Hey, how many of y’all are caught up with Girl Genius?  Because now having seen him, I think X is just Y having been exposed to extradimensional energy and spent years in another dimension only to atemporally arrive here recently, but I don’t have anyone to share the theory with.  (X and Y under cut for spoils, + images for further explanation)

X = Kjarl Thotep, Y = Dimitri Vapnoople

I mean, it feels almost too obvious so I’m not sure.  Their builds are even extremely similar, Kjarl’s is just an inflated version.

(And I think he IS legitimately good now, not pretending for subversion purposes, but I’d understand if not.  Him having been the one to heal his own mind after not recognizing himself, so he’d hop in the portal and become himself, is just delicious Homestucky time shenanigans.)

I don’t expect to keep having Girl Genius theories or start classpecting it so don’t bug me to make more Xo

EDIT: Added a Kjarl Thotep/Mad page to the wiki for this I guess. I can’t believe he didn’t have one before.

Agatha Heterodyne: Magical Girl - The Plot

Agatha’s main day to day buisness is rounding up all the rogue summons her ancestors have unleashed on the city and country over the centuries and which are now starting to wake up and go on rampages. This is mainly done by weakening the monster through combat (or you know, talking it into going quietly) then summoning her ultimate summon, Der Kestle, which then appears, casts out black chains, and then drags the monster of the week into its depths. To aid in this endevor she has of course her family’s Magic Relic, the Triolobite Relic, and the accompaning book of spells and summons. She also has her two friends, Gil and Tarvek.

Gilgamesh Wulfenbach holds the Flying Baron Relic, which originally belong to his father. He is currently under the impression that his oftentimes overprotective father has no idea that he has this relic, and that he needs to keep it secret from him. What he doesn’t know is that his dad knows exactly what he’s doing, because he was going the same thing when he was Gil’s age, he just hasn’t caught him at it. Many surprising conincidences that result in Gil nearly being revealed are in fact no such thing. He is also freqently briding his psychotic ex-priate bodyguard, Bang, not to reveal his secret to his father. (Not realizing his dad already knows.) His costume of course resembles a mix between a Prussian Baron and a swashbuckling pirate. Complete with pantaloons, and a large hat with a feather in it. Agatha runs into him on her first night on the job. Unfortunately they were both in the middle of a jump between rooftops. The resulting fall, five stories, face-first, into a concrete sidewalk, demonstrated just how supernaturally tough magic girls are.

Tarvek Strumvoraus holds the coveted Storm Queen Relic. It originally belonged to his older sister Anevka, except she is currently comatose in the hospital. Thanks to the magic of the Storm Queen Relic, she is currently possessing a clockwork doll styled after the legendary Muses of the Storm Queen Relic. Tarvek takes his possession of the Storm Queen Relic very seriously, and one of his major goals is to find the Nine Lost Muse summons that once formed the ultimate summon of the Storm Queen Relic. While he is dedicated to keeping the city safe and to helping Agatha round up her family’s rogue summons, he is also facing pressure from his father as what exactly he should be using the powers of his Relic to do. His costume includes a golden crown and a burgandy silk cape. He also has a long, complicated, and sometimes antagonistic history with Gil.

Aiding their endevors are Agatha’s two normal friends, Zeetha and Violetta. Zeetha is Gil’s twin sister, and the crown princess of a remote society of women warriors who live in the depths of the amazon jungle. Violetta is Tarvek’s cousin, and has literally gone to school to study the ways of the mythical Smoke Nights, the order of Europan ninja, who specialized in stealth and poison. Both consider themselves to be the normal ones of the group. The rest of the school does not agree.

Of course there are other things that stand in their way. Xerxsephnia Von Blitzengaard, another one of Tarvek’s cousins, is very angry with Tarvek because according to the ancient traditions of female inheritance when it comes to Magical Relics, she should have gotten the Storm Queen Relic when Anevka went comatose, not Tarvek. Of course with Magical Relics, possession is nine-tenths of the law. Its very hard to steal a relic from a Magical Girl that is actively using it, due to the fact they will know immediately if someone touches it, and they have magical powers that allow them to defend it. Thankfully, her brother Martellus holds the powerful Beastmaster Relic and is always willing to help his little sister out. Resulting in him and his Knights of the Hunt becoming a major pain to Agatha and her friends.

There is also the shining Zola Malfezium, a rival magical girl who holds the Queen of the Dawn Relic. On the surface she looks like your standard friendship and rainbows magical girl, abet one who is frequently duped by less scrupulous people. Below the surface she looks like a deeply insecure teenage girl who is trying her hardest to get people to like her and is determined to try and cast herself in the best metaphorical and literal light. Below that however, there are a lot of dark mysteries and unanswered questions. First among those is the fact that her Relic is nothing more than an expensive and beautiful, but otherwise normal piece of jewelry. Demonstrated by the fact Violetta was able to steal it undetected in the first place. Which begs the question, where is she getting her powers from then?

Then there is the perpetual mystery of Agatha’s ancestor Euphorosyina, and her relationship with the legendary Storm King, Andronicus Valois. A story which is increasingly revealed to be much more complicated and twisted than the contemporary story would suggest. A mystery made particularly relevant when they encounter the furious corpse ghost of the man in a hidden tomb under the city of Paris.

And behind that there is the dark and troubling mystery as to what agenda Tarvek’s dad is pursuing, and its increasing connection to the mysterious Geisterdamen summons, the deadly hive engines, and their connection to The Other, the ultimate summon of the Wasp Queen Relic, the same magical relic held by Agatha’s mother Lucrenzia.

The Adventures of Agatha Heterodyne: Magical Girl

Completely normal teenage girl Agatha Heterodyne has just lost her uncle, and is forced to move with her two guardians into the very-much-not-sleeply suburb of Mechanisburg. With its faux-european buildings and abundance of skull motifs, the whole place manages to scream, creepy tourist trap. The ancestral family manor she is apparently going to be moving into is even worse. It comes complete with a lovingly tended garden of horribly poisonous plants, a wrought iron fence complete with six inch spikes and screaming face decorations, and an honest to god looming bell-tower.

She’s spending her first night in her new room in this creepy house when she feels a draft, finds a concealed door in the walls, accidently presses a switch which causes the door to open to reveal… an on-suite bathroom. Further exploration reveals more secret doors, a whole network of them. Deathtraps too. Including trap doors and an literal hallway of swinging blades. Eventually she comes across a library of all things. A big library with lots of dusty books, and cloth covered reading chairs. And on one of the tables she finds a locket, embossed with a trilobite, complete with a brass choker to wear around her neck. Thinking it just a cool piece of jewlery, she puts it on.

When she turns around, she sees a book. Its large and heavy with a metal cover and this moving clockwork visible between gaps in the binding. She’s not sure how she missed it, and when she picks it up the grinning face on the back bites her. She barely has time to register the fact she is bleeding, when a great red eye opens on the cover and a deep female voice says.

“FINALLY!”

The book then reveals that she is the latest in a long line of villianous magic girls. The feared Heterodynes. That her father and uncle were one of the few male children born to that line and that they forsok their family’s powers in order to live a life of social activism and philanthropy. But now, NOW, there is finally some new blood to take on the mantle. Now the world will tremble before a new Heterodyne magic girl.

Then there is a surge of red light and Agatha’s clothes are replaced with a black-silk dress puffed up with gold lace, and gold plated bones. A great castle with russian domes looms behind her, and the words come to Agatha as the transformation sequence completes. “TREMBLE BEFORE ME!”

And the bell at the top of the looming bell tower rings.

DOOOOOOOOM!

Then the Jagers, the most loyal and powerful of the Heterodyne’s summons appear and all swear allegence. There’s explainations, about the power of the relic and how to use its powers. The spells and summons contained in her book and how they work. A great show of power that goes into the night.

The events last night seem more like a weird dream, as Agatha staggers into the kitchen to have breakfast the next morning. She doesn’t even notice, the strange look that passes between her guardians before Adam finally says, “We know what happened last night.”

“Everyone knows,” Lilith adds as Agatha chokes on her ceral. “We all heard the Doom Bell ring. Everyone who grows up in this town knows what it means. They even printed a special edition of the Mechanisburg Menacer.”

Sure enough, the front page of the newspaper is blazing with the headline. “NEW HETERODYNE CLAIMS THE TRILOBITE RELIC! DEATH, DOOM, AND A 25% DROP IN UNEMPLOYMENT PREDICTED! TAKE THAT RECESSION!”

What the hell, Agatha thinks, you don’t need that much water to drown yourself. Her bowl of ceral will do in a pinch.

If you don’t read Girl Genius, this will probably not interest you. If you do, read on…

The scraps of information we’ve gotten about the Heterodyne family basically boil down to this: 

1. They were terrifying monsters.

2. Yet somehow, they had a lot of incredibly loyal followers.

3. They did not seem to grasp the concept of empire. They would conquer a place, sack it, and then just… leave. Lose interest. Go home. 

4. The dynasty has lasted for around a thousand years. That is an INSANELY long time for a single family to survive, let alone a family that a) doesn’t have a high birth-rate, and b) picked fights with the entire known world on a regular basis. 

These four things do not go together.

So… what if some very early Heterodyne, possibly the same one who figured out the secret of loyalty, realized that that they couldn’t rely on their descendents to have the sense of a freaking garden snail (Sparks are like that) and took steps to make sure that they wouldn’t fuck up too badly? 

(VERY LONG RAMBLY HEADCANON UNDER THE CUT)

For a Spark with a basic grasp of biology, this wouldn’t actually be too difficult. It might not even have been intentional. Plenty of early Heterodynes were very interested in Nature, specifically the parts of it that bite, sting, or otherwise do terrible damage to squishy humans, we know that. How unlikely is it, really, that one of them decided to improve the bloodline with a spot of Essence Of Predator? A few useful traits borrowed from mountain cat, or wolf, or other sexy murdery beasty ting? 

Because (and I say this as someone with much more knowledge of narrative convention than of actual animal biology, so take my speculations with a grain of salt), what the Heterodynes are, as far as the reader can tell, is insanely territorial. They’ll go out raiding, reaving, conquering, what have you, on a regular basis, but they invariably return to their own territory, of which they are intensely protective and extremely (for Sparks) careful of. The fields are fertile, the land is tended, the people (assuming they don’t break the rules) are protected and, insofar as a Spark is capable of doing so, cared for. Even the vilest, maddest, most vicious members of the family, so far as we know, never visited their horrors on their own place. That is what other people’s territories are for! 

Incidentally, if the murals of conquered cities are anything to go by (as cited in the novelisation of Zola’s entrance into Castle Heterodyne), they didn’t do a lot of permanentdamage even then. Unlike the works of most Sparks, as far as we know, most creations of the Heterodynes tend to run down, wear out, or shut off after a while. (The Beast being a notable exception, of course) After all, if you kill off the whole herd, or poison all the water, or salt the land, or whatever, you can’t come back again later and do it again. 

This might also explain the apparent willingness of the Heterodynes to just recruit stray monsters, Sparks, minions, etcetera. Plenty of herd, flock, or pack animals are perfectly willing to adopt in new members, recognising on an instinctive level that outbreeding is good. And the ones who succeeded in adapting to the Heterodyne’s pack mores would have contributed more ‘team player’ genes to the pool while strengthening the guard over the young and the ability to fight for territory. 

Faustus Heterodyne, of course, really brought it all together, building the city and the Castle, but I suspect it started long before that. Look at the loyal armies they kept building up, and the Jaegermonsters. That kind of loyalty doesn’t just happen, it’s a product of knowing that as long as you’re part of ‘us’ you’re relatively safe, and can gang up on ‘them’. All of ‘them’. And I wouldn’t put it past Faustus, brilliant as he was, to realize that this fierce territorial instinct was a huge asset, and to take further steps to make certain that even his most lunatic descendents would, on an instinctive level, return to and defend both Mechanicsburg and the family. After all, the Castle is obsessively devoted to the preservation of the bloodline, and it was both his masterwork and originally a copy of his own brain. It’s not exactly a leap. (This also explains why the Heterodynes don’t seem to have done a lot of serious infighting. Even the Red and Black Heterodynes didn’t actually kill each other, after all) 

Now, this would have been an absolute stroke of dynastic brilliance. Given that Sparks appear to be as much of a danger to themselves as to others (which is saying a lot), managing to instil an instinctive level of self-preservation (don’t damage our own territory, don’t eat our young, don’t hunt out our own ground) would give a truly enormous advantage to the Heterodynes over other Sparks. It may also be why the Heterodynes we’ve seen (Bill, Barry, Agatha, etc) seem to have a much stronger temporal awareness than most other Sparks, insofar as they grasp that a) tomorrow will almost inevitably come, and b) the possibility of failure exists and I should consider that before hitting the switch, because c) if I am still alive when tomorrow comes I will have to deal with the fallout of what I did today. 

So, even the maddest Heterodynes had enough of a sense of self-preservation to grasp the idea that there is a fundamental difference between winning the game and breaking the board. They didn’t poison their own lands, they didn’t eat their own young, and they protected, insofar as they understood the term, what was their own. 

Then the Heterodyne Boys showed up. Thanks to their mother’s influence, they weren’t raised entirely by people completely out of touch with reality, and grew up relatively sane, BUT with a strong learned aversion to the Castle and Mechanicsburg. No wonder Saturn wanted to kill them. They were a clear and present danger to the pack and to the territory, something which would even override his own instinctive desire to protect his young. 

But they still had all those protective instincts, the drive to preserve what is ‘mine’. The urge to destroy other predators. The desire to form a pack, or pride, or clowder, or whatever it is they have. Thus the adventuring, the drive to stabilise and preserve, the willingness to befriend and recruit others. They were very bad Heterodynes by Heterodyne standards, in that they abandoned Our Territory And Our Pack, but the instinctive imperatives were clearly there, even if they were expressed incorrectly. Unfortunately, this also led to the Lucrezia Problem. The traditional willingness to accept mates from outside the pack meant the Jaegers, the Castle, and the other inhabitants of Mechanicsburg were too slow to realize that this one was a serious threat, because until now no Heterodyne would have brought in someone who was a clear and present danger to the territory (so far as Heterodynes understand the concept of danger), and Bill didn’t think of the Castle as ‘mine’ and wasn’t interested in protecting it. 

Buuuut.

BUUUUUT.

Someone else did. Someone else had a strong grasp of temporal inevitability. Someone else was incredibly territorial. Someone else grasped the concept of recruiting, building a ‘pack’, protecting the young, and maintaining a territory. 

Klaus Wolfenbach acts exactly as one would expect a moderately sane person with this built-in set of instincts to do. It’s repeatedly stated in canon that this isn’t normal Spark behaviour. In fact, he takes the unprecedented step of rounding up the offspring of other Sparks and important people and protecting and teaching them. The original Castle Wolfenbach is one of the four fortresses almost within hailing distance of Mechanicsburg. Surely, over the centuries, there’s been at least some Heterodyne by-blows. Powerful Sparks with strong survival instincts would naturally wind up in positions of power, and while known offspring would have been welcomed into the fold, unknown ones would have grown up thinking as the Heterodynes as monsters. As enemies. So it makes perfect sense that Klaus, the strong Spark and next-door neighbour, has a few Heterodynes in the family tree somewhere. Probably not enough to pass the ‘Test of Blood’ or smell like Family to the Jaegers, but enough to produce someone with the right instincts to appeal to them. 

And then Agatha is exposed, and Agatha is a Very Good Heterodyne indeed. Agatha instinctively responds positively to the Jaegergenerals, despite all the terrible stories.  Agatha is deeply protective of any person, place, or creature that she considers hers. Agatha has no instilled dislike of the castle or the town. She shows up in Mechanicsburg and has an intense, visceral ‘mine’ reaction literally from day one. MY people. MY castle. MY monsters. She goes from zero to ‘I will hold my city or die fighting’ in a couple of days. Now, Nurture obviously plays its part, as well as Nature, but Agatha was primarily nurtured by Adam and Lilith. Constructs. Monsters. Quite certainly without realizing it, Barry gave Agatha something approximatinge a traditional Heterodyne upbringing, in which she was raised and loved by ‘monsters’ whom she trusted implicitly. Of course she wasn’t put off by Mechanicsburg’s monster collection and insane but devoted Castle. Both her nature and her nurture combined to tell her ‘this is Home. This is MINE’. 

A strong support to this idea that the Heterodynes built in these instincts on the genetic level, rather than simply conditioning them in early, is that Agatha displays no Mongfish tendencies at all, aside from happening to sound like her mother. And she should! The Mongfish family specialised in genetics. Their breeding programs are notorious. They’re a family of profoundly selfish survivalists who barely tolerate their own offspring. And all that heredity, that Lucrezia put so much faith in when she planned to possess the mind of her own child, hit the Heterodyne DNA like an exquisite vial of poison hitting a stone wall. Agatha is So Pure A Heterodyne that she’s immediately identifiable by smell. She’s so strong a Heterodyne that she regained control of her mind from Lucrezia within minutes when one of her people was in danger. She confuses and frightens Lucrezia, because Lucrezia doesn’t have those instincts and doesn’t understand them. 

Agatha and Gil bond almost immediately,because Gil also has his father’s probably-Heterodynish tendencies. And how does Agatha know that? How does she go from resenting to liking him within a day? Aha, I will tell you. 

It’sZoing.

Zoing is a construct. A weird, not very strong or very smart construct, that Gil made when he was very young. A ‘normal’ Spark would have discarded him years ago. But Gil hasn’t. Gil loves Zoing. Zoing is one of his people, his pack. He even apologizes to Zoing for letting Wooster do his special job, making tea! 

That interaction, right there, is why Agatha takes to Gil. And Agatha’s friendly overtures to Zoing, and her protectiveness of her little dingbots, are probably a big part of why Gil likes her so much. They’re giving each other the right subconscious cues, telling each other without realizing it that this is another person who is capable of loyalty and trust, who loves and respects what a more selfish person would despise. (This is how you make a love at first sight plot work. I saw you and you were beautiful? Not love. The first time I saw you you tactfully pretended to like a dumb birthday present, showed affection for the people around you, then ran back into the fire to save your dog? That’s at least grounds for immediate attraction)

This also applies to Tarvek, incidentally. She doesn’t show any sign of genuine romantic interest in him, as opposed to playing along because she needs him, until she sees him with Violetta. He may be a treacherous weasel, but he does have someone he loves and wants to protect. He gets a lot more attractive to Agatha once she has real reason to believe that he’s capable of loyalty and affection.

Their biggest single problem is that Klaus doesn’t know any of this. Klaus only ever sees Agatha when she’s a) deeply distressed, or b) under Lucrezia’s control. He has no idea that she’s the kind of person who would treasure an early construct or a silly little clank or love her adoptive parents. He believes that she’s like her mother, that Gil got suckered in by big eyes and vamping, not a much more reasonable instinctive reaction to someone being Nice and Smart in a world where that’s a rare combination. Klaus doesn’t know that the Boys’ admirable traits were actually Heterodyne traits (or that his may be as well), or that Lucrezia and her daughter are nothing alike except in voice, or that Tarvek is also capable of genuine love and loyalty. 

But Gil does. 

And when GIl’s instinct to protect MINE comes into conflict with his father’s equally sincere desire to do the same, well, that’s when it all really goes to hell.