Group Seed: Silence Dogood’s Master Practical Jewelers.

Blame it all on this.

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Silence Dogood’s Master Practical Jewelers

“Lost time is never found again. Guaranteed.”

So you’ve stolen yourself a time machine.  The problem now becomes, how do you get away with it for any length of, well, time?  After all, aside from the usual questions about causality and predestination and whatnot, there’s also the practical problem that the entities that you stole the time machine from probably want that time machine back, and in all likelihood the original owners have some generally efficient way to track down their stolen property.  After all: how many times have you heard about people stealing time machines?

Exactly.

Fortunately, there’s a solution: Silence Dogood’s Master Practical Jewelers (“Dogood’s” for short).  It is the temporal equivalent of a chop shop: you take your stolen time machine there and – for a nominal enough fee – Dogood’s technicians will sanitize, jailbreak, and generally launder your new ride.  And they are artists at their work, too. They know all the tricks, mostly because Dogood’s hires the people who came up with the tricks in the first place. Or at least those people’s dimensional twins.  That’s sometimes a bit cheaper, and a whole lot easier.

Dogood’s operates out of an underground bunker in the back lot of Monticello – well, unless you have a time machine, you’re not supposed to know about that bunker, correct? – between the years 1780 and 1824, with a few interludes in 1837, 1856, and 1876 to handle rush jobs and holiday traffic. The facilities can handle anything from Renaissance clockwork to Interstellar Age chrono-technology; if there’s a way to uncouple items from the time-stream, then Dogood’s can strip it of all distinguishing and traceable features, then provide you with an impeccably forged set of ownership papers for it.  This also means that they can repair most time machines, too – but that’s not always of practical value, given that Dogood’s doesn’t do roadside work.

You may be wondering why Dogood’s is even allowed to function, assuming that you didn’t realize that, yes, the company is run by Ben Franklin in partnership with Thomas Jefferson.  And that’s pretty much why: thanks to a lot of well-meaning temporal tourists, those two are absolutely, completely, and a bit smugly aware of how vital they are to various ‘true’ timelines. Some entities simply have a lot of temporal inertia; and some people get dipped in temporal inertia at regular intervals. Franklin & Jefferson enjoy all of the benefits of both.  

Besides, they’ll call it in to the appropriate authorities when they get a truly unsavory would-be customer.  Also, people who don’t pay their bills.  Then again, there’s no excuse not paying your bills when you have access to time travel…