The 2nd Girl Genius Thread

[Alyeska]

Umm. Well, thats one way to move the plot out of Mechanicsburg and shake things up...

[LaCroix]

A bit cheap, if you ask me, but meh... I've seen worse from comics I had to pay for...

[LadyTevar]

At least Zetha and Higgs are also out and free

[Enigma]

So, it was a "time" bomb?

[Dass.Kapital]

[LadyTevar]

So, it was a "time" bomb?

Think about it. The portal was supposed to be Instant Travel. Assuming the bomb that went off either stops or slows time, it would cause the Instant Travel to stretch, similar to that StarGate episode with the BlackHole effected time/space. The stretching of time is why the portal device burnt up when they exited, Time snapped back in a rush.

Come to think of it, a StarGate might be the best comparison for that portal.

[Hawkwings]

And thus Agatha discovers how to use the portals for time travel, refines it, and we get the time windows that we saw way back in the beginning of the story.

[Dass.Kapital]

Well...there is also that...um...glowy ball thing she hooked the rapiers up to.

It was 'blinking' them in some weird way. Though Agatha and Gil didn't notice the effect from inside the field.

Still....We have yet to see Agatha take control of the pale ladies and their spiders yet.

[LadyTevar]

The Geisterdamen have been waiting two years for their mistress to tell them to make their move. Agatha/Lucretia was supposed to meet up with them, iirc. Princess Aneka/Lucretia was to hold Stormhaven. Didn't work that way, and Krause took the hard way to escape the Princess's influence.

I am certain "The Baron" is Gil, and his pogrom against the Knights was payback for Mechansburg (and Agatha his 'lost love'). What influence Aneka has is unknown, but Gil did have something done to him by his father.

BTW: We did have a foreshadow of this WAAAAY WAAAAY Back; The Opera Revival about the StormKing & Heterodyne Princess. Just before Intermission, the Heterodyne Girl was stolen away by the StormKing's Rival, and the comic discussing this ended there. The connection at the time was Tarvek & Gil fighting over Agatha. Tweedle came out of left field, but it fits the Opera.

[Simon_Jester]

It seems awfully arbitrary, though- kind of a copout, in that Agatha's basically been reset to nothing (depending on how much damage has been done to Castle Heterodyne and Mechanicsburg by whatever the hell happened). We spent YEARS of real time just covering her attempts to repair the place, about a year more on her trying to save her paramours, and a year or two after THAT covering the battle against the Baron's forces.

And now the consequences of that are damped out by her enemies having had years of in-story time to paper it over.

[LadyTevar]

That's a good point, Simon. She did just get drastically De-Powered and once again in the role of "Everyone out to kill me" and "i have only the weapons on me"

[TimothyC]

Everyone wanting to kill her makes even more sense now. We know that at some point she uses the timewindows - We've seen them before (and it explains why Gill has the weird outfit in them), so if she's able to use them to go back in time to when she got thrown forward, from the perspective of most people she is likely to have never left Mechanicsburg. The people that want her dead right now don't see the Agatha that had just taken back her town, they see the Agatha that has defended her town for two and a half years.

Or I could be totally wrong.

[Marko Dash]

so has time stopped in mechanicsburg, or are we a lot closer now to the end of the castle's 3 year powerup?

[Dass.Kapital]

OKay..am now betting that 'Xerxsephina' is actually the real identity of 'Pinky'.

Now we get to see what a few years has done for her figure/outlook/demeanor/wardrobe.

[FaxModem1]

I'm going to be honest, I'm not really feeling a connection to Girl Genius anymore. They basically made the entire Castle Heterodyne plotline pointless, which is a really bad thing to do after spending years and probably a fourth of the comic on it. Now the comic just seems tacky and disjointed to me.

[Dass.Kapital]

Oh dear...has poor Pinky been quietly written off?

[LadyTevar]

Indeed. It makes me wonder if Pinky survived the destruction of the hospital.

[Enigma]

Gil is alive but there is no empire?

[Alyeska]

Well, if Lucrezia is loose in two different bodies and Mechanicsburg is frozen, interesting things can change.

[LadyTevar]

I'm betting The Other returned with a vengence

[LaCroix]

Whenever Agatha does her thing and bystanders get bulging eyes, I can't help but getting giddy about what is to come...

[LadyTevar]

Whenever Agatha does her thing and bystanders get bulging eyes, I can't help but getting giddy about what is to come...

That looks less like and more like
I'm betting that whole speel about throwing out logic, nature, and all that results in mechanical horses or something.

[Enigma]

Whenever Agatha does her thing and bystanders get bulging eyes, I can't help but getting giddy about what is to come...

That looks less like and more like
I'm betting that whole speel about throwing out logic, nature, and all that results in mechanical horses or something.

More like she manages to get one of the mech's legs to work. Picture all three in the mech's re-purposed leg as it hops its way to Mechanicsburg.

[Alyeska]

So, who all is outside of Mechanicsburg? We know Zeetha and Higgs are. Agatha, Violetta and Krosp. So is Gil. Whats his name, the Brit. He should still be around. That one female Jegar could be outside.

But just like the circus and Mechanicsburg story arcs, we are undoubtedly going to get some new characters. Maybe some old as well.

Oh, Punch and Judy. Its been two years.

[Zixinus]

I think that the portal-thing's time-skip is meant to help with storytelling.

I doubt that Foglio spent literately years showing up Mechanicsburg and how Agatha saved it only to throw it out of the window. On the contrary, this time-forward thing may actually be a move to increase the pace of the story and allow Agatha to be not "trapped" in Mechanicsburg.

Think about it. The battle at Sturmhalten and Mechanicsburg were events that cracked the Wulfenbach empire and had far-reaching effects on the balance of power in Europe. Wulfenbach's power, which relies on others perception of its strength (and Baron senior), has cracked and there were rebellions underway already during the battle. Even if people believe that Wulfenbach forces somehow did win at Mechanicsburg the Empire did lose a lot of forces and most importantly, Klaus himself. Gil takes over, but he is still filling his father's chair rather suddenly, not to mention his own problems going in.
This radically changes the balance of power in Europe!

And the story wants to SHOW that! Agatha's action Mechanicsburg are extremely relevant and world-changing. However, how would this show in the story? If Tweedle didn't kidnap Agatha, she would have stayed in Mechanicsburg. Europe is just about to have a big wave of violent rebellion and war, the safest choice for her would have been to stay in Mechanicsburg where she is in control and safe. She would have to be a spectator of the war, all while trying to keep Mechanicsburg a safe heaven for herself.
The story would then have to gloss over all the events going around in Europe that would be quite involved, complicated and very boring.

The fighting would continue until after a point of equilibrium where most parties have run out of war resources and the will to fight. This would allow the most strong (economically and politically, not just militarily) players to sweep up the mess and dominate. The Other would definitely be such a force, waiting until most potential threats to her (mostly, powerful Sparks that could counter her technology) to have killed each other. Likely, she has manipulated several conflicts to happen just to make it easier for her to take over.
Gil and other forces would have been busy fighting her and her catspaws, trying to survive. Plus, likely other mayor players may also have appeared, further complicating the conflict.

But in story-telling terms, the above and probably a lot more are difficult to show well. It would be confusing, especially if they were explained as they happened.
Plus, Agatha and Mechanicsburg may become involved with the conflicts, exhausted their resources and likely would have come up short when the real enemy would come, the Other. It is still only a town after all, it needs farms to feed itself and resources to make and keep their machines.

With this time-skip however, most of these problems become easier: it is easier to explain a convoluted, Europe-wide war in hindsight. Agatha would have a fresh perspective on things and this could work to her advantage. It would also be easier to show and explain the effects of Mechanicsburg battle and how the geopolitics changed. Comparing "before" and "after" images is easier than watching it slowly transform from one to the other.

Plus if it was somehow trapped in time, Mechanicsburg would have avoided the devastation and resource-drain of being part of an Europe-wide war. The Castle would be ready and repaired, there would be still plenty of war-resources at hand and the population still loyal to Agatha (not to mention her friends and allies). It's sudden appearance would also have changed the new power balance.


I however have a personal theory: Mechanicsburg was not put in a time-trap. Instead, it was put into a pocket dimension of some kind. Wooster did say something about how they come out of nowhere. It would explain why the Black squad is regarded so highly and why Wooster would fear them: they can appear and disappear at will. This would be a powerful battlefield ability, especially if it baffles Sparks. The Black-level item that Klaus brought in may have been a far greater extension of that technology, one that may have been a last-resort device for the Spark that invented. Putting your town out of reach and inaccassible for your enemy is a good way to withstand an active siege.

Plus, it was shown somewhere that Mechanicsburg has amassed enough food for two years. We conveniently time-skipped forward two years. The black-level device likely interfered with the teleport Tweedle came through. Hence the time-skip.
Also, such a thing would be so weird that it may explain the way they talked about Mechanicsburg. It would be an interesting conversation subject, because it would be an oddity that no one could adequately explain.