Patrice Eastaughffe (11 June 1882 - 23 December 1952) was a scientist and founder of The Ring. Named by many as one of the most influential people of the XX century, Patrice Eastaughffe led a group of scientists who discovered other dimensions and developed Normal Portal.
Today Eastaughffe is also known for her extremely private way of life, so much so that after her death it was realized that there are no public records about even the most basic facts of her life. Several biographers have attempted to write her story, but quickly gave up due to not being able to find enough information. The infamous biographer Frank Dupeaux has published a story of her life entitled When the Bough Breaks: What we don't know about Patrice Eastaughffe, where he speculated about what her life could have been like. His book has received praise from both readers and critics, however the consensus was that Dupeaux has written a touching story, but it most definitely has nothing to do with reality.
Eastaughffe was born in 1882 in New York, to Maurice and Claudia Eastaughffe. A middle class family, Eastaughffes were generally well to do. Maurice Eastaughffe owned a small but known pocketwatch shop "Tillie's" on 5th Avenue. It was also a bar and a way to evade police or otherwise unwanted company, since one could go through Tillie's from East 11th to East 12th Street.
From the early age, Patrice was interested in science, kittens and steam heaters. The latter is captured in the fact that The Ring has a steam heater on its underground floor. Frank Dupeaux speculates that the steam heater in The Ring underground floor was used as a secret passage to Eastaughffe's secret home, but he offers no evidence of this. The steam heater was inspected following Dupeaux's book, but no signs of the steam heater being other than an ordinary steam heater was found. To this the conspiracy peddling organization WTF responds: “Of course!”
She went to public school 81 in New York, and then studied with Professor Vinaigrette at Cornell University. Earning her physicist degree she went on to work at the Experimental Physics Institute to try to create an invisibility cloak by firing anti-photons at the subject. She was joined by Fred Rogers, another physicist from Cornell, who was also interested in working on something “disruptive”, as he put it. Together, they hired a team of assistants and began work.
The invisibility experiments had quickly failed, but Eastaughffe was so disappointed at the quick failure that she made sure to analyze the data they had gathered. Her analysis uncovered some inconsistencies, and further investigations eventually led to the discovery of other dimensions and the development of Normal Portal.
First results were published in a joint article by Eastaughffe, Rogers et. all in 1901. By this time the fate of the Experimental Physics Institute was in jeopardy and Eastaughffe moved her team to Urban Labs, where work continued.
In 1903 they published an article demonstrating the ability of the seeker device developed by the lab to penetrate through dimensions.
By 1905 Eastaughffe and Rogers had produced results with such lasting implications for physics that they were able to open their own lab, which they named The Ring due to the shape of the facility, which was built in a form of a donut, with a huge circular corridor. The architecture looked very impressive at the time, but The Ring was criticized for wasting too much space on the corridor. A lot of the equipment, however, is hosted underground, and the main labs B and C are underground as well.
It is at The Ring that Eastaughffe and Rogers have completed the seeker design which allowed to lock the connection between our Universe and other realms, thus securing an interdimensional link (a funnel). The Normal Portal was born. It took 15 more years to be able to develop a saving system, that would reliably re-connect with a given dimension.
Although most of the administrative work was done by Rogers, Eastaughffe was the one who originally pushed for creating a separate facility. It was quickly recognized by the scientific community that the discoveries of the group are bound to open a large area of investigation, and The Ring was not a controversial project.
What became controversial was the architecture of the building. Conceived by Eleanor Leontes, The Ring is built in a form of a donut, with a spacious corridor dominating the structure. While the building looks impressive, it is frequently criticized as wasting space. Although most of the laboratories are underground, the underground part was not part of the original concept and was added only later, which raises questions as to the practicality of Leontes' design.
Nevertheless, The Ring became the global center of interdimensional travel and remains in this capacity to this day. The only Normal Portal in the world is located at The Ring, in its underground premises.
Eastaughffe was reported to be a strong, yet very flexible leader, a talented negotiator, able to masterfully resolve conflicts.
Known to be private to the extreme, Eastaughffe kept her personal life a complete secret. Not only did no one know anything about her family status, her home address has been a mystery and all correspondence arrived to The Ring.
Rumors circulated that she was married to Rogers, but Rogers always denied that, and public records show that Rogers never married. He also lived in an apartment across the street from The Ring, and Eastaughffe was never seen there.
One time, two lab assistants, Dory and Lory, tried to follow Eastaughffe from work, but she probably noticed them, since they reported a convoluted path across the city to Tillie's. They lost her there.
On another occasion, Nick “Nicolas” Pacth, an engineer from lab B, tried following her too, but she noticed him and told him to go home.
Several journalists, most notably Rob and Dean, managed to put a GSP tracker on Eastaughffe's coat, but she must have found out, since its readings made little sense and send the signal roaming the whole of New York for days, as if all Eastaughffe did was walk around town.