Agatha H and the Voice of the Castle

¹ The Great Hospital of Mechanicsburg was the first of the Great Projects that Bill and Barry Heterodyne undertook when Bill officially became the Heterodyne. Before that, an entire section of the town had been zoned for, among other things, biological experiments. The Boys tore it all down and cleansed it with fire. In its place, they built a hospital. The staff had to undergo a rigorous, and prolonged, retraining using assorted incentives, hypnotism, threats, and cattle prods, which was—on the whole—surprisingly successful. Today, The Great Hospital is one of the leading institutions of medical research. It is also known for its pioneering research regarding the humane treatment of the insane, which is greatly appreciated by the staff.

² Before leaving Master Payne’s Circus, Agatha had arranged for them to receive sanctuary in England. Since she had secretly reengineered their circus into a mechanical fighting force which had wound up wounding the Baron and damaging a significant part of one of his armies, it had seemed like the right thing to do.

³ Dr. Sun Jen-Djieh was the administrator and chief doctor at the first Great Hospital. He was a Spark whom the Heterodyne Boys and Baron Wulfenbach had met in China during their adventures there. (See The Heterodyne Boys and the Even Greater Wall of China for a reasonably accurate record of their meeting.) Shortly thereafter, the Emperor decided that Dr. Sun had been contaminated by exposure to foreigners and should be put to the Death of Five Hundred Tightenings. Dr. Sun decided that it was time to listen to his doctor and take an extended vacation in the West.

⁴ A perusal of archived Empire records reveal that other red flags were: “Impossible,” “Illogical,” “He wouldn’t dare,” and the all-time favorite: “…couldn’t possibly be that stupid”

⁵ According to the private journals of Klaus’s personal physician, Dr. Merrliwee, the Baron never actually believed that he had the time to allow himself to heal up naturally from anything. After a series of escalating events that were, in retrospect, actually rather humorous, unless you were one of the poor souls involved, she took to shooting him with a tranquilizer dart whenever he got a papercut. After the third time this happened, Klaus reluctantly established “sickness protocols” that allowed him to at least remain conscious while “taking it easy.” He also felt spurred to invent “cutless paper,” which has saved the lives of thousands of office workers across the Empire.

⁶ Until Recently, Ardsley Wooster had served aboard Castle Wulfenbach as Gilgamesh Wulfenbachs’s valet. In actuality, he was working for British Intelligence. It would have been an extraordinarily useful position from which to winnow out the secrets of the Empire, if it wasn’t for the fact that both Gilgamesh and his father had been aware of Wooster’s true allegiances from the get-go and had been cheerfully feeding him false information. Spies find this sort of thing terribly embarrassing and are loath to mention it on their résumés.

⁷ The Seven Mad Wonders of the World is an informal list kept by the British Museum. Castle Heterodyne was indeed on it for at least two centuries (One must remember that neither the penchant for odd creations nor the British Museum are new institutions).

In addition to Castle Heterodyne, there are listed the Storm King’s Muses, the Awful Tower in Paris, the London Dome, Mr. Tock of Beetleburg, the Secret Library, and a semi-open spot which was whimsically referred to as the “Impossibility of the Day.” Since its fall into ruin, Castle Heterodyne’s spot on the list had been usurped by Castle Wulfenbach.

⁸ Professor Mordechai Donowitz, PhD. Tampering Within God’s Domain and Chair of the Department of the Non-Humanities. The father of Hezekiah Donowitz, whom Agatha met while aboard Castle Wulfenbach. See our earlier textbook; Agatha H. and the Airship City.

⁹ The Heterodyne Boys traveled the world righting wrongs and fighting evil. Once they disappeared, publishers realized that people still wanted to hear about their adventures, and The Heterodyne Library of Spark Snapping Adventure was born. These books purported to chronicle the actual adventures of the boys, but as your humble professors are well aware, and do our best to avoid, it is the rare recitation of facts that suffers from the injection of blood and thunder, egregious villainy, and spicy romance. Thus, after a few volumes, the facts of the Heterodynes’ lives became more and more unimportant, while the books themselves became more and more exciting.

CHAPTER 2