Agatha H and the Siege of Mechanicsburg

by Phil Foglio

  119 For quite a long time, lightning was the power source of choice for your more over-the-top mad science needs. Unfortunately, one cannot just assume you’ll have a sufficiently pyrotechnic storm at the same time one has a potential abomination of science slowly decomposing on the slab. Thus the Lightning Futures Exchange, which banked gigawatts during Mechanicsburg’s frequent lightning storms and then parceled them out to its clients when needed. Closed for over a decade at this point, the building was still standing only because the vast rooftop array of lightning rods and assorted accumulators provided a tourist-pleasing show whenever a thunderstorm blew through.

  120 While they do have a town watch, many of your smaller municipalities do not have the resources to support a permanent standing army. Even Mechanicsburg, which has a sizable standing force of assorted monsters, clanks, and semi-autonomous death machines, has the Mechanicsburg Defense Force. Every adult citizen is expected to be able to serve either under arms or in a support capacity in an emergency. They are further required to spend one week out of the year performing maintenance or repair and another week brushing up on military exercises. In recent years, standards had begun to slip badly, and many citizens were able to fulfill their yearly requirements simply by volunteering to deal with tourists.

  121 The Heterodynes have not given a lot of things to the world that the world has actually wanted, but the monster wagon that is now part of the standard equipment of almost every town in Europa is one of the rare exceptions. These stout conveyances have been engineered to contain creatures capable of any number of deadly attacks and, if properly maintained, have never been known to fail. The Mechanicsburg Monster Wagon Works is one of the few local industries that is highly regarded throughout the civilized world and has been for over two centuries. A suspicious person might wonder why the Heterodynes of old allowed this unarguably beneficial export to thrive. The answer is that each wagon secretly signaled whenever it was used and, as often as not, agents of the Heterodyne, suitably incognito, would appear and offer to buy the now-captured monster from the victimized town. These they brought home and they were studied by the Heterodynes, incorporating any particularly nasty innovations into their own future creations. The Heterodynes knew that staying as feared as they were required capital outlay and continued hard work and were afraid of neither.

  122 A scene that has been thrillingly detailed in our first textbook: Agatha H and the Airship City.

  123 Kolee-dok-Zumil is the contract that bound the lady Heterodyne to the Princess Zeetha. A rough translation could be read as “Teacher trains student,” but there is a great deal more to it than just that. A better understanding can be gleaned from the unfortunately titled: Lust, Honor, Sex & Death Among the Lost Warrior Women by Professoressa Kaja Foglio. Which, she wants made perfectly clear, hit the publisher’s doorstep with the title An Ethnographic Overview of the Societal Mores and Underlying Philosophical Principals of the Skifandrian Warrior Queens. The fact that, under its current title, it is currently in its twentieth printing, is irrelevant.

  124 Fafflenarg beasts (Fafflenarg gigantus skifandrus) were unknown to Europa at this time. These days, of course they have become a familiar part of every Europan’s table, known to us as Tasty Breakfast Beasts™, even though they are, by law, only eaten at lunch.

  125 Othar Tryggvassen did tend to run through female assistants rather quickly. Contrary to scurrilous rumors promulgated by his detractors, hardly any of them were killed in the line of duty. Most of them simply discovered the job looked a lot less glamorous up close. One of the principle reasons for this seems to be that while there is no denying he was a great lover of women, Othar was unshakeable in his resolution to never dally with an assistant. For many of his companions, that had rather been the whole point.

  126 The Court of Gears is the section of the town where one will find not only the great central factory, but hundreds of individual manufacturers and workshops.

  127 Doctor Jupiter Bren (MD, PhD) was the driving force behind the development of the creatures known as wasp weasels.

  128 This had, in fact, been a popular fad amongst sixteenth-century eastern European blacksmiths

  129 The G. M. C. C. P. M. S. B. S. S. J. is but one of approximately twenty organized street gangs that roam Mechanicsburg. Many of them are hundreds of years old. While most cities labor endlessly to eradicate this sort of thing, the rulers of Mechanicsburg long ago coopted and deputized them. They are considered an integral part of the town’s early warning system.

  130 Known colloquially in the Mechanicsburg region as “the madness place.” When a spark is in this state, they are blind and deaf to almost any outside influence that would interfere with what they are doing at the moment.

  131 We, your professors, have tried, for quite some time, to receive permission from the proper authorities to detail within these books the actual mechanisms and processes by which the creatures known as slaver wasps infiltrate and control their hapless victims. We have been informed we will not be allowed to do so under any circumstances, as they do not want us to “give anyone any bright ideas.” While we rail against this dictate in the abstract, the real world sensibility of it is inarguable, and thus we shall continue to portray this process in a way that ignorant and shortsighted critics will no doubt continue to call “fabulist hogwash.” This is simply yet another way that we, your professors, suffer for our art. We hope you appreciate it.

  132 Herr Docktor Getwin Mittelmind (PhD, MD, BFA, University of Salzburg) was a spark who specialized in mad psychology. A specialized field to be sure. He was not locked away in Castle Heterodyne because he built giant anteaters. No, he was locked away in Castle Heterodyne because he could take a perfectly ordinary group of people and within six days they would build a giant anteater—because it was the logical thing to do.

  133 Professor Dyson Iskenshod theorized that narwhals, which remain severely understudied animals, actually spent part of their life cycle underground and used their horns to dig. When anatomical studies failed to validate any of his theories, he turned to engineering and designed and built mechanical narwhals that were, in fact, able to function as he claimed they would. As far as mad science goes, this was considered a stunning success by everyone but zoologists, biologists, and anybody who had ever owned an aquarium. When last heard from, he was in the process of attempting to breed normal narwhals with his creations.

  134 The Mechanicsburg Kraken Works was a private project of Nemo Heterodyne. It was built underground so as to have access to the subterranean lakes created and fed by the Dyne, which circuitously flows into the Danube. He planned to become a river pirate, but abandoned the project when he discovered a heretofore unknown allergy to grog. Determined to recoup the vast expenditure the project had accrued, the town leaders marketed bespoke mechanical kraken to the world at large and did a surprisingly brisk business until the fad was eclipsed by airships—a fad that remains ongoing until this day.

  135 As we have mentioned, dragons are not really considered a viable life form, as they come into direct conflict with humans over things like money and power, which, frankly, is just asking for it. The comments made by General Zog give credence to ancient rumors that the Jägers were instrumental in the hunting of dragons back when it was a sensible career choice.

  136 Dragons were programmed to be intensely territorial and to challenge all other dragons, no doubt as a way to impress dragon females. This is even more tragic as there has never been a female dragon. Even insane alchemists had survival instincts.

  137 The record among humans is unclear about this, but according to the few remaining dragons, it is firmly accepted that Franz was indeed the first dragon.

  138 The Siege of Mechanicsburg is considered the crowning moment of glory of the empire’s Phantasmagoric and Misdirection Division. An offshoot of Klaus’ psychological warfare division, they specialized in misrepresenting battlefields. Either by trying to convince enemies that there were more Wulfenbach units pre
sent than there actually were, or by trying to lure enemies in by disguising the army as a smaller unit, or even something else entirely—like a herd of sheep. Although they had been used throughout Klaus’s reign, never again would they have such a stunning success.

  139 The Dreen were the strangest and most inexplicable members of Klaus Wulfenbach’s collection of oddities and monsters. Almost everything about them was shrouded in mystery, such as where the Baron found them, why they consented to work for him, or what the actual nature of their powers and abilities were. Most worrying was the evidence they were creatures that existed “outside of time.” They frequently displayed foreknowledge of things to come, yet were often flummoxed by events they had just experienced. A lot of this might have been more acceptable if they were avuncular old men who lived in a traveling box or something, but frankly, they were creepy as Hell.

  140 The Red Cathedral of Mechanicsburg has its reliquaries, but the things they contain are not the bones of saints.

  141 The Gargoyle Squad of Notre-Dame de Paris has become rather famous as the final refuge of last resort for any number of Europa’s spark-produced and then abandoned megafauna. The Master of Paris claims they help to keep the city protected and dramatically curtail the pigeon population.

  142 Castle Wulfenbach is festooned with numerous mechanical gargoyles. These are not merely decorative, but serve as the first line of defense against air pirates, aeroapes, sky kraken, balloon barnacles, and the occasional meteorite. It is unusual for them to be detached from this assignment.

  143 Golf is a “sport” that became popular in Scotland in the fifteenth century. Players stalk about a predetermined course, driving small balls into holes in the ground with specially shaped sticks known as clubs. Devotees, of which there are many, claim it is one of the “purest” sports, as it develops nothing in the player that could be useful in the mundane world.

  144 After learning about Euphrosynia Heterodyne’s troubled relationship with the Storm King, Saturn Heterodyne’s turbulent marriage, or the present drama unfolding that is a direct result of Bill Heterodyne’s marriage to Lucrezia Mongfish, one could easily believe that certain Heterodynes seem to be particularly unlucky in love. Sadly, this sort of thing was actually the norm as far as the family went. The Heterodynes constantly sought to embrace danger, adventure, strife, madness, and relished injecting sturm und drang into every aspect of their (and everyone else’s) lives. Therefore, it should come as no surprise that, as far as they were concerned, courting and matrimony were simply two more playing fields for this sort of thing. Perversely, one of the greatest books dedicated to the resolution of relationship difficulties and the preservation of marriage is Herr Doktor Danjharl Savage’s (PhD, SE, University of Amsterdam) historical overview and analysis of Heterodyne courting: Don’t Do This. (Corbettite Press/Belfast).

  145 A suspicion that was quite justified. Empire records show that when Mechanicsburg was invaded, the Baron deliberately selected the empire’s most troublesome, unsustainable, and high-maintenance units to lead the charge. One justification was that the members of these spark-created units would be more capable dealing with whatever mad science the citadel of the Heterodynes would throw at them. But the clearly discernible subtext was that if someone had to be turned into balloon animals, on the whole, the empire felt slightly more comfortable with it happening to established abominations of science, who might not even mind the change.

  146 Originally devoted to dentists, taxidermists, saw sharpeners, the makers of man-traps, and combs. Today it houses many of Mechanicsburg’s portraitists and engravers. No one knows why.

  147 The glorious dawn in question had been the signal that some now-forgotten, long-awaited revolution was to begin. Unfortunately, it rained that day and, for the conspirators, things went downhill from there. The never-activated Undead Army sat, unclaimed, in a storage locker for two years until the empire bought them at auction. This was not the strangest way that the empire had ever acquired new troops, but it was unquestionably the most cost effective.

  148 An unfortunate name, but still one to be reckoned with.

  149 When Princess Zeetha first arrived in Europa, everyone who had brought her here and knew how to get to Skifander—or even knew that it actually existed—was killed by air pirates. Since no one else Zeetha met in the subsequent three years of her travels across the length and breadth of Europa had ever heard of the place, Zeetha had begun to think she had made the whole thing up in a fever dream. This fear was shattered and her sanity restored when Agatha casually mentioned that she had heard stories of the place from Barry Heterodyne.

  150 Even after all this time, the mechanics of how the Castle is able to blithely manipulate itself, not to mention the rest of the town of Mechanicsburg, remains one of the Heterodyne family’s most closely guarded secrets. The fact that the Castle admits it cannot control glass goes a long way towards explaining Mechanicsburg’s thriving glass industry, which is well known for being able to supply everything from delicate laboratory glassware up to pre-made madness-inducing mirror mazes. There was a brief fad for these within the homes of Mechanicsburg’s idle rich . . . until they all went mad, of course. Some people just have too much money.

  151 When the Heterodyne Boys inherited the Castle and the town, they realized they had a monumental job ahead of them: converting the Mechanicsburg economy from “pure or chaotic evil” to what Professor Garibaldi Gygax (LLM, The School for Advanced Studies of the Unnatural World, Lucca) referred to as “lawful evil.” Realizing they couldn’t turn a town of minions, pirates, and henchmen into honest people overnight, they began slowly by turning them into hucksters, which, while it lay upon a bed of solid, accountable mercantilism, still allowed for a generous exercise of low-level chicanery. Repurposing the various death machines that littered the place was a bit more problematic, but as we see here, they were working on it.

  152 Yes, this was, in fact, Lieutenant Yarl Bollet, who’s firsthand account, The Fall and Rise of Mechanicsburg: One Half-Hour of Terror (Transylvanian Polygnostic University Press), became, on its release, the most read and, at the same time, most banned book in Europa. A very effective use of viral marketing.

  153 A derogatory term, long used by outsiders, to refer to the natives of Mechanicsburg.

  154 For the record, no ethical teller-of-tales would tell the story of the Fog Merchants to children. It might give them ideas.