tabby tom (physical descriptor, first adult name)
telly tom (tell-on-you-tom) (for paranoid habit developed standing guard after death/disappearance of brother)
old tabby tom (respectful version of name after many years)
old telly tom (less respectful name)
old tally tom (invention of "tallies" a bastardization of his name based off makers used to track in/out at camp)
Old Tally Tom, a quarry cat who stands guard at the mouth of camp who interrogates whose coming in and out and when theyll be back. habit formed after his brother disappeared + no one noticed how long his brother was gone except him and no one was concerned or remembered when/why he left
in his older age he started using representative marks or items to tally or denote who was where. simply moving stones back and forth as the stones to represent and count who was were. as he counts jobs taken as well, he runs out of stones and needs a representation that stands for increments larger than one, rudimentary arithmetic.
TIMETELLER/timetally apprentice to old tally tom noticing and demarked the movement of shadows to increment passage of time at all. was looped into this as a child so old tom could sleep and rest his bones and was apathetic to the position and would sleep on the job. long shifts and not moving allowed him to notice the changes of shadows by seeing them almost side by side after waking up and needed to know time passage to understand how much he fucked up. found it easier to notice the movement of shadows if he stuck a stick in the ground in the open rather than a shaded tree whose shadow was a little large to see when filled with leaves. rudimentary sundial
dripPot inventor of dripping water filled skin to count time in reference to shadow moving markers. apprentice to timeteller and fascinated by time and counting it. pot that fills with water drips that tips over when full, inventing the drip (similar to seconds/minutes) and pot (half hour to hour) as a smaller metric of time
