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Introducing Mortimer — Description
I'm on a character-making spree

So here we have my latest creation: Mortimer the garden dormouse. I have a weak spot for small rodents and I looove dormice! So it was only a matter of time before one popped up as a character. This one does have a little story with him, so I'll write that here after his info.

Mortimer doesn't know when or where he was born. Somewhere in Europe, possibly in Germany, but it could also have been France, Belgium or the Netherlands. He simply doesn't remember. He also doesn't remember when he was born, or even how old he is. The reason? Mortimer is a time-traveller, and after the many trips to the past and the future he simply forgot. It is for that reason too that other dormice tend to stay away from him, calling him a 'freak'. Therefore, Morty is rather solitary and tends to keep things to himself a lot. He is, however, highly inquisitive and eager to learn. His gift is both a curse and a blessing to him, as he loves to travel, but the loneliness that is inherent to it hurts him. When he meets someone he usually is very cautious and introverted, once he starts to trust them he apparently becomes a whole different person: talking a lot (mainly about the things he's seen) and acting a little clumsy. Mortimer, the (seemingly) bitter time-traveller, just wants to have some friends.

I first started doodling this garden dormouse two weeks ago, after a very strange dream about time travelling (I blame it on having watched too much Doctor Who and Back to the Future, though I've always liked the very idea of time travel). It involved a little dormouse who could travel to other time-periods through mirrors and still water, and who could take other creatures with him as long as he touched their skin. It was pretty cool and really weird, but the idea stuck and so Mortimer came to life.

Just as my dream-dormouse, he travels without a time machine, as it makes no sense for a rodent to build or own a machine (but what sense does time travelling make to a dormouse you ask? A lot, actually! Think of the possibilities: going back in time to find more food, jump into the water and disappear into another time period to escape predators, and much more) so instead Mortimer is his time machine, and although he doesn't understand how exactly it works, he knows that if he thinks hard of a certain time or place and jumps into still water or against a mirror he'll emerge in that very time or place he imagined. Pretty cool stuff he thought, and once he learned that there was a rat in London that would read books as if he were obsessed (guess who that may be hello Ben!) it has been Mortimer's plan to go and meet this rat and learn more: he could show the rat all that he had read in his books, and the rat could tell him of times and places he had never even dreamed of, and so enabling him to visit those periods for real. Yeah, a good excuse to draw my three rodent characters a lot together (I usually draw Millie and Ben together) I also draw Mortimer a lot with clocks, hourglasses and all that stuff that represents time.

Drawn this if photoshop with the default chalk brush

I hope you'll like Morty as much as I do

art, character, story and whatever else there is © to me, *Avanii

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