Professor Layton vs Phoenix Wright: The Frigid Melody

The Paintings in the Cave pt. 2

In a matter of seconds, they were overwhelmed by a flood of brilliant, fiery colour.

"Wow..." Luke sighed.

"Whoa, that's so cool!" cried Trucy.

The centre of the mural was an immense silhouette of a person, standing at least seven feet tall, their empty shape curving and bulging with muscle fuzzily outlined in sprayed reddish-brown pigment. Surrounding their silhouette on all sides was a blossom of outlined hands, the positive space ranging in colour from brilliant red to deep brown, every finger blooming like the petals of a gigantic flower.

They stood out stark against the dull grey rock, as pristine as if they had been painted mere moments ago, their colour almost comparable to that of dried blood.

Layton lifted the torch to his shoulder and cast the light over the vibrant shades of red, tracing up the height of the gigantic figure in the centre.

"Just as I had suspected," he said to his companions. "I caught a glimpse of this when Phoenix and I were exploring last night, and it seems my hunch was correct."

He reached out to the wall and held himself back from touching the paint, fearing the pigment would rub off on his fingers.

If he was to consider how deep they were in the caves, as well as the temperature and humidity, how difficult it would be to get in and out without a proper ladder, the rate of decay for paints in the era before modern pigments or varnishes, the stone surface and the rate of erosion for granite, whether or not other people had visited this place prior to their arrival...

"If I were to hazard a guess," he said, mostly to himself, "I would say that this mural is perhaps around... five hundred? No, maybe six hundred years old. Six hundred and fifty, give or take a decade."

"There are so many of them!" Trucy kept hold of his hand as she approached the painted wall. "Oh my gosh, look how small some of them are! This one's the same size as mine!"

She held up her open hand over one of the silhouettes.

"Ah! Careful not to touch them!" Luke reached past the Professor to hold her back, and Trucy lowered her hand in disappointment.

"Yes, do be careful," said Layton. "As a matter of fact, it would be best for us to keep moving. We have no way of telling what kind of effect our presence may have on the preservation of whatever we find down here."

Rather than moving onward, however, Luke took a step closer to the mural, fingers on his chin as he processed the magnificent sight before him.

"It looks like they're all right hands," he pointed out, holding out his own hand at the wall to match it up with the silhouettes. "Professor, do you know why? Any ideas?"

Unable to contain his own curiosity, Layton raised his hand and compared the shape of his gloved fingers to those that had been spread out over the wall. One here, one up there, all those between and next to them... yes, Luke was right, they were all right hands!

He cast his mind back over everything he had learned regarding how dominant hands were treated in the past.

"Admittedly, it's quite a backwards way of thinking," he told Luke, "but people of the past believed that to be dominant in one's left hand was, in some way, evil. Some would even say Satanic."

He took a step back to get a better view of the mural in its entirety.

"However," he said, "the lack of diversity does make it easier to estimate how many people left their mark on this wall..."

He counted how many silhouettes were lining the edge along the bottom, all those that were fanned out around the central figure, others that were above their head like an ochre-coloured halo and those that reached up into the corners.