Madame Askew and The Grand Arbiter

Originally posted to our Patreon

With great excitement, I am pleased to introduce Dr. Stitches, infamous mad scientist and associate to Professor Whitmore. Stitches was born in the backroom of a bookshop in the heart of Oxford. Despite the need to keep uninvited rodents at bay, the shop owner was not keen to have cats on the premises and rousted the small family from their warm home. The barkeep at the pub two doors down was so aghast at this turn of events that he took the little family into the safety of his storage room.

Stitches’ mother was a fierce mouser and several of his siblings were clearly happy to take on the family business. Stitches, however, remembered the smell and mystery of that bookshop. His native curiosity could not be satisfied by catching mice and defending hops. Stitches set out from home to find his own access to books and  as a young kitten soon found himself in the famous stacks of the Bodleian Library. There he met the young academic Whitmore who himself was discontent with the status quo.

The two young rebels became fast chums, spending countless hours deep in the stacks, consuming tomes on natural philosophy, physics, and advanced mathematics. The two young scholars quickly ascertained that there was simply not enough time in the day to study everything, to see everywhere, and to do al that their minds imagined. They needed more time, much more time. They only answer was to find a way to manipulate and harnass the time slipping by them every moment of the day. Their research started simply enough but when Stitches discovered that he had access to pocket dimensions that Whitmore could not access, things became interesting indeed. Once Stitches was able to introduce his human to Cat-space, their experiments with time began to bear fruit, and the two chums proceeded to turn the academic world upside down with their research into time travel.

After their initial breakthroughs in time manipulation and travel, Stitches and Whitmore were incredibly hard to pin down. Ultimately, Oxford chose to simply give them each a Doctor of Philosophy as it was impossible to track their attendance at the university or when they had started and finished certain experiments. Everyone agreed that clearly the two had pioneered an entire field of study. Although some scholars were frustrated that a partnership with a willing feline scholar was necessary for pursuing the field of study, most of the student population was delighted that they had new found permission to bring their kitties with them to their academic rooms.

There is some confusion as to when and where the two  chums retired but everyone is certain that they were last seen as corporeal beings outside of the old walls of Carn Fadryn in Wales.  Why and how Wales is an ongoing mystery and whether they have in fact retired or are merely still traveling through time in one dimension or another continues to plague scholars of time manipulation. Regardless of speculation, it is true that Whitmore arrived 30 years before he and Stitches commenced their partnership and left all of his wealth and resources to become an endowment in time studies for the newly established Stitches Scholar of Temporal Physics. (One is best served by not considering too closely any paradoxes. That’s why one needs a willing feline partner and access to Cat-space.)

Through some temporal means, Stitches has gone on to his forever haunt. He is a little hard to track as he lofts about his new home, appearing and disappearing at whim, but he provides most excellent companionship wherever books are read and laps are in need of warming.

A hip hip and hurrah for the infamous Dr. Stitches!