Gitz and the Curators of Time: Book One of the Nine Lives Saga

By Jessie Wipperman

While being an inventor doesnt seem to be the best line of profession for the accident prone, an inventor working on a way to speed up the cooking time of a microwave unknowingly invents the first time machine. Not realizing what he has just made, he throws it out with all of his other nonworking inventions only realizing what it was he had made after it is stolen. After a daring rescue and a visit to the oracle (really just a crazy old cat lady), he must save time and maybe even fall in love armed with just a superheated ice-cream scoop, a modified version of his time machine, and his talking cat Gitz.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Sep 16, 2016
• ISBN: 9781524523831

Jessie Wipperman

While being an inventor doesn’t seem to be the best line of profession for the accident prone, an inventor working on a way to speed up the cooking time of a microwave unknowingly invents the first time machine. Not realizing what he has just made, he throws it out with all of his other nonworking inventions only realizing what it was he had made after it is stolen. After a daring rescue and a visit to the oracle (really just a crazy old cat lady), he must save time and maybe even fall in love armed with just a superheated ice-cream scoop, a modified version of his time machine, and his talking cat Gitz.

Book preview

CHAPTER 1

The Supposed Eventuality of Bed

L ET’S JUST SAY that I knew it was going to be a bad day when I woke up and my bare feet found the cold hardwood floor instead of the inside of my warm comfy house slippers. Of course every day like this will eventually snowball until your bad day is conspicuous to the entire populous of the whole world, but this day of all days I stuck out like a sore thumb. This must be why I’m writing this story down sitting in a jail cell wearing somebody else’s underpants, rather than finding the supposed eventuality of my bed.

It all started on a frigid late January day, January the twenty-fifth to be precise; the day that my bare feet hit the cold hardwood floor.

As my sleep clouded mind made a direct and abruptly sharp turn towards wakefulness, my feet like two tiny icebergs seeking out the Titanic went in search of my slippers. But what if there was never a Titanic then the iceberg would never have found it? A thought-provoking sentiment but nevertheless this meant that I never found my slippers. At this point I was fairly miffed, wondering where my slippers had gotten too, but regardless I scurried on tiptoes across the floor to my dresser in search of the thickest woolen socks I could find.

Hopping up and down on one foot; trying to pull on my socks while trying to keep both of my feet off of the cold floor as long as I possibly could; I managed to slam myself headlong into the camcorder I keep perched on a tripod in the corner of my room. Now before you get any crazy ideas in your head, I’m no pervert quite the opposite, really. I just never remember my dreams, but I have been told that I talk in my sleep though, hence the recording device.

Once In my childhood my mother tried to avoid me for more than a week because she walked in on me conversing with myself in multiple different languages and vocal ranges. (Quite traumatizing for a ten year old really) but she was utterly convinced that I was possessed by a demon. This may have been because she was extremely Catholic or it could have been a good reason to have father Callahan come for a luncheon, but who am I to say. Either way I was never exercised which may explain a lot of things about my physical state as of this day.

Well as I was saying I am not a pervert. Women seem to think otherwise or they get some sort of weird kick out of the recording devices but I assure you that the camcorder is only there to record myself while I sleep like a dream diary I suppose with audio and video. It is not there so that I can be the one to fulfill some women’s fantasy of being in an X rated home video of themselves as the star of the show.

Anyway back to the story at hand. As I hopped up and down, I managed to careen headlong into my recording devices. This caused me to fall flat in my back, and as I lay there gasping for breath; the wind knocked out of me, my camcorder came crashing into my face leavening a nice golf ball sized lump on my forehead and a near swollen shut black eye to top it all off.

By this point I was near ready to crawl back into bed; go back to sleep and forget about this awful day, But I being ever the optimist mustered all the willpower I had remaining to me, strapped on my big boy pants and made my way downstairs.

Now at this point there is something that you must know about me. I am an inventor, and that being said; as an inventor my house is in a state of total chaos at any given point in time. My house is a hoarders dream of wire, books, old newspapers, and pizza boxes; these most likely with old stale pizza crusts remaining in them, but everything has its own place; even if there are boxes stacked the ceiling.

I don’t really like to call myself an inventor, more like an idea man because I do not actually put the devices I think of together. I generally subcontract that kind of work out after I’ve drawn out extensive plans complete with meaningless abbreviations and numbered parts. I tried the technical aspect of inventing once; putting together all the electrics and what not, but it was a very messy ordeal. Let’s just say my idea of a heated ice cream scoop left me with nothing but a gallon of melted coconut cherry chocolate chunk ice cream and a left pointer finger missing from the cuticle up. It is rather painful to think about really, but after attaching a knife blade I did bring to the table a very practical hot knife that cuts through steel as you would say a hot knife through butter.

As I reached the bottom of the stairs, I turned down the hall into the kitchen and looked to make sure that my cat’s food dish was empty. I hadn’t seen him for three days at this point so it could have been the mice (darn cat and I still manage to have mice) but I believed that he was still running around the house lurking out of sight somewhere in the cluster.

So I’m going to admit now that yes; I am a cat person. It’s not that I prefer them to dogs, in fact I love dogs, but cats are loners just like myself and their personalities fairly well match my own. Besides the only thing I have to do to keep a cat alive is feed it and clean the litter box, This notably not being the most enjoyable job in the world, but not so bad when it’s part of the routine.

Gitz as I like to call him is a fat yellow tom that I have had for thirteen years. I got him when he was just six weeks old and originally he was going to be named Garfield, yes like the comic (I love Garfield; it is the best comic ever and I always leave it for last). Well when Garfield got home on the first day, instead of checking out the place and getting the feel for his new home, he went straight for the cords hanging down off of one of the end table. Before I could correct him in the matter of not playing with electrical cords, I hear an electrical sound, a yowl, and see a poor yellow kitten; hair all spiked up run under the sofa. That electrical sound was the only thing I could think of for weeks when I saw the look of indignation on his face as he sat and stared at those cords. That Gitz of electric shock always popped into my head and it just stuck.

So as I was saying I suspected that Gitz was running around the house somewhere not catching mice but still emptying his food dish on a normal basis and if he was emptying the food dish, this must mean that he was filling the litter box. Simple logic really, but I must confess that he has had me worried about him lately; well at least since I tried taking him to the vet to get him neutered in all honesty, but I simply couldn’t have him spraying in my house any longer. As I made a valiant attempt to search the house for Gitz, in my mind’s eye I could see perfectly the day I tried packing him into a cat carrier to take him to what would be most men’s idea of the cruelest and most unusual punishment there is.

That day I had taken his food dish off of the floor and placed it onto of the refrigerator knowing full well that he would just get it off of the counter if I left it there. This threw him off, he slowly stopped circling my legs and looked, and I mean looked directly at me and meowed at me in the nicest please can I have my food back voice. When I subsequently did not give him his food dish back, he began to hiss at me and pounced for my leg like he intended to eat that instead so I ran for it. I ran from the room arm pin wheeling screaming as Gitz came chasing me down the hall leaping the stacks of boxes I began toppling over in my haste to get away from the demon that had taken control of a hungry cat. Needless to say he did finally catch me (cats being the nimble little monsters they are) at the top of the staircase. Here he finally decided that he would take that bit out if my leg.

While I waited for the paramedics to arrive I had managed to hobble my way down the stairs and back to the kitchen to give Gitz his food dish back. This is where they found me passed out not due to blood loss but because the sight of blood tends to do that to me no matter how little it really is. When they finally got me to come round, I found one small bandage a broken front door and three hysterical paramedics laughing at the expense of one unfortunate cat owner that had been attacked by a fat old tom. As they left, they asked if they should send animal control over to take care of the mountain lion that must be lurking in the shadows somewhere in my house. Laughing and high fiving the one last quip before they got into their ambulance and speed away to victims that were sure to need more help than I did.

Well if you hadn’t guessed after the ambulance pulled away I never ended up actually trying to get him to the vet. If he was going to fight to keep them, then I wasn’t going to take what was rightly his anyways, but this still didn’t stop him from his game of hide and seek that he had been playing with me since, so my search of the house ended up to be in vain.

Oh well, I began to think to myself he will eventually come around and maybe even enjoy my company again; it seemed unlikely, but who could say.

As I started a pot of coffee, I poured myself a bowl of cereal complete with the accidental orange juice, and since my mother; always the one to throw out the, there are starving children in Africa, bit, I poured out the OJ into a glass and topped my bowl off with milk this time instead.

I always wondered as a kid if I didn’t eat my food if it would really affect those poor children in Africa my mother was so worried about, but after I decided to mail them my leftovers one Saturday after the mail had come, the mailbox began to smell a bit rancid by Monday lunchtime and I gave up feeling pity for them. I just knew in my ten year old mind that it would take more than 2 days for it to reach any kids in Africa after that and yet I still couldn’t waste food. It also didn’t help that the mail courier threw up on the doorstep due to the smell and my mother made me clean up the mess, because it was my fault. I told her that it wasn’t my fault that the mailman had a weak stomach but it didn’t matter in the end the African children didn’t get my dinner and I had to clean up the mess.

As I raced the milk before it could start the curdling process due to the acidity of the oj I began to smell burning coming from the vicinity of the coffeemaker. So I went to inspect it knowing full well that it had to be on the out and out again.

It was this day; something awful was going to happen, but at this time I didn’t know that did I, so I took out the foul powder known only as the instant, that I keep just in case the coffee maker is on the fritz again. I heated the water for the instant, in the microwave knowing that the stove would only lead to me burning the house down.

Now I’m not sure if the makers if microwaves do it on purpose but there is no way that a microwave minute is the same amount of time as a normal minute. The amount of time for a microwave minute is more like five. This may be some evil plot to take over the world by stealing minutes away from unsuspecting users but I haven’t quite figured out how this would be possible nor will I be fooled. Being an inventor I once tried remedying the slowness of said microwaves by speeding up the timer. This was accomplished by completely rewiring it and adding in some components from a V.C.R. that I had lying around, mainly the fast-forward button but I also put in the rewind button because the fast-forward button looked so lonely all by itself. This invention turned out to be a complete and total failure and went out with all my other failed inventions to the garage.

My bitterness because of my shortcomings may have added to my mistrust of the machines, but All I know is that you can’t put metal in them which to me has always sounded suspicious and the amount of time it takes to boil water on the stove is substantially longer which means that there is definitely something going on. If I ever figure out what it is they are doing I plan on broadcasting my findings and be damned the hecklers.

After I managed to pour myself a lukewarm mug of the instant, without making too much of a mess I sat down to a nicely separated bowl or curds, way, and tasty o’s that were no longer quite so tasty.

I sat there poking at the contents of my bowl when I heard the front door buzzer. Who, I thought to myself would be coming for a visit this early in the morning? I didn’t hesitate as I wondered this, but got up and headed through the maze of my living room towards the front door only slightly tripping over the pizza box that was the remains of last night’s dinner. As I opened the door, the man standing there wearing an all khaki uniform that stated on multiple badges that he was from animal control, was just lifting his hand to knock.

Good morning, I said trying to sound as cheerful as I could what can I help you with.

The man took a look at me and shook his head. It’s dang near 2 in the afternoon sir you’re a bit behind the times. My name is Officer Hardy, he pronounced it as if both his name and the officer part were both to be capitalized. I am with animal control, and we believe that we have picked up a cat that may belong to you.

This part seemed well rehearsed as if I were being read my Miranda rights. "Yes I can see