Agatha Heterodyne

Agatha Heterodyne, also known as Agatha Clay: the Girl Genius of the title.

Agatha is a powerful Spark, especially talented at creating and repairing electrical and mechanical devices.

Among her creations is an ever-present, highly versatile coaster-sized clank named Dingbot Prime,capable of performing complex tasks without supervision; it can even build similar small clanks to assist it, making it a self-replicating machine.

Though each generation of these clanks is slightly less well-made than its predecessor (ensuring that they do not replicate endlessly), together they are capable of truly amazing feats of engineering – such as secretly converting Master Payne's Circus of Adventure into a Battle Circus capable of repelling an entire division of Wulfenbach's troops.

Tarvek and Gil have recently discovered that first-generation Dingbots apparently possess the Spark, the first mechanical creations with a manufactured Spark.

Agatha Heterodyne has an impressive heritage as she's believed to be the daughter of the heroic Bill Heterodyne and Lucrezia Mongfish, who is the Villain's Beautiful Daughter and evil Spark herself, but who was believed to have turned a new leaf and given up her wicked ways upon marrying Bill.

Agatha has inherited both the legendary Heterodyne charismatic genius and the distinctive Mongfish voice.

Due to this, she is pursued by many other Sparks.

As a Spark of a major House currently without an empire of her own to protect her, she is a potential asset or enemy.

Baron Klaus Wulfenbach wishes to imprison her or kill her if necessary, knowing her to be a source of potential discord.

Othar Tryggvassen at first wished to kill her as part of his crusade against the Spark, but once he realized that she was the Heterodyne heir, he decides he would prefer to ally with her.

When Agatha was five years old, her uncle Barry Heterodyne gave her a locket containing pictures of her parents, instructing her to never remove it.

The locket secretly contained a mechanism that prevented her from realizing she was a Spark by neutralizing her early attempts to hyperfocus with excruciatingly painful migraines.

Punch and Judy — constructs presumably made by her father and uncle (named for the famed medieval puppets) who took care of her under the names Adam and Lilith Clay – watchfully ensured she always wore it.

Punch and Judy settled with Agatha in Beetlesburg, where Agatha attended Transylvania Polygnostic University (T.P.U.) under the direct supervision of the Spark Professor Beetle, who had been briefed on her by her Uncle, but who had his own ulterior motives.

Less than a day after the locket was stolen (by von Zinzer), and in the aftermath of Professor Beetle's accidental death at the hands of Gilgamesh Wulfenbach, Agatha seemingly "broke through" by building her first clank while sleepwalking ("sleep-Sparking"), a quirk she continued to display for some time.

Unlike most Spark break throughs, Agatha's was relatively benign in nature (Baron Wulfenbach's assistant Boris labelled her clank "entertaining, but harmless").

However, through an odd turn of events (the Baron at first believed the clank to be the work of soldier and locket-thief von Zinzer), Agatha still ends up on the Baron's massive fortress airship, Castle Wulfenbach.

Agatha escapes both Castle Wulfenbach and Othar Tryggvassen with her new liege, Krosp I, a talking cat construct, and eventually crash-lands in the Wastelands.

After rescuing a traveling circus from a rogue clank, they take her in gratitude. Master Payne's Circus of Adventure gains a new fortune-teller as Agatha learns more about this new wider world outside of the quiet walls of Beetleburg and T.P.U.

She becomes "zumil" (daughter-like student) to the Circus's resident swordswoman, Zeetha, Daughter of Chump – the Amazonian lost princess of a civilization about which Agatha's Uncle Barry had told her stories.

In appreciation for Agatha's confirmation her family actually exists and were not fever-dream constructions, Zeetha swears a vow of training and protection to the young Spark, and becomes her best friend.

Agatha gains her first sworn servitors: a trio of Jägerkin, who had been searching for the Heterodyne heir and are surprised to find she's a girl instead of a boy as expected.

She also proves herself adept at playing the role of Lucrezia Mongfish in the popular Heterodyne plays performed by Master Payne's Circus, an irony which is not lost on her or Krosp, though she keeps her real identity secret from the other members of the Circus.

On the way to her ancestral home of Mechanicsburg with Master Payne's Circus, Agatha's route led through Prince Aaronev VI's province of Sturmhalten.

While on stage, the Prince and his son, Tarvek, recognized her voice as a match for their "Mistress".

Agatha was ordered to the castle by the prince, forced into a mysterious machine and imprinted with the mind of her mother, Lucrezia Mongfish, resurrecting Europa's deadliest enemy – the Other.

However, Lucrezia's plan failed to take into account Agatha's own fury at being violated and her willpower.

Through the use of her family trait of "heterodyning", she was able to suppress Lucrezia's consciousness for limited periods of time, during which she did all she could to foil her mother's plans.

Eventually, with the help of her locket, which had been retrieved broken from von Zinzer and repaired by Baron Wulfenbach, Agatha had the strength to push Lucrezia down deep in her mind and block any further takeovers.

Unfortunately, this came only after the Baron found himself facing the Lucrezia persona, and he is not yet aware that Agatha is in control of herself.

Agatha hates the locket, a symbol of how bad her life was before she discovered her Spark – the agonizing headaches every time she attempted to use her Spark, self-hatred because of the inventions that never worked, the humiliation of her peers – but she must wear it to keep the Other from possessing her again.

Zeetha convinces her that it has become instead a symbol of her strength, and Agatha agrees: It's a symbol of everything she has and will overcome.

Finally, Agatha reaches Mechanicsburg and meets her greatest challenge yet: Convincing the mechanically sentient and mentally fragmented Castle Heterodyne, given human-like response by her ancestor Faustus, that she is a real Heterodyne.

What's worse is that she has to do it while a pretender is trying to kill both the Castle and herself.

As of the end of Volume XI (4 November 2011), Agatha had been acknowledged by Castle Heterodyne as the true heir, begun to learn both her mother's and the Castle's secrets, and was preparing to defend the city of Mechanicsburg from various factions seeking to assume control of Europa.

The defense was - surprisingly - so successful, that (as of 1 October 2013) Baron Wulfenbach had apparently put the town into a time stasis, which Agatha escaped only by having been kidnapped by one of Tarvek Sturmvoraus's cousins.

This state of affairs has persisted 2½ years in storyline time, during most of which Agatha was herself frozen or lost in time.

Both Gilgamesh Wulfenbach and Tarvek Sturmvoraus are potential love interests for Agatha, though earlier stories clearly suggested that Agatha would ultimately select Gilgamesh.

The significance of her choice cannot be overstated; both her father and uncle's heroism, atypical of the Heterodynes, and the legend of the "Storm King" who last unified Europa by taking a Heterodyne bride (and who is allegedly an ancestor of Tarvek) suggest that the future of Europa might be in her capable but inexperienced hands.

Agatha was ranked 51st in Comics Buyer's Guide's "100 Sexiest Women in Comics" list.

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