Doctor Patch
“Laughter is the easiest anesthetic—and the most honest.”
Full Name: Doctor Tavish Patch
Species: Gnome
Gender: Male (he/him)
Affiliation: Clown Hospital of Harlequin Vale; Embervault Sympathizer
Occupation: Chief Physician and Reconstruction Specialist
Faith: Atheist / Rational Coin Sympathizer / Antipriest Admirer
Base of Operations: Clown Hospital and Hospice, Clown Alley, Harlequin Vale
🧬 Overview
Doctor Patch serves as Harlequin Vale’s most notorious healer, coroner, and reluctant moral philosopher.
He presides over the Clown Hospital, a sprawling complex that functions simultaneously as infirmary, hospice, and judicial containment ward.
Patients arrive by choice or by sentence, and Patch treats both kinds with the same surgical precision and disquieting humor.
He believes in repair, not redemption—that a person can be rewired, but not reborn.
⚙️ Personality
Patch is pragmatic, darkly funny, and so precise it unnerves even Rational Coin accountants.
He jokes through pain, often using gallows humor to test a patient’s self-awareness.
When asked if he fears death, he once replied:
“Fear? No. But I do invoice it.”
Behind his wit lies a quiet exhaustion. He’s a man who has seen every kind of body—living, dying, and undecided—and decided the only way to cope is through punchlines sharp enough to cut sutures.
🧠 Background
Born in Embervault, Patch studied mechanical anatomy under the Council of Sparks and apprenticed to an Antipriest of Motion who taught that “failure is sacred.”
His downfall came after he revived a dead soldier using clockwork organs and conductive mirrorstone.
Silverwake called it desecration; Embervault called it art.
He fled to Harlequin Vale, where mortality is already half a performance.
Under Solenn Veyra’s protection, Patch founded the Clown Hospital, rebranding his blasphemy as medicine.
🧵 Practices and Methods
Mechanical Medicine: Combines biological repair with Embervault prosthetics. He has replaced limbs with brass, lungs with bellows, and hearts with resonant engines.
Therapeutic Performance: Uses humor and staged absurdity to reduce patient trauma; laughter literally lowers pulse in his metrics.
Judicial Rehabilitation: Criminals sentenced by the Sawdust Courts are treated here instead of jailed. Patch refers to them as “the still learning to move.”
🧩 Philosophy
Patch is a material atheist who still prays through precision.
He rejects Serendahl’s doctrine that perfection equals stillness; to him, every heartbeat is sacred because it’s imperfect.
His credo:
“Every mistake that keeps you breathing is proof you’re not finished yet.”
He is fascinated by the line between life and motion—by how much spark can be added before a body becomes machine.
His “patients” often blur that line, leaving his wards humming faintly at night.
🧨 Relationships
Talli Bramblecoat – Collaborator; she sends injured beasts to him, and he sends back miracles stitched with apology.
Eldric Reeve – Handles his accounts; the two argue about whether profit or pain drives innovation.
Solenn Veyra – Patron and occasional conscience. Solenn keeps him supplied with political protection; Patch keeps their performers alive.
Captain Alon of Harlequin Vale – Shares Embervault roots and questionable ethics. They trade parts, both mechanical and moral.
Nurse Chuckle – His most trusted subordinate; maintains warmth where his bedside manner fails.
☠️ Rumors & Hooks
Keeps a jar labeled “For Spare Smiles” filled with preserved facial muscles.
Rumored to have reverse-engineered mortality once, but destroyed the notes.
Some say the crematorium fires beneath the hospital occasionally laugh.
The doppelganger murder that sparked the Bearded Lady’s scandal passed through his morgue; whether he noticed the substitution is a mystery.
🧩 In Lore
Doctor Patch represents Harlequin Vale’s moral paradox: a city that heals with spectacle and sins with empathy.
He bridges Embervault’s blasphemous science and Canava’s demand for order, standing on the thin line where mercy looks a lot like heresy.
When asked why he stayed in a city of jokes, Patch answered simply:
“Because here, the punchline’s the cure.”