Thirty Days of Drabbles: Day Ten

[jeriendhal]

For sraun 's prompt of "Mark Vorkosigan hires Agatha Heterodyne to build a special piece of equipment."

The girl in the green tweed dress looked over the plans carefully. "So what's this mirror for anyway?"

"A focusing element in a telescope," Mark lied smoothly.

"Are you sure? With that kind of curvature…" She frowned, humming to herself as she pulled out a pencil and made rapid notes in the margins of the blueprint. "Hey, if you had some way of identifying unrelated connecting points in the spacetime continuum, you could build a ship that would…" She was cut off as she dropped face first onto the drawing table when Mark's stunner fire struck her.

"It took her all of thirty seconds to make a major breakthrough in five-space physics," Kareen noted glumly beside him.

"Yeah, and all the other "Sparks" we met who might be able to do the job are crazier than I am," Mark said. "We are never going to get off this benighted planet."

Comments

[sraun]

Oh, I have faith in Mark & Kareen - they'll come up with something.

As a plot bunny if you want to take it further - I don't remember stunner fire successfully causing amnesia - what's he going to do to wipe her memory?

[jeriendhal.livejournal.com]

Well, assuming Mark doesn't take the terribly expedient way out, one can assume some Spark has made the equivilent of RetCon somehwere along the way. :)

Okay, I actually hadn't thought it through that far. Presumably Agatha will still be doing the work, just in a more isolated location. I'm sure that plan will work out just fine.

[mmegaera.livejournal.com]

I have to ask. Who is Agatha Heterdyne?

[jeriendhal.livejournal.com]

Agatha Clay: Fine. So what you're telling me is that you, Gilgamesh Wulfenbach, the person next-in-line to the despotic, iron-fisted rule of the Wulfenbach empire, have got no weapons powerful enough to destroy those things. That's just great. What kind of evil overlord are you going to be, anyway?

Gilgamesh Wulfenbach: Apparently, a better one than I thought.

That would be this lady here from Phil and Kaja Foglio's webcomic "gaslamp fantasy" Girl Genius.

The basic premise is "Mad Science Rules the World! ...badly!" in an alt-Europa where "Sparks" have spent the past hundred years or more creating lunatic inventions and battling each other, until the legendary heroes, the Heterodyne Boys, Bill and Barry, brought peace to the various factions and hope to the common folk that tended to get crunched in the gears of Count Von Looneybrain's latest war hamsters.

Unfortunately they disappeared about twenty years prior to the start of the story, leaving things to fall apart again, until their old sidekick Baron Wulfenbach got fed up with the mess and made himself the (more or less enlightened) Tyrant of Europa under the war cry of "Don't make me come over there!" and brought peace (more or less) of the land again.

Then Agatha, Barry Heterodyne's long lost daughter, finds out about her heritage about the same time as the Baron does. Now it's race for Agatha to regain control of her ancestral castle/sentient deathtrap before the Baron does something extremely permanent to her to prevent the chaos from spreading again.

It's ridiculously fun, with a deep(and sometimes overly convoluted) plot, well rounded heroes and at least a couple of sympathetic villains.

[mmegaera.livejournal.com]

You know, I've had at least half a dozen people recommend this series to me, but I've never actually read continuing saga comics like this, so I've just sort of said that's nice and gone on.

Is there a way to start from the beginning, or do I just have to jump in the middle? And is there a way to put this on my google reader (does it have a feed?) so that I actually remember to read it?

[jeriendhal.livejournal.com]

Well, the beginning starts here. I'm not sure if it has a Google feed, but here's the Livejournal feed.

[mmegaera.livejournal.com]

Thanks! The LJ feed will actually work better, since the Google feed is just a link.

[mbernardi]

The first part of the story has been novelised, and can be bought at amazon.

[jeriendhal.livejournal.com]

Having read it myself, I really can't recommend the novelization, even if it does fill in some details.

[shadur.livejournal.com]

Of course, not all of the villains think of themselves as villains -- and sometimes, they have a pretty good argument.