“I KNOOOOOWW!”
The doctor picked himself up off the floor in time to find his arms full of a sobbing Agatha. “You’re only a little late,” he said comfortingly.
“My locket! Oh, Doctor, they stole my locket!” Quickly she filled him in on what had happened that morning. “It had the only pictures I have of my parents and it belonged to my mother and now it’s gone!”
Dr. Glassvitch looked surprised. “I didn’t know that. You never showed—”
Agatha interrupted. “My uncle gave it to me before he went away. He made me promise to never take it off and now it’s gone and he’ll be disappointed in me again and he’ll… he’ll never come back because I’m… I’m stupid and damaged!” To Glassvitch’s horror, she slid to her knees and began to sob even louder. “Why? Why can’t I do anything right? What’s wrong with meeeee?”
“Agatha! Mon Dieu!” Agatha only sobbed louder. Glassvitch’s specialty was chemical engineering, which minimized his experience with hysterically sobbing young ladies. Up until now, that had seemed like a perk, but now he realized he had no idea what to do. He cast about desperately and his eye fell upon a bulge in Agatha’s greatcoat pocket. “Agatha!” He gently shook her shoulder. “Show me your latest machine!”
Agatha’s cries stopped as if a switch had been thrown. She blinked up at Glassvitch through her tears. “My machine?”
“Oui!” Glassvitch patted her pocket. “Your petite clank? Does it work?”
Agatha got to her feet and smoothed down her skirt. “I… I don’t know.” She pulled the little device out of the pocket. It looked like an excessively large brass pocket watch. She wound the stem at the top as she talked. “I… I wanted to show it to you before I showed it to the Master.”
Glassvitch nodded encouragingly. “Ah. Good idea. We don’t want to waste his time, eh? Let’s see it.”
“All right.” Agatha smiled nervously at him and placed the device on a lab bench. Her index finger hovered for an instant, and then pushed down the stem with a sudden click. Immediately, the sound of gears grinding emanated from within. The device shuddered and a small dome on the face snapped up, revealing a crude eye that jerkily surveyed its surroundings. With a lurch, a pair of legs unfolded from the bottom and it shakily stood, then took an uncertain step forward. Suddenly, the ticking of the gears ended with a Poink! A horrible grinding rattle came from the little device and it began to shake uncontrollably. Its single eye rolled up out of sight, the body twisted violently and exploded in a shower of tiny gears and springs that sent half of the body casing shooting past a startled Agatha and Glassvitch and out through a window pane. The remaining small bits showered down throughout the room.
Agatha looked at her shoes and whispered, “Sorry. I… I was so sure…”
Glassvitch shrugged and patted her shoulder. “Well, at least this one actually moved before it blew up. That is improvement, no?”
Agatha looked up at him in surprise. She opened her mouth—
“I should have guessed.”
The two flinched and turned. At the door stood the Tyrant’s second in command, Dr. Silas Merlot. A small, thin, elderly man who owed his current position not to the Spark, but to procedural brilliance and a dogged perseverance in his work. He was rubbing his head and clutching the piece of Agatha’s device that had shot out the window. Agatha groaned mentally. Dr. Merlot hardly needed this additional excuse to cause her trouble.
Dr. Glassvitch smiled. He was one of the few friends the cranky scientist had, and often interceded on Agatha’s behalf. “Good Morning, Dr.—”
Merlot interrupted him. “I don’t know why you encourage her, Glassvitch, we have enough problems today.”
“Problems?”
“Baron Wulfenbach is here.”
The smile drained from Glassvitch’s face. “WHAT? He’s early! Weeks early! We’re not ready!”
“He’s with the Master, if you’d care to complain.”
“No! I meant… What do we do?”
“We’ve got to remove all traces of the Master’s project from the secondary labs. Miss Clay, get this lab cleaned up. You’ve got half an hour.”
Agatha started and looked wildly around the lab. It was a rat’s nest of equipment and papers strewn about the room. The Master always demanded that it remain untouched during an ongoing project. “Cleaned up? By myself? In half an hour? This room is a disaster area!”
Merlot narrowed his eyes. “Don’t be impertinent with me, Miss Clay. The Master may derive some twisted amusement from your pathetic antics, but if this lab is anything less than spotless, you’ll see how patient Baron Wulfenbach is with incompetents. Now move!”
As the two scientists hurried to the secondary lab, Glassvitch frowned. “Silas… there’s no need to frighten the girl—”
Merlot cut him off. “Listen. The Master’s little pet may actually prove useful for once. With her crashing around, perhaps the Baron will not look too closely at the rest of us, understand?” Glassvitch frowned, but after a moment, reluctantly nodded.
Meanwhile a stunned Agatha surveyed the mountains of equipment. “Half an hour?” she whispered to herself. “How can I possibly—” Her eye was caught by a storage closet. Her jaw firmed, she nodded to herself and rolled up her sleeves.
Twenty-nine minutes later, Merlot and Glassvitch were striding back to the lab, muttering to each other.
“Have we forgotten anything?”
“Ssh. Hugo, we have done the best we can. This whole project was a mistake just waiting to destroy everything we’ve—”
They turned the final corner and stopped dead in their tracks. Before them was the main lab. Every surface was cleared. Every shelf was tidy. The floor was swept and the instruments had been neatly laid out in geometrically perfect rows. In the exact center of the room, a deeply breathing Agatha stood with her hands clasped behind her back.
Dr. Merlot blinked, opened his mouth once or twice and in a dazed voice said, “Well…” It almost choked him to say it. “Well done, Miss Clay.” And, because he was an honest man, “I’m… impressed.”
Dr. Glassvitch nonchalantly slid his hands into his pockets and rocked back on his heels with an enormous grin lighting up his face. “Not quite so incompetent after all, hm?”
Agatha smiled demurely, “Thank you, doctors.”
Suddenly the main door slammed open and a harsh voice commanded, “No von move! Dis is you only varning!”
The hairy face of a Jägermonster quickly surveyed them and as quickly dismissed them, although his weapon never left them. He made a quick motion with his free hand and, with a crash and a hiss, two large Wulfenbach trooper clanks lumbered into the room. The tops of their shakos barely cleared the doorway and their gigantic machine cannons never stopped moving. Agatha saw at once that everything she’d heard about them was correct.
Unlike the Clockwork Army, these clanks moved as smoothly as animals. You knew these machines were dangerous.
Behind them came a group of four people. At the center was Baron Klaus Wulfenbach, the man who currently controlled a significant part of Europe. He loomed above the rest of the group, and his movements were those of a jungle cat kept in check. No one knew how old he truly was, the only sign of age was the silver color of his hair. Klaus had been an adventurer in his youth, and indeed had traveled with the Heterodyne Boys. It was known that Klaus and Bill Heterodyne had both vied for the favors of the beautiful but villainous Lucrezia Mongfish, with Klaus finally losing out to his more heroic rival, who had managed to win her over to the side of the angels when he took her as his bride.