny/wholesome moments! We notably get the full story of how Schrader heard about, and then tried to acquire the Elysian box (...story which contradicts the fact that he would already own it in Eternal Diva, by the way), but it's not the only fun lore crumbs this prologue to DB gives us :)

Also, for the fans of the puzzle theory -- I suggest you take a look in particular at what Luke says when he solved puzzle 09. It sure is intriguing that he would mention walking from island to island on foot as if he were... Physically doing it?? Or at least had the impression that he could experience it somehow???

Heh, puzzles and hint coins have mind powers anyway, for all we know perhaps some of them can trap you inside your own mind for a bit while you're solving them. Deliciously horrifying, so much potential for fanfics/comics and lore analysis. So shameful that nobody would have thought of taking advantage of this by throwing puzzles at someone with the specific intent of slowing them down by trapping them in a trance for a bit. smh, Level 5. smh.

[lutiaslayton]

Inspector Chelmey’s Casebook: Special Recipe is now finally accessible outside of Japan!

Just like the (somewhat) more widely known Professor Layton and the Mansion of the Deathly Mirror, Chelmey’s Casebook is a Japan-exclusive DoCoMo game. Because of this, it is a game that not only never left Japan at all, but was also considered lost media up until very recently, when someone kindly recorded and published a full playthrough of it.

This two-part cosy little game is a mini story in which the protagonists are Chelmey and Barton, who investigate in St. Mystere in hopes of solving a certain case involving a lost recipe…

Thanks to this playthrough and the help of a few other people, we finally were able to archive the full story and dialogue with text and images! The github website I host now gives a full transcript of what this playthrough showed us, in both its original Japanese text and its (Google Translate) English translation.

» Go read it here! «

All this being said, please please please reblog this to any Layton fan, and ESPECIALLY to Chelmey/Barton fans! This game’s story was adorable and gave us some actual lore and backstory for Chelmey, so do take a look and let the others know that this game exists!

PS: I don’t actually speak Japanese. If you do, Google Translate and I gummed up most of the work for you. The Japanese text is available as is, so you can rely solely on the website for translation work. So please, if you have the time and motivation, it would be a great help to provide me with a more reliable translation!

[lutiaslayton]

Random update on the transcription of the Eternal Diva novel, aka probably the one that most people don't even care about that much to begin with

(though you should, I haven't translated it yet but I spotted a few words here and there that caught my attention such as Luke mentioning Misthallery multiple times. Also there is in the introduction a novel-exclusive scene with Janice in it, just fyi.)

To those who didn't know, most of my free time as of lately has been put into the transcription/translation website I have dedicated to the Japan-exclusive Layton content that we never got to see, and more specifically I have been transcribing the Eternal Diva novel. Because yes, now you know, Eternal Diva was adapted into a novel and none of us non-Japanese fans got to read it. And boy this novel is going to drive me insane because I have been working on it for literal weeks by now.

In terms of progress, I have reached the part of the story in which Puzzle 004 is about to start, aka right after the end of the "Layton McGuffinned a helicopter that thinks it's a grasshopper" part. I have transcribed up to page 119 (+ the ending is already transcribed and translated because past me felt like it), and there are now 74 blank pages left for me to fill. And then the translation will come, too. I am totally looking forward to it. Can you feel the enthusiasm in my exciting punctuation.

This is the shortest novel of the list (200 pages if I count the blank ones), and this is the only novel that has furigana everywhere (aka the only one of the four I can actually read somewhat properly). Yippeeeee

Anyway if you want to take a look even though only the beginning and the end are translated for the time being:

You can take a looksie right here!

The reason why I'm going through the entire transcription first and that the full translation will only come afterwards is because, at least in my opinion if I were to view this as a reader instead of as the person uploading the content, this means that you guys get to know the story faster than if I progressed through both the transcription and translation at the same time.

After all, let's see it like this: sure, you can't read Japanese, and for the most part, neither can I. But since it's been transcribed, it means that you can easily copy-paste the Japanese text into DeepL, or Google Translate, or any translator of your choice. Sure, it's more work for you and if you are of the lazy kind you will still have to wait the same amount of time regardless (not saying it in a derogatory way), but at least it gives the choice for the ones who want the whole story to get it somewhat faster.

I don't speak Japanese, and I am not translating things as I go, so I have only a vague understanding of what is going on in the novel (and obviously, the fact that I know the plot of the movie is a huge help). But I can already tell you this much:

We get the lyrics for the ending's song, obviously. This is part of what has been translated so far.

The whole novel is not divided into chapters, but rather into smaller scenes/sections (however you want to call it). Some are narrated by Luke, some others are narrated by Janice (and/or Melina, I guess it depends on the context). Just like the three main novels you may be slightly more familiar with, the narration is in first person.

Since the only narrators who showed up so far are Luke and Janice/Melina, I don't think the scenes from Emmy's POV will be included (aka the one in which she questions Nina's parents, the one in which she is with Schrader, and the one in which she finds and rescues Grosky in the middle of the ocean). Perhaps they are going to appear later in the novel, but I highly doubt it for a number of reasons (number of pages in each section, and titles of said sections).

The novel starts with an exclusive scene under the POV of Janice. It takes place three years after the case, and she is just finished singing for the last rehearsal before the opera she will play in the day after — it is The Eternal Kingdom, which she has not sung in three years, and the next day will be the second time ever this opera will be sung in a theatre with a public. Of course, no eternal life game planned this time. Janice also gets a letter of encouragement from Whistler, which is pretty sweet.

Unless I missed it and it somehow happens in the part I did not yet translate, the intro of the movie in which Luke and Layton solve the case where Don Paolo decided to mess with the bells of Big Ben is not at all mentioned in the novel. Luke in the novel doesn't give the introduction-narration speech that he does in the movie, we jump straight into the scene in which he is shown in Layton's office pretending to be pointing at culprits (and we get a fun little scene showing what led up to him doing it). Go read it, it is translated, and I do not want to spoil for you the opportunity to read Luke being a dork all over again.

We switch to the flashback telling the actual events, and this is the part that has no translation yet. I won't give many details as a result since I don't know the things for sure myself, but as I said earlier, I saw a few words that I recognised here and there: notably, Luke mentions Misthallery on at least two occasions. If memory serves, one of them is when Grosky shows up to "arrest" the puppet, and I think Luke went on a small tangent to give a small summary of the events of Last Specter (aka how he met Grosky), and also mentions Descole (though he does not give his name, since I'm pretty sure that he didn't hear the words "My name is Jean Descole" at the time, and only learned that precisely upon meeting him again in ED). On another time he mentions it, from what I vaguely understood he may be making a reference to Naiya, Janice/Melina's friend who can be found in Misthallery and who is also a singer (she's the NPC who is meant to represent the singer of Paxmaveiti, just like Yuming is meant to represent the singer of Mysterious Flower in Miracle Mask). Pretty inconsequential, but it's always fun to have continuity nods and references to the actual plot of other stories.

Finally, back to three years later, we get an epilogue narrated by Luke which is the exact same scene as the movie: Layton and Luke are listening to Janice's opera, and at some point Janice shows up to say hi. Luke also mentions what happened to the rest of the participants after the case throughout those three years; most are just what we see from the credits, but the novel still gives a few more details in some cases:

By the time of the original trilogy, Amelia is studying abroad at a foreign university, and she recently sent a letter to Layton and Luke, saying that she is grateful even after three years.

Luke is friends with Nina, who comes by at Gressenheller every now and then, and he even considers her a rival of sorts due to Nina having a good memory and studying well. (also what the heck Luke why are you talking about getting to college and how you're worried that she may be admitted to college before you do, you're THIRTEEN)

Celia Raidley and Pierre Starbuck got married "just the other day" (yes, the ship is now officially confirmed beyond just the one image from the movie credits) and the tabloids are going wild over it.

Luke is reading Annie Dretche's latest mystery novel, and he can't put it down. Annie apparently told him that she has been writing faster so that Bargland (the guy who said he did not have much time left due to an illness) can read them at the hospital. Seems like "six months" turned into three years after all, good for him!

Anyway, that's all I have to say for now, I hope you enjoyed the rambling. I hope this will reach some fans of the movie who would be excited to get a few more details!

[lutiaslayton]

I spent the past few weeks transcribing and translating London Holiday.

» Go read it here! «

Hi! Have you ever heard of Professor Layton and the London Holiday? No? Well, this is a prologue of sorts to Diabolical Box, which was released on the Japanese versions of PL2… but was never translated into any other language. Any translation of PL2 completely removed it.

London Holiday is pretty much like a mini-PL adventure, though a purely slice-of-life one. This mini-adventure has 12 puzzles, of which I'm sure that most, if not all, are already present in the main game. Some will definitely look familiar to you (I didn't provide screenshots yet, but I might someday. In the meantime, just know that the images are identical as well to the puzzles you've already solved in the regular PL2 game).

London Holiday isn't part of these ‘lost media’ like would be Deathly Mirror, but it still was quite a mysterious, vastly unknown piece of the PL legacy. Up until now, the only thing we non-Japanese people had to access it was a blog that gave a few non-translated screenshots, and which now leads to a broken link, and two speedruns—speedruns, not playthroughs.

Anyway. Ever since I was able to find a Japanese rom of PL2 which had LH on it, I made it my mission to mend this mistake, and make the knowledge accessible to anyone. And at last, everyone can finally know what this mini adventure is about, in the details.

This isn't a let's play, but it has every single piece of dialogue I could find, and pretty much everything that is relevant. Like, the only things I didn't show are the tutorials such as the one that teaches you how to walk or open your menu in the original games. I might add them one day, but I think you'll agree that this hardly counts as primordial knowledge.

All this being said, please please please reblog this to any Layton fan! I don't care much about being recognised or anything, it's just that I don't want this mini-game to remain in the dark any longer, now that FINALLY it has been (somewhat) translated.

PS: I don't actually speak a single word of Japanese. If you do, Google Translate and I gummed up most of the work for you. The Japanese text is available as is, directly copy/pasted from the game's files (thank you Tinke), so it is 100% reliable. Google Translate, however, is not, as you can imagine. Therefore, if you have the time and motivation, please do help me make the translation more accurate!

[lutiaslayton]

Fellow writers. My dear fellow writers.

If, like me, you are of the plotter type; that your stories are complex, with many characters, and that you are trying your best to keep track of everything that is happening; but that no matter what you tried, there is simply no way to write your notes in a way that would quite fit your needs…

Well, I am here to give you a more visual method that would hopefully be of use to at least some of you?

I present to you: a timeline saying what each of your characters is doing, at any hour of any day, 24/7, that you can download and edit for your own use, on your own computer!

Take a look here at the live version!

There are two versions of the web page:

The “vanilla version” for simple use and writers who don’t need things to be too complicated

The “multiverse version” for writers who want to push this thing to its most absurd limits and handle multiple timelines at the same time, and keep them synchronised.

Anyway, the best part? Even though it does need you to look at a lot of HTML code, I included inside this exact same HTML file a complete comprehensive tutorial explaining step by step how to make your own, using this template as a base.

Anyway, all that to say: Once again, my need to keep things organised for the sake of my own fic has led me to create an entire tool out of nothing, completely for personal use, up until I realised that it actually could be helpful to other people 😆

[lutiaslayton]

Hello! You seem to be knowledgeable about Japan-exclusive Layton stuff so I wanted to ask if you knew how many chapters were there in Mansion Of The Deathly Mirror? I tried to look it up myself but I couldn't find an actual answer

Thank you for all your translations btw I really appreciate them!

Hi, and thanks! <3 There are six chapters in total. For more info, I will simply give you (and anyone else who reads this) a Reddit post:

This post explains everything we know about Mansion of the Deathly Mirror and how to deal with the fact that this game is lost media.

That link aside, I have a transcript planned for Mansion of the Deathly Mirror just like I did with Chelmey's Casebook and London Holiday, but I don't even have the full first chapter completed yet, so I'll have to catch up whenever I have the time and materials to do so. I haven't had the time to work on it in many months, but don't worry, I haven't forgotten about it and I WILL make a better, FULL version of the translation, as soon as I can get to it (but right now I'm kinda supposed to be preparing for my PhD defence hahahahaha).

Now for some ramblings related to the above-linked Reddit post. Long story short: we have chances of securing the game. But for that to happen, we need to be patient, and we need to be silent. If you ever find footage of the game on youtube or elsewhere, no matter what you do, leave the player alone.

Let them upload at their pace and gather the crumbs as they fall off the table, because asking for them to let you eat the whole cake has never worked in the past. By that I mean: asking someone who owns the game "hey can I see your cool shiny thing asap plz plz plz" will result in that person blocking you, no longer posting any footage or content related to that cool shiny thing, and possibly disappearing off the face of the entire internet forever. I am neither joking, nor exaggerating.

I'm not talking that much about MotDM because we don't want to get too much attention drawn to it for the time being. But don't worry, if this game ever is found (and we have a whole team searching for it, we're just secretive on purpose -- for the reasons I mentioned here and for those that are explained in more detail in the Reddit post), we WILL make sure that the fandom knows about it. It's mostly just that right now, the only person we know who has the game and is somewhat willing to make a playthrough does not want any unwanted attention, and this person is not a friend of ours. They will stop uploading if people ask for them to upload faster, and they already threatened once to delete all their videos when someone asked them if they could "share the ROM." (No. No they won't. And even if they were willing to, we can't even make anything out of a ROM yet because of the hardware being stupidly complicated anyway.)

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So there you have it -- your answer is "6," and I could have left it at that because I have no strict obligation to say anything more since you didn't ask for any other info haha.

Unless you want to dive into this endless rabbit hole, I highly suggest you just keep that answer, leave it at that for now, and go about your day minding literally anything else. We will get back to you and the rest of the fandom once we have real news about it! It's just that for now we're all stuck in limbo hahaha, there's some stuff done in the shadows but nothing worth hyping about until we're done with it. I mean -- we can't do anything until the one (1) person who owns the game decides to upload more footage of it. Given how desperately lost this game is, we should actually be happy we get to have anything at all, even if even NWoS might come out before it.

[EDIT] Needless to say, the player who is sharing some gameplay footage does NOT know that I have a website with the beginning of a fan-translation, and if they learn even so little that it exists, they are going to have a heart attack and will likely delete their entire playthrough. And nobody wants that.

I personally won't celebrate and heave a real breath of relief before footage of the full game from start to finish with as much content as possible is secured, which is why I don't talk about it a lot. I'm just paranoid that something might go wrong like it already has multiple times in the past hahaha

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DO NOT show my website link around at random until I say it's ok to do so. And if you share it with friends, ALWAYS mention that I am the one running it. That way if you or your friends have questions, you know who to ask for explanations.

[lutiaslayton]

Before we start our journey through the official novel retelling of Eternal Diva, I wanted to let you know that I did make scans of all the pages that are not plain text. I won't scan the remaining 190-ish pages of the book since they are basically just black text on white paper, and my transcript is trying its best to look as close to the originals as possible.

If you want to know what the captions for the movie screenshots mean, they are translated on my transcript. Enjoy!

[lutiaslayton]

hello, is the site where you posted the London Holiday translation down? i can't get to it anymore

Oh no I'm so sorry for that 😭 The website isn't down but it is entirely my fault if your link no longer works.

Here, this is a link that will ALWAYS work. It is not a link to London Holiday directly, but it is a link to EVERY transcription/translation I have so far (which includes for now London Holiday, Chelmey's Casebook, the beginning of Mansion of the Deathly Mirror, and a WIP for the Japan-exclusive Shogakukan novelisation of Eternal Diva). It also gives links to the Google Doc fan-translations of the three novels that were made years ago, but as a heads up, I have started making my own because 1) the current versions do not provide the original Japanese text, and 2) the translation... sort of sucks at times. There are times when it says "the thief tried to steal the professor's shoes" instead of aiming for his bag, and there are times when it straight up made stuff up (like the time when Raymond says that they used to play near a specific forest from the West of the UK when Des was a child, while the Japanese version doesn't say anything about that at all).

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Quick explanation as to why the link you had no longer works: hosting a website is a bit like sharing a folder from your computer, except unlike on places like Google Drive, visitors don't get to actually see the folders and how they are organised (not directly that is), they're only given the absolute location of each file (aka links). And the issue is that if I move/rename a file in order to be more organised, it creates a dead link.

I will likely change again the link for an individual media in the future, but the link to the index that holds them all is extremely unlikely to ever change, given how its link really can't get more straightforward than it already is. I mean, good luck finding a file location more sensical than "/layton/index.html" Chances of this name changing are really abysmal.

For the individual pages themselves though (one per "lost" media), I will likely rename them as more and more show up. In my local computer (not online yet), I have renamed London Holiday's file to "lt1-5_lh" instead of just "lh", for example. This is not just in case I come to work on something Layton-related which also happens to have "LH" as an acronym, but also so I can use the "lt1-5" part of the name as a way to find the file more easily, as "lt1-5" would put it between Curious Village (lt1 if you datamine it) and Diabolical Box (lt2 when datamining). Novels will have a "nv(#)" prefix, DoCoMo games a "dcm" prefix, etc.

TL;DR Just hold on to the index page and have faith that it has everything you need, and I'm sorry for being a mess qjgjzkdkv

[lutiaslayton]

Hi! I really love your timeline analyses and have been thinking about them a lot as I try to write my own Layton longfic. (I hope you don't mind me referencing your timeline and puzzle research for it ^^;) It's very well done! I have a hard time figuring out so many details at once like that, so it's been a huge help.

...I don't want to be annoying or overly nitpicky when I point this out, but I just thought I'd mention something.

We know that Dropstone was founded on August 12th (by the JP version) and Layton travels there on its 50th anniversary (also August 12th). In your deduced timeline you have that arrival date down as Wednesday the 12th, 1963. The year with a Wednesday on an August 12th is actually 1964. In 1963, the 12th falls on a Monday.

I don't know if the day being a Wednesday specifically matters at all, or if Layton's days of the week aren't in sync with ours, but from what I understand, your timeline might be 1 year behind. (Or that date was meant to be Monday the 12th...?)

I figured with SLS (one of my favorite fics ever, by the way!) being in 1953, a detail like this could be important to you, but you can totally ignore this ask if I'm wrong! I just wanted to let you know just in case.

Hi! The fact that you picked up on this is a true testament to your dedication and rigorous work, congratulations!!

I haven't touched this timeline in a long while for a number of reasons (far too many other projects + "um actually I think there might be multiple timelines and you can't put every single game/novel/manga/movie/other in the same chronology but it becomes soooooo much more interesting if you start placing them in multiple ones, also puzzle theory makes that not only plausible but also quite probable"), so sadly I have forgotten most of the details of how past me from over a year ago reached the conclusions that she did. From what I remember, however, the quick answer to your question is simple: yes, the days of the week in the Laytonverse are out of sync with ours.

(I kinda like how I take it as a bigger reminder that the Laytonverse really is disconnected from our world's History in a number of ways, from the mention in the novels of kings and queens that do not exist IRL to the simple logical fact that there is no way History happened the same way when mechas are a thing, the Azran happened, Targent happened, and also puzzles break the laws of physics daily. But that's just personal preference.)

I think what started it was the fact that London Holiday takes place on a Sunday and that I could not find any way to make the whole "a few days ago" for both Curious Village and Diabolical Box work alongside the "They arrive in Dropstone on August 12th." I won't redo the math right now because schedule and to-do list and other stuff (+ I trust you more to check it since your brain cogs are already warm and revving in the middle of it, so you would be more efficient at figuring it out as well as more critical than present me), but if memory serves, this was the best I could manage at the time, and I never went back later to recheck the math. I really just stopped at "Yes, there is a desync, so what? That's not supposed to be the real world anyway. Also huge kudos to whoever notices."

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My mind is set on the fact that the Layton timeline places the original trilogy on the year 1963 because of the promotional UF artwork implying that UF would take place during the winter between 1963 and 1964, but that part is personal preference since I know (and stated on the timeline web page iirc) that in-universe, this date does not appear in the game. I know other people use for example the "Year 1960" unused artwork which had been datamined from Curious Village. I also know that the World of PL interview just says "There is no official date, it's inspired from the 1960s but we are never going to give a date because we don't want to." I also also know that some others, who consider the PLvsAA crossover canon, take the Ace Attorney timeline and thus completely yeet the "1960s" part into oblivion.

So the choice is ultimately up to personal preference, and you're free to choose a different one! The only reason I put 1963 in the timeline instead of "Year YYYY ; Year YYYY - 50 ; Year YYYY + 1" and such is for obvious readability reasons... and because past me had not thought that perhaps there could be a Javascript way to say "hey put here the year you'd like the original trilogy to take place in," have the user click on a button, and make the whole page do the calculations and display the new dates according to the user's chosen year of reference. darn it now I'm going to be nagging myself into implementing that but it would also be so tedious.

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Anyway TL;DR yes I was aware of this, and past me either forgot to mention it or thought "Eh it's not like anybody will notice/care" hahaha. Rather insensitive from past me admittedly, I do now wonder why I didn't add that as a small paragraph in the preliminary notes... Most likely reason is that the thought just didn't cross my mind at the time.

Good luck on your own longfic, don't hesitate to send me the link (no promises on reading it the day it comes out because there are SO many fics already on my to-read list, but nnngnfhghh I wish I could read other people's works as well as continue working on SLS), and thank you for your ask! Even though I was personally aware of it, you can absolutely feel proud of having picked up on it, and don't hesitate to come back to me (and make me sweat cold bullets) if you figure out a way to make "1963" + "London Holiday on a Sunday" + "No week day desyncs with the real world" work. Thanks to you, other people can now be made aware of this detail which I had apparently forgotten to explain explicitly!

Lastly, I don't remember whether I mentioned it here or not because it's still far from done and isn't going to be truly useful before a LONG while, but just in case what little info is on there could still be useful to you or someone else in any way: among many other things, I'm working on a Lore Map. Imagine having the ENTIRETY of EVERY SINGLE CANON FACT we have been given, in a single web page, with a whole list of tags so you can filter only the trivia that is relevant to your fanfic research <3

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(Now this paragraph is completely unrelated to your ask, I'm going to leave this here for a different person (or not? would be good luck if you're the same anon): I am so sorry to the anon who asked me if I considered the LMJ ARG event canon or not, I uhhhhh... got carried away and I don't think the answer will be posted anytime soon, because for the sake of answering it in an exhaustive way I wanted to re-read the entirety of what has been preserved of it + add every bit of trivia I could find to the Lore Map mentioned earlier. And I'm juggling between many other projects too so progress is very slow. TL;DR version of my personal opinion so far: as for everything else it is up to personal preference, but I could theoretically see at least parts of it being canon. The trickiest part I found by reading just the introduction of the ARG is the fact that Kat would apparently make livestreams. Which implies the existence of the internet or a similar technology, the existence of streaming platforms, and the fact that she would have a decent-ish enough following for her random viewers from all around the world to want to help her. And if we go with the hypothesis that there could be multiple timelines, I could see that happen in an Ace Attorney-based timeline such as the one in which the PLvsAA crossover is canon, for example! I don't know enough about AA to be able to speak about it with confidence, but I think that 20+ years after the original AA trilogy, internet technology is indeed quite advanced enough for this to be possible? anyway. Just thought I'd give you a first short answer so you don't have to keep holding your breath and/or think I completely forgot about you. I'm sorry :'D)

[lutiaslayton]

Here’s the timestamp for the in-game scene if you don’t believe me (which you shouldn’t)

I am going to scream

I am back to transcribing and translating what was left of Chelmey’s Casebook (for now, I just finished Part 1, so more or less the first half of the whole game), and for once the reality-bending soft magic system BS is blatantly visible in there.

As you can see, I am taking the reveal quite well, because it's not like I had been theorising about precisely this sort of thing being canon in-universe for the past few months or anything.

What is Inspector Chelmey’s Casebook: Special Recipe?

Just like the (somewhat) more widely known Professor Layton and the Mansion of the Deathly Mirror, Chelmey’s Casebook is a Japan-exclusive DoCoMo game. Basically, it’s a PL game that not only never left Japan, but was also considered lost media up until very recently, when someone kindly recorded and published a full playthrough of it. And BOY was I not prepared for this moment in the story when I saw it.

That aside though, it’s great to have a mini story where the protagonists are Chelmey and Barton, for once! This game’s story is about the two investigating in St. Mystere and trying to solve a certain case…

As I said, I still have quite some work to do before being done with the full transcription of the game, but you can read what has already been done right here!

[lutiaslayton]

The timeline thing is a godsend!! Is there any chance or you creating one that is year based, instead of days? This is more intuitive than any other writing/plotting timeliness I've been able to find.

Hi, thank you and I'm glad this is (somewhat) helpful to you!

To be entirely honest, the timeline I am using for my own story purposes got even MORE insane with even more options, and I've been wanting to share that template as well. But unfortunately... Making it "I don't know how to code 😭" friendly is insanely hard (even more so because now I'm using a python script to automatically generate the main HTML file out of sub-files + a number of parameters that can adjust things such as which time period is shown, how wide/thin the time scale is, custom elements for the size of icons and such, etc, and ALSO by far the most important detail, my timeline now actually has a smooth transition between day X and day X+1 instead of having a blank that creates an offset every time the clock strikes midnight, I'm so sorry that the currently downloadable version has that issue in horizontal mode), and unfortunately I just don't have the free time to make that right now (<- PhD student with way too many side projects).

I could try sharing the current state of my timeline as it is now, but I don't want to do that because it's like. full of spoilers for my own fanfic for obvious reasons lmfao. So for the time being I guess I can just share a screenshot of what it looks like and just how insane I am:

Regarding your question on the time scale: you could change that yourself by changing the contents of the svg file named "scale.svg" in the chr folder. It is actually a text file, not an image, and hopefully the logic behind it can be guessed easily enough! So if you know what exactly you want, and if you're willing to risk tinkering with it yourself, you can make a backup of that file, remove/change a few lines of code in the scale.svg file (don't rename it or move it around, change exclusively the file "scale.svg"), then reload your main timeline HTML page in order to see what that does.

The numbers in that file are X/Y coordinates for the most part, so by adding/moving/removing vertical bars, you could transform that 24-hour scale into a year scale. I guess it's convenient that a day has 24 hours and a year has 12 months! You could start first by deleting one in two hour bars and renaming the labels from "XX:XX" to month names. After that if you want to add the days... Well, it'll be trickier, but hopefully you'll have figured out a bit better how the logic of that file works so you'll be able to add these smaller day marks through a bit of trial and error.

......After looking at the state of my SVG file actually that might be a bit trickier. However, I have good news for you: you can copy-paste the code into the website SvgPathEditor in order to make your editing process much easier! All you have to do is copy-paste only the part of the code that looks like "M0 20 0 50M300 20 300 50M600 20 600 50M900 20 900" (the logic here is "M 0 20 0 50" = one vertical bar that starts at coordinates (0, 20) and ends at coordinates (0, 50), so it's just a list of the vertical bars one after the other. Sorry it's much less clear than I remembered it ^^')

(EDIT: I just hope you don't need to account for leap years, because due to the way the timeline is coded, I don't think it can afford to do that unless you make your scale so that it works by four years instead of only one. And let's not even get started on the "sometimes it's a new century so there's no leap year but some centuries do start with a leap year anyway" rule.)

All that being said, thank you again for your kind message, I'm sorry I can't do more than that for the time being (and you shouldn't hold your breath waiting for an update, I honestly don't know when / if it will ever have the time to happen :')), and good luck! I hope what I gave with the current zip file + this reply's advice will be good enough for you.

(EDIT²: For people who never heard of the original timeline post, here it is! It's a tool I made forever ago that lets you create a timeline in order to keep track of what each character does at what time in your own stories.)

[lutiaslayton]

Seems like we’ve got something pretty solid for the canon timeline between Curious Village and Diabolical Box! I did not expect to really ever get this close to a 100% set timeline, and yet here we are. It certainly helps that we got the mention of “a few days after the mystery of the Curious Village was solved” (London Holiday) and “a few days earlier” (time between the moment Layton received Schrader’s letter and the moment he boarded the Molentary Express), and that Puzzle #030 of DB is here to give us a canon date! Going with the assumption that “a few days” means “between 3 and 5 days”, this reduces the number of possibilities by quite a lot.

You can find the full timeline here!

Also, in other news, I finished updating the dates in Stable Like Sand as well. I had a few oopsies due to the fact that I needed the fanfic to start on a Monday, but I eventually found a set of dates that works for both the canon and the fanfic! I will be going on the assumption that the SLS timeline, despite being a Canon Divergence, will still follow the same logic as the canon timeline in terms of events that do not depend too heavily on the butterfly effect brought on by the fanfic’s events; and the dates considered will be those in the leftmost green column (which is the “Not 100% Canon Date But These Dates Work Together” timeline). In that regard, I don’t expect anyone to truly have taken notice to it, but if anyone did: I apologise for the fanfic retcon and the confusion. SLS now takes place on August 22 instead of September 28, since it was actually impossible to make the canon timeline work by keeping September 28 😅 At least, let’s all be thankful that the retcon took place so early on in the fic and that aside from the date (and the fact that therefore Hershel will start teaching later, not right the next week), nothing else changed, whether spoilery or not. If you have any, your theories will not be affected in any way because of this.

For a little more detail regarding my canon timeline choices:

Thanks to Puzzle #030 of DB, it is 100% canon that Layton, Luke and Flora visited Dropstone (and thus boarded the Molentary Express) on August 12.

Layton received Schrader’s letter “a few days” earlier, and thanks to London Holiday, we know that this was a Sunday (It is a mystery who went as far as to pass by Layton’s office on a Sunday and personally give him the letter without actually showing their face, but since it is Sunday, I doubt that it was the mailman). I went with the smallest amount of days, aka 3 days, because I assume that after seeing Schrader seemingly dead, Layton wanted to board the Molentary Express as soon as possible. This means giving August 9 as the date for London Holiday, and this makes August 12 a Wednesday.

Curious Village ended “a few days” before London Holiday, and lasted for two full days + more or less one morning. I arranged the dates so that the first day would fall on a Sunday (I could not make it so that it would be Saturday unfortunately), coming from the basis that Layton probably intended for this case to be solved quickly and did not necessarily plan to spend the night there (he only checks in after the crank to the drawbridge disappeared and Luke and him literally had no other choice but to stay in St. Mystere until it was found).

Anyway, all that being said, I will now finally go back to actually writing the next SLS chapter. …assuming I don’t get distracted again and start reading exhaustively the Japanese dialogue I datamined—