Meet Professor Timeon Zeitgeist Chronometricos, even if the meeting will be short, for the time being. With his name already being that unsubtle, I felt I had no reason to leave any stops in concerning his design, and gave him an hourglass-shaped discoloration in his (Father-Time-)beard and a birthmark shaped like a watch’s hands. Either you are destined for a certain field of study, or you aren’t.
Unsubtle or not, neither the name nor the appearance ever caught the particular attention of either Professor. That’s because they’re arch-scientists, so they look straight past such trivial superficialities to the more relevant issues beyond. Mopey is only a scientific assistant, for the time being, so she has retained a small sliver of non-obliviousness to the obvious – but give her twenty years, and she’ll probably laugh heartily at some student pointing out the morbid assosciations to her own name, which she will have completely forgotten about by then.
Speaking of science, the Professor is staying firmly within its bounds in panel four, I should point that out. He’s not giving in to some hunch or precognisance, he’s just manifesting a special type of sensory ability actually shared by all human beings. Every human gets that feeling when a friend of colleague of theirs is about to be kidnapped while they are talking to them on the phone – the Professor just is one of the very few people who had that happen to him so frequently that he can actually categorize the feeling. That’s just how it is, in a B-movie world: Only a few of the scientists are protagonists, and all the others get kidnapped all the time. ._.
More on Thursday.