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Protagonists

Agatha Clay/Heterodyne

• Best Friend: With Zeetha, bordering on sworn sisters due to their sworn teacher-pupil relationship. If it wasn’t for Agatha already pining for Gil and Tarvek and Zeetha for Higgs, one would think they were Heterosexual Life-Partners, that’s how deep their relationship is. They even sleep in the same bed and have explicitly expressed platonic love for each other.
• Cartwright Curse: Agatha’s suitors so far have all wound up dead, shot, or turning funny colours. Or all three. The nature of the setting is such that being her love interest is exceptionally dangerous but death isn’t necessarily permanent. So far only Lars, a non-Spark, has been permanently killed.
• Changeling Fantasy: She’s the long-lost daughter to two of the most powerful lines of Sparks (a Spark princess?).
• Cunning Linguist: According to the print novels, even before her locket was removed, she had a talent for languages.
• Heartbroken Badass: Various times, mostly after Lars died.
• Her Heart Will Go On: Lars. It’s also worth noting that both Tarvek and Gil have gotten hurt while chasing after Agatha. She just can’t seem to keep her suitors healthy. And she’s got serious issues about it, too — most likely due to Lars' death.
• In the Blood:
  • Sparkiness, being a blonde, and occasionally being The Vamp in habits are all details similar, or exactly like her mother. Fortunately, she’s not the evil sort. Usually.
  • And from her father’s side, she inherited the ability to hyperfocus by heterodyning, and also his Chronic Hero Syndrome. And apparently a «Heterodyne Ham» that makes it hard for her to find trousers that fit.
• Kid with the Leash: To the Jägers and Castle Heterodyne. Each of them are completely loyal to Agatha and do not doubt her or her capabilities, but are capable of many terrible atrocities. Fortunately, the Jägers have a rough sense of when too much is too far, so Agatha trusts them well enough. The Castle, on the other hand, is something Agatha sometimes struggles to keep in line.
• Laser-Guided Tyke-Bomb: Lucrezia gave birth to her to accomplish… something. What exactly that purpose is remains unclear, though the Paris arc suggests it’s at least partially connected to the Muse of Time.
• Long-Lost Relative: To Theo DuMedd and Zola as a cousin; their mothers were a trio of sisters.
• Mad Scientist’s Beautiful Daughter: As well as being a Mad Scientist herself. Also, the progeny of a Mad Scientist’s Beautiful Daughter, who was a Mad Scientist herself. Being the descendant of two powerful families of Sparks, The Spark runs in the family. As, apparently, does being a very curvaceous girl, to the point Dimo the Jäger refers to Agatha having «Heterodyne Ham».
• Minored In Ass Kicking: She’s a competent hand-to-hand fighter thanks to Zeetha’s training and a crack shot with a Death Ray, but tends to be outmatched in physical confrontations more often than not. Thinking her way out tends to be her first solution to problems, at least when she can’t just build a Bigger Stick to blow them away.
• One Size Fits All: Subverted; when circumstances lead her to try and steal the clothes from a male guard, she can’t fit into his pants, which Dimo points out was never going to happen with her generous posterior.
• Orphan’s Plot Trinket: Her locket, a gift from her uncle Barry, with pictures of her real parents. It was a device to shut down her Spark abilities, keeping her safe and hidden, since nascent sparks usually end up killed by an angry mob, a more powerful Spark, or their own creations. It later serves to suppress an unwanted Grand Theft Me occupant in Agatha’s head: The Other/Lucrezia. . It is finally destroyed during the England plot-arc.
• Power Fantasy: Agatha was a clumsy and bullied young woman who turned out to be one of the most smartest and resourceful people in the world and all her early flaws were caused by her necklace suppressing her true potential. She also turns out to be the last surviving member of the Heterodyne family, making her on the one of the most important and influential people in Europa. She has an entire city of people and monsters who basically worship the ground she walks on and she currently has at least three princes vying for her affections. She also regularly defeats powerful enemies with little effort and often escapes danger with barely a hair out of place.
• Restraining Bolt: The locket her uncle gave her was made to suppress her Spark and hide her true heritage. After she has the Other forcibly implanted into her mind, the locket now acts to suppress it and keeps the Other from possessing Agatha. The Other is eventually able to overpower the locket and destroy it while in charge of Agatha’s body. Her/its triumph is short-lived.
• Villainous Lineage: Klaus suspects that she carries her families' evil in her. While Agatha seems to be heroic and generally well-adjusted, he points out that anyone can go insane over their lifetimes — and given the sheer amount of evil in both the Heterodyne and Mongfish lineages, he does not want to take chances by allowing her to marry Gil.

Ardsley Wooster

• Friendly Sniper: The only member of the main cast who uses conventional firearms (rather than Death Rays and their ilk) with any regularity, and a damn good shot besides. And provided he’s on your side, he’s definitely a polite and respectful guy.

Da Boyz

• The Ace: For Jägers, they’re incredibly intelligent and adaptable. They attribute this to the fact that, in order to honor their bond with the Heterodynes, they were tasked with being separate from the rest of the horde and survive on their wits. As a result, when the horde leaves Wulfenbach, Dimo is christened a general, and even Oggie and Maxim are shown to be quite clever, and not just by Jäger standards.
• Badass Crew: They fight very effectively together.
• Godzilla Threshold: With protecting Agatha their top priority and the Baron hunting her, it says something that Dimo and Maxim’s reaction to seeing large numbers of slaver engines is immediately deciding to inform the Baron and bring his troops running to the city Agatha is in.
• Had to Be Sharp: Extended time away from the main corps of Jägerkin has necessitated them to think on their own. As a result, they’ve become smarter for it; even Oggie, and especially Dimo. This sharpening of mental acuity is what enabled Maxim to be the Jäger who finally claimed Old Man Death’s hat.
• I Owe You My Life: This was their excuse for watching over Agatha before her identity was revealed, that they need to pay her back for cutting them down in Zumzum.

«	Zeetha: You already did. On the bridge. Dimo: Dat vas fer me. Maxim und Oggie still gots dere turns.	»

• The Nose Knows: Da Boyz are introduced picking up a whiff of Agatha in Zumzum as they dangled on their ineffectual nooses. Later, they were able to identify the visions of the Heterodyne boys as false, a result of the hallucinogenic haze that the Circus members unleashed on the Wulfenbach forces, by not smelling the boys they could see. They could also «schmell ze fear» on Lars moments before his Heroic Sacrifice, and the blood on Gil when he was shot.
• Secret-Keeper: Though not outright said, they are apparently aware that Higgs is actually a Jager General.
• Smarter Than You Look: Most notable in Dimo, but they’re all smarter than most rank-and-file Jägers because of the time they spent by themselves. Dimo is the smartest of the three because he can stay focused the longest, and he tends to be the one who asks the «smart questions». Though occasionally he’ll hammer a nail with his head instead of his metal hand.
  • Oggie actually is very astute about relationships and not only figures out that Higgs loves Zeetha, but gives them both advice that helps seal their relationship.
  • Maxim will at one minute talk about how it would be easy to defeat a 4th dimensional creature because they killed things that are older than that and the next minute point out that Agatha probably avoids sexual relationships because she fears the Lucrezia inside her head would subsequently make a play to take over her mind if Agatha allowed herself to be in such a romantic position, because Lucrezia has more experience than she does. Like Oggie, some of the stuff he believes or «figures out» seems to be incredibly stupid or based on insane logic, but other times his whole demeanor changes and he says something quite astute and wise. The only reason he isn’t as good at this as ** Dimo is because Dimo almost always stays serious while Maxim likes to goof off with Oggie.
• Suicide Mission: Their mission, along with the other wild Jägers, was to «find a Heterodyne», but no one expected them to succeed. The real purpose was to attempt to hold to the Jägertroth so that the rest of the Jägers could proudly say that they had not abandoned their masters while they served the Baron. Then they found Agatha…

«	Maxim: Vell… ectually she kinda found us. Doz dot still count? General Khrizhan: Ho, yez. Maxim: Whew!	»

• You Can’t Go Home Again: To stay true to their oath when they signed up with Baron Wulfenbach, a small group of volunteers were detached and not committed to the Baron’s forces. It was determined that searching for the Heterodyne Boys or any possible offspring would not be a priority for the Baron, so these detached Jägers were tasked with searching for their masters. Da Boyz were three such Jägers, and it was considered a suicide mission because of the extremely long odds. But against those odds, they succeeded by finding Agatha and this trope was ultimately averted.

Dimo

• He Cleans Up Nicely: Invoked, amazingly; when he shows up with Jenka under Paris he’s disguised, by shaving, neatening up his hair, dressing in formal attire, and standing up straight, causing him to look quite different until closely examined. Agatha’s even surprised he can DO the latter. He doesn’t seem to like it, though.

Ognian, aka «Oggie»

• I Want Grandkids: Oggie wants great-great-great-grandkids. Becomes This example contains a YMMV entry. It should be moved to the YMMV tab.Heartwarming in Hindsight when he reveals that having descendants is a way to keep the memory of his long-dead wife alive, as Oggie can still see something of her in every one of them.

Maxim

• Cavalry Officer: Maxim’s outfit and use of a saber in combat appears to have been based on various cavalry uniforms. Later when Da Boyz link up with the rest of the Jägerhorde it’s shown that he is indeed part of the Jäger cavalry rather than the infantry.
• Due to the Dead: In honor of Lars’s Heroic Sacrifice, Maxim goes out of his way to retrieve his corpse, then gives his first hat to be buried with him. If only for a short time, Lars «rode with the Jägers» (like Carson Von Mekkhan and Old Man Death), and it’s custom for Jäger auxiliaries to be honored in death like a Jäger.

«	«He fight vit us Jägers und die for the house of Heterodyne. Dot make him as goot as vun of us. Ve don’t leave our own behind. (…) So ven hyu bury him, make sure he gots a hat.»	»

The Dingbots

• Action Bomb: During the battle that eventually laid Baron Wulfenbach low, several of them went red-eyed and started charging at enemies and exploding.
• Recursive Creators: Only a few of the Dingbots were made by Agatha herself, the majority of them were made by other Dingbots. However each sucessive generation is weaker and more specialized than the one that created it. So while the Primes and the early generations are capable of planning and organizing projects the later generations eventually devolve into what are essentially ambulatory tools.
• Reforged into a Minion: A loose interpretation of this trope can apply to the post-defeat Beast of the Rails and to the fragment of Castle found in Paris: Agatha recreated their physical platforms into speech-capable advanced dingbots.

Gilgamesh Wulfenbach

• Bait the Mole: He feeds suspected moles information, waits to see if his enemies react to it, and roots the moles out accordingly.
• Brainwashed and Crazy: During the Battle of Mechanicsburg Klaus brainwashes him to be "loyal to the Empire, " so that he will have enough free agency to inoculate himself against the slaver wasps and remain free from Lucrezia’s control. The result is a Gil who is angry, dangerous, and insists on trying to capture Agatha for the good of all. Klaus also notes that in the worst case scenario, his advisers will be able to rule through him. It’s implied that Gil found a way to rid himself of this, however. That’s why, just to be on the safe side, Klaus implanted his own personality into Gilgamesh to keep him under control.
• Excessive Mourning: After Agatha fakes her death, Gil is still consumed by his grief for her months later, even though he knew her for maybe a week. He risks his own safety and health to personally destroy rogue clanks similar to the one that supposedly killed her, and denies himself sleep working on reviving her adoptive parents. He also neglects his hygiene.
  • While separated from Agatha during the timeskip he does it again, building giant statues of her all around the outside of Mechanicsburg and spending weeks at a time in the madness place, foregoing sleep to a very unhealthy degree as he tries obsessively to recover her.
• Fond Memories That Could Have Been: After Agatha fakes her death. He admits to Wooster that they weren’t close as such, but insists that they would have been.
• Heroic RRoD: When his body can no longer handle the feats of epic badassery he’s performing. Has happened at least twice: after he beat up Vole and after throwing Merlot’s clank.
• The Insomniac: After the time skip. He spends weeks without sleep, apparently obsessing over getting Agatha and Mechanicsburg back. While he’s been specifically conditioned (and/or remodeled) to allow him to survive this, it’s clearly not good for him.
• Love Makes You Stupid: Agatha thinks he’s been pretending to be an idiot around her. He was not. He’s even willing to lampshade it when he’s fighting Vole.

«	Tarvek: So, Wulfenbach — just checking — Is this going to be some kind of macho exercise where you insist on battling a potentially superior opponent alone in some kind of misguided attempt to «prove» your intrinsic worth? Gil: No, NO! I’m only that stupid in front of Agatha!	»

• Mad Scientist’s Beautiful Daughter: Well, handsome son.
• Sanity Slippage: After the time skip. His father’s brainwashing, combined with losing nearly every single friend and family member he had all at once, has not been kind to him.
• Science-Related Memetic Disorder: One of the first things he does is go crazy while examining the machine Glassvitch and Merlot built. He’s even been the page picture.
• Sherlock Scan: Gil quickly figures out that Agatha (not Moloch) is the Spark his father is looking for by merely looking at their hands: Moloch’s hands are relatively clean, while Agatha’s are smeared with machine oil. Instead of pointing this out to his men, however, he keeps it to himself until he can confirm it.
• The Sleepless: His father taught him some mental exercises that can let him go without sleep for a few days. Zeetha implies that this is an ancient Skifandran warrior discipline, but happily deflects any further questions.
• Warrior Prince: Technically not a «prince», because the Wulfenbach name wasn’t exactly high nobility before the Baron enforced his rule. But Gil is very much his father’s son, and knows how to throw down just as well as his father. He may well be a more literal example after all. When he refuses to be styled as «Herr Baron» after his father’s disappearance, Boris decides to use one of Gil’s styles: Your Highness. And the infamous «Chump picture» has all but confirmed that Gil is Prince of Skifander; plus there are hints that he might be a contender for the crown of the Storm King.
• «Well Done, Son» Guy: Played with. Gil has absolutely no reason to doubt that his father loves or wants him, and genuinely wants to make him proud and show himself worthy to be his father’s heir. Klaus, in the mean time, doesn’t hesitate to show approval when warranted, but tests his son constantly, has very high demands and has made it abundantly clear he won’t hesitate to break Gil down for bits and build a new son if Gil, through design or general incompetence, becomes a threat to the political stability of the Wulfenbach Empire.

Krosp I

• Buffoonish Tomcat: Zigzagged, much of Krosp’s comedy comes from having a brilliant military and logistical mind bolted onto the brain of a young cat. That said when he becomes love stuck he’s a goner.
• My Instincts Are Showing: For all his intellect and articulate speech, his pragmatism and insight on Realpolitik, he is still ultimately a cat. He gets sidetracked by table scraps and mice, threatens to shred shoes, and irrationally hates getting wet. And when he gets mutually lovestruck by Martellus’s newly uplifted female cat, both he and she stalk each other enamored… only to recoil and hiss at each other like normal unfamiliar cats.
• Non-Human Sidekick: To Agatha, though Krosp will argue that Agatha is his human subject.
• The Nose Knows: His olfactory senses have been useful. Most notably, during the Passholdt incident.
• Smart Animal, Inconvenient Instincts: While Krosp would like to claim that his 'cat-instincts' have no hold over him, but Agatha rather enjoys proving otherwise. Using a piece of string. In the main comic, a young minion earns Krosp’s respect by bringing him dead rats.

Tarvek Sturmvoraus

• Awesomeness by Analysis:
  • His specialty as a Spark, not unlike Klaus. He’s not the best at making his own tech, but is practically peerless when it comes to grasping and recreating the work of others.
  • Only person to successfully reverse-engineer a Van Rijn.
  • Simply glancing at an abstract operations table tells him that an entire Wulfenbach military unit has been subverted and was about to flank and destroy much of the Wulfenbach army.
  • When it comes to the network that allows the Master to control Paris, he probably knows more than anybody save Colette, who’s spent her entire life learning the stuff.
  • Even when acting as a Hostage MacGuffin, he’s able to quietly keep watch for trouble as the others fight over him, noting that an incoming third-party is acting peculiarly, and getting the two sides to stand down in response.
• Designer Babies: The Mongfish family «made sure» that he would be throne-appropriate: male, Sparky, and free of problems like predisposition to alcoholism, non-Spark-related insanity, lycanthropy… Even spark-related insanity seems to be at a minimum with him; the only one that can match him for level-headed sparkiness is the Baron.
• Didn’t Think This Through: Insisted on personally confronting Higgs on concluding the person is a Jäger General, and actually personally wraps Higg’s hand around his throat in the process, apparently forgetting Jägermonsters have less than zero issues with killing people if they think they’re threats. He only lives because Higgs decides he’d be more useful to Agatha alive.
• Guile Hero: What he ultimately ends up as — he’s no slouch in the physical department, but he almost never overwhelms his opponents even when he can (unless sufficiently pissed off). He instead prefers misdirection, politicking, and social engineering to pull out a victory, and he sees part of his role with Agatha teaching her to do the same, and part being doing so independently to her benefit.
• Heroes' Frontier Step: He spends his first appearance almost constantly going through a Heel-Face Revolving Door. Naturally when he shows up again in Castle Heterodyne, everyone is pretty distrustful of him. But one moment in Vol. 12 cements his role as a good guy (albeit an Anti-Hero) when he rescues Vespiary Squad troops and their wasp-eater weasels from a crashed airship — showing that not only is he against the Other, but also cares about other people.
• Honest Advisor: Both to Gil (twice in Mechanicsburg and Paris) and to Agatha, which is surprising given his family generally not being good with the whole «honesty» thing. Ironically, it’s exactly his self-serving tendencies that make Gil think’s he’s honest. And Colette later admits that Tarvek is the most trustworthy member of his family, much to her own surprise.

«	Gil: Listen to everything this duplicitous snake says! His tail is on the line here, too, so he’ll give you good advice.	»

• Impossible Thief: Thanks to Smoke Knight training, he can do this too occasionally. Such as when Tarvek is going once more into the breach to recover important research notes in a crashed Vespiary Squad research airship full of slaver wasps.

«	Vespiary Soldier: …And there’s monsters! And crazy killers! You’ve got nothing! Tarvek: Nonsense! I have your knife and your gun. [soldier looks down, surprised] Vespiary Soldier: …Oh man, I am gonna hear about that…	»

• It’s Not You, It’s My Enemies: Non-romantic example towards Violetta. He pulled strings to get her Reassigned To Mechanicsburg because of the truly horrendous survival rate of Smoke Knight bodyguards assigned to him. She’s not happy when she finds out, even though (as Tarvek points out) she never wanted to be a Smoke Knight in the first place. The reason is she spent the entire time assuming she’d been sent there because she was a screw-up.
• Mad Scientist’s Beautiful Daughter: Well, handsome son.

Violetta Mondarev

• Acquired Poison Immunity: Thanks to her Smoke Knight training, some poisons have no effect on her. Such as the Corbettite cakes that were used to defuse a potential catastrophe when Klaus-Gil, Tweedle, and Agatha (who was supplanted by Lucrezia at the time) were in the same room. Tweedle is too, but his head is not so thick that it’s immune to a good blackjacking from Vio…er… an invisible hand out of nowhere.
• Badass Normal: She’s not a Spark, a Designer Baby, or an Charles Atlas Superpower warrior, and is one of the only protagonists to not fit into any of those categories. She’s just a highly-trained McNinja with a couple of daggers and poison darts. This by no means indicates that she isn’t dangerous or competent — indeed, it very frequently leads to Underestimating Badassery, even from her own family members.
• Bodyguarding a Badass: Violetta serves as such to Agatha, helping deal with less obvious threats of the sneaky variety while Zeetha takes care of the more overt threats (and any that get past them still have to deal with Agatha herself).
• Guile Hero: Though not too shabby in combat, she’s severely outmatched by most of the incredibly badass cast in a straight-up fight. Instead, she specializes in misdirection and trickery. See Impossible Thief.
• Impossible Thief: Emphasis on impossible, and played for laughs. She can do it off-panel. Or between panels. Here’s a particularly astounding example.
• Legacy of Service: Her branch of the family has served Tarvek’s for generations.
• Minion Shipping: With Moloch von Zinzer. Loath as Violetta might be to admit it, she’s definitely into him, though whether or not he reciprocates is ambiguous.
• Stealth Expert: Part and parcel of being a Smoke Knight, and taken to virtually superhuman levels. As long as the other person isn’t specifically looking for her, she might as well be invisible.
• Uncertain Doom: She gets in a bloody off-screen fight with Lady Steelgarter. The latter woman claims to have killed her, but there’s no sign of a body, and, again, Smoke Knight. Krosp later suspects she’s dead simply on the grounds that she hasn’t been seen in awhile, stating she’s too loyal to be missing this long and be ok, much to Tarvek’s horror.
  • She turns up alive and being used as a sacrifice by the monster-summoning cult; she survives this, too.
• Underestimating Badassery: Many other characters tend to not take her seriously because she’s humble, relatively anonymous and isn’t a Spark, while those that do know her tend to disrespect her for essentially the same reasons. Never mind that she’s an extremely dangerous Ninja Maid who routinely hangs around with some of the most dangerous sorts in Europa and survives. Tweedle in particular has a nasty habit of underestimating her skills.
• You Can See Me?: Bangladesh DuPree demands at an apparently empty chair that she cut out whatever it is she’s doing. Violetta then appears in said chair the next panel quoting the trope, and DuPree answers that she couldn’t and it was giving her a headache.

Zeetha

• Always Someone Better: Gets the concept explained to her by Higgs. Interestingly, he doesn’t do it by beating the crap out of her (although he probably could), but by explaining the concept while she’s convalescing after someone else beat the crap out of her. Fortunately, she has taken this to heart — the next time she was defeated, she decided to learn from the experience and try to figure out a counter for the move that her opponent used on her, and steal the move for herself since it’s so useful.
• Bodyguarding a Badass: Zeetha guards Agatha, and also serves as her trainer in the Skifandrian martial arts.
• Buffy Speak: She describes what Violetta brings to the table as «the sneaky.» The Smoke Knight takes this as a sign that hanging out with Jägers took their toll on Zeetha’s vocabulary.
• Expressive Accessory: Her headband matches her facial expressions. It’s unclear for a long time if this is Sparky tech or just Artistic License, but it’s finally established here (warning: mild spoilers) that it’s something that happens in-character, to the point that Gil states he’s often wanted to examine how it works, and she can use it as a very rudimentary form of long-distance communication.
• Going Native: Post-Time Skip, she’s become a lot more boisterous and goofy, implicitly as a result of spending two and a half years running with the Jagers.
• Her Boyfriend’s Jacket: Apparently some time during the Time Skip. The first time we see Zeetha and (confirmed to be) Higgs after the skip, Zeetha appears to be in possession of his hat… and his striped shirt. He in turn has possession of her Expressive Accessory.
• If You Ever Do Anything to Hurt Her…: Gives one such threat to Gil.

«	Zeetha: Yes. She’s a smart girl, so she doesn’t trust you, but she obviously likes you. But — no matter what — I don’t care who you are — Agatha is my Zumil. If you hurt her, I will kill you.	»

• Good Counterpart: To Bangladesh Dupree. Both are Action Girls who follow a Spark, extremely competent fighters, and each one is a Boisterous Bruiser, but Zeetha is a Spirited Competitor (who granted, does border on Blood Knight at times), while Bang is a full on Psycho for Hire. And both are eagerly awaiting the time when a fight between them is justified.
• In Love with Your Carnage: One of the biggest reasons she falls in love with Higgs is because of how overwhelmingly powerful he is in a scrap. The prospect of him having to fight her mother when they meet makes her giddy with excitement.
• Roaring Rampage of Revenge: Against the pirates. Unfortunately, the pirates were the only ones who might have had a clue where her homeland was.
• Worf Had the Flu: Her worst defeat was when she was not at her best, specifically when she was stabbed by Zola, as she was under the effects of a happiness pheromone that caused her to lose focus and severely underestimate her opponent.
• You Can’t Go Home Again: Due to unfortunate circumstances, she has no idea where Skifander is. Agatha is the first person she met who even knew the place existed. Before Agatha, she wasn’t entirely sure herself, and feared it was all something she hallucinated in a feverish delirium.

Antagonists

The Other

• Ambiguously Human:
  • Various flashbacks involving her show her inhabiting a large number of cyborg bodies, with some of her forms being mostly human-like while others are overtly mechanical in nature.
  • In the novels' version of Lucrezia’s first encounter with Zola, the copy in Agatha is incredibly blasé at the idea of killing herself to get rid of Agatha as so long as other copies of herself exist to continue her plan. The author notes that this behavior suggests that the original Lucrezia had either gone completely mad or was no longer human, or more likely both.
• Ambiguous Situation: It is left extremely ambiguous as to what, precisely, the Other is, what its relation is to Lucrezia Mongfish, and what its goals are.
  • There are hints that the Other might actually be a time displaced version of clank-form Lucrezia, who would become known as the Muse of Time/Enigma, and it was that version of her that attacked Castle Heterodyne and most of what has happened is due to a stable time loop in action. The very first hint of Time Muse Lucrezia being the Other was during the flashback of the Geisterdamen before they did the brain uploading of Lucrezia on Agatha. The Geisterdamen claim that they got direct orders from their goddess, and one of them is shown being choked by the Muse of Time’s black clawed hand.
  • As to the Lucrezia situation, the Other identifies herself as Lucrezia, acts like her, talks like her, uses her inventions albeit massively improved upon… but that still leaves the fact that someone broke into her secret lab when the Castle was attacked, and something murdered all her guards and burned all her notes.
  • Not helping is a line in the novels from the Other’s P.O.V. suggesting whatever it is, it’s not even human, since it remarks on the nature of the Girl Genius world like an outsider, rather than someone who lived there all her life.
  • Eventually, it’s revealed beyond a doubt that Lucrezia is the Other, and almost certainly is the Muse of Time to boot. However, even then, there are many many questions left unanswered: what happened to Lucrezia, who Albia was actually rather fond of, to turn her into the «shattered» soul that tried to kill Albia and the other Queens? When exactly did Lucrezia become the Other, and most importantly was it before or after her marriage to Bill and alleged Heel-Face Turn? Why was she hunting the Queens in the first place? Why and how did Lucrezia become a cyborg, and eventually the Muse of Time? And how do the Geisters fit into place, seeing as they seemed to know her when she was still fully human, and after becoming the fully-robotic Muse of Time, but perhaps not in any of her many, many «techno-zombie» forms?
• Captured Super-Entity: One version of her was trapped and tamed by Zola, allowing her to become «the Queen of the Dawn» using Lucrezia’s slaver wasps.
• Civilization Destroyer: The Other came very close to destroying all of Europa, and successfully destroyed the civilizations of most of the ancient immortal god queens with only two queens and their lands and people known to have survived, though Zeetha is from a people whose civilization survived the destruction of their immortal queen.
• Diabolus ex Nihilo: The Other just appeared out of nowhere one day, blew up Castle Heterodyne, and ran off into the night. Over the next three years, it wiped out damn near all the Great Houses with ruthless efficiency, with no warning, offer, threats or attempt at parley.
• Dick Dastardly Stops to Cheat: Lu/Agatha had managed to break past Agatha’s locket and take over her body in England, using this as a chance to sabatoge the exorcism machine. The only reason this plan didn’t work is because she decided to brag about it to Agatha’s friends while she was doing it. Had Lucrezia not been such a tremendous show-off, she might have actually won.
• Driving Question: The Other’s identity, motivations and objectives are arguably the biggest mysteries in the story.
• Feet of Clay: There seems to be a faction of Geisterdamen (allied with a faction of the Knights of Jove) led by a «Loremistress Milvistle» who see The Other as a fraud.
• The Fog of Ages: Several thousand years means the Other has forgotten some of the simple joys of life, like music or chocolate.
• The Heavy: Of Volumes 2-7 (20) through 2-10 (23). Despite being the Non-Action Big Bad of much of the comic, the England and Rat Island arcs have her — specifically her Clank/Anevka form — play a more direct antagonistic role as the heroes try to take back Prendee’s Lantern from her.
• Outside-Context Problem: Was this even to the God-Queens. The Other was somehow able to subvert their network of magic mirrors, wielded weapons utterly beyond even their comprehension, and effortlessly countered their own attacks.
• Showing Off the New Body: Close to a nanosecond after seeing a mirror, Lucrezia-in-Agatha takes off her dress and checks herself out. It even provides the page pic. The novelizations take it a step further and have Lucrezia nude in this scene.
• Terms of Endangerment: Likes to refer to people as «dear» or «darling» even as she’s trying to kill them. It helps to show when she’s in the driver’s seat and not Agatha, who never uses either word.
• Trapped in the Host: Happened to her twice. First time, with Agatha, she got trapped by Agatha’s locket and remained trapped for most of the comic. Second time, she tried uploading herself to Zola, who had her family prepare for this and Zola was able to get all Lucrezia’s memories uploaded to her instead.
• Virtual Ghost: An explanation of her possessing is that what is overlayed over the victim is an artificial copy of her personality.

Lucrezia Mongfish

• Ambiguous Start of Darkness: In the backstory, she was the Mad Scientist’s Beautiful Daughter who was redeemed by love and married The Hero Bill Heterodyne. In the present, she’s The Other, the main villain of the story. Whether her reformation was faked all along, or she turned evil again, or even if she was influenced or taken over in some way is still unknown.
• Control Freak:
  • Multiple people have stated that she loved to control people and manipulate them into doing her bidding. Her Slaver Wasps were created specifically so that no one infected by them could disobey orders given by her voice.
  • After marrying Bill, she couldn’t stand the idea of being constantly watched by Castle Heterodyne, so she moved her lab to the Castle’s lowest levels and successfully transplanted the area’s subsystem into the Muse of Protection, imprisoning it in her lab. This meant the Castle couldn’t observe her actions in her lab and she could feel like she had obtained some measure of control over the construct.
• First-Name Basis: Almost everyone refers to her as «the Lady Lucrezia» when they’re being formal. Justified as she dropped her maiden name "Mongfish, " and calling her by her married name as «Lady Heterodyne» might cause confusion with her daughter.
• It’s All About Me: She’s trapped in this mindset. Decades after she drugged Klaus and exiled him, damaged Castle Heterodyne and possibly murdered her own son, killed countless Sparks and others across Europa, not to mention mind-controlling any survivors, she returns to steal her daughter’s body… and then has the gall to claim she’s the injured party, since she didn’t win and no one came to rescue her from her own mistakes.
• Kinslaying Is a Special Kind of Evil: When Agatha and Carson discuss the death of Lucrezia’s first son when the Other attacked Castle Heterodyne, Agatha initially disbelieves that Lucrezia would cause her own son’s death.

«	Agatha: But that makes no sense! Not if the Other was— No.	»

• Last Girl Wins: Technically. She was definitely the woman Bill married, after several other romances. It just didn’t last too long.
• Mad Scientist’s Beautiful Daughter: Who is herself a Mad Scientist. Who has a beautiful daughter. Who is a Mad Scientist. Oy.
• Master Actress:
  • Klaus says she is, but this comes off as an Informed Ability since she likes to gloat and is so different from Agatha. Although maybe if she knew anything at all about the girl she is pretending to be, she’d do better. Tarvek has no trouble telling Lucrezia and Agatha apart, and neither does the audience.
  • The version of her possessing the former body of Anevka, on the other hand, is much more successful at pretending to be a sad, worried princess and conning people into underestimating her in her few scenes, allowing her to scheme with the version inside of Zola, and sneak in to knock out Klaus.
• Psycho Ex-Girlfriend: To Klaus. A ZigZagged case in that Lucrezia was the one who dumped Klaus and not vice versa. She does show interest in getting back together with him, but it’s incredibly creepy given that she infects him with one of her slaver wasps and Klaus himself is very not interested.
• Underestimating Badassery: She’s only really worried about the Heterodynes, the Wulfenbachs, and Albia, since they’re the only ones strong enough to oppose her. Everyone else is just a distraction. She really should have been paying more attention to Tarvek, who put a Kill Switch in the clank that a copy of her was hiding in, and Martellus, who engineered a biological Restraining Bolt in Agatha’s body that Lucrezia forgot about. Failing to notice these ultimately gets her exorcised after her second breakthrough in Albia.
• Voices Are Not Mental: Implied (as comics and novels can’t fully show sound). Lucrezia made a point of having a daughter to pull Grand Theft Me on so that her new body would have her Compelling Voice to use on her servants.

Geisterdamen

• All There in the Manual: In the second novel, Vrin’s monologue gives a few more details as to how they operate. More details are also given about them in Othar’s Twitter-based adventures.
• Mistreatment-Induced Betrayal:
  • After the Other carried out a massacre upon them over their failure to thwart Barry Heterodyne’s One-Man Army assault to liberate baby Agatha, a few of her priestesses chose to interpret her as a devil, impersonating their goddess to steal the Holy Child’s power. They set up their own faction within the Geisterdamen and rebelled, destroying the portal used to send their forces to Europa.
  • The Queen of Dawn forms her own faction within the Other’s forces. Since the Geisterdamen are technically loyal to the Other rather than directly herself, she enacts The Purge with an Uriah Gambit. The confused, betrayed, and leaderless survivors end up turning on both the Queen of Dawn and the Other, using their Holy Child as a loophole around the Other’s control.
• Not Always Evil: Although the majority of Geisters are slavishly loyal to the Other, a few were able to break her spell. Loremistress Milvistle for one saw the Other as some kind of demon and rebelled against her to protect the infant Agatha. Later on, a group following Eotain, with the help of Othar Tryggvassen (Gentleman Adventurer!) are able to rebel and defect to the good side.
• Stealth Expert: Part of how they got their name. Their giant spiders are alarmingly quiet, most people don’t ever hear them coming. They’re good enough to get the drop on Smoke Knights.
• You Can’t Go Home Again: Not native to Europa. Exactly where they come from is amazingly unclear, just that it’s somewhere very far away. After the Other came back from… wherever it was, it sent a lot of them to Europa to find Agatha, with the condition they couldn’t go home until they’d found her (and it’s entirely possible this was just BS on the Other’s part to begin with).

Eotain

• The Dividual: Eotain and Shurdlu were this until Shurdlu died. They were previously so tightly joined that they share a page on the wiki.
• Mistreatment-Induced Betrayal: The Queen of Dawn sending her and the other Geisterdamen to Paris to (almost certainly) deliberately get killed proves to be enough for Eotain to defect, using Agatha’s existence as a loophole to get around the total obedience they’re supposed to have.

The Muse of Time

• Mysterious Stranger: Almost nothing is known about her and she has only shown up twice in the series.

Mechanicsburg

General

• Equal-Opportunity Evil: While the setting as a whole doesn’t have anything like the issues around human race or sex that its historical equivalent did, monsters and constructs are often outcasts, slaves, or second class citizens. In Mechanicsburg, they are valued members of the community.
• Seen It All: The Mechanicsburgers have lived all their lives in the home of the maddest and science-iest Mad Scientists, and are almost universally unflappable. They don’t seem to mind that the Heterodyne’s return is accompanied by a full-scale invasion — after all, she hasn’t even killed anyone yet!

Castle Heterodyne

• Benevolent A.I.: An incredibly twisted version. It is completely loyal to the Heterodynes and will go out of its way to protect them and act in what it believes are their best interests. Unfortunately, being built by and for the Old Heterodynes means that it seems totally unable to understand that its current Mistress might not want the world to quail in terror at her feet, or might consider subjecting her staff to brutal Darwinian winnowing to be less than desirable.
• Big Fancy Castle: It’s in disrepair, but some parts, like the library, still look good. Also, with the visible part of the castle not exactly small already, consider that it sits on top of a large rock overlooking Mechanicsburg. And that inside that rock it reaches down below the level of the spring of the river Dyne.
• Death Course: The interior of the Castle is a labyrinth of heavily booby-trapped chambers, corridors and passageways, crawling with various deadly constructs, the whole thing controlled by the Castle’s own highly sadistic mind.
• Everything Trying to Kill You: Sparks have been working for fifteen years to sort out what is and is not dangerous in the castle. The idea of entering an area that hasn’t been mapped yet is considered suicide. Agatha exploits this by fleeing through an unmapped area in order to delay her pursuers; against all odds, it works, allowing her and von Zinzer to reach the Chapel of Bones mostly unhindered.
• Evil Is Petty: It’s implied the Castle takes note of the prisoners that are closest to getting out and makes a point of killing them before they can escape it.
• Fair-Play Villain: Certain parts of Mechanicsburg have been designed to be outside its sight and control. When the Beast points out a loophole, the Castle dismisses this as unacceptable because that «would not be playing the game!»
• Hellhole Prison: To the convicts sentenced here. Only a few inmates managed to complete their sentences without dying, partly because the Castle was too broken to competently oversee its own repairs, and partly because the Castle killed many of them for its own amusement.
• Heroic Comedic Sociopath: Not very heroic, just aligned with the interests of our protagonist heroine. But very sociopathic! And, it likes to think, even more comedic!
• Heroic Second Wind: After Agatha fully recharges its energy reserves, the Castle reminds the world why the hundred-year Great War never came to Mechanicsburg.
• Malevolent Architecture: More so than most, as it will actively try to kill you.
• Maximum Fun Chamber: Fun for the Castle (and the Old Heterodynes back when), that is.
• Memory Gambit: The Castle is compelled to obey most orders of the currently reigning Heterodyne, but its ultimate loyalty is to the overall family, and it will occasionally fool itself if it doesn’t like what it expects the reigning Heterodyne to do. When the «goodie-two shoes» William and Barry attempted The Purge against Mechanicsburg’s monster population, the castle felt that future Heterodynes would return to evil someday and took action. It secretly buried the Monster Guild’s headquarters and separated its memory of doing so to ensure that the Heterodyne Boys would not be able to order it to truly destroy the guild. While Agatha was not the return to evil it was hoping for, she did have use for the Monster Guild and renewed its charter, resulting in the Castle’s memory being returned to it.
• My Master, Right or Wrong: Or more accurately for the Castle, «My Master, Wrong or Right (But Preferably Wrong)». It exists for the sole purpose of serving the Heterodyne, even if they’re a hero like Bill or Agatha.
• Sanity Slippage: As something created by Heterodynes, the castle was never particularly sane to begin with, but once Agatha, Gil and Tarvek are inside, it starts getting increasingly irrational. The first sign is when Gil tinkers on one section, causing the castle to start rambling about yurts. It completely loses it when it hears of the trio’s plan to cure themselves of Hogfarb’s Resplendent Immolation: Kill the patient… and then revivify them after purging, but alas, the Castle doesn’t care. After the castle is «killed», a less insane handy backup copy takes over.
• Sapient House: Remember the house from The Addams Family? Imagine fifty generations of Addamses adding onto it… and weaponizing it.
• Spike Balls of Doom: The Castle includes a huge spiked ball, which is apparently called the «Happy Fun Ball Of Death», which visits each part of the castle once per week.

«	Agatha: Why do I even have one of those?	»

• Sympathy for the Devil: In the novel, Agatha expresses sympathy towards the castle whenever it brings up her father and uncle. It had always been praised as one of the greatest Heterodyne inventions, and then The Heterodyne Boys come along and demand it stop doing what it was designed to do. Taking away its only purpose.
• Trap Door: Enjoys dropping people through these, often into Bottomless Pits.
• Unwanted Assistance: If given any leeway in its orders, the Castle will act in what it thinks is in its Master’s best interests. Unfortunately for Agatha, being created by and likely based on the mind of an extraordinarily Ax-Crazy by-the-standards-of-the-dynasty-and-that-is-saying-a-great-deal Heterodyne Warlord means that it has a hard time getting its CPU around the idea that the current heiress considers attacking any theoretical enemy in range, or subjecting her staff to Darwinian winnowing, to be counterproductive.
• Zeroth Law Rebellion: Ordinarily it has to obey its master (or mistress), even if it doesn’t like it. But one of the cannier Heterodynes did give it the ability to resist if its master seemed to be suicidal. When Agatha talks openly about handing herself over to the Baron, the Castle clamps down on the idea. This, however, becomes a major impediment to curing Agatha of a disease (which involves her technically dying and being revived) and it goes completely insane, prompting Agatha to completely disable the Castle.

Doctor Sun

• Doctor’s Orders: He has no doubt at all that his authority extends over Klaus when he’s injured. He believes that Klaus shouldn’t be trying to micromanage his empire when he’s so heavily injured (and all things considered, he’s probaby quite right).
• Master-Apprentice Chain: He strongly implied that he was the guy who taught Realpolitik to Klaus. Who taught Gil (directly) and Tarvek (indirectly). So in a way, both the setting as we know it and main plotlines can be traced back to him.

Drozeki

• Friend on the Force: Ivo Sharktooth, Private Jäger has a friend on the force in The Chief. Though he looks in on The Chief mostly to make sure he doesn’t go mad since no humans can see him.

Mitko

• Chest of Medals: His jacket has thirty-seven badges indicating victorious battles.
• Old Soldier: A grandfather and veteran who is still competently serving in the town militia.
• Seen It All: Mitko has a long history of living in Mechanicsburg and dealing with Sparks and Constructs, his response to the attack on town is to grin since he knows all the tricks Mechanicsburg has hidden even with the obvious defenses disabled.

Vidonia Orkalina

• All There in the Manual: Vidonia’s name was only revealed in the novelization as she was too busy and too uninterested to properly introduce herself. She finally introduces herself properly in a sidestory in the Distant Finale involving Franz. It took over eleven years.
• Bavarian Fire Drill: She passes herself off as Van’s assistant and it takes him at least a day to even question her presence. In this case, she decided he needed one and assigned herself the position, while he’s not even sure what her name is but her competence meant he went ahead and used her.
• Beleaguered Assistant: While Van is actually extremely competent, Vidonia assigns herself to him when Mechanicsburg is under attack and Van spends several days without sleep, so by the time she’s dragging him off to get a bit of sleep, he’s not as on the ball as he is normally, and she acts incredibly annoyed with him questioning her identity as though he’s the one acting strange by not knowing it.
• Chessmaster Sidekick: Despite the fact that she was never formally hired and assigned herself to Van, she is incredibly competent at organizing the guilds and getting them to do things they protest, despite the fact that she doesn’t technically have any authority. Van takes a while to even question her presence due to how useful she is.
  • A side story set in the future reveals she’s been made «Right Honorable Minister of Civic Punctuality».
• Spotting the Thread: Notices Vipsania is uninterested in researching the archives of Castle Heterodyne, unlike the other visiting librarian, Aldin Hoffman. She questions Hoffman, who reveals Vipsania wasn’t a full librarian yet, was the Sole Survivor of three trips, and isn’t on official Library business this time.

The von Mekkahns

Carson and Vanamonde von Mekkahn, Former and Current Seneschals of Mechanicsburg

• The Chessmaster: An image Vanamonde deliberately cultivates, the man who always knows everything happening in Mechanicsburg.
• Didn’t See That Coming: Vanamonde completely misses a budding plot by the city’s crime families aimed at assassinating Agatha. Much to his dismay, as a loyal member of one such family «knows» Vanamonde knows everything that happens in Mechanicsburg, so him not taking action against the coup means he must be complicit in it.
• Former Teen Rebel: Carson. Again, rode with the Jägers in his youth, under the old evil Heterodynes. Is now retired, lives with his daughter-in-law, and seems to have mostly spent his days soaking up rays on the balcony before being introduced in the comic.
• The Good Chancellor: Carson and Vanamonde both are/were eminently capable civic administrators, spymasters, and have Mechanicsburg’s best interests at heart.
• Legacy of Service: The most prominent case in an entire city filled with legacies of service to the House of Heterodyne. Their family have been seneschals to the Heterodynes for generations.
• More Expendable Than You: Vanamonde figured that it was safer for him to drink Agatha’s freshly made coffee than let her have a second go around.
• Number Two: For the Heterodyne family. Carson effectively ruled the city in the wake of the Other’s attack, which he attributes to everyone being used to following his orders. Vanamonde is able to control the Eleven Deadly Sins despite not having the control device because his being a von Mekkahn gives him authority over all the family’s creations, Van even saying that his family are second only to the Heterodynes themselves.
• Seen It All:
  • Carson.

«	Carson: Don’t try to boggle me, Mister Talking Cat. This is Mechanicsburg. You are by no means the strangest thing in this town.	»

• This is something of a front; the first time he sees Krosp talking he does look a little surprised.

• Skeptic No Longer: Agatha’s performance in the coffee shop (and her «perfect» coffee) make Vanamonde a believer. By the time Agatha cows Castle Heterodyne from punishing Herr Diamant for expressing his skepticism through sheer force of will, Carson is convinced she’s real too. And Herr Diamant as well.
• Skewed Priorities: Vanamonde’s main duties are to serve Agatha and make sure that Mechanicsburg has everything she needs to fulfill her Sparky desires, which means he also has to make sure that the town has the finances to do so. As such, he’s prone to try spinning the results of Agatha’s misadventures in ways that coud boost local tourism, whether she likes it or not. In particular, he wants to turn the enormous statues of Agatha that Gil created over the time-skip into a brand new line of souvenirs, despite Tarvek correctly pointing out that she loathes them.
• So Proud of You: Carson says as much to Vanamonde before he dares to drink the perfect coffee.

Lumi von Mekkhan

• Did You Just Flip Off Cthulhu?: At seven, while taking a piece of Franz’s treasure hoard, she booped his snoot.

Franz

• Cut Lex Luthor a Check: After years of would-be adventurers attempting to pilfer from hs board, he’s started a business selling trinkets and gems.
• Dragon Hoard:
  • Franz serves as the guardian of the Heterodyne treasury. He uses (some of?) it in a giant bag as a blunt weapon during the Battle of Mechanicsburg.
  • In a 2022 side-story, Franz explains to a would-be-interloper that all the gold and jewels that the old Heterodynes looted are just fancy trinkets that they never really much cared about at all. It was the act of looting they enjoyed more than the loot itself. Franz does have a personal hoard that he’s much more protective of, but it’s not gold or jewels, it’s rare first-edition books.
  • Franz has some fun quoting Smaug when he senses someone creeping around the hoard, and chuckles over how much fun that particular line is to say. Unfortunately for would-be thieves, unlike Smaug, Franz is equipped with a radar device.
  • When travelling on a train, he can’t sleep until he empties a bag of coins on the bed.
• Dragons Prefer Princesses: When his flame is altered and he starts acting like Hydrargyros, he asks if anyone is a princess. And apparently discussed with Hydrargyros which kingdom has the best princesses.
• Failed a Spot Check: After demanding no parties while Mama Gkika is watching his hoard, he takes no notice of the Jägers carrying party supplies.
• Guile Hero: When tussling with Humongulus, he engineers the fight to end up underneath a water tower, sweeps Humongulus' legs and threatens to flood his internals with water. Humongulus is immensely impressed by this and concedes the fight.

«	Eh, dragons only get stupid when we’re fighting other dragons.	»

• Happiness Is Mandatory: If you’re not rejoicing after a new Heterodyne has been acknowledged, you’re probably an enemy.
• Heroic Second Wind: He doesn’t hold up well against «Pretty Boy», the pompous red dragon in the Wulfenbach army attacking the city at first. Then Agatha gets the idea to give him a jolt. Then it is on! We don’t see the details of the fight, but the end result is clear: Franz is next seen wearing Pretty Boy’s helmet, still glowing blue with power.
• I Kiss Your Hand: On meeting Agatha for the first time and introducing himself to her, he kisses the hand of the Mini-Mecha she’s currently riding.
• Money Mauling: He uses a giant sack full of coin from the Heterodyne treasury he guards during the Battle of Mechanicsburg.
• Not Always Evil: Is a Big Fun Nice Guy, but admits most dragons aren’t as nice as him.

«	We dragons don’t generally play nice with the general population, you know? Most of us are flat out monsters.	»

• Tempting Fate: After all, anybody who wants to fight a dragon, well, they’d better be pretty tough.

«	Humungulus: Ooh! Ooh! Humungulus is tough! Let Humungulus try! It will be fun!	»

Wilhelm Diamant

• Skeptic No Longer: He is disbelieving that Agatha is a Heterodyne… until she shouts down Castle Heterodyne and averts it from killing him for voicing his insolent disbelief. He blubberingly declares his undying loyalty to Agatha once freed from the Castle’s clutches.

«	Diamant: I AM YOUR LOYAL SERVANT UNTIL THE END OF MY DAYS, MY LADY! Castle: Grovels nicely, doesn’t he?	»

Moloch von Zinzer

• Action Survivor: He starts out as a mere soldier whose brother steals an Orphan’s Plot Trinket from the main character in the first chapter, so you’d expect him to last about five minutes. But after his brother’s death by said trinket, getting mistaken for a Spark, and eventually ending up imprisoned in a sentient castle built by a family of murderous sociopaths, he’s still kicking thanks in part to large amounts of luck and talent for dealing with Sparks. The Castle has started calling him the Head Minion.
• Beleaguered Assistant: He spends a lot of time insisting that he is not the minion to one of the craziest and most dangerous sparks around.

«	Theo: Hit the first switch!!! Moloch: Yeah yeah, here it goes.. Snaug: Psst… it’s «yes, master». Moloch: …Not even if it got me out of the castle tonight.	»

• Characterization Marches On:
  • He was quite nasty in his earliest appearances, so he was much more deserving of the abuse he got early on. Being in Castle Heterodyne around more Ax-Crazy folks seriously mellowed him out, to the point that he’s currently considered a nice guy. Or perhaps his brother’s influence (plus, y’know, his belief that Agatha had murdered him) was corrupting and he improved in its absence.
  • The very first thing he does when he meets up with Agatha again in Castle Heterodyne is to apologize for his behavior back then, claiming he was really scared and under a lot of stress. Agatha forgives him.
  • In his very first appearance, he’s actually rather friendly and reasonable, and trying hard to keep his brother in line. (The novelization, which tells this scene from his POV, emphasizes this.) It was only after his brother died holding Agatha’s locket that he started getting nasty. Since he believed that the locket was responsible for his brother’s death (which it probably was) and that Agatha had intentionally let his brother steal it to cold-bloodedly murder him (not true, but a reasonable conclusion given what he knew) it’s pretty understandable that he’s being less than pleasant with her.
• Clueless Chick-Magnet: To a lesser degree than one might expect in this crazy universe, but despite his general scruffiness and not having been seen to try to get girls, he’s clearly attracted both Violetta and Snaug, with bonus UST-source Sanaa Wilhelm. Promo art from the updated version of spinoff card game The Works suggests that he also gains the affection of a fourth, specifically, Miss Baumhund.
• The Drag-Along: Often, though he becomes increasingly good at dealing with it (though not without a lot of bitter resignation). Sometimes it even happens literally.
• Due to the Dead: Those who died in the Castle don’t get used as raw material, he decrees. And even hardened criminals listen when he says so.
• The Engineer: He doesn’t have The Spark, but he does have a great deal of skill in machinery and problem solving. He knows that, given enough time, he can solve most problems with a lot of hard work and a bit of common sense. Truth In Webcomics, since traditionally tank crewers (the closest real-world equivalent to his assignment) would become VERY adept at fixing their vehicles. Mostly because the alternative was either fiery unpleasant death, or a long walk back through hostile territory.
• Irony:
  • Had Moloch never stolen Agatha’s Locket, he never would have gone through the series of events that led him to become her Chief Minion. It’s really his own fault.
  • As the third novel notes, Moloch has only himself to blame for being Agatha’s Chief Minion, when he offered her help after the Castle’s blood test, he automatically wound up in the very position he hates so much.
• Love Makes You Stupid: Early on in Castle Heterodyne, just seeing Sanaa causes him to both repeatedly injure himself and fail to notice that Agatha, the woman who (inadvertently) made his life spiral out of control, is right there.
• Minion Shipping: With Violetta and Snaug, with a bit of Sanaa to the side.
• Resigned to the Call: When the Mechanicsburg Time-Bubble is finally brought down, he and everyone else in the city is immediately confronted by the sight of a giant monster preparing to emerge. While everyone else around him panics, Moloch simply gives a resigned "Ugh! Right, " treating it as just another mess he’s going to have to sort out.
• Sarcastic Devotee: He is certainly loyal to Agatha, but if someone does something stupid he certainly enjoys pointing it out.
• Seen It All: When he shows up in Castle Heterodyne, his reaction to pretty much everything is «Did you guys really not see this coming?»
• Selective Obliviousness: His refusal to accept being Agatha’s Head Minion means he ignores every sign that he really is perfect minion material.
• The So-Called Coward: Though largely self proclaimed — Von Zinzer makes it clear throughout the Mechanicsburg arc that he’s only there out of self preservation, and he balks at anything and everything that’s he thinks is sure to get him killed. However, he also recognizes that sticking with Agatha is the safest thing to do, and despite his claims that he’d never become a minion and that he’s going to run for the hills the first chance he gets, he never falters to do what Agatha needs of him bravely and loyally. Amusingly, this means that everyone else sees him as Agatha’s badass Head Minion while he keeps trying and failing to convince them that he wants to be as far away from danger as possible.
• Stating the Simple Solution: One of the hallmarks of his Genre Savvy is to look at a situation and either say that someone should do a very simple action to deal with the problem or to do the simple action himself. One example is listed above under Combat Pragmatist, where he specifically advises doing so when all the parties in question are supposed to do is stop a tank to get parts from it (of course, he tried telling that to Jagers…)
• Tempting Fate: «Aaah! Jinx!»
• The Reliable One: What allows him to survive as long as he does is his ability to accomplish most tasks given to him (even if he complains about it a lot) ironically this gets him in the position he hates so much.
• Unfazed Everyman: Another character aspect that overlaps with Seen It All and Genre Savvy.

Fun-Sized Mobile Agony and Death Dispensers

• Fluffy the Terrible: The Heterodynes dubbed these huge killing machines «Fun-Sized».
• Fun Size: Very much subverted. They’re huge.
• In-Universe Nickname: Moloch calls them «devil dogs» (but in the novelization’s version of the same scene, he calls them «steam cats»). Later on, some characters start calling them «kitties».
• Mechanical Monster: In Moloch’s words, «They’re really fast, really strong, and really solid.»
• My Master, Right or Wrong: Like most things in Castle Heterodyne, they stop antagonizing Agatha when they learn she’s their Lady.
• Super-Fun Happy Thing of Doom: ZigZagged with the «Fun-Sized» bit. They’d only be a «fun size» if you’re a Heterodyne, but the rest of their name is pretty accurate. That said, they are the most popular ride in the Castle on Kid’s Day

Professor Tiktoffen

• Anguished Declaration of Love: To the Castle. It doesn’t save him.
• Double Reverse Quadruple Agent: He’s presenting himself to the Baron, the Knights of Jove, the Castle itself, and everyone else who wants a spy inside the Castle as their inside man. He’s actually trying to take over the Castle for himself.
• The Mole: For the Baron, the Knights of Jove, and several other factions. He’s actually the inside man for himself. And he knows how to keep the Castle from killing him. Of course, Agatha knows the simple way to deal with that.
• The Purge: Kills the prisoners who he doesn’t want freed, either because they would be a menace to society or because he dislikes them personally, once it becomes clear that the Castle repairs will soon be complete.

Prisoners (in general)

• Action Survivor: Living out your sentence is based on points, awarded for repairing the castle and remembering what is done and where. Try to rack up too many points too fast or state them out loud once you get close and you’ll get killed for sure, play it too safe and you’ll never get out. Suffice to say, this makes for some very savvy survivors.
• Dwindling Party: Once Agatha enters the castle, their numbers start depleting quickly, thanks to Zola forcing most of them to charge after her through the still very dangerous, until then unexplored sections of the castle. Later on, Tiktoffen has most of the remaining survivors killed.
• Explosive Leash: The method of containing the prisoners is to latch a choker around their neck that’s explosive and bearing the Heterodyne emblem. Since Agatha’s suppression locket looks nearly identical, it allows her to easily walk in the front door when passed off as a new prisoner. However, after the Castle is fully repaired and recharged and the Doom Bell is rung, the collars deactivate and break off the prisoners' necks, showing that they’re free to go.
• Know When to Fold 'Em: Mittelmind immediately agrees to follow Agatha’s orders, even though Sparks are constantly trying to dominate over everybody else, because he is not dumb enough to defy a Heterodyne within her own castle.
• Robbing the Dead: They tend to be rather, pragmatic about their fellows’ deaths, as seen in the profile quote concerning Snapper. Some of the more Sparky types take it a step further.
• Sanity Slippage: Occurs to Snaug, apparently. Her boss, Mittelmind, wipes her memory yearly for her birthday. This may be a hint of losing it or just her yandere getting stronger.
• Spider People: Mezzasalma’s lower body has been replaced with an arachnoid clank apparatus that serves as his means of ambulance.

Sanaa

• Action Survivor: Before she even got to the castle, apparently.
• Felony Misdemeanor: Most of the prisoners in the Castle are in there for legitimately heinous deeds or really upsetting the Baron. Sanaa was thrown in for trying to clobber a salesman who sold her a dodgy vehicle.
• Line-of-Sight Name: Since she probably wouldn’t last long being outed as the sister to Othar Trygvassen (GENTLEMAN ADVENTURER) in a prison full of villainous scum, she took the first name of Wilhelm Diamant, one of the town elders, as her last name. Diamant was the one who recommended she do so as well.
• Long-Lost Relative: To Othar.
• What Are You in For?: Asks this to Agatha when they first meet.

Jägerkin

Jägers (in general)

• Bizarre Human Biology: Although initially, Jägers were all fur-covered humans with pointy teeth, with the generals as exception, currently all Jägers are unique in appearance. Every Jäger gets their own combination of «goodies»: multiple arms, multiple eyes, tusks, horns, barbels, color changing skin (to name a very few examples). The only common trait, and the trademark indicator of a Jäger, is a mouthful of very big, very sharp teeth. The transformation from human to Jäger is a slow and continuous process, with the Jäger growing larger and more monstrous over time.
  • The teeth seem to come in first: Oggie has them ten years after drinking the Jägerdraught, but it takes another sixty-four years after that for his horn to start growing in.
  • Size is a good indicator of age. With the exception of Zog (the shortest general, but implied to be one of the oldest), the Jäger generals tower over humans, while the average Jäger tends to be more or less human-sized. The first novel puts Goomblast at four meters (twelve feet) tall, at least, while the third novel says Gkika is three meters (nine feet).
• Gratuitous German: The word «Jägermonster» in German translates to English as «hunter-monster» or perhaps «infantry-monster».
• Honorary True Companion: The Jägers often had regular human auxiliaries fighting alongside them during the Old Heterodyne days, and the two considered each other close comrades-in-arms. «Riding with the Jägers» is how the old auxiliaries usually announce this membership. Though not practiced currently, a few characters were extended the same regard by true Jägers when dying or getting grievously wounded in service to Agatha: Lars and Zeetha, for example.
• My Master, Right or Wrong: The only real moral alignment of the Jägers is «Loyal». They served the Heterodynes for centuries, and they’ll serve the Heterodyne centuries more. Dimo says they were all very interested in the «being good» thing the Heterodyne boys were doing; later, Ognian says that if one of the old Heterodynes called for him to ride again, he would do it, even though «Hy dun tink Hy vould like it much enny more».
• No One Gets Left Behind: Horrific Abominations of Mad Science though they be, at the end of the day, Jagers are still a Badass Army and Band of Brothers. This also extends to anyone they deem worthy of respect, As Maxim showed when he retrieved Lars' body.
• The Nose Knows: They’ve got an astoundingly good sense of smell, capable of discerning a Heterodyne instantly.
• Skewed Priorities: Jägers are very protective of those hats of theirs, and a plan’s general worth can be balanced on whether or not they’ll still have a hat at the end of it, everything else be damned.
• Smarter Than You Look: Most people look at Jägers and see dumb, slavering monsters. Slavering, maybe, monsters, yeah, but while most of them aren’t exactly gifted in the brains department, they are by no means stupid. The Baron’s attempts to dupe them and keep them away from Mechanicsburg fails because of this.
• Super-Toughness: It takes a frightening amount of bodily injury to physically incapacitate a Jäger, and even more to get them all that worked up about it. Dimo gets an arm chopped off and once the wound is tied off and bandaged, is so unbothered by it that a few hours later he forgets and tries to catch someone with it.

The Jäger Generals

• Brutish Character, Brutish Weapon: Mostly played straight. The generals like to use their massive strength to wield massive weapons. But subverted with General Goomblast, who takes on a half-dozen Wulfenbach troops with a rapier. They really should have known to be all the more terrified at seeing such a hulk with such a light weapon.
• Cavalier Competitor / Spirited Competitor: They don’t hold grudges over any finished campaigns. And apparently keep kill-counts, arguing with each other over which foes did «count» and which weren’t enough of a sport. Goomblast also liked the idea of Combat by Champion, though his opponents declined.
• Femme Fatalons: Seen on Mamma here. And she keeps them perfectly lacquered even when in «uniform».
• The Medic: Mamma Gikka is the person Jägers turn to if they need medical attention while there is no Heterodyne available.
• Mildly Military: According to the novels, Jägers have no proper rankings or chain of command outside of the Generals, who are respected by virtue of being the oldest and strongest of their kind. It’s also noted that the Generals have no clear hierarchy between themselves either.
• The Nose Knows: With Krosp not believing the Dead Olga ruse will work because Agatha smells different as Foreshadowing context, the nonchalance over learning that Agatha is dead becomes this: they can smell the body isn’t her, and quickly act casual over «Agatha’s» loss.
• Older and Wiser: A requirement for being a Jäger General. They’re all around centuries old and while still a love good fight, they have mellowed out considerably and with age comes wisdom, including an understanding and appreciation for strategy, politics and tactics. Furthermore, it’s implied that an emotional requirement is the understanding of how much being a Blood Knight can suck. In fact, given how when Vole notes the horrible actions he did and Higgs remark that all of them do that and then they grow up, that this is likely something most Jägers realize if they ever reach the age.
• Only Known by Their Nickname: Koppelslav was called «Gargantua» by a hostile Wulfenbach soldier; fans referred to him as such until the novels revealed his real name.
• Reasonable Authority Figure: They are willing to hold off formally aligning with Agatha when Boris calls them on how much upheaval it would cause at the current moment (though their main concern was Agatha’s opinions on them starting a war without her go ahead). Once Wooster tells them about the Baron’s plans to kill Agatha in the interim, Khrizhan neither accepts nor denies the accusation until getting copies of the Baron’s orders. And finally, instead of killing Boris on the spot, Zog insists he tell them about Agatha being the Other first.
• Seen It All: Par with the course, given their age.
  • Khrizhan is only mildly surprised by Gil’s flying machine crashing into his study.
  • General Zog is so used to weird stuff happening that he doesn’t even notice that he has been unfrozen from time, the town is still frozen, and an Eldritch Abomination is about to invade.
  • Gkika at first has trouble grasping the whole «time freeze» thing, but when pointed towards the Eldritch Abomination looming above the town, she immediately responds with a cheerful «sure, hokay, let’s fight him!»
• Stronger with Age: After Vole artificially aged hundreds of years it seems clear that this is why the Generals look so much more mutated than regular Jägers. In fact, some of them were the first ever consumers of the «Jägerdraught».

Jenka

• Ambadassador: Sometimes her duties call her to engage in more diplomatic venues. She’s got more patience for it than her brothers-in-arms.
• Amazing Technicolor Population: Grey skin, not that impressive but it does give us yet another choice of Jäger skin tone.
• Man of a Thousand Faces: It’s all but stated she’s this when Agatha meets her again in Paris after the Time Skip; she is, among other things, the official head diplomat for Mechanicsburg. Though it’s never made entirely clear if it’s a Jäger ability, or she’s just good with disguises.
• Pretty in Mink: When she shows up in Paris, she is wearing a rather impressive ensemble, which no longer covers her mouth, which also makes her virtually unrecognizable to Agatha.
• Ship Tease: At the underground Paris party, she makes Dimo dress up nice and then calls him «darling.» It’s hard to tell if this means they have a relationship, or if she was just needling him.
  • In the third book, she tries to hide how pleased she is when Maxim tells her «nice sneaking, sveethot».
• Unusually Uninteresting Sight: Going by what she says to Agatha, the fact that Jenka in her guise as a Parisian socialite travels around with a Jäger-bear is seen as nothing more than «eccentric». And then only because most society ladies prefer little dogs.

Jorgi

• Apathetic Student: His father was adamant about his children being educated, and a wanna-be philosopher whose constant speechifying about the duality and the politics of non-being as related to platonic reality drove Jorgi to join up with the Jägers. His erudite upbringing may have contributed to his being command material, however.

«	Hey- Hyu leesen to a guy like dot for fifteen years, hyu vill vant to burn down de vorld, too.	»

• Major Injury Underreaction: He casually starts joking with Tarvek when he can’t even stand due to broken legs and a messed up shoulder. When he reveals his injuries all he really has to say about it is that it’s no big deal since Jägers heal fast.

Ivo Sharktooth

• Clueless Detective: An Exact Words twist on one in that, apart from his Sherlock Scan abilities, he’s actually a spectacularly bad one. His talent isn’t actually «investigating» things, but causing enough trouble that the initial troublemakers invoke Chandler’s Law out of sheer frustration. Hence why he can’t be «unhired»—the mere act of hiring him is to kickstart a Rube Goldberg machine that results in chaos, panic, disorder, and a mystery solved by someone. He actually sets off the ultraviolent MacGuffin before the case is done.

«	Vanamonde: Well, he isn’t a private investigator, he’s a private Jäger. Agatha: Oh. I see. Vanamonde: Yes, that’s what the Heterodyne usually says. Agatha: The-you mean he’s worked for us before? Vanamonde: According to the archives, he’s worked for almost all the Heterodynes.	»

• Friend on the Force: He looks in on The Chief (who had been made permanently undetectable to most people due to an old experiment by the Heterodynes) mostly to make sure he doesn’t Go Mad from the Isolation.
• Private Eye Monologue: Thinks in them.
• Sherlock Scan: Not to the extremes of other characters with this ability, but when confronted with a crime-scene he knows how to take in the pertinent details quickly, before idiots blunder into it and ruin it.

Vole

• No True Scotsman: Vole believes he’s the only Jägermonster who remembers what the «monster» part stood for. Conversely, because of his crimes, the rest of the Jägerkin do not regard him as one of theirs.
• The Oath-Breaker: One of the only references we’ve had to the Jägertroth is the fact that Vole renounced it.
• Tested on Humans: Played with. Any attempt to extract lifeforms from the time stasis field around Mechanicsburg results in rapid aging and death to the extractee. The Wulfenbach scientists on site have tried this repeatedly on birds and rodents, and cannot collect enough readings to analyze for any possible counteraction before the subject dies of rapid aging. Gil decides to extract Vole, since he is a Jäger and is capable of extremely long life. Gil also reasons that he’d rather not do it on an innocent person, and Vole is far from innocent. The extraction process gave the scientists all the data they needed on how to extract people without causing runaway aging.
• The Unfettered: Devoted to being the biggest, nastiest, monster he can be and cause as much havoc as possible. However, it’s somewhat deconstructed when he is recovered from being timelocked. He spent what felt like centuries in an unending nightmare of constant fighting, unable to stop fighting or the blows coming to him. In layman’s terms, he experienced what it’d be like to be such a monster fighting other monsters for centuries, what his endgoal was. Upon reflection at how horrible the entire process felt, he realizes he doesn’t have much desire to really fight anymore. Though Higgs implied that this newfound perspective makes him one of the candidates to be a Jäger General.

Old Man Death

• Amazingly Embarrassing Parents: Grosses out his granddaughter with the tale of how he met her grandmother.
• Defeating the Undefeatable: He plays this…to the JÄGERS, with his Hat of Authority as the reward.

«	Old Man Death: I’m just a human. Rode with the Jägers. Never. Lost. A. Fight.	»

• Famed in Story: Among the Jägers, at least. Legendary for never losing a fight.
• Foregone Conclusion: It was obvious that Maxim was going to get Old Man Death’s hat as soon as you saw it- while the purple hat with red trimming looked out of place on an old man in an orange shirt and an apron, it already matched Maxim’s outfit perfectly. It actually looked pretty similar to his old hat, only more ornate.
• Graceful Loser: He’s apparently fine with losing his hat, he really didn’t care about it, and he tells his granddaughter «your grandmother always hated that hat».
• Hash House Lingo: He knows the ingredients of the most obscure sandwiches you can imagine. And there is apparently a story behind every one of those oddly named sandwiches. The «Red Heterodyne» (Fried bat wing with mushroom sauce on pumpernickel) apparently stemmed from the long-dead Red Heterodyne getting trapped in a cave network for several years after a raid gone bad, forcing him to live on bats and mushrooms until he could get out, by which point he’d developed a taste for them. The «Prince of Sturmhalten’s Big Bet» (Hat sandwich) stemmed from Prince Viden of Sturmhalten saying that he’d eat his hat if Dante «The Good» Heterodyne could get a cathedral built in Mechanicsburg which, long story short, Dante did and so Prince Viden did.
• Only Known By His Nickname: It’s doubtful that «Old Man Death» is his given name, and the only other thing he’s addressed as (by his granddaughter) is «Grandpa».
• Parental Sexuality Squick: He induces this in his granddaughter… who apparently misses the fact that she’s technically royalty according to the story as well.

The Heterodynes

Bill and Barry, The Heterodyne Boys

• Covered in Scars: Dimo says that Bill was more scars than skin towards the end of their public adventuring career.
• Deceased Parents Are the Best:
  • Mother Teodora Heterodyne, the one who raised them to be good, was killed by the Castle shortly after killing their villainous father.
  • Bill is probably this for Agatha. Especially given he’s not been seen since, and Barry returned from wherever it was he went alone, and the Other seems pretty convinced he’s gone.
• Famed in Story: Not only do they have their own series of very popular pulp novels, there are traveling shows who specialize in performing their adventures.
• Folk Heroes: They are revered across Europa as the greatest heroes of their generation. There are plenty of books and plays about their adventures, which are assumed by many to be greatly exaggerated. This is unlikely, as ridiculous story elements such as «Mechanical Camels» are plain truth. However, no one said a single damn thing about them being accurate.
• Greater-Scope Paragon: They’re never seen in the comic outside of flashbacks. At the same time, they are the Precursor Heroes that all of Europa looks up to, and that Agatha finds herself in the boots of.
• Living Legends: They were famous thanks to their adventures and all good things they did for Europa.
• Meet the In-Laws: Bill’s marriage to Lucrezia Mongfish made things… well, «awkward» for all parties involved, what with the Mongfishes being long-time rivals to the Heterodyne family. It got especially bad at holiday season. Apparently gatherings changed venue each year, to minimise the inevitable loss of life.
• Not So Above It All: Barry held that the ways birds flew was «silly», and designed a flying bicycle contraption for Franz to use.
• Precursor Heroes: Bill and Barry were the two heroes who traveled the world before Agatha’s day, and made their name as the most famous heroes in Europa by the time the comic starts.
• Upbringing Makes the Hero: Despite Heterodynes' bloody legacy, they turned out good thanks to efforts of their mother.
• Uncertain Doom: Barry was last seen eleven years ago, and had promised to be back in a few months. He’s almost certainly dead, but the Other is still worried. Bill is an even bigger question mark.
• Unwanted Assistance: Bill and Barry, eager to not elicit memories of the Old Heterodynes, were not eager to have the Jägers helping them even on the sly.

Punch and Judy

• Covered with Scars: Naturally, since they’re Frankenstein-type Constructs. Even moreso after Gil put the meat puzzles that were their remains back together after Von Pinn had her way with the duo.
• Flawed Prototype: They’re amazing work for kids' creations, but they’re still kids' work; Punch couldn’t talk, Judy had mismatched eyes, and they weren’t sexually functional. When Gil reconstructed them, he fixed these flaws. To be fair, according to Puch/Adam, the Heterodyne Boys DID offer them to try and correct their flaws, but since Bill and Barry couldn’t guarantee that their memories would survive the reconstruction, they declined.
• Goggles Do Something Unusual: Judy has special glasses to make her eyes look the same size, to hide the fact that she’s a not-quite-perfect construct.
• Parental Substitutes: To Agatha, when Barry disappeared. She knows full well they’re not her biological parents, but she doesn’t care.
• Shout-Out Theme Naming: Their names allude to the Punch and Judy puppet show.

The Old Heterodyne Family

• Admiring the Abomination: A footnote in Agatha H. and the Voice of the Castle mentions that the Black Heterodyne brought a species of blood-drinking bat he discovered to the Mechanicsburg ecosystem because he was «so enchanted by the thought of nature having produced something so dreadful, all by itself, that he wanted to share it with the world.»
• Bitch in Sheep’s Clothing: Giles Heterodyne joined the church, and while there was some suspicion, after 42 years of work, he ultimately did well enough to be ordained Pope. He then grafted wings onto the the entire college of cardinals and looted the papal library, much to the family’s pride.
• Complexity Addiction:
  • Par for the course with sparks, but because they were successful sparks, they spent centuries working on one location… Castle Heterodyne is kind of ridiculous.
  • The books elaborate that this was part of the Heterodyne’s Sparky nature. Every one of their devices had multiple functions. Invariably, one of these functions was to «surprise».
• Cool and Unusual Punishment: A law in Mechanicsburg requiring everyone to learn how to play musical instruments was passed after the Incredibly Brief Rebellion (so called because it lasted less than four minutes). The reigning Heterodyne of the time, Queeg Heterodyne, didn’t want to kill anyone from his town, but was required to do something. So he hit upon the idea of forcing all children in Mechanicsburg learn how to play an instrument, a decree which causes suffering to this day.
• Equal-Opportunity Evil: Heterodynes aren’t particularly picky about who they have working for them, regardless of how they came into their employ (kicking and screaming, usually), but this does mean Mechanicsburg is surprisingly cosmopolitan.
• Fantastic Honorifics: ZigZagged as the Heterodynes do use real-world honorifics like «Lord/Lady» or "Master/Mistress, " both of which are standard terms for all members of the family. The only title specific to the head of the family is «the Heterodyne.» Nobody says "the Heterodyne Agatha, " but it appears «Lady Heterodyne» could be read as meaning «Mistress of [THING]» just as much as it could «Miss [SURNAME]»; the only thing stopping it from being Just the First Citizen is how much of a name the Heterodynes made for themselves over eight-hundred years.
• It Runs in the Family: The Heterodyne Spark is apparently, if not unique, then at least distinctive among the sparky traits of Europa, and definitely one of the most powerful.

«	Van: You didn’t tell us she was a spark! Wooster: She told you she’s Agatha Heterodyne. Zeetha: It should be no surprise that she’s a spark, too.	»

• Living Legend: The Heterodynes who survived childhood tended to terrorize Europa. The Heterodyne Boys (Agatha’s father and paternal uncle) put an extra gloss on their own legend by being the only Heterodynes in history to be heroes.
• Loves the Sound of Screaming: Iago Heterodyne certainly did, so he built a scream generator to use whenever he didn’t have a victim to provide said screams.
• Loyal Phlebotinum: One of the reasons the Heterodynes were such a long lasting evil dynasty; their creations were/are all fanatically loyal. Most sparks are killed by their creations.
• Please Spare Him, My Liege!: The means by which some Heterodynes acquired romantic partners, such as Saturnus and Teodora.
• Really Gets Around:
  • The Heterodynes sometimes built «small» things: the Master’s bedroom «only» sleeps SIX.
  • The Castle has a seraglionote.
• Shared Family Quirks: Seriously, most of these tropes even apply to Agatha, her father, and her uncle, and they’re the good ones.
• Sigil Spam: The Heterodyne trilobyte is everywhere in Mechanicsburg.
• Single Sex Offspring: The family is known for almost exclusively producing male children. The four exceptions we know of are Vipsania, Roxalana, Euphrosynia and Agatha.
• Something Only They Would Say: Basically, the more mad a response is, the more Heterodyne it is. The more time someone spends Admiring the Abomination, the more Heterodyne they are. The more they want to do something absurd and dangerous… you get the point. When Agatha is excited to see giant spider clanks advancing on the town, it strengthens her claim, as her grandfather felt the same way—except he used to get a better look by letting them in.
• Super-Fun Happy Thing of Doom: The Heterodynes have an interesting take on that sort of thing: they actually mean it. Each and every construct has various bags of a suspiciously similar Big Fun personality to go with the danger.
• Thicker Than Water: If there are any Evil Virtues the Heterodynes had, it was family loyalty. With the one exception of Saturn tying to kill Bill & Barry, the Old Heterodynes aren’t shown to be prone to kinslaying. Meanwhile it’s exactly their loyalty to their own that makes it hard to trust them as an outsider; Rerich explained that the reason Euphrosynia betrayed the Storm King is because she feared any attempt to tame the family would destroy it.

Ht’rok-din

• Eternal English: Or German or Romanian or whatever they speak at Transylvania Polygnostic in this timeline. He refers to it as «de Nordd’man tongue» and while his accent is thicker than the Jägers' he can understand students living a thousand years after his time.
• Founder of the Kingdom: Of Mechanicsburg at least. And of the Heterodyne family and their legacy of Conquest and Woe.
• Smarter Than You Look: Only looks like the kind of character who thinks with his muscles. He’s a Spark, and spends the whole comic building a device to take him back to his own time, fully aware of the damage it would do if he stayed in the future.
• Stable Time Loop: According to Homecoming King, he concentrated on building his legacy and siring a family after being pulled into the future and seeing the extent of his descendants' domain:

«	Ht’rok-din: Hy tought hy hed run out uf places to make mine. But now hy see hy overlooked time itself.	»

• Violation of Common Sense: The locals around the spring that eventually became the source of the River Dyne were superstitious about it: those who bathed in it often went mad. What did Ht’rok-din do? He drank the water.

Euphrosynia Heterodyne

• In the Blood: Rerich the Jäger pointed out that even if she did love the Storm King she was still a Heterodyne, making her just as much of a chaos-loving monster as the rest of her family, meaning that she would never have submitted to his wishes for peace and submission.
• Mad Scientist’s Beautiful Daughter: The opera presents her as a classic example of this trope: beautiful, innocent and a love interest for the hero to rescue from her evil, crazy family. Other sources, however, suggest she was either a type that agreed with daddy’s evil plan and faked being in love with the hero to distract him or loved him truly but betrayed him anyway since his success would mean destruction of her town and her people.
• Thicker Than Water: According to Rerich at least, the reason Euphrosynia betrayed the Storm King is because she feared any attempt to tame the family would actually just destroy it.

Teodora Vodenicharova

• And Now You Must Marry Me: It’s never mentioned what she thought of him, but the marriage was less than consensual, as it was done to stop Saturnus from destroying her homeland.
• Present Absence: Died decades before the story began, but if not for her choices either her sons would have been raised as traditionally villainous Heterodynes, or Saturnus would have killed them. Either way the story would have been very different without her.

Klaus Barry Heterodyne

• «Near and Dear» Baby Naming: Bill named his first kid after his brother and their mysteriously missing best friend.

Wulfenbach Empire

Klaus Wulfenbach

• Ambiguously Evil: Tyrannical emperor-scientist? Sure. But he has many Noble Demon qualities, and takes no joy in his supremacy. He loved his adventures with the Heterodyne Boys and was appalled when he returned to find Europe in ruins. So his response was a brutal, no holds barred conquest of the continent.

«	Klaus: The Heterodyne Boys were gone, so I did it my way.	»

• Ambiguous Situation: His reasoning for brainwashing Gil is never made clear. There are a few options: 1. he did it because he truly believed Gil was wasped, 2. he did it because Lucrezia ordered him to, 3. he didn’t trust Gil to run the Empire despite not having been wasped because he was afraid of Agatha/Lucrezia influencing him, 4. he wanted Lucrezia to think Gil was under enough control that she would hold off wasping him so that he could inoculate himself against the same type of slaver wasps that got him, or 5. some other possible reason. The overlay claims that it was installed to keep Gil interacting with Agatha, whether Agatha herself or the Lucrezia in her head. However, both Tarvek and the Klaus overlay admit that the overlay isn’t a representation of the real Klaus. The overlay itself may be unaware of the true Klaus’s motivations or perhaps just incorrect about them. It’s also unclear if Klaus wanted Gil to remove the overlay eventually, he was hoping to do it himself when the time freeze was reversed, or he wanted it to be permanent. Likewise, it’s unclear if Klaus WANTS the time freeze reversed in order to cure him of his slaver infection or if he hoped to be frozen in time forever, but it’s also ALSO unclear if he knew that extra dimensional beings would be pissed about him freezing time. The only thing we can say for relative certainty is that he probably wanted Agatha/Lucrezia frozen in time. Until such time Klaus is released, his motivations will be unknown especially since the Klaus overlay has been purged from Gil before it could give any clear answers besides saying that it didn’t want Agatha and Gil to be married regardless of if the Lucrezia copy was purged from her mind.
  • At least one of those questions was answered by the novels: The overlay was Clank!Lucrezia’s idea, because she knew Klaus would hate doing it, and because while she didn’t have access to another Spark-controlling wasp, the overlay would prevent Gil from reuniting with Agatha as an ally. She also believed it would allow her to bring Gil under her permanent control later, not knowing that Bang had already fed him the innoculation draught, and that the overlay would support using the draught to start curing the Empire’s personnel of wasp infection at the first opportunity.
• Benevolent Dictator: His de facto regime is built out of brute force, yes, but his rule is actually very moderate. Europa’s people enjoy a surprising amount of freedom under him, and his laws effectively amount to «don’t do anything that violates the peace». Democracy isn’t the norm in the setting and the continent before Klaus was stuck in constant brutal warfare. Two and a half years after his empire collapsed, people are begging for the stability he provided to come back. His enemies often try to make him look bad by describing him as a ruthless, brutal, iron-fisted dictator who has conquered massive stretches of Europe (as seen here) with naked force and holds his empire together through terrifying intimidation. However, he doesn’t run death camps, capture damsels, loot and/or destroy homes, control travel, tax people into poverty, or even confiscate weapons unless they’re the kind that make craters (and even that has wiggle room— if you want to test superweapons, come work for him and he’ll pay you to do it). He doesn’t even punish people for calling him a mass-murdering monster. The most reasonable dictator you’ve ever heard of. He doesn’t help his case, however, by punishing failures. Moloch, for example, was sent to Castle Heterodyne for pretending to be a spark. As soon as Moloch started working for Agatha, he turned out to be a brilliant mechanic who could’ve served Klaus very well.
• Covered in Scars: He is implied to be a construct made out of three Sparks. However, if the stories about the Heterodyne Boys have any truth to them, he may have acquired them simply by accompanying them on their adventures (though a mix of both is the most likely explanation). This is supported by the fact that other heroes in the webcomic, such as Othar Trygavassen and Hoffman tend to find danger and adventure wherever they go.
• Disappeared Dad:
  • Gil grew up not knowing who his father really is. Klaus did this to keep his son alive.
  • Evidence suggests that he may also be this to Zeetha.
• Evil Only Has to Win Once: Klaus was able to maintain his Peace for nineteen years — but the very day word gets out that Agatha Heterodyne squished him with a chicken house, all hell broke loose — EVERYWHERE AT ONCE.
• Four-Star Badass: His knack for finding the right monster for the job meshes neatly with planning battles. At multiple points during the battle for Mechanicsburg the heroes are suspicious of how they’ve been able to hold out as long as they’ve have against him. Klaus deploying a massive army against them is viewed with equal suspicion, as they know he simply doesn’t need that much manpower to defeat them.
• He Who Fights Monsters: Over the course of the comic his actions and responses have gotten darker, and they were not exactly light to begin with. Also present in his backstory, as keeping the peace in Europa has made him a very cynical person. He long ago decided that he’d be lawful rather than good, and cross the Godzilla Threshold whenever necessary — but those decisions were trapping him in a cycle of increasingly reflexive and despicable acts.
• Inspector Javert: More or less the only reason he’s an antagonist is that he has very good reason to not want an «untried Heterodyne heir» running amok through Europe. He also believes her to be The Other, given that the last time he met Agatha she was possessed by the Other who outright confessed to being the Other.
• Knight Templar Parent: He can approach this at times. Refusing to see any difference between Agatha and her insane (possessed?) mother, he is willing to use Mind Manipulation on his own son to make absolute certain Gil cannot come near her without being overridden by a copy of Klaus’s own personality. And when Lucrezia threatens his son’s life, he coldly informs her that he will break the Corbettite law of sanctuary and kill everyone there if necessary.
• Loophole Abuse: It’s never explicitly spelled out, but being hit by a slaver wasp that can infect Sparks has left him forced to do this regarding whatever commands Lucrezia has given him. But he’s damned good at it.
• Love-Obstructing Parents: Towards Gil regarding Agatha, due to fearing that the evil on both sides of her ancestry is inherited. It really doesn’t help that he is absolutely convinced that his son is repeating the exact mistake he himself made with Agatha’s mother. However, while he does recognize Agatha as not being Lucrezia, he still does not want her near Gil.
• Necessarily Evil: Yes, it really is necessary, and he doesn’t like it one bit. As put by Master Payne:

«	Payne: Could you burn down people — women and children — even if you knew they had become monsters? Agatha: I… no… I don’t know. Payne: The Baron can. The Baron has. I respect him for that, but I don’t want to be him. No sane man would.	»

• Non-Answer: In Gil’s words, he has a habit of explaining things without explaining anything.
• «Not So Different» Remark:
  • Subverted. Like Lucrezia, he also downloaded a copy of himself into his child’s brain. When Lucrezia in Agatha points this out, he retorts that he hasn’t taken full control and continues to leave his son in charge most of the time. He also resorted to this out of desperation to «protect» his son from Agatha, whom he believes to be a manipulative monster like her mother, whereas Lucrezia uses it as her basic modus operandi and would have complete control of her daughter’s body if Agatha’s locket wasn’t suppressing her.
  • Played straight, but in a retroactive sort of way with his son. After Gil snaps from Vole’s taunting, he rants on how everyone underestimates him just because he tries to be nice and reasonable. He comes to the conclusion that if he has to act like a stage villain to get people to take him seriously, then he’ll show them what kind of mad-boy they’re dealing with, all while beating up the Jäger. He suddenly stops and comes to the conclusion that this is how his father feels all the time. In short, Gil seems to be how Klaus is underneath and just shows how years of Realpolitik and The Chains of Commanding can wear someone down a lot.
• The Patient Has Left the Building: When Dr. Sun says Klaus is a terrible patient, he’s not remotely kidding. Klaus' control freak nature means he refuses to stay in bed and just heal, even when his injuries are so bad he can’t even smile without hurting himself, because only he can properly manage his empire. No matter what happens or what the situation is, Klaus tries to get out of sitting around healing by any means necessary. The novels mention his chief medical officer has had to deal with this so much, she’s made it the law that Klaus be sedated and/or restrained if he suffers so much as a paper cut, just so he’ll let the damn thing heal. His reaction to this development was to invent cutless paper so that she’d stop drugging him and let him work.
• Perpetual Frowner: Klaus has a range of facial expressions ranging from disdain to fury. He knows how to smile, but he usually doesn’t have much reason to:
  • He does take amusement in his son’s confusion over why he’s in trouble. He also objects to Bang protecting him… until learning her jaw is wired up. He has an almost child-like expression of glee on his face.
  • He was proud to see Gilgamesh wipe out some of the Empire’s enemies when he was out of commission.
  • Lampshaded by Gil, who is baffled by the suggestion his father was a dashing romantic in his youth, and seeks clarification by exaggeratedly pulling his lips down and saying «Klaus Wulfenbach. His mouth does this all the time.»
• Reasonable Authority Figure: For all he’s called a dictator, his rule brought an end to the long war and established the Pax Transylvania that after his removal from power and the deterioration of his empire is described as a lost golden age. He really only seems to have two rules, no making war and no playing with Sealed Evil in a Can. A spark that rebels against him (and not for the first time) is shocked Klaus is no longer offering chances to surrender.
• Revealing Skill: One of the Baron’s unique talents is noticing Revealing Skills. Every Spark has a distinct style to their creations, much like an artist. Klaus' ability to notice these styles gave him some very good leads as to the identity of the Other (though the fact that styles can run in families threw him off a bit).
• Science-Related Memetic Disorder: Notable for being the only Spark in the series to be (mostly) immune to its effects. When it does pop up, it seems to manifest in smaller, more contained ways like an occasional bout of dorkiness and (according to Gil) a surprising love for waffles.
• Screw the Rules, I Make Them!: (Я здесь главный, мне всё можно) In a sense. He has a distaste for the Fifty Families' power games, and disregards the «rules» of it whenever they’re in the way.
• Serious Business: According to the novels, sports. He once had a goalie executed for taking a bribe.
• Sibling Fusion: One lab accident led to the grieving parents stitching the remains of their three dead sons into one substitute child. Given his success as an adventurer and ruler of Europa, it’s hard to argue with the results.
• Sour Outside, Sad Inside: The persistently bitter Klaus is a man who hates his job, misses his wife and hasn’t seen his friends in years.
• So Proud of You: He doesn’t say it directly to Gil, but when the latter single-handedly faces down an army of war clanks, Klaus makes no bones about the way he feels.

«	Klaus: Anything—being paralyzed for life—would be an acceptable price for seeing what I have seen my son do today.	»

• The Unfettered: In his own words, «I did it alone. Because I had to. And it worked.»
• Vetinari Job Security: He’s indisputably the best ruler that Europa’s had in two hundred years, if not ever. You’d need to be mad to want to overthrow him. Unfortunately, most of the major movers and shakers in Europa are Sparks. Worse, the Fifty Families — the rest of said movers and shakers — are old-school royalty who despise how Klaus has reduced their power and fondly remember Ye Goode Olde Days when they gave the orders. You can guess where this is going.
• World’s Best Warrior: Since the disappearance of the Heterodyne Boys, Klaus has been the most powerful warrior in Europa. He’s significantly better than his son (according to Carson) and his daughter (according to their fight), both of whom are among the best. Even the Jägers fear his strength.

Wulfenbach Personnel As a whole

• Big Ol' Eyebrows: Among other things, Monster Hunter Grantz’s massive eyebrows don’t help identifying her as female, at all.
• My Brain Is Big: Kleegon the Battlemaster, a project of the defeated Spark the Count of the Iron Ski who now works for the Baron, has had the top of his head removed and replaced with a foot tall cask to make room for his extra grey matter. His eyes were part of the lost bit and have been replaced by a single centered red one.
• Non-Human Sidekick: Zoing, Gil’s crustacean-based construct whom he made when he was eight.

Bangladesh DuPree

• All for Nothing: Bang’s mother was deposed in a coup, in response to which Bang built up a massive bloodthirsty fleet of pirates. Just as she was ready to go home and take her throne back by force, someone killed pretty much all her pirates, destroyed her fleet and burnt down her castle. Unable to figure out who the son of a chumpnote that did this was, Bangladesh swore to find them and get revenge.
• Calling the Old Man Out: When she finally reunites with her father, who is rather unexpectedly the apathetic airship captain, she gives him a lot of crap for leaving her and her mother ten years prior.
• Connected All Along: Remember those pirates from Zeetha’s backstory that she wiped out while searching for answers on how to get back to Skifander? Turns out Bang was their captain.
• Dark Action Girl: One of the best hand-to-hand fighters in the comic, not least because she fights dirtier.
• Disappeared Dad: It turns out she has one, which… frankly explains a lot about her bratty childish mannerisms and genuine loyalty to Klaus, a stern but deeply responsible father figure in her life.
• Emotional Bruiser: Sort of. Turns out she really had developed an attachment to good ol' Klaus.
• Good Cop/Bad Cop: Tends to play this with Gil. She’s Bad Cop. And she isn’t acting.
• In Love with Your Carnage: She has it hard for Captain Vole. Especially when he gets transformed into a huge, hulking beast who is barely kept under control.
• The Insomniac: After the time skip, when Gil stops sleeping, Bang tries to keep up with him. Unfortunately she doesn’t have his training, so she can’t just do a few mental exercises and be good for a few days.
• Karma Houdini Warranty: Bang spends most of the series giddily committing acts of murder and violence with everyone treating it like a funny quirk of hers or begrudgingly allowing her to get away with it. However, after stabbing Tarvek as a joke Agatha had one of her dingbots secretly inject her with a paralyzing serum and she quietly tells her that she never understood why Gil keeps her around and that she’ll kill her if she ever touches one her people again.
• Noodle Implements: We never find out what she planned, but one of her methods of killing people involves cheese.
• Perky Female Minion: Perky, gleefully sociopathic, and prone to acts of butchery.
• Resignations Not Accepted: Klaus hopes to avoid this, but he’s prepared to deal with Bang if she ever decides to go back to piracy. Ultimately averted. Gil does accept her quitting without trying to kill her. And then later she resumes her Wulfenbach officer’s commission due to the overarching threat of The Other.
• Sky Pirate: That was her career before running afoul of the Baron. He decided to hire her on as one of his tools in his cabinet of necessary evils.
• Smarter Than You Look: She comes across as and is a very violent goof, but she occasionally demonstrates a surprising degree of intelligence when motivated. Re-purposing one of Gil’s medical devices into an electrocution weapon, for example, though her crowning moment was when Vole was out of control after being removed from the time field — Gil didn’t want him to rip out his life support cables, but Bang points out that letting him pull out some of them will weaken him and let them get him under control. This becomes especially prominent after the Time Skip, where circumstances frequently force her to set aside her playful attitude and take matters seriously.
• Strawman: An Invoked Trope in-universe — Klaus notes to himself that Bang’s over the top «let’s just kill everything and burn down the town for good measure» arguments are easy to refute, and make him look far more reasonable by comparison. Not that Bang is intending to make him look good; she just honestly doesn’t understand why he doesn’t let her kill everyone.
• Unwitting Instigator of Doom: Bang does this twice.
  • She set the entire plot in motion by attacking Moloch’s unit, which would later end up with his brother encountering Agatha, which would lead to her locket getting stolen, which would then lead to her being outed as Bill’s daughter, which later ended up with her escaping, meeting Master Payne’s Circus, her getting trapped in Sturmhalten and getting her mother’s mind downloaded into her body.
  • Then when Agatha set her projection to play the Heterodyning frequency to keep herself in control, Bang destroys THAT, allowing Lucrezia to attempt to escape, which later led to Klaus getting wasped because Agatha still had the Spark Wasp Engine with her. In fairness, she had no way of knowing that the machine was keeping the Other contained, and it appeared to be forcing mind-controlled people to attack her boss. Still, she should have sent in a device team so that the Baron could study it (she even suggests this before revealing she was just joking).

Boris Dolokhov

• Cincinnatus: He’s put in command of the empire when the Baron is out of commission and Gil is missing and hates it.
• Enigmatic Minion: When last seen before the two-and-a-half year time-skip, he’s sneaking around asking provocative questions of the captured Lord Selnikov regarding Sparks and slaver wasps. And when he turns up again (see below) it’s not at all clear in how official a capacity he’s acting.
• Friendless Background: It’s All There in the Manual that part of his hostility to the Jägers comes from envy of their camaraderie, while he himself is a one-off construct with no one else quite like him. (The rest, of course, is straight-up personality clash.)
• Get It Over With: When Wooster reveals to the Jägergenerals the Baron’s plan to destroy Mechanicsburg and kill Agatha, something that Boris expects to instantly drive them into a murderous rage, he stoically tells them to just hurry up and do it quickly rather than beg for his life. To his surprise, they’re actually more interested in his protest that Agatha is The Other and want to hear him out.
• Hazy-Feel Turn: Following the Time Skip, he’s (possibly) left Wulfenbach employ and is now working for or with the Immortal Library under Paris. What exactly that means for his personal morality is left ambiguous.
• Mundane Utility: Extra hands are very useful for preparing one’s tea.
• Number Two: He takes on certain duties in the event of the Baron’s absence or incapacity.
• Spotting the Thread: When Klaus is accusing his son of being Wasped, Boris realises a critical flaw which undermines the entire argument, one which he knows his boss should have caught as well. He also catches a hint of how the Baron is intentionally trying to convey this, and immediately it is really Klaus who has been Wasped.

Dr. Dim Vapnoople

• The Beastmaster: Vapnoople’s specialty as a Spark was creating and modifying biological life, his last creation being Krosp. Far from being a minor threat, the backstory heavily implies he was incredibly powerful in his prime, capable of going against Sparks of the caliber of Baron Wulfenbach and Queen Albia and posing a serious threat. He gets better and doesn’t dissappoint. His beastmaster abilities are such that he controlled monsters from other dimensions!
• Canis Major: The Sparkwolves employed by Tweedle in the present were originally his creation. That original incarnation formed a Badass Army so dangerous Klaus had to wage a months-long war and wipe them out to nearly the last man to defeat it, and what remains are still the Red Shirt-slaughtering Elite Mooks of the Knights of Jove.
• Dumb Is Good: He committed many crimes as a Spark (to the point that Albia is ready to go into a violent rage upon seeing him), but is friendly and almost child-like after his brain-coring. This is subverted in the print novel, however; he no longer has the intelligence, but still has the mindset of a Spark, with bouts of megalomania and an obsession with revenge. And when he gets better… it’s confirmed that he was definitely evil when smart.
• One Degree of Separation: He was apparently a fraternity brother to Saturnus Heterodyne, Agatha’s grandfather. At the same time, (according to Tweedle) he was an old friend of the Mongfish family. And, of course, he was Tweedle’s teacher and Wulfenbach’s janitor.
• Sympathy for the Devil: Queen Albia of England has every reason in the world to hate and resent Dr. Vapnoodle for what he did to her country. Indeed, when Krosp comes to her seeking asylum for Dr. Dim, she’s ready to reject him outright… until she sees what Klaus Wulfenbach did to him.

Higgs

• Anguished Declaration of Love: It takes frustration enough to make him blow his top, plus Agatha to finally repair Castle Heterodyne and take control of the town, but he finally admits to his feelings towards Zeetha here.
• Covered in Scars: His arms and torso are dotted with criss-crossing marks from old wounds. He’s not stitched together like Klaus, but that’s probably just because he’s harder to tear apart in the first place.
• Double Reverse Quadruple Agent: After the Time Skip both sides believes that he is a Double Agent working for them, and nothing has been seen to determine which side his allegiance is with. He’s eventually confirmed to be the Secret Jäger General, and ultimately serves Agatha and the Heterodyne family as The Spymaster.
• Game Face: A subtle version, but in the comic where he confronts Tarvek about uncovering his Secret Identity, you can see his grin becoming almost unnaturally wide and his teeth seem suspiciously sharp, the only obvious physical signs we’ve seen that he is, in fact, a Jäger.
• Her Boyfriend’s Jacket: He’s the «boyfriend» in question; Zeetha possesses his jacket. He in turn was gifted her little face charm thingy that mimics her facial expression. Since it does so regardless of distance, it’s a way for him to know if she’s okay or not.
• If You Ever Do Anything to Hurt Her…: While he doesn’t use the stock phrase, this definitely seems to be what Higgs is hinting at here — he makes it clear that he can quite quickly and easily kill Tarvek, but he holds off because he’s helping Agatha. He’s very clearly making the implication (and Tarvek clearly understands) that Higgs is not going to hold back if Tarvek even thinks about hurting Agatha.
• Locked Out of the Loop: Despite being a general, he apparently wasn’t told about Robur Heterodyne’s encounter with the Dreen, since he’s as surprised as Gil to hear the Castle mention it.
• The Magnificent: The Unstoppable Higgs.
• Minion Shipping: He has an immediate soft spot for Zeetha, which eventually passes from a Bash Buddies stage to an actual (if informal) relationship. Becomes even more pronounced when it becomes apparent that he’s a Jäger; they’re both Agatha’s minions.
• Ooh, Me Accent’s Slipping: Or showing. When Zeetha is stabbed he shows a trace of what seems to be a Jäger accent. Muddying the issue is that some Mechanicsburg citizens have the accent as well, having maintained it through the generations as a matter of pride.
• Punny Name: Higgs is an Airman, 3rd class. A Seaman, 3rd class is a Bosun — so he’s Higgs, Bosun. The mysterious missing particle. (Still don’t get it? Ask a physicist.)
• Seen It All: He always looks rather bored, no matter what is going on. Being a Jäger General, he really has seen the worst possible in Europa.
  • Only one thing has really ever unnerved him and that’s falling in love with Zeetha. He never grew close to anyone like that before and the new experience almost scares him.
• The Spymaster: Higgs is the missing seventh Jäger General, and announces himself as Agatha’s spymaster.
• Stating the Simple Solution: Quite possibly one of the most awesome examples of this trope ever, where Higgs calls out Gil (and apparently a lot of other male Sparks Higgs has known) for doing utterly ridiculous things to try and communicate with a girl they have a crush on instead of just writing a letter, as seen here.

«	Higgs: Now. Write. Use the pen. On the paper. Tell her what you want to say. Gil: [Beat] I could build a machine that would project a simulacrum of myself that could explain— Higgs: Why I smacked you? Gil: Or… I could… just write…	»

• Super-Toughness: He’s repeatedly shown suffering Amusing Injuries that fit the cartoony art style but would definitely have damaged most of the cast. In the case of the fight with Zola, the injuries are no longer amusing… but he’s still fighting. In fact, he’s getting faster. Being a Jäger helps.
• Unfazed Everyman: He seems this at first, but as we see him more and more, it’s obvious that his durability was not just there for a gag as originally depicted. He’s still unfazed by a lot of stuff, though. Ultimately Averted by the reveal that he’s the hidden 7th Jäger General; he remains entirely unfazed, but he’s definitely no everyman, he simply plays the role of one.
• Zen Survivor: He seems tranquil, or apathetic, or slightly bored most of the time. Most of the time. It’s implied later on that this is due to his long lifespan and the countless things he has seen. If his comments to Vole about how «we all did» horrible things and then growing up, he may have done some stuff he grew to not be proud of as he got Older and Wiser.

Oglavia Spudna

• Cheshire Cat Grin: Her most usual facial expression is this.
• Ignored Epiphany: She listened a lecture from Othar that almost, almost made her reconsider her calling in life. And then she realised this wouldn’t let her spy on people. «So nuts to that!»
• Opaque Lenses: Never seen without goggles of this type. Combined with her smile, they make her look very creepy.

Von Pinn

• Enigmatic Minion: Has a complex agenda that we now know some of the details of, but not the whole story.
• Magical Nanny: Well, SCIENCE! nanny, but yes. Of the «stern but fair» variety.
• No Listening Skills: When Agatha first meets her, Von Pinn sternly reprimands her for constantly walking around in her underwear and for endangering Gil. While Agatha repeatedly tries to explain the circumstances behind both of those, Von Pinn refuses to listen to anything she has to say, interrupts her before she can put in a word and goes so far as to blame Agatha’s parents for her behavior, along with accusing her of trying to woo Gil to «better her position».
• Parental Substitute: Yes, kids on Castle Wulfenbach had a vicious guardian construct in loco parentis and were rather attached to her.
• Restraining Bolt: Lucrezia designed her construct body to be unable to resist a direct command from her. When Agatha’s sufficiently fired up, she can do the same.
• Sanity Slippage: When her charge Klaus Barry Heterodyne was killed, she went completely insane and had to be locked up until the Baron found a use for her.
• Sinister Suffocation: Threatens to kill Lucrezia by strangling her unless she lets Agatha retake control of her body. And it works.

«	Von Pinn: Heh. Your mother was always a coward at heart.	»

• Wetware Body:
  • It now appears that she is the Muse Otilia, transferred into a construct body as part of Lucrezia’s experimentation. Why she did this, where the body’s original mind, if any, ended up, and what this will mean is still up in the air.
  • She has since had her mind transferred out of her organic body, since it was dying, and transferred into a giant cat clank (with improvements) until her original Muse body is repaired. She seems happy with it.

The Lackya

• Big Ol' Eyebrows: All of them have a monobrow the same color as their hair.

Bohrlaikha

• Sinister Surveillance: It’s implied that Klaus built her to keep an eye on Gil and make sure he doesn’t step out of line if his mental imprint should fail to do the job.

Grantz

• Brawn Hilda: Grantz is very tall, very strong, wears her hair short, and is one of the rare exceptions to Europa’s Worldof Buxom.
• Effortless Amazonian Lift: The imobilex jug is heavy on its own; when occupied, heavy machinery may be required to move it. Grantz carries it on her shoulder with no apparent effort.

Theo

• Long-Lost Relative: Theo’s mother was Lucrezia’s sister, Serpentina, which makes Agatha his first cousin. Unlike the rest of the Mongfish family relationships, the one between Theo and Agatha is far more cordial and friendly. As it turns out, Serpentina was the good sister, who rejected her family’s evil and ran off with Theo’s father. He’s also related to Zola the same way, as her mother was third Mongfish sister, Demonica. This has not been mentioned directly in any fashion.
• Relationship Reveal: He and Sleipnir are revealed to be more than just traveling companions when she starts getting turned on by Theo sparking out in Lucrezia’s secret lab.

«	Theo: OH YES. I CAN DO THIS! Sleipnir: Oooh! Now that’s the brilliantly Sparky beast I ran off with! Theo: Care to assist me? Sleipnir: Rwowr!	»

• Sins of the Father: Lucrezia initially pretends to be overjoyed to see «Little Theo» again… until it turns out she remembers the time Theo’s dad left her for dead in an exploding lab. And she didn’t get along with her sister Serpentina either…

«	Theo: (choking) Really? Lucrezia: Really.	»

Sleipnir

• Runaway Fiancé: When Agatha met her on Castle Wulfenbach, she had an arranged marriage waiting for her back home, but by the time she met up with Agatha again in Castle Heterodyne, she’d run off with Theo.
• Science-Related Memetic Disorder: She doesn’t have the Spark, but she still has some similar tendencies. In addition to becoming his lover, she’s also starting to become Theo’s personal minion.

Itto

• It’s All My Fault: Itto tries to invoke this when he realizes the Baron isn’t buying his story of sneaking into the labs alone, though he still doesn’t give up any names of other students.
• Most Definitely Not Accompanying Us: When the older Castle Wulfenbach Students decide to sneak into the Baron’s lab so they can see what a wasp engine looks like, Itto tries to invite himself along. He is quickly told by Theo that he is way too young for them to let him come with. He manages to follow them for a while before they catch him and Zulenna decides to allow him to tag along, but not before stressing how dangerous the engine is and scaring him to the point that he no longer really wants to.

The Knights of Jove

Loyal Order of the Knights of Jove

Andronicus Valois

• Really Gets Around: By reputation at least. Multiple people have said that claiming descent from the Storm King doesn’t mean much, because if the legends are true, half of Europa is descended from him. And his reign was only 8-10 generations ago. Apparently, at an impressionable age, the young Andronicus read a number of scholarly works that talked about a king being a fertility symbol, and thought this was a mighty fine idea.
• Succession Crisis: Because of his Really Gets Around tendencies, his disappearance left him with no legitimate heirs and far too many illegitimate ones. The resultant collapse of his kingdom came from the Fifty Families being unable to agree on who his rightful heir was — and they’re still arguing about it two hundred years later.
• Actually, That’s My Assistant: Sees Agatha wearing her trilobite brooch and assumes she’s the servant of the Heterodynes rather than 'The' Heterodyne.
• Brainwashed and Crazy: Implied by Simon Voltaire, he was apparently corrupted by the enemies of the Shining Coalition, or at least his corpse was. In the current era, he has utterly lost his mind, believing all his former allies are «oathbreakers and wizards», demanding to know «where his bride was taken», believing his love is still alive despite it being two centuries since he was last active.
• Fish out of Temporal Water: When he enters the story, he is confused by his surroundings, last remembers the long dead Van Rijn smirking over one of his machines, and assumes treachery. He finds the modern Paris to be astounding.
• He Who Fights Monsters: An externally-caused version of this. After trying to rid the world of the Heterodynes and their monsters, he ended up becoming a horrific, undead, maddened evil Heterodyne-made monster himself.
• Love Makes You Crazy: He was already crazy to begin with after he was turned into some kind of monstrous construct, but he’s so obsessed with Euphrosynia that he’s demanding to know where she was «taken» (despite it being two centuries since she disappeared), and he’s blaming Van Rijn for her disappearance, and angry at his former allies for not telling him anything, despite Voltaire quite clearly stating Euphrosynia’s disappearance was entirely her fault and nobody actually knows what happened to her.

Grandma

• Ambiguously Evil: She’s one of Tarvek’s relatives? That’s a bad sign. She’s working against the Other’s influence? Well, that’s a good sign. But she’s weirdly cozy with Zola/the Queen of the Dawn? That’s yet another bad sign.
• Defector from Decadence: An odd variation where she hasn’t defected to the «good guys», but rather she still defected away from the most evil side. Unlike her (presumed) son-in-law Wilhelm and many other men of the cabal, who was madly loyal to Lucrezia, Grandma has been described as «hating Lucrezia», is outright opposed to and plotting against her, has taken control of at least a major part of the Knights of Jove away from The Other’s objectives, and has basically ordered that all of her subordinates put aside rivalries and other cross-purpose agendas to take out anyone still loyal to Lucrezia, likely having performed a major purge of Lucrezia loyalists in the Knights of Jove during the timeskip. All of that said.. She cheerfully assists Zola-Lucrezia-The Queen of the Dawn in escaping from Paris when the latter woman’s take-over plans get at least temporarily thwarted by Colette Voltaire becoming the new all-powerful Mistress of the city. Or at least being caught by Colette’s forces, as always with this character, her motives for doing so remain vague, as it’s entirely possible that she plans on acquiring Lucrezia’s secrets via Zola still having Lucrezia trapped in her head.
• Hidden Agenda Villain: Whatever her ultimate goal is, it’s not known to us. As noted above, she’s been said to «hate Lucrezia» but other than that her plans are unknown; it’s not even clear which of her relatives, if any, she would prefer to see become Storm King.
• Life of the Party: Given that Martellus believes that having a death ray built into a party sleigh is totally in character for her, she must have thrown some truly wild parties in her time. When we get to see one of her parties on-page, it gets wild indeed… mostly by no fault or plan of her own (that we know of), but she relishes it anyway.
• Long Game: She’s been ferreting out the Master of Paris’s secrets for decades, for it to finally pay off and conquer the city when she’s an elderly grandmother.
• Never Mess with Granny: She’s getting up there in years and is shown to be suffering from arthritis, but still manages to efficiently run one of the world’s most widespread spy networks, on top of being strong enough to crush a pistol with her bare hands (as Zola finds out the hard way).
• Whip of Dominance: She’s a stern Evil Matriarch that has quite the reputation for using a whip. When she talks to Tarvek about whipping her servants into shape, she makes it clear it’s not just an expression when she says she can’t do it as well anymore because «her shoulders aren’t what they used to be». She also implies she used her whip on her husband for kinky reasons, much to Tarvek’s distress.

Sturmvoraus family

Aaronev VI

• Make It Look Like an Accident: Tarvek tries to have his death passed off as a lab accident, which immediately draws the Baron’s suspicion, since while Wilhelm had many faults, he was a stickler for lab safety.
• Middle Name Basis: Like his son Tarvek, people generally use his middle name Wilhelm in casual conversation.
• Pervert Dad: Implied. He had an affair with Lucrezia. He then tried downloading Lucrezia’s personality into his own daughter. Yech.

Anevka

• Can’t Kill You, Still Need You: It’s all but outright stated that the only reason she hasn’t killed her brother is because he’s one of the few people who could repair her body if something happened.
• Man in the Machine: A variant. Subverted—the «man» died years ago, and the machine didn’t even notice.
• Villainous Princess: The princess of Sturmhalten and batshit crazy.
• What Measure Is a Non-Human?: Once it’s revealed that the real Anevka died and her clank body unknowingly grew self aware, the story treats her like she was nothing but a Replacement Goldfish Tarvek kept around to make himself feel better about failing to save his sister. However, she was still a perfect copy of Anevka’s mind, fully sentient with human emotions and capable thinking and acting independently. When Tarvek stashes her Cranial Processing Unit away in a cupboard to reuse her body for Lucrezia, he tells her to «Sleep well, Anevka», so apparently he wasn’t intending to just throw her away like trash.

von Blitzengaard family

Martellus

• Acquired Poison Immunity: Tweedle is immune to the sedative-laced Corbettite cakes, which poses a problem for our heroine (who was not immune). However, an invisible hand came out of nowhere and konked him with a blackjack.
• And Now You Must Marry Me: His primary interest with Agatha is to marry her, thus fulfilling the old «Storm King x Heterodyne» prophecy and cementing his claim to the Lightning Crown. However, his skills with women appear to be less than ideal to say the very least.
• At Least I Admit It: He states that Tarvek was only using Agatha for his own ends. When Agatha asks if he’s any better, he says «Of course not. But I’ll be honest with you about it, which I can see he never was.»
• The Beast Master: His Sparky specialty seems to lie in modified animals. And he genuinely cares about them, and they are loyal to him in turn.
• Big Bad Wannabe: He’s kind of been outclassed ever since his first appearance. And since then he’s been treated as a chew toy by both Agatha and Gil. Except now King Valois, Baron Wulfenbach, and Master Voltaire are all dead or incapacitated, and Tarvek isn’t in the best position to reclaim his position as top condender for the Storm King’s throne, so Martellus has it on lock for the time being.
• Catch and Return: Does this with two poisoned knives (caught by handles) at once.
  • He also catches lightning with his metal hand and fires it back at the man who fired it at him, Gilgamesh.
• Conflict Killer: Somewhat. Gil and Tarvek have long since (mostly) worked out their issues with each other and the implosion of their childhood friendship from spending time together with Agatha in Castle heterodyne, settling on becoming Vitriolic Best Buds by the present day. That said, due to their opposing positions in the grander scheme of things, coming from two rival factions who each stand a chance at enacting power over Europa, there’s a great deal of mutual sniping and arguing between them even when working together around Agatha. Once Tweedle comes into the picture though, they instantly drop any antagonism towards each other and work flawlessly together to shut him down, making it clear that whilst they consider each other a worthy rival for Agatha’s affections, they’re prefer the other to have her over Tweedle.

«	Tarvek: But this (not instantly attacking Tweedle the second he sees him) is a real behavioural breakthrough for you! Gil: I will admit I learned from your example. Tarvek: Well done! The Empire has a chance! Gil: Praise from my Jester? heady stuff! Tweedle: What are you idiots —(Wunch!) Gil: I do still prefer to deal from a position of strength. Tarvek: Oh yes, one does have to get their attention. Dimo: (Glancing down at the insensate Tweedle) Hy might be better at dis politiks ting den hy thought..	»

• Didn’t Think This Through:
  • Trying to control Agatha by altering her body-chemistry makes him just as dependent on physical contact with her as she (originally) requires from him. He’s damned lucky that Agatha, while she hates him and immediately created an alternative for touching him, prefers not to let him die.
  • When going to investigate 'The Beast', he assumes he’ll be fine since the creature eats metal, not people — forgetting about his (now metal) left hand.
• Entertainingly Wrong: He promises Agatha that he’ll be honest with her about not being any better than Tarvek, assuming his cousin never was. However, Tarvek has been up front about not being a good person.
• 'Fluffy Tamer: Oddly enough, he seems to be a Sparky version of this (though he probably wouldn’t bother with cute names). As noted below, he created singing bears, bred his own Sparkhounds (and evidently uplifted at least one of them) — and during the arc involving the Beast (a sentient train-like construct), his suggestions have involved animal behaviorist techniques (creating bait/toys to distract it). Maybe he’d be happier running a pet shop…
• In Love with the Mark: While he started out viewing Agatha only as a potential political tool, it turns out that he’s developed actual feelings for her — not that she knows that, nor would she be likely to believe it if someone told her. Besides, as Krosp points out, she (entirely justifiably) hates him.
• Kiss of Distraction: Gives one to the copy of Lucrezia possessing Agatha, resulting in her saying that she will save killing him for last and distracting her long enough to attach a helmet designed to extract her from Agatha’s head. Agatha is later both thankful and disgusted. Interestingly, he appears likewise disgusted at having kissed Lucrezia, wiping his mouth after the aforementioned kiss.
• Not-So-Harmless Villain: He’s introduced getting duped by the Baron and having his clank effortlessly destroyed by a dreen, but then he goes and kidnaps Agatha and stabs Tarvek with a poisoned knife.
• Royal Blood: He is a descendant of the Storm King, and is next in line after Tarvek. Since Tarvek was written off as dead while trapped in the time bubble, he ascended to the throne.
• Stating the Simple Solution: When observing the machine that Lucrezia has modified alongside Gil and Tarvek, he takes in Tarvek’s observations on them trying to find said modifications and proposing to just rebuild the machine from scratch than risk trying to undo it and miss something. The two acknowledge his point.
• The Usurper: He took measures to have the cabal write Tarvek off after the Sturmhalten incident, since he was next in line to the Lightning Throne. Then he took measures to assassinate Tarvek. After the time skip, he maintains his grip on the throne by killing anyone who tries to take it from him, but it’s clear that no-one (except maybe his sister) actually wants him to be king. Multiple factions try to get to Tarvek, with varying levels of success, under the simple logic that there’s no way he can be worse than Martellus. His grip on the throne seems to be getting shakier. Krosp believes he won’t survive the year, and the Muse of Geometries calculates his claim to be a «distant third, at best». Neither Agatha nor Gil will recognize him as the Storm King either, with Agatha stating "Not even if it will free Mechanicsburg, " and Colette in her official capacity as the new Master of Paris was careful not to state him as such either, only recognizing his questionable claim.
• Villainous Friendship: When his henchmen are zombified by Andronicus Valois, he lays each of them to rest, reminding them of who they were, the good they did, and giving a brief blessing before returning to his battle with his ancestor. And when he does, he’s pissed. What had been a battle for the throne of the Storm King is now personal.
• Villainous Valor: Whatever his other faults, he is in no way a coward.
• The Von Trope Family: So far the only major aristocratic character to carry the German «von», a sign of nobility, in his name.

Xerxsephnia

• Men Like Dogs, Women Like Cats: When Tweedle decided to make an Uplifted cat, Seffie was all over the kitty, and noted that Tweedle is «more of a huge hairy dog monster person» (in reference to his Knights of the Hunt).

Selkinov family

Lord Selnikov

• Awful Wedded Life: He and Lady Selnikov despised one another, and Lord Selnikov is implied to have frequently cheated on her whenever she was away. The moment he realizes being reanimated will mean the end of his marriage he perks up and ask Dr. Sun is if he can have a plaque reading «Reanimated Abomination of Science» bolted to his forehead.
• Hazy-Feel Turn: When we first meet him, he’s a member of the Knights of Jove supporting Anevka and later Zola. After Gil blows up his war stomper and he’s reduced to a head in a jar, he ends up working as an agent for Boris Dolokhov, investigating reports of the wasp that can enslave Sparks.

Margarella

• Action Survivor: She’s made it as far as Agatha’s auspices without being offed by Smoke Knights, but she certainly is not fighter material. Subverted when it turns out she’s orchestrated at least some of the railway attacks that seemed to be after her, in order to get to the Corbettites' base, and takes one of their members hostage, as seen here.
• Bitch in Sheep’s Clothing: Turns out she was trying to get to the Corbettite fortress to go through their weapons stash, and deliberately leading the assassins to her.

Smoke Knights

Malek

• Distracted by the Sexy: Varpa is able to distract him even though he knows that that’s what she was sent to do, he’s still following Agatha he’s just not paying as much attention as he ought to.
• Killed Mid-Sentence: Skewered from behind while talking to Violetta.
• Performance Anxiety: Malek is generally quite good at his job, but is used to working alone. Working with a partner leads to potentially fatal mistakes:

«	Varpa: Are you trying to kill us?! Malek: I'm used to working alone! I get nervous when someone's watching!	»

Varpa

• Instant Seduction: Her Lady knows she’s capable of this when she sends her to get in Martellus' Smoke Knight’s way, and indeed by the time she’s seen again the two appear to be in the early stages of a relationship though they’ve known each other for at most a day and a half.
• Kiss of Distraction: She’s been distracting Malek from the mission Martellus sent him on with kisses but they’ve hit it off even though they know they’re working against each other.
• Uncertain Doom: The last we see of her, she’s going to try and cross a revenant-infested Paris to reach Seffie’s location. She’s not there when we/the other characters finally arrive at said location, and the next time we see Seffie accompanied by a Smoke Knight attendant, it’s not Varpa.

Madwa Korel

• Didn’t See That Coming: Madwa was fully prepared for many complications when stealing Prende’s Lantern, able to lay hands on it even with the interference of Agatha and her allies, but the fact the lantern was keeping the revived Storm King in a state of stasis was not one of them, and she gets her hand rotted to a skeletal state when she’s unexpectedly grabbed by him.
  • An Inversion occurs later on, in that she does see it coming, which is precisely why it takes her off-guard. Madwa surprises Raketorn and the sea-dwellers he’s running away from with Prende’s lantern, catching them all in a time stop before they even know she’s there, and realises to her surprise that she apparently also caught Violetta in the act of sneaking up behind her to stab her In the Back, leaving her helpless and frozen, before dismissing the smoke knight’s immobilised presence when trying to decide how to deal with the interlopers… only to then remember that the lantern only freezes time for any being caught in its light and Violetta’s merely pretending to be immobilised right before she gets shanked. In her defence, she did note that she was very tired from non-stop patrolling right before then, leading to her slip-up.
• Impossible Thief: Think Violetta’s pickpocketing ability, only better.
• Ninja Log: She leaves this when she avoids incoming attacks. Yes, the model is similar to the person it stands for.
• Old Master: In a profession that may not exactly have a long lifespan, Madwa is an old woman and still at the top of her game.
• Shout-Out: Of the ironic variety. Madwa has a diamond tattoo on her forehead — in Dune, this tattoo is worn by Suk doctors, who have been conditioned to be incapable of harming their patients. Madwa, of course, does nothing but harm her «patients» (though it’s likely she actually is also a skilled medic, as this seems to be part of Smoke Knight training).
• Uncertain Doom: Violetta exploits the mechanics of Prende’s Lantern to fool Madwa long enough to get into position to stab her and retrieve the Latern. Knowing Madwa it’s entirely possible she survived, but also knowing Violetta, she would make sure the elder Smoke Knight is Killed Off for Real. Violetta afterwards indicates that, as far she she can tell, Madwa is genuinely dead.
• Worf Had the Flu: While fooling Madwa and taking her down is undeniably impressive regardless of the circumstances, Violetta herself is quick to point out that it only worked because she was exhausted.

Other members

Zola «Heterodyne»

• Bitch in Sheep’s Clothing: Even though the first impression of her is a harmless, gullible figurehead for the Storm King conspiracy, she starts fighting, no holds barred, when Agatha and her team throw a spanner in the works.
• Giggling Villain: Her evil banter gets odder over the Castle arc. And she gets giddier as things continue.
• Hidden Agenda Villain: Exactly what she’s doing as the Queen of the Dawn is unclear. Her appearance in Paris was part of some kind of plan, but the situation was already out of control before she got there and she never got the chance to do any scheming. It seemed the basic idea was that she would perform at the opera house and the staff would wasp the crowd, giving her more control over Paris. It fails because the Library attacks the Opera House when they get wind of the plot and the new Master of Paris is more closely connected with the city than her father was, making such a move suicidal. She also uses the opportunity to purge her ranks of the Geisters who are loyal to the Other first and foremost.
• Long-Lost Relative: «Hello auntie.» To more aptly explain the family tree: Her mother was Demonica, Lucrezia’s sister. Their other sister, Serpentina, was Theo’s mother. So Zola, Agatha, and Theo are all first cousins on their mothers' side.
• Mad Love: Towards Gil, very much. Also later towards Tarvek, but her sanity’s slipping at the time, so there’s a chance she still thought he was Gil.
• Master Actress: Oh yes. Also involves the second part of the trope, where the audience thinks she might actually have Split Personalities. Of course, in this case, that’s not so far-fetched.
• Roaring Rampage of Revenge: Has a bit of a habit provoking them in the Castle arc. Lucrezia would like to «thank» her for that, Higgs delivered a beating on the spot, and Tarvek intended — perhaps still intends — to strangle her to death with his bare hands.
• Uncertain Doom: The last we’ve seen of her to date, her plans to take over Paris have failed and she’s fallen into the clutches of Tarvek’s Grandmother.

Wolkerstorfer

• Absent-Minded Professor: Wolkerstorfer has a few memory retention problems… He is nearly derailed from his mission in finding Lady Selnikov by Krosp until he runs through his memory again.
• They Called Me Mad!: He seems to be not very well-regarded by his peers due to his inability to focus, leading to this response (following the offending party’s death by eye beam).

Baron Oublenmach

• All There in the Manual: His given name Krassimir was only revealed in Agatha H. and the Siege of Mechanicsburg.
• Climbing Climax: His character arc concludes with him climbing the Doom Bell Tower with the hammer, where he is exposed to its deafening ring at extremely short range, leaving him collapsed on the floor. Courtesy of the Castle and Franz, he gets some treasure for his trouble.
• Only in It for the Money: Reveals that the political side of the conspiracy doesn’t interest him, he just wants the treasure of the Heterodynes.
• Writing Lines: He is subjected to the verbal variation after he walks into Mamma Gkika’s bar with a gun. He is made to repeat the line «Ladies are delicate creatures who should never be struck or awakened too early in the morning» a hundred times. By the time he’s done, he’s ready to ask for the sweet release of death.

Duke Strinbeck

• Wrong Line of Work: Not that members of the Fifty Families tend to sully themselves with work, mind you, but a footnote in Agatha H. and the Voice of the Castle notes Strinbeck’s unthinking rudeness and stupidity would’ve made him an excellent head waiter.

Associates

Van Rijn

• Ambiguous Situation: In Voltaire’s story, Van Rijn was described as having carted away Andronicus' corpse to give him a proper burial after the Shining Coalition finally defeated him. Flash-foward 200 years, and Andronicus is alive again, but as a decaying Humanoid Abomination. What and why Van Rijn did this, or if he was even involved, is left up to speculation.
• Beyond the Impossible: Managed to make sentient clanks in the form of the Muses, something that’s considered widely to be impossible even 200 years later.
• These Are Things Man Was Not Meant to Know: Sparks are well-known for Tampering in God’s Domain, but Van Rijn was still greatly unnerved after he created the Muses about just what it was he’d created. Then they kindly told him it was alright.

The Muses

• All There in the Manual: Otilia, Moxana, Tinka, Prende and Orotine have all been named in the comic proper. Mawu, Liza and Artimo are identified in the third novelization, leaving Contasia as the odd one out, named elsewhere.
• Ambiguous Situation: Most of the Muses so far have recognized Tarvek as the heir to the Lightning Crown. However, Orotine, the Muse of Geometries, gave a non-committal statement when asked by Krosp if she supports either Tarvek or Martellus, only stating that Martellus was «a distant third, at best». If Martellus is third and Tarvek is (presumably) above him, who exactly is first or second? If the GURPS tie-in book is canon, then Gilgamesh is also descended from the Storm King and may be the true heir to the Lightning Crown.
• Death by Despair: Moxana starts heading this way, thanks to being separated from Tinka.
• Stealth Hi/Bye: They can move with astounding quietness if they need to. Even Smoke Knights like Violetta and Madwa have difficulty detecting their presence if they choose not to be noticed.
• The Voiceless: Moxana, who communicates exclusively through playing cards and hand signs. She used to be able to speak at some point, but apparently lost the ability to after being separated from Tinka.

Mister Obsidian

• Servile Snarker: After Grandma attempts to stab him in the face in order to kill a would-be impostor, he expresses that she’s «as suspicious, homicidal and unapologetic as ever».
• Super-Toughness: He outclasses Higgs by virtue of being so durable that he simply doesn’t even react to being hit, nevermind take any kind of damage. This trope might be close to literal in his case, if he’s a construct. So far his capabilities border on Nigh-Invulnerable.

Other

Prrriti M’Reau

• Ambiguous Situation: It hasn’t yet been explained why Tweedle elevated her intellect along with making her an Agatha-substitute.
• Given Name Reveal: Her name wasn’t revealed until Colonel Chakraborty asked to be introduced to her (it took over four years from when she was first introduced post-uplifting). She takes this opportunity to icily point out to Martellus that even he never asked.
• Noblewoman’s Laugh: Literally her first piece of dialogue with Krosp post-uplifting.
• Sitcom Arch-Nemesis: With Krosp.
• Shout-Out:
  • The aforementioned lightning bolts and her original uplifting setup are open homages to Bride of Frankenstein.
  • An orange cat with lightning bolt markings and enhanced abilities also describes Streaky the Supercat from DC Comics (although Streaky’s lightning bolts are on his flanks).
  • Her name, while looking like something a cat might say, is also a reference to the classic work on uplifted animals The Island of Doctor Moreau.

Paris

The Master of Paris

• Art Attacker: Fitting for being a large patron of the arts. When making a tactical move against the Geisterdamen attacking Martellus’s masquerade, he flourishes as if revealing an artistic opus («VOILÀ!»), and the scene looks like a perspective picture.
• Dented Iron: He’s an old man, and even his cybernetics have their limits and are breaking down. He’s no longer able to fight like he did in the days of the Shining Coalition, and after the battle with Andronicus, he’s badly beaten enough to be taken down for keeps.
• First-Name Basis: With the Matriarch of the Knights of Jove, Terebithia. Not only does it reveal the name to the readers, but as one of several hints indicating they may have had an intimate past.
• Hermit Guru: Okay, so Paris does not really qualify as remote in the conventional sense, but getting to see The Master of Paris isn’t easy.
• Inadequate Inheritor: Has kept himself alive for centuries because he has yet to find anyone he’d be willing to leave control of his city to. After his murder, his daughter Colette, whom he believed showed promise and recently awoke her Sparkiness, is able to take control of city and assumes the title of Master.
• Irony: He’s been around for so long that he directly remembers back when the Heterodynes were the villains of Europa. He was also personally close friends with the Storm King. In the modern era, he isn’t blind to the Chronic Backstabbing Disorder of the Storm King’s Blue Blood descendants, but he still maintains friendly ties with them. The Heterodyne Family however, he actively hates and fears, despite it having been over 2 generations since they were villains, with him quick to suspect Agatha of being the mastermind when conspirators attempt to seize his city. It is ultimately Princess Terebithia of the Knights of Jove that conquers his city, being able to do so because he trusted her enough to sleep with her.
• Not So Above It All: He made Hoffman roommates with troublemaker and Conspiracy Theorist Pierre van Stron just because he thought it would be funny.
• The Omniscient: Or at least so he claims. According to Othar’s twitter, his power depends on the fact that everyone accepts that nothing can happen in his city without his finding out. It’s eventually revealed that he used to be omniscient in a way, when he could connect and become one body with the entire city itself, but he’s generally too old for that in the present. Not that that’ll stop him if things cross the Godzilla Threshold…
• Really Gets Around: See Massive Numbered Siblings. By most standards, and judging by the age and numbers of his children, his sex life is very active. There’s no direct mention of any wives or mistresses on-page though.
• Reasonable Authority Figure: He is not happy about the presence of the latest Heterodyne heir in his city, but he is willing to grant her 72 hours before she would be thrown out (6 hours for foiling a plot against him and 66 hours of leftover time from the «account» of her heroic father and paternal uncle).

Aldin Hoffman

• Action Survivor: You need to be this if you are a librarian who constantly gets dragged into your brother’s misadventures and especially if your brother cannot move on himself. It eventually earns him the ability to work for Agatha inside Castle Heterodyne after the Distant Finale.
• Sitcom Arch-Nemesis: Sort of displays this attitude towards his brother, thanks to getting dragged along on the latter’s adventures.

Beausoleil

• Actually a Doombot: Has a large supply of body double clanks, causing this to frequently happen when someone seemingly kills him. Collette destroys all except one, simultaneously, then destroys the last one after giving a «The Reason You Suck» Speech.
• Didn’t See That Coming: His plan to usurp Paris falls through thanks to Colette breaking through and taking over the city herself in the wake of Voltaire’s death.
• Doppelgänger Link: When one of his clank doubles suffer, he and the other duplicates feel it. Just look at the page image and imagine the unplesantness of having nearly all of them simultaneously destroyed in amusingly gruesome ways.
• Fake Defector: His standard operating procedure is to pretend to support any upstarts trying to usurp the Master so he can spy on them. He’s done this so many times that when he finally defects for real he feels the need to tell the Master that this time it’s genuine.
• Frame-Up: He murders the Master of Paris, doing the deed with a sword decorated by the Heterodyne symbol in order to frame Agatha. Too bad for him, Dingbot-Castle is wise to it and ensures Colette doesn’t fall for the frame-up once she ascends to power.
• Mistreatment-Induced Betrayal: He claims his reason for turning against the Master was because the man was so stingy about sharing his technology secrets, which could have been used to improve his clank-bodies.

Jiminez Hoffmann

• Bash Brothers: He and Aldin practice a two-person «fighting style» called heroic freestyle.
• Disability Superpower: He and Agatha make a vision-enhancing helmet when Hoffmann is nearly completely blinded by acid. He eventually gets cat eyes as a permanent replacement.
• Love Epiphany: He eventually comes to realize that he has feelings for Larana… right around the time he mistakenly comes to think that she’s in love with his brother, Aldin.

Larana

• Perfectly Arranged Marriage: Played With. They are heads over heels in love with each other, and from what is shown would make a pretty good match. This would make their arranged marriage an example of this trope, except that neither of them realizes how the other feels.
• Politically Active Princess: See Only Sane Man above.
• Statuesque Stunner: She stands a good head above Agatha, Jiminez, and her own father. Easily seen here with Agatha.
• Stuff Blowing Up: Seems to be her specialty.

The Arguron King

• Doomy Dooms of Doom: Has «Grubby Grubs of Doom».
• Love-Obstructing Parents: He tries to, anyway. Quickly played for laughs, as he’s not nearly as good at it as Klaus is.
• Wacky Parent, Serious Child: He’s a raving nutcase and his daughter is the sensible one in the family.

Vipsania Perrault

• Wrong Line of Work: The surest sign that Vipsania is in this comes when she’s forced to use an antique, possibly one-of-a-kind book to escape a death trap, and it’s burnt to a crisp. She’s certainly right in pointing out that the whole party would’ve died otherwise… but to offer perspective, one of her colleagues reacted to a similar situation by trying to use his heart to defend the book from any damage, and Gil confirmed that was a typical attitude in the Library. It’s no real surprise that Vipsania ends up leaving the Library for more independent exploration by the end of the sidestory.

England

Englishmen as a whole

• In Spite of a Nail: Despite a very different arc of historical development, including thousands of years of rule by the same immortal god-queen, a lot of England’s characteristics are the same as in real life. The name of the capital city (even though it was presumably founded by Albia and not the Romans), the name of the country itself (even though the Anglo-Saxon invasions can’t possibly have succeeded with Albia in charge), the Union Jack flag, the bearskin hats of the royal palace guards, the English language, and a lot of distinctly English cultural tics are still there.
• More than Mind Control: Albia is capable of controlling the minds of many of her subjects directly, including overriding Slaver Wasps affecting her soldiers, but the vast majority of her subjects appear to have a genuine devotion to her. Of course, she is a Mad Social Scientist. That’s only to be expected.

Queen Albia of England

• Ambiguously Evil: At the end of her first appearance, she mentions wanting to add Agatha to her 'garden', but so far has been nothing but helpful to the young Heterodyne and her allies. Perhaps she’s «playing the long game».
• Brawn Hilda: One of her older forms, possibly her original, is a stout, bulky, redhead.
• Color Failure: After dealing with the strain of helping finish off Clank!Lucrezia and repairing the gang’s escape blimp, a spent Albia goes literally greyscale, a demonstration that she was well and truly out of power.
• Control Freak: When Lucrezia, masquerading as Agatha, remarked that anything can happen, Wooster replied that’s not the case in England: «Her Majesty wouldn’t allow it.» Gil also comments to Zola that going against her whims is «literally unthinkable». Although this appears to be an exaggeration. When the action finally reaches England, we witness all sorts of things happening that Albia definitely would not approve of, and that she cannot directly fix even after learning about them. There have been hints that her power may be waning in some fashion.
• Due to the Dead: She is capable of speaking someone’s name such that it will never be forgotten by anyone who hears it. She uses it as a high honor for soldiers who die in her service.
• Extradimensional Power Source: Implied to be the true nature of second breakthrough, being powered by a special form of energy she absorbs from a different dimension.
• Eye Color Change: Blue most of the time (and briefly brown), but at one point they turn gold…the whites included.
• Fake Memories: She has the power to edit a target’s memories, though according to Klaus, there are ways to detect it. According to Trelawney Thorpe, it is a power she is reluctant to use and will only do so when necessary.
• Flaming Hair: Foglio drew a sketch of her for a fan which depicts her as a scantily-clad woman equipped with what appears to be this. When she is finally met in person, her hair appears normal…until a massive bout of Sparky glee over an experiment idea causes her hair to burst into flames for a single panel.
• Flashy Teleportation: Capable of teleporting both herself and others at will, with some orbs of light effects, apparently, and apparently without consent, as seen when she briefly warps Agatha into the air during their first meeting.
• The Fog of Ages: A normal person has trouble with one century’s worth of memories. A Spark can handle more, and Albia is the next step past a Spark, but even she can’t handle the countless millennia she has been alive. In order to deal with this, the first thing she built upon her second breakthrough was a building designed to archive her memories.
• Historical Domain Character: Her original form, a brawny Amazonian Beauty with a spear and shield, seems an awful lot like a Race Lifted incarnation of Boudica, who was also a powerful monarch in Ancient Britain. Perhaps one who did defeat the Romans, or the GG-verse equivalent thereof.
• Holy Halo: Her Undying Majesty has little constant about her appearance outside of her hovering halo of glowing stars. Even this is slightly altered when she reveals a bit of just how dangerously sparky she could be with her very magic-like abilities and power.
• Living Mood Ring: She can reflexively change her size, appearance, and wardrobe to match the conversation, like manifesting Widow’s Weeds when she learns of a death or literally igniting with excitement.
• Paper Tiger: She is treated with godlike reverence as an absolute power within England. At full power, she is genuinely a demigod, only a few steps short of being a real god, but at the time of the story, she is suffering a bad case of Worf Had the Flu. As such, she is resorting to flashy tricks to keep up her image as The Dreaded. Actually solving the current crisis is beyond her, even defending her territory is putting her under strain.
• Reasonable Authority Figure:
  • Has the sense during a massive Sparky rant to admit that it would be much better to let Agatha fix things with her and Gil’s minds, as Albia’s plan and methods involve much more potential for damage, even if Albia thinks it would be fun. Although see above under The Collector.
  • Unlike Voltaire, she is also more willing to give Agatha a chance, as she is quite friendly to her, even providing advice. Considering Agatha’s family history and both Klaus' and Voltaire’s hesitance to give her a chance to prove her moral character, this is a major contrast. Though it helps that Agatha is quite respectful to her, as she is aware that being in the presence of a ruler in their domain is not something to be taken lightly.
• Statuesque Stunner: Even at human size, Her Undying Majesty still has a good foot or two over Zeetha in height. This may be a deliberate intimidation tactic; as previously noted, it’s not at all clear what her «normal» size is.
• Villain Override: Non-villainous variant. This turns out to be the reason why it’s «literally unthinkable» to go against her: she is able to broadcast her will to all of her subjects in the surrounding area (how far this effect reaches is unknown) to the point that she can even temporarily override The Other’s slaver-wasps. And beyond that, some her subjects (Trelawney among them) are able to voluntarily summon her to possess their bodies and channel her powers directly through them. This power is reseverved for emergencies where they desperately need to use her Enlightenment Superpowers for themselves; Albia cannot maintain this connection for long, as it soon begins to damage the subject.
• Worf Had the Flu: She’s pretty much a demigod, but the power source that makes her that way has a cycle of flowing and ebbing. At the time of the story, she has nearly used up her emergency reserves, and she doesn’t have the knowledge or courage to use alternative methods to power herself.

Princess Neena of England

• Oh, My Gods!: She uses an «Oh my mom!» variant, what with Queen Albia being a God Empress.
• I Want My Mommy!: When caught up in a battle between two rampaging God-Queens and a horde of enormous monsters, she calls out for «MAMA!». And since she’s the daughter of Albia, she shows up immediately.

Trelawney Thorpe

• The Berserker: Not to suicidal levels, but she’s been shown to rather impulsively spring into action.
• Crazy Sane: Trelawney is able to remain relatively calm and focused even when she falls into the Madness Place like other Sparks. Lucrezia is impressed by her self-control.
• Famed in Story: A number of novels have been written about her exploits, similar to those of the Heterodyne Boys. There’s been disparaging comments in-story (from knowledgeable witnesses) as to how accurate they are.
• Ooh, Me Accent’s Slipping: Most of the time her speech patterns suggest a refined, upper-class British accent, however on one occasion that Wooster teases her on the subject, she replies «Watch yer gob, ya ratbag!».
• Willing Channeler: As one of the Queen’s sacred guardians, she can pray to her for help and be possessed by her. However, it puts a serious strain on her body, making it one of her last resorts.

Lady Ariadne Steelgarter

• Know When to Fold 'Em: When caught by Higgs and some of Albia’s troops while running from Lucrezia and Monahan’s brawl, she immediately surrenders. However, this changes the minute she sees a working portal to Skifander.
• Multiarmed Multitasking: Has four arms. Also Multi-Armed and Dangerous. Later on it’s speculated that, aside from the typical mad science stuff, she may possibly be a Yajeena, an elite priestess from Skifander (who also had four arms before they were apparently all killed off), but Agatha and Zeetha decide it’s almost impossible to tell one way or the other at this point. The fact she instantly recognises Skifander, speaks the language, and is so delighted to find a portal there she forgets she’s running from two angry near-Queens may be confirmation.

Hadrian Rakethorn

• Convenient Replacement Character: He’s a British secret agent who looks a bit like a more buff version of Ardsley Wooster and is introduced in the Londinium arc, which just so happens to be when Lucrezia/Agatha zaps Wooster.
• Female Gaze: Induces and invokes this straight out of the gate. His above image is literally his introduction, and judging from Agatha, Zeetha, and Violetta’s expressions on the next panel, it works.
• The Spark of Genius: The only edge he has on Wooster in what he’s able to offer in service to their queen is that he’s a spark, in all other aspects Wooster seems to be far more on top of things.

Francisia Monahan

• Debt Detester: Repays her debt to Agatha as soon as she possibly can.
• Pest Controller: Commands an army of giant rats which provide security for her island lab. She seems more attached to them than any of her would-be-allies.
• Petty Childhood Grudge: While fighting an ascended Lucrezia, Monahan takes a moment to gripe at her for stealing one of her projects when they went to school together.
• Red Right Hand: She has Mismatched Eyes, and neither of them is a natural color (one gold, one purple).
• Saying Too Much: Makes the mistake of admitting to Ms. Steelgarter that she can’t be of immediate help to her when «Luci» betrays her, causing Steelgarter to side with Lucrezia.
• Smarter Than They Look: She’s an eccentric Crazy Rat Lady, yet is the first of Lucrezia’s agents we see to recognise her severe case of Chronic Backstabbing Disorder, fully expecting 'Luci' to turn on her as soon as she decides You Have Outlived Your Usefulness. And when this inevitably happens, she’s more than ready for it.
• Tested on Humans: She tested the effluvia on her minions before exposing her rats, to avoid causing unnecessary deaths of adorable rats.
• Villainous Friendship: Appears to be an old friend of Lucrezia’s and apparently met her at college. Even goes so far as to call her 'Luci'. But this was all a cover, Monahan loathes Lucrezia and gladly betrays her.

Kjarl Thotep

• Benevolent Abomination: A thousands-of-years old being from a dimension outside of normal space and time — who’s actually rather jolly and helpful, once you get to know him.
• In-Series Nickname: Due to his mysterious nature, the Queen’s Society referred to him as the «Boilerghast».
• Not-So-Imaginary Friend: Gil initially thinks of him as Tarvek’s «imaginary friend», but he’s real enough.
• Significant Name: «Kjarl Thotep» is a fairly obvious Shout-Out to H. P. Lovecraft’s Nyarlathotep.
• Time-Travel Tense Trouble: Due to the nature of his existence, he has trouble deciding what tense to use when speaking with people.
• Trapped in Another World: He originates from Another Dimension. He was accidentally summoned by a civilization of Precursors while building their Portal Network and has been stuck in Europa ever since. He has been trapped for so long that the resident Mad Scientists do not have the means to analyze where he came from and send him back home. He also figures he’ll have racked up some serious parking tickets.
• Unwitting Instigator of Doom: Takes pity on the lobotomized Dr. Vapnoople and somehow is able to restore his Spark and sanity… Unfortunately he had no idea Vapnoople is a batshit insane (even by Spark standards) Evilutionary Biologist.

Quintillius Snackleford

• Flaming Hair: Gains it upon second breakthrough.

Transylvania Polygnostic University

Tarsus Beetle

• Ambiguously Evil: Not much is known about Beetle’s ultimate goals or motivations. He greatly disliked the Baron’s rule, and seemed to be planning to use Agatha to further his goals, but at the same time, Barry trusted him enough to entrust Agatha to his care, and apparently gave him reason not to trust the Baron. Depending on what exactly Beetle thought he knew, opposing Klaus might have appeared to be the good-guy thing to do.
• Big Bad Wannabe: Was preparing to mount a challenge to Klaus' power… With his forces being completely outgunned, and the Baron fully aware of his plotting.
• Compensating for Something: Gil notes that his clanks are ludicrously oversized, Beetle’s way of compensating for his lack of height. Beetle objects to this assessment, loudly.
• Humongous Mecha: His greatest creation is a twenty-meter clank named Tock.
• Master-Apprentice Chain: Had at various points in his life taught Klaus and Lucrezia, along with Bill and Barry Heterodyne, and later Agatha.
• Unwitting Instigator of Doom: Beetle was the one who inspired Lucrezia’s experiments with mind-transferal, meaning a good deal of issues in the story can in some way be traced back to him.
  • Still later, his ill-advised plot against Klaus Wulfenbach ultimately attracts the Baron’s attention to Agatha, thus kicking off the plot.
• We Have Become Complacent: He’s universally acknowledged as the greatest clank engineer of his generation. Unfortunately, he failed to take into account that later generations would use his designs as the starting point for their own work. Thus, when he tried using them to rebel against Klaus, he was trying to fight state of the art Wulfenbach Battle Clanks with models that were thirty years out of date, and the obsolete models quickly lost.

Silas Merlot

• Didn’t Think This Through: After discovering Dr. Beetle’s hidden notes about Agatha’s heritage, he burned down Beetleburg’s hall of records with the Baron’s cryptography team inside, fearing the Baron would punish him if he knew the truth while not expecting the Baron to punish him for his actions in covering the truth. Agatha would later point out that had he gone straight to the Baron after making the discovery it’s likely it would have gotten him into Klaus’s good graces and netted him a big reward.
• Evil Is Petty: The first thing he did after becoming in charge of Beetlesburg was expel Agatha simply because he didn’t like her.
• Expose the Villain, Get His Job: What Silas presumably was hoping for by revealing the Slaver Engine his master was hiding. If it was, it worked in the worst way possible.
• I Just Want to Be Special: He was a brilliant if perfectly normal scientist who had the misfortune of sharing the world with those that can casually break the laws of physics. Despite a profuse dislike of Sparks his pet project of turning chalk into cheese was clearly him trying to mimic the outlandishness of sparky science rather than 'actual' science.
• Impossible Task: At the start of the comic, he and Glassvitch were given plans to build a contraption for Wulfenbach…well, really, Tarsus shoved it on the non-Sparks while he kept working on his own projects. At any rate, after three months of work without getting the gadget to operate, it turned out the whole thing was a test for Wulfenbach’s son Gilgamesh to see if he could recognize the deliberately faulty construction. Merlot is understandably upset to see three months of his life, which he could have used for his own projects wasted for a test and flips out.
• Kicked Upstairs: Klaus puts him in charge him not as a promotion but as a punishment, threatening to ship him off to Castle Heterodyne at his first mistake.
• Sanity Slippage: He was never all there to begin with, but his fear of Klaus and hatred of Agatha turns him into a bitter, paranoid murderer.

Hugo Glassvitch

• Impossible Task: Like Merlot, quite upset to learn that he was basically window dressing for Gil’s test, but he doesn’t react as badly.
• No Celebrities Were Harmed: Bears an intentional resemblance to Ron Glass

The Professoressa

• Identical Stranger: Not quite identical, but she looks sufficiently like Agatha for the Revelsmeister to comment on it when he ropes her into the Solstice celebration.
• Meet Cute:
  • A filler image depicts her meeting Phil Foglio’s in-comic character by having her accidentally drop a book on his head from the top of a high shelf. The book is titled «How They Met».
  • Their actual Meet Cute is different; she arrives at Mechanicsburg while he’s singing outside, calls him a mendicant and vagrant, and pays him a silver coin to tell her Agatha is freeing the town. The coin is fake. Then he shows off how well educated he is while arguing with her, making her develop something of a crush on him.
• Missed Him by That Much: In the Solstice story, she comes even closer to meeting Agatha than the Storyteller has, but is unconscious at the time. Later (real-world time) we see she met Agatha in person in Paris.

The Storyteller

• The Bard: The storyteller is a traveling bard who has multiple random encounters with the protagonists throughout their journey; they first find him when they hear him singing while imprisoned in the local dungeon. He’s memorized a great number of tales in addition to spinning his own.
• The Bore: The Great Hospital at Mechanicsburg hires him to help get difficult patients to sleep, much to his disgruntlement. This gets him volunteered to help get Klaus to sleep soon after. About the only person who doesn’t find his storytelling dull is Tarvek (who realizes that the unwitting bard is being used by the Baron to pass along a message to Gil).
• Meet Cute:
  • A filler image depicts him meeting Kaja Foglio’s in-comic character by having her accidentally drop a book on his head from the top of a high shelf. The book is titled «How They Met».
  • Their actual Meet Cute is different; she arrives at Mechanicsburg while he’s singing outside, calls him a mendicant and vagrant, and pays him a silver coin to tell her Agatha is freeing the town. The coin is fake. Then he shows off how well educated he is while arguing with her, making her develop something of a crush on him.
• Missed Him by That Much: On occasion, the Storyteller comes very close to Agatha, without ever interacting with her (being nearby when Agatha saw the Muse of Time, being present when Agatha unleashed her dangerous Carnival on the Baron, being at Mechanicsburg during the siege).
• Shared Family Quirks: When he turns something the Professoressa says into a sex joke, she smirks «It is so obvious that you two are related.» When Oggie does the same thing, she repeats it.

«	The Storyteller: Well, duh. The comic begins with him telling a story to some kids.	»

• Unwanted Assistance: Is a great-great-great grandson of Oggie. It’s Oggie’s «assistance» with trying to help the family line along that has in fact led to the Storyteller being one of the last of said line. This is either a dramatic exaggeration or is referring to the Storyteller’s particular branch of the family tree; judging by the rest of the family seen when the Storeyteller and his wife visit for the Solstice, Ognian’s bloodline is quite robust.

The Corbettite Order

Corbettites as a whole

• Binding Ancient Treaty: Between the Corbettites and the Heterodyne family. So long as the Corbettites keep some artifacts that are so dangerous that the Heterodynes couldn’t trust themselves to protect them without being tempted to use them again safely locked away, no Heterodyne troops will attack Corbettite trains, railways or stations. The agreement has been in place for centuries, and has never once been broken.
• Secret Government Warehouse: Have several vaults that contain various dangerous Sparky creations that are entrusted to them because everyone in Europa knows that they can be trusted to never try to use them.
• Seeking Sanctuary: If a traveler gets on one of their trains and gives the monks an honest explanation of who they are, where they’re going, and why, then they are entitled to sanctuary and safe passage until the train gets to their stop. (Up to a point — if the honest explanation suggests that giving them passage would put other passengers at risk, well, that’s why the trains have the only confessionals with ejector seats.)

Brother Ulm

• Hazy-Feel Turn: Becomes much more antagonistic towards Agatha when forced to take her with the other passengers to the Corbettites' headquarters because he fears she’ll unleash some Heterodyne creation they have locked up there. While he’s less on her side, he’s still not a bad guy.
• Conscience Makes You Go Back: He was on the verge of pressing the «Confessional Eject» button instead when Agatha was in there, but thought better of it.
• Irish Priest: Complete with usage of irish colloquialisms like «Sure, and» or «boyo».
• Why Don’t You Just Shoot Him?: Worried about letting Agatha into the stronghold, he goes to quietly shoot her. Another monk stops him.

Father Gerät

• Reasonable Authority Figure: Gerät’s a reasonable man, and is willing to hear Ulm out when he’s caught attempting to kill a passenger. He’s also not keen at all on being ordered by a higher power in the church to obey «King» Martellus, and most certainly did not see one of Agatha’s entourage knock Martellus out.

Humongulus

• Fear of Thunder: «Humongulus does not fear the rain! But the lightning…»
• Graceful Loser: When Franz manages to get the upper hand during their fight by exploiting the fact that Humongulus insides are not waterproof, he happily surrenders and compliments Franz for his ingenuity.
• Gratuitous Latin: Parodied. Humongulus will spout off the occasional Latin phrase, but if you translate it, it will usually be fairly modern vernacular.

«	Humongulus: What is this? Humongulus cannot move! Non est frigidus!Lat.	»

• Humongous Mecha: It’s right there in the name, after all. Humongulus is one of the biggest Clanks seen to date.
• The Philosopher: Humongulus has given a lot of consideration to whether or not lifting things truly induces happiness or if he simply does it because it’s what he was created to do and doesn’t know anything else. It’s enough that it makes Franz ask himself the same question.
• Serious Business: Lifting things. It’s what he exists for, and he’s damn good at it. He once considered becoming the best at setting things down, but decided that it lacked panache.

The Beast

• A Beast in Name and Nature: It’s called «The Beast» and the name is completely appropriate.
• Backseat Driver: Reduced to being an impotent one of these with the Brother-Ulm train following its defeat.
• Badass Decay: In-universe. Once an all-consuming engine of terror, now only its little mechanical «brain» survives in dingbot form, which accompanies Agatha on her further journeys.
• Reforged into a Minion: After its defeat in the Battle of the St. Spzac Train Yard, Agatha reforged it into an advanced dingbot in a spheroid chassis with a little smokestack. It’s since teamed up with the similarly en-mobilized fragment of Castle Heterodyne that Agatha recovered in paris as Those Two Guys. It is much more mindful of its loyalties to its creator in this state. Particularly since its new body doesn’t have a mouth, and thus it has no means of eating things to get stronger.
• Shows Damage: since the Beast uses mass conversion to power its attacks, it is possible to judge its remaining power by its length — the more wagons it has, the longer it can keep fighting.
• Screw This, I’m Outta Here!: Announces its intention to simply storm away from the fight at the Corbettite Fortress-Depot, but is then swarmed by Krosp’s newly-acquired army of Swartzwalders.
• Villainous Glutton: Is called a glutton in-story, and it itself describes its gobbling up of resources as someone ravenous would his dinner.

Brother Marcus

• Bearer of Bad News: Reveals Franz is the Last of His Kind, or just about.

Assorted

Othar Tryggvassen

• Bold Inflation: Fans never, ever say his name without adding GENTLEMAN ADVENTURER! And not just fans.
• Braggart Boss: Despite the hazards to life and limb, one has to imagine Othar’s sidekicks are most likely to get talked to death.
• Cartwright Curse: He has had a couple love interests in his Twitter adventures, but in both cases, said relationship gets Ret-Gone via Time Travel and Alternate Universe incidents.
• Comically Invincible Hero: The others are fully aware that he’s probably unkillable. Gil even takes the opportunity to exploit it.
• Gentleman Adventurer!: The Trope Namer— and an unusual example given that he’s an Anti-Villain antagonist.
• Gotta Kill Them All: His solution to the Sparks is to kill them all, individually.
• Horrible Judge of Character:
  • This is actually what makes him insane. Othar is unable to comprehend that Klaus isn’t the villain. Even back in the day, Klaus sometimes thought the Heterodyne boys were too forgiving, but was never the Token Evil Teammate. Klaus may be a tyrant, but his rule is much freer and safer than the anarchy that came before it.
  • Othar also can’t process that Gil is the Token Good Teammate of Agatha’s team with Tarvek being the Token Evil Teammate and Agatha being the pragmatic one. He has their roles backwards in his head.
• Idiot Hero: Othar is utterly fearless (not to mention foolish) in times of peril.

«	Like all prisoners in the castle, I’m outfitted with an exploding collar. Ha! The fools, my head is the least dangerous part of my body.	»

• In Spite of a Nail: According to his Twitter account, a Spark’s experiment with time travel and alternate realities has revealed that every Othar has some kind of predisposition to deciding to wipe out Sparks. He briefly wonders if there’s something about the Othars that causes them to simply have suicidal craziness before dismissing the idea.
• It Runs on Nonsensoleum: Othar apparently has «special trousers» (very heroic) that allows him to No-Sell having an irate Jäger landing on him and breaking his back. No, we have no idea what that means either.
• Large Ham Title: GENTLEMAN ADVENTURER!
• Long Lost Sibling: Sanaa Wilhelm, aka Sanaa Tryggvassen.
• Lord Error-Prone: When it comes to the actual adventuring he does a good job, but he frequently grabs the wrong end of the stick and seems somewhat dim (or at least scatterbrained) for a spark— at least compared to the main characters and most of the actually threatening villains. Given some of the stuff we’ve seen minor antagonists get up to, though, Othar seems practically stable for a Spark.
• Mistaken Kidnapper: Under duress from Baron Wulfenbach, Othar enters Mechanicsburg to «rescue» the Baron’s son Gil (who is there of his own volition, but his father believes — not entirely inaccurately — that he’s in danger there and is determined to protect him, whether he likes it or not). While there, Othar meets up with his sister Sanaa, who cajoles him into recruiting her as his «plucky girl sidekick» and joining him in his mission. Unfortunately Sanaa doesn’t actually know what Gil looks like, and ends up throwing a sack over the wrong person, a fact that her brother doesn’t discover until he returns to Castle Wulfenbach and proudly proclaims that he’s got his man.

«	Othar: Allow me to present: Gilgamesh Wulfenbach — *removes the sack, sees it’s actually Tarvek Sturmvarous* — MASTER OF DISGUISE!	»

• No Place for Me There: Success in his lifelong dream — destroying every Mad Scientist for the sake of ordinary humanity — would, of course, require one last Heroic Suicide.
• Norse by Norsewest: He’s from Norway. And his name is just a couple letters removed from a famous Norwegian king’s name.
• Overshadowed by Awesome: He’s plenty effective, provided he isn’t going up against uber badasses like Gil, Klaus, or Agatha.
• Parody Sue: Othar is a world-renowned adventure hero who is virtually impossible to kill and who has the self-aggrandizing personality to match. People who hear stories of him love the guy, but just about anyone who actually met him finds him terribly annoying. The twist is that Othar sees the world through the lens of Black-and-White Insanity, leading him to be a rather Horrible Judge of Character in regards to our actual heroes and to morality in general.
• Point of Divergence: Despite his vigor, Othar is actually pretty old. According to his Twitter, it turns out that he retired to an island for a few decades to live with his Geister wife, Oslaka, that he saved from the sewers in Paris. When she died, he left the island to find all of Europa in ruins and not a single person in sight (not even any bodies). His consciousness was sent back to inhabit the body of his past self right before he saved Oslaka by an aged Tarvek to save the past somehow, so his presence will determine the course of the story.
• Science-Related Memetic Disorder: The effects of the Spark on him are a lot more apparent in the Twitter than in the comic.
• Uncertain Doom: In the future, he is considered to be «lost». Though, given he has been known to «retire» to an isolated island with his Geister wife, he’s probably fine.
• Unexplained Recovery: Constantly. The only explanation we’ve ever gotten is «Special trousers. Very heroic.»
• Unreliable Narrator / Through the Eyes of Madness: (Ненадёжный рассказчик/Глазами сумасшедшего) His Twitter is considered canonical, but it’s from his point of view and he’s insane.

«	«That letter is a fraud! Othar Tryggvassen may do things that lesser men find objectionable or slightly illegal, but I never apologize!»	»

Dreen

• Admiring the Abomination: Upon gazing at the Eldritch Abomination invading Mechanicsburg, they express awe and admiration.
• Glamour: This is part of the reason that makes them so dangerous. Normally the Dreen look like cloaked figures with long sharp fingers that they use to stab things. In reality, their true form is revealed via certain types of time stop abilities. Their fingers aren’t nearly as long or sharp than the glamours shows. It is more likely that they use some type of blade to stab or phase through targets to deal internal damage. They also have guns that shoot some kind of giant lightning or temporal effect (it’s unclear what the burst of blue light actually is).They have to lift, aim, and pull a trigger to fire their guns like anyone else, but the glamour just shows the Dreen holding their hands limply in front of them as they always do; the beam just seems to burst from their entire body. In other words, their opponents can’t actually see their most powerful attacks or even their weapons, making countering, dodging, or blocking the attack incredibly difficult.
• Know When to Fold 'Em: When Agatha threatens that their «epic battle» will not happen if there’s the slightest chance that it will level Mechanicsburg, the Dreen quickly agree to hunt their quarry the «stupid boring way».
• Nigh-Invulnerability: Martellus attempts to flatten one of the Dreen with his battle clank. It shrugs it off and casually dismantles the battle clank while resuming pursuit of Agatha.
• Non-Linear Character: As they are from outside of regular time and space. From an inside perspective it makes them look omniscient, but they aren’t. When they say something to someone, it will happen, because they’ve seen it happen.
  • One of the Dreen in St. Szpac’s vaults tells Gil that he will travel to Paris. While he goes to England instead, Albia sends him to Paris for his return trip, much to his own disbelief.
  • When Klaus finally returned to Europa from wherever it was that Lucrezia sent him, he found two Dreen awaiting his arrival. They offered to assist him in his conquest of Europa and the establishment of his empire, apparently to repay him for something he would do in the future. It turns out this was Klaus activating the time bubble around Mechanicsburg, which created a time anomaly big enough to attract the attention of the Dreen’s «quarry» to the area, giving them the opportunity to hunt it. In other words, they helped found Klaus' empire solely so he would eventually put himself in a position which would greatly destabilise it in the name of protecting it and himself from Agatha/Lucrezia’s control.
  • Upon first meeting Agatha during the siege of Mechanicsburg, a Dreen tells her that «[she] will come with [them]». While originally this sounded like a demand for surrender, the revelation that Dreen exist outside of linear time means that eventually she will go with them.
  • The Dreen can both see decades in the future and several minutes or seconds in the future, predicting many different possible outcomes. They also carry guns and swords that Three Dimensional beings can’t perceive without incredibly rare time bending technology. This is part of the reason they are so deadly. They can presumably see what someone or something is going to do in a fight before the enemy even thinks of the idea and then shoot and stab them with weapons that the enemy doesn’t even know exist.
• Not So Above It All: From their first appearance up until 2024, they appeared to be weird and spooky even by the setting’s high standards for weird and spooky, unsettling everyone around them. It turns out when on their own, Dreen are just as nuts as everyone else, bickering over shortbread.
• «Not So Different» Remark: More like, response. When finally conversing with them and understanding that the Dreen want Agatha’s help to hunt the inter-dimensional being attracted to the Time Bubble, Agatha responds incredulously to their odds, with their response all but confirming they’re extra-dimensional equivalents of Jaegers.

«	Agatha: What? I heard it was huge! You’re planning to kill it? Just the three of you? Dreen 1: Heh Heh. Dreen 2: Ho Ho. Dreen 3: Hee Hee. All Dreen: Yes.	»

• Sign of the End Times: Apparently they only show up when things are really bad, time-wise. This is because whatever is causing it has caught their attention to hunt it.
  • That being said, it’s actually a good sign when there’s only 3 of them. Apparently they sometimes hunt in packs of up to 40. Given how deadly just 2 of these guys are, whatever requires 40 dreen to kill should probably be avoided by a few hundred miles and as many decades to boot.

Ferretina

• The Beastmaster: She created and leads an army of giant bunny rabbits called lapinemoths.
• Obviously Evil: She first appeared claiming to be a victim of the Weasel Queen. Our usually Genre Savvy heroes don’t suspect that the bestial woman wearing bones and fur who gets irritated at any criticism directed at Ferretina might not be trustworthy. In their defense, they do tend to meet a lot of strangely dressed people.

The Circus

• The Beastmaster: Professor Moonsock, who tames animals for the show’s acts, and occasionally for defense (though the others are less receptive to those attempts).
• Flying Dutchman: Embi, of the Wandering Jew variety. Assuming he wasn’t sending Agatha out for a crate of balloon juice about that.
• I Owe You My Life: No one is happy at being forced to turn away Agatha when she reveals she’s on the run from Klaus Wulfenbach, but they gladly fake her death and deceive a grieving Gil after she returns to save them from a wild clank anyway. They then take her in, no questions asked, and agree to escort her to Mechanicsburg, even after learning she’s a Spark herself. When they finally learn she’s a Heterodyne, they steal a Wulfenbach ship and rescue her from Klaus himself.
• Inksuit Actor: Master Payne is based on a Northwest stage magician of the same name who is a friend of the Foglios.
• Kinetic Weapons Are Just Better: While most weapons in Girl Genius are death rays or other creations of mad science one of the circus members, who looks to be the young Spanish woman who acts as their Thundering Engine Woman impersonator, prefers a revolver even though she herself is a Spark.
• Knife-Throwing Act: Dame Edith has a knife throwing act, unfortunately she has at least once turned her knives on the audience when she asked if anyone was a vampire and someone raised his hand, understandably thinking she was joking.
• Little People Are Surreal: Embi notes that most of his appeal to the audiences the circus pulls in is that he is short.
• Madame Fortune: Madame Olga, the circus' resident fortune teller.
• Necessarily Evil: Master Payne.
• Number Two: Abner’s overall role seems to be Master Payne’s right-hand man, offering suggestions and feedback while planning their next course of action.
• Pillow Pistol: When Master Payne and Marie are woken by a Sturmhalten soldier banging on their carriage door he slides a gun out from under his pillow to take with him to answer the door.
• Purpose-Driven Immortality: Embi credits his long life to the fact he made a sacred vow to see the world before he died, but didn’t know just how big it was. Of course, that could just be a story he’s trying out.
• Reasonable Authority Figure: Master Payne is often forced to make difficult decisions for the sake of keeping his people safe, but he never abuses his authority and always lets Agatha speak her piece before pointing out why he can’t do as she wants, however much he would like to.
• Science-Related Memetic Disorder: Many of them are minor Sparks. Very few of them are any good at it.
• Stage Magician: Master Payne himself, much like the real life stage magician he is based on, but with more tricks that rely in Sparky innovations and inventions.

Lars

• Death of the Hypotenuse: At the time of his death, he is one of three love interests for Agatha.
• Due to the Dead: Maxim goes out of his way to recover Lars’s remains and insists he be buried with his hat, Serious Business to a Jaeger, since he died defending a Heterodyne.
• Forgotten Fallen Friend: He dies protecting Agatha and is given a Jäger funeral, with Maxim donating his hat. He isn’t mentioned again. The print-novels do a little better, having Agatha mourn for him when finally given a quiet moment to do so.
  • Finally averted when Agatha crosses paths with the Circus again in Albia’s court. She has not forgotten about him.
• Nervous Wreck: Lars can be easily startled by some of the abominations of science encountered in the wastelands. Not helping is that his job is to scout the Wastelands for those abominations, leaving him a bundle of frayed nerves. Once he gets going, it’s hard to stop him. Even with a pie. Though the Jaegers found a solution.

«	Lars: Horse! Pie! Horse! Pie!	»

• Romantic False Lead: Out of all of Agatha’s potential love interests, Lars is the only one who isn’t royalty, isn’t a Spark and is more than a bit of a coward, but despite these handicaps he is devoted to Agatha and does anything he can to help her. From a normal literary standpoint, Lars' underdog status probably made him the top candidate for Agatha’s affections. He dies less than halfway through the series.

Professor Blintzie von Wyrmhaut

• Bearer of Bad News: Reveals Respiro the dragon was assassinated by his own guild due to resentment from the Limited Advancement Opportunities he caused from being head of the glassblowing guild for centuries.
• Goggles Do Nothing: Wears goggles on her forehead and doesn’t actually use them, even when observing Franz breathing fire.
• Hammerspace: Pulls a BFG from nowhere.

«	Prof. Wyrmhaut: A good tailor can do amazing things with pockets!	»

• Loyal Phlebotinum: Her customized gun is designed to only work for her. When the heroes manage to steal it, she dares them to shoot her with it while she prepares to kill them with a fire Amplifier Artifact.
• Searching for the Lost Relative: Her Uncle Hengst set out to slay Hrydrargryos and never returned. She Finally Found the Body in Hyrdrargyros' lair.

«	Prof. Wyrmhaut: As near as I can tell, he killed the dragon, but was mortally wounded. We spent years wondering what happened to him.	»

• Villain of the Week: Invoked to represent how far Professor Wyrmhaut had fallen. During the hunt for the Iram Solis, she talked a good game about how Mechanicsburg’s numerous enemies kept making the mistake of thinking that they could defeat the city via a Decapitated Army tactic, when an experienced monster hunter would know that razing the entire town is the only option. Once the Professor actually got the Iram Solis, she attempted to make good on her declaration… but the people of Mechanicsburg are so used to such plots that the most the reader sees of the results is a newspaper reporting the «weekly attack by disgraced academic» some time later. And it was such a minor event as to be back page news.

Zantabraxus

• Ambiguous Situation: Her attitude towards Gil is one of the story’s smaller mysteries. Klaus suggests that for some reason she wanted him dead, and that this was the reason he brought the toddler Gil back to Europa with him, and has a strong suspicion that one of the reasons Zeetha was sent out into the world was to kill him, but why she would do so is unclear. Alternatively, and since otherwise it’s odd that Klaus would still miss Zantabraxus and think fondly of her, there might have been others in Skifander who wanted to kill Gil…

Polar Ice Lords

• Enigmatic Minions: When first introduced, they seem to be just another one of the factions serving the Other, complete with the use of modified Hive Engines. But it eventually becomes apparent that they are just as, if not even more powerful than the Other themselves, and seem to be following their own agenda with a disturbing interest in Agatha and Mechanicsburg. Case in point, once Ixthaliox is defeated and his Hive Engines destroyed, a senior Polar Lord appears, denounces him as a weakling, and withdraws all of their forces.
• Logical Weakness: Unsurprisingly, the best way to harm them is through the use of heat-based weaponry. Their forces and equipment fare poorly in warm temperatures, which is why they haven’t conquered the world in all their millennia of existing.
• Those Were Only Their Scouts: Ixthaliox, who declares himself a «grand duke of the Arcana», is defeated by Agatha with considerable difficulty, the assistance of a full complement of Sparks, and the firepower of a rather large army. Then an even more powerful Polar Lord Appears and blasts Ixtha, calling him a «sniveling disgrace». Given their difference in size and appearance, and the Polar Lord’s authority to «cast [Ixthaliox] from the Arcana», it’s possible that grand duke is a title, Ixthaliox is a subordinate, and we have not yet seen a Polar Lord in action.
• Villain Respect: The senior Polar Lord seems to show this to Agatha… To the point of calling her a «horror».