The Story of Nine Stitches
The year: 1112. The place: rural England. Though it's not the England written in history, oh no... but a few thousand years of civilization had shooed supernatural beings such as dragons and orcs away from the major cities. As such, jolly ol' Henry I could sit back in his throne, worrying about wars with kings of surrounding territories, safe with the knowledge his brother locked in his cell beneath the castle. But that's another story in itself.
Effectively, such things as magic and dragons were ignored since they no longer mattered to the higher echelons of society who could read and write. Every so often you had someone like Geoffrey of Monmouth who'd dare to speak the truth, but passing down over five hundred years of oral history didn't fly too well with conservative court historians, who quickly moved to quell the Arthurian legends as fantasies and bunk. In the long run, he failed to affect the progress of historical completeness.
Turning a blind eye to ghosts and demons doesn't make them any less real, though. Such things which were out of sheriffs' men's jurisdiction were handled by a group of people known as "hunters." They would've picked a cooler name, but the cool creative historical-type people weren't writing about this, were they? Besides, Middle English was just coming into vogue! It was a linguistic revolution! People do all kinds of crazy stuff in revolutions, right! Right?
*ahem*
So we've got these hunters who go around killing dragons. One of these hunters was named Wynne, and like others in her role, she was historically insignificant. In other words, she could disappear, and no one would notice. In other words, she was a perfect test subject for Dr. Zane Gryphon, who had just completed his temporal displacement system, and in his thirst for knowledge, wanted to know more about the unwritten history of his past.
Grudgingly, Wynne is coerced into accompanying Dr. Gryphon back to his own time. It started off as a simple exchange, really... Wynne teaches history and magic to the good doctor, and in exchange she learns about science and the history that happened in the thousand years since her time. It seems that Wynne is a little too successful, though, as Mal and Dr. Kinryu -- time-travellers from Dr. Gryphon's future -- seem hell-bent on stopping his work. Not only do they plan to stop him from making time travelling machines the 21st century equivalent of the light bulb, they also aim to stop Wynne from introducing magic to the world. As they explain it, magic-empowered individuals to the point that the entire notion of civilization became moot: what's the purpose of "laws" if you can smite annoying people yourself, after all?
... In the long run, Mal and Kinryu failed. Wynne and Dr. Gryphon lived through the numerous attacks, quietly working on agreements to keep their temporal tampering to a minimum. They publish their long-awaited tomes of magical history to critical acclaim... but unfortunately, rather than making the nonfiction topsellers' list, they make a killing in fantasy books.
As part of their quest to right their temporal wrongdoings, though, Dr. Gryphon and Wynne mutually decided it would be best if Wynne were returned to her own time. As a memento of her time in the future, the good doctor presents the young hunter with a gift: a chronometer that tells the time, astrocalibrated to give the correct time based on planetary alignments, rather than rely on the flawed time-reckoning of her home time. Remorsefully, Dr. Gryphon's plan was to send Wynne back to 1112 scant minutes after she left , via his temporal displacement machine,
... In the long run though, that plan failed too.
Volume 3: The story starts here!