Фил Фоглио - Agatha H. and the Siege of Mechanicsburg

8 After some experimentation, it was determined that the defense system of Mechanicsburg defines a league as 5.556 kilometers.

9 Intriguingly, there is no written record of a Roxalana Heterodyne. However, in a hundred kilometer radius around the town of Mechanicsburg, one will find assorted geographic features, clearly caused by the unleashing of cataclysmic forces; these include “Roxalana’s Chasm,” “Roxalana’s Blight,” “The Melted Mountain of Roxalana,” and a vast wasteland where nothing grows known as “Roxalana’s Comeuppance.”

10 Balloon bees (urinaria apis caeli Europa) are a species of cave-dwelling honeybee that has adapted to living within airship cells. Their signature characteristic is that they spread out in an enclosed space until they are as far as possible from each other. They then construct small, solitary dens.

11 Marshmallow guns (or other similarly useless weapons) are actually fairly common accessories in your typical spark laboratory. No one knows why. They just sort of accumulate.

12 Death-trauma-induced memory loss and the subsequent inevitable personality shift (usually resulting in deranged, murderous, fire-phobic dullards) are the biggest reason why sparks, as a rule, do not attempt to transform themselves into superior constructs.

13 Many sparks are perfectly willing to experiment on their fellow sparks when the occasion demands. Nevertheless, if one wishes to resurrect a specific person, one must have a functioning brain. While many people are accused of “thinking” with assorted other body parts, this does not actually work.

14 The Smoke Knights have developed a rather potent line of motivational drugs, all gathered under the family name of “Movit.” They range in strength from Movit Number One, which has an effect much like several very strong cups of coffee seasoned with horseradish poured directly into your sinuses, up to the until-now-unknown Number Eleven. Your humble professors, while advocating against unnecessary pharmaceuticals—especially in the work place—must confess it usually takes a dose of Movit Number Three to get them out of bed in the morning. It’s all right for us, you see, because it is research; as in fact, are most of the recreational excesses we indulge

in. A finding reluctantly confirmed by several Faculty Review Boards.

15 The crypt in question held the Throne of Faustus Heterodyne, an ancient interface dating from before the Castle was actually finished. It allowed the Castle to speak through anyone foolhardy enough to allow specialized sockets to be implanted into his or her skull. This was an honor reserved, in recent generations, solely for the seneschals of Castle Heterodyne. It was a creepy and horrible system and thus pretty hard to circumvent.

16 Fra Pelagatti’s Lion was a device capable of generating a low-pulse жtheric “roar.” It was constructed by prisoners using parts smuggled in by Zola’s organization. It was designed to completely eradicate the artificial intelligence that operated the Castle. When activated, it astonished everyone by working perfectly.

17 Klaus Barry Heterodyne: child of Bill Heterodyne and Lucrezia Mongfish. He was a little over a year old when he was killed in the destruction of Castle Heterodyne.

18 Everyone had heard about Abominations of Science but, like unicorns, they didn’t actually believe they existed. Thus everyone was rather grateful when the third Madrid Conference of Scientific Inquiry and Philosophical Horrors—Unleashed! released a codified list of things that constituted actual Abominations of Science. Over the years, this useful list has been updated and curated by our own Transylvanian Polygnostic University and has proven of great use to teachers, courts, and record books. The only downside was that one of the conference members—a Herr Doktor Spanakopita—was so embarrassed that none of his previous efforts met the requirements that he, in a fit of pique, bred a race of unicorns, who went about stabbing people while quoting the parts of the list that covered biological abominations. Before he was stabbed to death, he was graciously acknowledged as a genuine Tamperer in Things Man Was Not Meant to Know and his oft-desecrated gravestone lists his accomplishments in full.

19 A secret lab is considered by many to be the physical manifestation of a spark’s mind. Thus they tend to be rather individualistic. Some are spotlessly clean; some are filled with dangerous trash. Some are ruthlessly efficient; some are filled with suicidal deathtraps. Needless to say, sparks are usually vocally dismissive of the labs of others, while surreptitiously making notes about things they’d wished they’d thought of themselves.

20 The Muses were a set of nine clanks built long ago for the Storm King. Most people thought them lost, destroyed, or even mythical. But as we see here, this was not the case. Otilia was the Muse of Protection—a job she took very seriously.

21 The wizard Van Rijn appears in most popular stories of the Storm King, usually in his role as the king’s trusted friend. Little is known about his life (or death if you want to be paranoid about it), but he was certainly a genius who created scientific wonders that even the sparks of today have trouble duplicating.

22 Castle Heterodyne only remained operational at all due to a vast cavern full of Baghdad salamanders, a type of voltaic pile.

23 A P. P. R., or Post Revivification Rush, is experienced by constructs and humans that have been brought back from what those of a pedantic turn insist upon calling “death.” All of the senses are greatly enhanced and all of the governing mechanisms to be found in the human body are temporarily suspended. This means those experiencing a P. R. R. are filled with a great euphoria and a feeling of invulnerability. This is unfortunate for those around them as while they are mentally unstable, they are capable of great speed, strength, and endurance. However, once this effect wears off they tend to crash and they crash hard.

24 A microgarrote is a very thin wire that can easily slice through flesh. It is a staple of pfennig dreadfuls as an assassin’s weapon, where it is routinely strung inside doorways, slicing unsuspecting people, constructs, and clanks into messy chunks by their own momentum. This is absurd, as anyone who has ever leapt back from encountering a similarly strung spider’s web will tell you. To further disillusion our more bloodthirsty readers, we must point out that bone and metal are quite resistant to it when it is used by hand. Make no mistake: it can still do a fatal amount of damage very quickly, but there is no need to exaggerate.

25 This particular King Darius was presented with a “Magic Coat” that let him fly. It worked perfectly for almost fifteen years, in which time he used it to quell rebellions, rescue princesses, assassinate rivals, and awe the general population by correctly asserting that he could see their houses. Unfortunately, he neglected to carefully read the attached Magic Owner’s Manual—especially the chapter titled “Maintenance”—and thus subsequently earned the sobriquet “The Incandescent.”

26 It is the rare person who manages to actually remember their death after they have been revived. There is an amusing theory making the rounds that people would remember their death just fine. Death is natural. One goes through their entire life coming to grips with its inevitability. But resurrection—ah, that is incredibly unnatural, countermanding, as it does, the laws of gods and men and forcibly dragging a person back from the Undiscovered Country, regardless of whether or not that person actually wishes to return. That experience, being summarily wrenched apart from the natural order of things and crammed back intro one’s meaty little shell, that is the trauma so great that sanity demands its erasure. Unfortunately, this is a theory that will only be proved once science has made substantial breakthroughs in ouija technology.