OUT OF CHARACTER INFORMATION
Player Name: Inkwell
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misterporcelain
Age: 20
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wulfenbachmanpain
Characters Played: None yet!
IN CHARACTER INFORMATION
Name: Klaus Wulfenbach
Canon: Girl Genius
OU/AU/OC: Mayfield AU
Canon Point: Right after capturing Gil on Castle Wulfenbach and ordering him to be confined / After Disciple is moved into his house in Mayfield
History: Canon history here! Girl Genius is a pretty long and involved comic so if you need any clarification please feel free to ask.
Klaus was in Mayfield for two years, so bear with me if this gets long.
The first time Klaus woke up in Mayfield, he'd just been forcibly knocked unconscious by his doctor while trying to break out of the hospital in a battle clank. He arrived during the Maipole event, a time when the usually idyllic 50s town became for a week a Soviet Russian slum. He was forced to farm beets and, to make matters worse, his Spark was entirely gone. This wouldn't have been too bad if it were like a normal power, but the Spark is an intrinsic part of a Spark's mind, something they need to function properly, and so he was assaulted with constant headaches whenever he tried to get anything done. In addition, Maipole was a brutal place where selling out one's fellows to the police was encouraged and children were shot in the street. Klaus's introduction to Mayfield included attempting to save the life of a girl who'd had her arms ripped off using nothing but vodka and a hot knife to cauterize the wounds. Though quite used to bloodshed and dangerous places, this introduction left a huge mark on him and colored his early interactions with the town.
Klaus had always been a person who was used to being able to confront problems by having the largest gun or the most to bargain with, and barring that, having the power to think up new and inventive ways to make a larger gun. By removing his Spark and all of his power, reducing him to a suburban husband (complete with fake assigned family), Mayfield effectively removed all of his usual courses of action for dealing with a problem. The idea of being unable to really do anything to change his situation was completely foreign and very unpleasant, and for a while, he railed against it.
Soon, however, his priorities began to shift. He met people in Mayfield he formed connections with, something he'd never allowed himself to do before as a political leader but all he really had left in this place. His assigned daughter, Chrome, was one of the first people he truly began to care for, to the point that he kicked down a door to get to her when she 'regained' the loss of her organs and was dying because of it. Having always been a person used to protecting those who needed it, even if from afar, he found a new purpose in protecting people in Mayfield. Eventually Chrome left the house to be replaced by Hiccup Horrendous Haddock III, one of the people who would shape Klaus's personality more than anyone else.
Another one of those people was Ples Tibenoch. Klaus gravitated toward him instantly given his scientific leanings, and at one point helped him with his clockwork and blood/oil integration (mostly by knocking him out, strapping him to a table, and sticking tubes in him. Consensually, but still). During the Valentines event of 2011, the two of them were mentally manipulated by the town to remember a past romance they hadn't actually had, and though they both figured out the memories were fake at the event's end the romance stayed on. It was a very quiet non-affair, really, mostly consisting of talks over tea and worrying about each other, but it gave Klaus's life in Mayfield a bizarre sense of normalcy.
Around this time, Lucrezia arrived, assigned as Klaus's fake 'wife'. This went about as well as you'd expect: though Klaus by this point had phase 1 and 2 of his Spark back and she was entirely Sparkless, he was still intensely wary of her. This turned out to be a legitimate reaction, because as soon as she was given a chance to get back her Command Voice, she infected him with a slaver wasp (a mind control device of her own design) and forced him to torture and kill Hiccup to test her control over him. This was the turning point in Klaus's stay in Mayfield: when it became less about fighting the town and almost entirely about keeping his ragtag group of friends safe. It was also when his relationship with Hiccup solidified into that of surrogate father and son: the next day, Hiccup had respawned and escaped to his forge, where he was offering to make weapons for anyone who wanted them (there was an event going on at the time that pitted players who had taken a deal with the town against those who hadn't), and Lucrezia ordered Klaus to kill him again. Instead, Klaus asked Hiccup to shoot him. He did.
A little after this, Klaus, Lucrezia and Hiccup had a talk about what had happened and, amazingly, Hiccup advocated for a truce in the household. Amazingly, Lucrezia agreed (Hiccup reminded her of her own murdered son, and lacking her Spark for so long had rendered her mellower and far less genocidal), and the three entered a sort of tenuous quiet period.
That is, until the Spring Cleaning event of May 2011. Residents were given targets and told to murder them for prizes or be punished. Though suspicious, Klaus decided to participate. His theory was that Mayfield was a huge experiment designed to test various types of mental and physical trauma, and that this event was designed specifically to incite guilt and emotionally manipulate the subjects. His intention was to be an outlier, someone who participated willingly as a sort of 'counter-experiment'. This seemed like a great idea until he found that his target was Ples. With no other option, he invited the man to a duel in order to make the fight more fair. Ples's evil second personality fought the majority of the duel and Klaus, hesitating despite himself, was shot dead.
Some time after this, Gilgamesh Wulfenbach arrived in town. His relationship with Klaus, while initially strained, changed quickly once Gil realized how profoundly his father had changed. Having Hiccup in his life as a second chance at parenting properly had given Klaus new perspective on how he'd raised Gil, and he went out of his way to try and be a better father. Sadly, he disappeared soon after, as did Ples.
Klaus soon made new friends in Mayfield's Homestuck troll population. He had been working as a kindergarten teacher (a cruel joke derived from his assertion that ruling an empire was like teaching kindergarten) for some time, but around his one-year anniversary in Mayfield he was joined at that post by the Signless Sufferer, who he was quickly made friends with by whether he liked it or not. This by extension included him in the troll rebel group, where he made friends with the Disciple and had troll romance explained to him (apparently, he and Lucrezia were fated kismesis and it was ~sooo romantic~).
Lucrezia was still around, after all. She and Klaus had kept their truce going and Lucrezia, without her Spark, continued to be non-threatening and even strangely friendly. Her time in Mayfield had changed her as much as it had changed Klaus, and the two fell into less of a hatred and more of a friendly rivalry like they'd had when they were much younger. This continued right up until Lucrezia disappeared. It should be noted that if she'd stuck around, she would have regained her Spark and immediately begged him to remove it to keep her sane and safe and happy like she'd been before the Other War, a testament to the strength of their strange relationship at that point.
For a while, things were fairly quiet for Klaus, save for some more low-key events like being switched into Lucrezia's body for a day or being swapped in species to a troll for a similar length of time.
And then shit got real. In late April 2012, Klaus was canon updated to a point several days past where he was taken previously. Where previously he had entertained thoughts of leaving Mayfield and perhaps working to save his world and carefully tended empire from the canon Lucrezia's influence, he came back from his update enraged and despairing over his perceived failure. Lucrezia had won. She had control over him and through him, his empire and more importantly, his son. His hatred of the Lucrezia from his own timed warred with his much more confused and painful feelings for the Lucrezia he knew in Mayfield: he attempted to talk with her about what he'd seen and the talk went poorly. He entered a horrible Spark rage that he wasn't snapped out of until the Signless approached him and attempted to stop him via the usual troll methods of papping and shooshing. Klaus threw him twenty feet into a wall and then calmed down (after this point, Signless considered them romantically involved as moirails, something Klaus still didn't quite understand but also didn't argue with). Soon after, Lucrezia disappeared.
A second Gilgamesh showed up in Mayfield around this time; I say second because he had no memory of his previous time in the town. Klaus determined to re-build the relationship he'd started to have with the previous iteration of his son. Understandably due to his upbringing Gil was hesitant, but the two of them formed a strange sort of bond, with Gil even asking his father to help him build a prosthetic leg after he lost one of his in exchange for his Spark back from the town.
Signless was taken from the town around this point. Klaus comforted a grieving Disciple, and then awoke one day to find she'd been moved into his house. I'll be taking him from then, mid-august 2012.
Personality:Despite being a relatively off-screen character for much of the canon (which, to be fair, is over ten years in the making and thus has a LOT of screen-time to be divvied up), Klaus manages to be one of the most emotionally complex of the characters and is very much on the level of the main leads in that regard.
Klaus is a leader to the core. As a Spark, this is understandable: he has the natural charisma and need to be in charge that all Sparks do. However, he has manifested this in much more than just squabbles with neighboring Sparks, which is what I believe qualifies him as a true leader. He managed to take control of an entire country in a mere span of years and keep that control since, despite waning popularity as the decisions he had to make became increasingly difficult. And still, those Sparks and Nobles he absorbs, as well as their troops and followers, generally side with him once beaten and become loyal to him, adding to his unstoppable force. He is gifted in the realm of politics and is able to foresee the outcomes of any action he may take in regards to the country as a whole, rather than just how it will affect him. However, his 'politics' often takes the form of being the man with the largest gun or the most to bargain with. He believes in heading off conflicts before they even have a chance to occur, rather than waiting for things to get to a point where he absolutely has to step in; in effect, he espouses a policy of zero tolerance. For instance, he keeps the children of the Fifty Families (the often-Sparkless nobility that he oversees) on his airship castle to ensure that not only are they educated properly and taught how to use their Spark, if they have one, but to also keep their parents on a tight leash. It may seem like extreme measures, but in a country still war-torn, fearful, and often at war with itself, it is a very necessary precaution, and thus-far it has worked very well for him.
He does not, however, enjoy being the Tyrant of Europa. He enforced order because someone had to, and he knew he was the only one who could manage it and maintain it. This perhaps reveals a bit of arrogance -- Klaus feels that most of the people around him, with the exception of the other strong Sparks he associates with, are fools who would be lost without someone to guide them. He is not exempt from the general Spark stereotypes, after all, though he generally seems to be unaffected his Madness in the way that many Sparks are. He has likely learned to control it in order to present a more civilized and 'together' picture to the nobles he so desperately needs the approval, or at least grudging respect, of. After all, he is not technically allowed to be ruling at all: he is a contstruct, and the laws of the Families say that a construct cannot rule.
Klaus did it anyway. This is a habit of his, really: He very often disregards rules simply because he knows there is no one that will truly oppose him. When a young noble dies under his care, he orders her to be ressurected despite the fact that her family would most likely be very much against it, stating that it is her choice and if she is displeased with the decision she can take it up with him. He cares very little for what the stuffed shirts think, especially because most of their useless rules and regulations are what cause the wars in the first place. Hence, not bothering to negotiate about them and instead merely ignoring them and effectively saying 'what are you going to do about it?'
He would much rather be left alone to his research instead of quibbling over laws. Klaus, like most Sparks, is a scientist. His particular strength as a Spark is analysis: he can recognize patterns that many others would not see, and can often recognize the 'styles' that run in Spark families. This is how he realized that Lucrezia was the Other: the works of the Other bore very striking similiaries to her inventions. He also was able to combat Agatha properly because she used many of the principles that her father did, and Klaus, as Bill's closest friend, was able to accurately predict based on experience what she was likely to do. Like all scientists, he also has a chosen area of study: his particular interest is the Spark itself. This is one of the reasons that he keeps so many Spark children on his castle: observing them as they grow and Break Through into their abilities has led to some of his most interesting findings on the nature of the Spark. And then, of course, there's all the brains he's cored, destroying them bit by bit until the Spark is no longer present in order to discover what causes it in the first place. This often leaves the subjects a gibbering mess, or a half-memoriless vegetable, but hey -- it's for SCIENCE.
It is hard to say where Klaus falls on the scale of morality and 'good vs. bad'. He believes that he is acting in the way that is best for the country, and that he is justified in his actions because they are for the greater good. That is his justification for the brain-coring: he must study the Spark in order to understand it, to be able to test for it and then disable it in those too unstable to handle it, thus reducing the number of Spark-caused wars or massacres. He has killed countless people on the path to where he is, both politically and scientifically, and is an iron-fisted tyrant who will not tolerate those who attempt to get in his way (and believe me, there are many of them. During his stay in the Great Hospital, during which time he was incapacitated, he had several assassination attempts per day.)
Despite all of this, Klaus does have a softer side, hard as it is to imagine when he's coming after you with a six-foot sword. In fact, Lucrezia states that he used to have an 'annoying soft-hearted romantic streak'; this is now very much hidden, but it does sometimes manifest. Generally this happens in the company of his son Gilgamesh, of whom he is extremely protective and fond (good luck getting him to show it, though -- at one point he awkwardly ruffles Gil's hair and the young man is so dumbstruck by this that he's speechless, pointing to the rarity of such a display of affection). Gil is one of Klaus's top priorities -- when trying to escape from the Great Hospital, the very first reason he gives for his desperate need to leave, even before saving the country or stopping Lucrezia, is that he needs to save his son. This also tends to extend to most children, especially younger ones. For instance, when a young boy is caught in his Dangerous Equpiment lab trying to see a Slaver Engine (a machine that manufactures slaver wasps) and gives him an excuse about having heard a story about a dragon from mars that shot slaver wasps and wanting to see what could do that, he doesn't have the boy punished. Instead, he invites him to stay behind and help clean -- on the condition that the boy tells him said story while they work.
His time in Mayfield mellowed Klaus considerably. Forced into a place where his title meant nothing and where he was in effect powerless even after his Spark had been returned to him taught him that not everything can be fixed by force and that interpersonal relationships are perhaps more valuable than he'd previously allowed himself to admit. In a way, Mayfield broke him: two years of being constantly hurt, of constantly losing people, of constantly having it enforced that he was at the mercy of someone he could not touch or combat, beat the fight out of him and reduced him to living day by day. He's tired, to put it simply, and relies far more strongly on interpersonal support networks than he did in canon when he was in charge and didn't need the emotional support as much, or at least could afford not to have it. He plans much more for the short term now instead of for the long term, because he has so much less control over his environment and those he loves may be taken from him at a moment's notice.
He also has a new and strange view on death. Though ressurection is possible in Girl Genius canon and it's highly implied Klaus has already died and been ressurected once, in Mayfield he died more times than he can even really remember (shot in the head several times, axed to pieces, literally fell apart due to radiation poisoning and reduced to a pile of hamburger meat in an event where all previous deaths and injuries came back at once are some of the more notable ones). In Girl Genius, ressurection is very risky and even if it works the mind may be permanently damaged and ressurection could result in a brainless vegetable or a bloodthirsty monster. In Mayfield, ressurection took only about a day and had really no long-lasting effects, and so death became nothing more than a slap on the wrist, effectively. Klaus thus has less fear of death, viewing it more as an annoyance and a personal failure than as something to be feared and avoided at all costs as a permanent thing. He's more willing than ever to take stupid risks (even more than in canon) because the worst that can happen is he might be out of comission for a day or so. Also, by the point in canon I'm taking him from, he's expressed through a coded message that he wishes to be killed, likely to prevent Lucrezia using him to take down the empire.
His views on people he knows from canon are also different, most notably his feelings about Lucrezia. Instead of blind hatred, his feelings for her a big painful mess that he really doesn't like to think about. He really desperately wants to go back to the happy times he and she and the Heterodyne Boys had when they were younger, especially now that he knows she's capable of her old personality when not Mad, but he also knows he can't allow himself to get caught up in romantic notions of the past and ignore the horrible things she does in the present. In addition, he's more aware of how his chosen parenting style ruined his relationship with his son. Even though that was his intention, to sever his relationship with Gil so that Gil could run the Empire without needing his hand held in case Klaus was killed, he feels much more remorse over their stunted relationship and has begun to prioritize rebuilding that emotional bond over shaping Gil into the perfect leader (another example of prioritizing the short term over the long term). From the short time there was an Agatha in Mayfield he learned that she was not, in fact, a monster like her mother, and began to see her as more of her own person and a good person at that.
There were also a few denizens of Mayfield that made a great impact on him. Though not mentioned in his history due to space constraints, Garviel Loken had a particularly big impact on Klaus's views on morality. As a Space Marine, Garviel operated on a very strict code on honor and morals that Klaus always found to be fundamentally flawed and especially resented having projected onto him by his well-meaning friend. It doesn't help that quite a few of the times Garviel warned him against doing something while citing this code, he turned out to have been right (Garviel was one of the people that warned Klaus away from conducting his 'counter-experiment' during the Spring Cleaning event). Though Klaus still tends toward making snap judgements and then trusting them above anyone else's advice, Garviel is one of the main reasons he often consciously reminds himself to stop and listen to what his friends are telling him. Though he's still morally gray as ever and this likely won't change, he does often look at a situation from the point of view Garviel might take when thinking about what he ought to do.
Strengths: Though he won't have the Spark as a pony in the way it manifests as a human (since it'll become magic), it's worth mentioning. The Spark, also referred to as the Madness, is a hyperfocus state with three phases that a Spark enters in which their mind kicks into a different sort of gear. They make connections more quickly and can put together truly amazing inventions and ideas very fast, at the expense of that same hyperfocus, loss of judgment, increased excitement or aggression (depending on what's causing the Sparking) and mania. The best way I've found to explain it as that when a Spark is in the Madness Place they can see and understand the world around them on a much deeper and broader level, and thus make connections and see solutions humans without the Spark couldn't. The deeper into the Spark they get, the deeper and wider this understanding of the world gets. Phase one is the sort of transition phase; you start at base one and ramp all the way up into two, which is regular Sparking, then all the way up through two and to three, which is extreme Madness and almost always a state entered through anger (think of it like a berserker rage mode). No one knows what comes after three because most Sparks get themselves killed at that point, either by their own folly or because they're endangering others.
Klaus doesn't display this mania and loss of judgment like other Sparks do when he's Sparking at normal levels, likely because he's mature and has had at least thirty years with his Madness to learn to control it to his liking. However, this means when he does go Mad, he goes very, very mad (he had to have a house dropped on him to break him out of his third phase murderous rage in canon). If it's alright, I'd like him to display this same general shift in temperament when using his magic, taking into account the 50% rule (even though the Spark isn't technically a supernatural power so much as an actual physical miswiring of the brain; it's strong enough I'm counting it). Since Spark has three phases, he'll only ever display symptoms associated with a low two, which is about his normal level anyway.
He's also seen a ton of shit in his lifetime. There's very little that surprises him anymore and because his main specialty is analysis and synthesis it's very easy for him to apply previous situations he's been in to new ones he's encountering.
Physically, he's exceptionally strong. He's seven feet tall and made of muscle, likely reinforced due to his status as a construct. He's able to throw another man through a wall and punch his way through solid metal even when not at his full capacity of health. He's an excellent fighter, both on the field in melee and directing the combat from the sidelines through strategy: there's a reason no uprising has ever been able to get past him in twenty years.
Weaknesses: Klaus can justify just about anything, and he'll often resort to talking his way into being in the right instead of owning up to his mistakes. He's very stubborn once he's decided he knows what's the best course of action and it's very difficult to talk him down, though since his time in Mayfield he's gotten much better about this and usually will listen to people he knows and trusts.
He tends to make stupid snap decisions or put himself in danger in order to help others, and he doesn't value his own health and safety really at all (when he's so injured that he can't move besides small finger movements he still nearly burns down the hospital trying to escape just so he can get back to the empire and the people he believes it's his duty to keep safe, and of course this tendency only got worse in Mayfield where death meant very little). He often thinks he can take more than he can, and though he can take quite a lot, it's still a dangerous mentality to have.
Though Mayfield helped with this some, he still does in general have problems with interpersonal relationships (understandable for a man whose friends in his younger years all went missing or were killed or turned into genocidal maniacs). It takes him a long time to warm up to a person and even then he may not really be the best at interacting with them in a normal and relaxed way. Either he comes across as overbearing and frightening or distant and uncaring; he's bad at giving interpersonal cues that would suggest otherwise. Even his relationship with Ples, who he cared for very much and was very close to, was marked with a lot of fumbling and awkwardness on his part, and it took him months to approach anything close to passably 'fatherly' with Hiccup even after their relationship had reached that level of closeness. A lot of this can be blamed on the setting but some of it is undeniably Klaus's fault.
Physically, he has very few weaknesses. He's a big target, certainly, but he's been shown to be dextrous and light on his feet, so he's no slow lumbering giant. He is a construct held together by stitching, though, and his body likely needs maintenance to keep it in tip-top shape. In addition, given his tendency to get himself in dangerous situations, it's likely that any given time he'll be recovering from some injury or another.
Pony/Animal Type: Alicorn (if that's not acceptable to the mods, he'll be a unicorn).
I have several reasons for this. The most obvious is that he's both very strongly associated with the mind and his world's equivalent of magic (the Spark; he is an exceptionally strong one and has demonstrated that he is on the cutting edge of current technology and ability), and with the air (the capitol of his empire and his base of operations is a kilometer-long airship of his own design which never lands, and if he didn't need to go there for political reasons or to fight battles he likely wouldn't have set foot on solid ground in years. Also, his sigil is winged, likely indicating ascension in rank or political favor).
Not only does he rule arguably the largest empire in the known world, but he is a living legend that almost everyone knows something about. There are books and plays written about him, and even if not all of them are flattering given that he's a political figure, he is still acknowledged as one of the most influential heroes and strongest Sparks of his time by basically everyone. Everyone will admit even if grudgingly that he brought stability and safety to a world that had nearly been completely destroyed. He's wise and exceptionally fair (which gets him negative attention when he simply cannot please everyone) and rules his empire as best he can, building roads and schools and ensuring that the next generation of Sparks is well-trained to handle their gift if he can manage it. His methods may be unorthodox but they're what's best for the country and that is his main concern.
Slightly less deep reasons: he's goddamn huge (canonically seven feet tall) like an alicorn and, as a baron, has noble blood.
Cutie Mark: The Wulfenbach sigil, specifically the tower portion (see the Pony Picture; or this elegant and finely crafted link if you imagine it sans wings). This represents power as well as protection.
Pony Picture: Here! I have a wingless version if you don't allow alicorn status.
SAMPLES
First Person [Text]:
An open inquiry, to whomever may be able to help:
I want someone to explain, clearly and concisely, what magic is and how it works. I've been to your library and the books on magical theory are lacking any clear biological basis. Lists of spells are informative, but not in the way I would like.
What is it about unicorns and our horns in particular that allows us to perform magic with greater scope and efficiency? Does the horn act as a conducting rod for a specific type of energy or element not present in other places across the multiverse? If so, has this energy been studied or isolated in any way? You would think a world built on the use of it would have a greater understanding of the underlying scientific principles.
As we all know, magic is merely science that has not been studied closely enough yet to be comprehensible to all people regardless of intelligence. Thus, I propose the formation of a group dedicated to better understanding 'magic' not as a force which needs no explanation and is simply used with no thought for how it works but as a phenomena with a perfectly reasonable and presumably discoverable explanation grounded on facts. Any and all interested, please respond promptly.
[The scroll is written in clear, concise penmanship, black ink. The signature at the bottom reads 'Baron Klaus Wulfenbach, Tyrant of Europa'.]
Third Person:
Klaus didn't think he'd ever quite be comfortable in Ponyville. It was no Mayfield, certainly, and a small part of him knew he ought to be grateful, but two years of conditioning were hard to unlearn. The native ponies reminded him far too forcefully of the Mayfield drones: always cheery, always friendly, always just a little suspiciously oblivious. Perhaps it was just his cynicism but such a sudden explosion of non-native beings, most of which had not been ponies previously to their arrival and none of which knew exactly what they were doing in Equestria, should have elicited a far more guarded and cold response. When an alien with unknown origin and intention stepped into your front yard, you didn't greet him and invite him in for sugar cubes. It was common sense.
Their use of technology baffled him as well. For creatures without thumbs or indeed even separate fingers they were remarkably proficient at building everything from mundane furniture to complicated machinery. Those who had magic like himself he could perhaps forgive, but the rest of them had absolutely no excuse for defying logic so soundly. He'd fallen into a routine in Mayfield. He knew its rules and its exceptions and all the things he just had to accept. This place was another matter entirely and he still felt perfectly justified in feeling personally insulted by all the affronts to common sense he saw every single time he walked down the street.
Like, for instance, an electric blue earth pony trying to get what looked like a brightly-painted cannon to do more than sputter sadly. She had it pointed at a drab storefront for what looked like an art supply shop. This cannon-wielding was a sort of aggressive display he hadn't at all been expecting to see in this place, and it piqued his interest enough that he trotted over to investigate.
"Horsefeathers," the pony muttered to herself, hitting the side of the cannon with a hoof. It clunked sadly.
"Is there an issue?"
"Darn thing won't work! This is what you get for trying to paint your store the fast way, Bristle." She plonked herself down next to the cannon with a pout, ears dropping.
Klaus regarded the cannon critically. Nevermind that the idea of painting something with any degree of accuracy with it was absurd (perhaps absurd enough to work? He'd seen situations like that before), but there were clearly fundamental issues in the design. He picked the machine apart in his mind's eye, trotting around it in a circle a few times. Without him noticing, his horn had begun to glow white.
"I think I see your issue. One of the internal mechanisms is likely jammed. This device is too compact for the required machinery to fit comfortably."
"What? Hey!"
He ignored her shout, pulling the cannon apart with his magic and regarding the parts critically. As he'd thought, a few gears had gotten jammed on each other and clogged the whole thing. A bit of careful rearranging and streamlining would fix that.
A few minutes later, the blue pony stared at the reassembled cannon.
"I've streamlined it and removed several unnecessary components. You had a whole superfluous gear system, and relying on a full palette instead of internal mixing of pigments was slowing down both firing time and color selection. It ought to work now."
He didn't stick around to see the result – he knew it would work – but the gasp of 'woah!' and the splat of paint on wood from behind him were enough. He still didn't trust the native ponies and he certainly didn't like their impossible technological innovations, but that didn't mean he wouldn't take the chance to tinker with them if he could. At least on a pure design level they made sense, which was comforting. From that day on every time he passed by the art supply shop Bristle the blue pony would wave to him, and every time he found himself minding less and less.
Player Name: Inkwell
Player Journal:
misterporcelainAge: 20
Contact: AIM: misterporcelain;
Characters Played: None yet!
IN CHARACTER INFORMATION
Name: Klaus Wulfenbach
Canon: Girl Genius
OU/AU/OC: Mayfield AU
Canon Point: Right after capturing Gil on Castle Wulfenbach and ordering him to be confined / After Disciple is moved into his house in Mayfield
History: Canon history here! Girl Genius is a pretty long and involved comic so if you need any clarification please feel free to ask.
Klaus was in Mayfield for two years, so bear with me if this gets long.
The first time Klaus woke up in Mayfield, he'd just been forcibly knocked unconscious by his doctor while trying to break out of the hospital in a battle clank. He arrived during the Maipole event, a time when the usually idyllic 50s town became for a week a Soviet Russian slum. He was forced to farm beets and, to make matters worse, his Spark was entirely gone. This wouldn't have been too bad if it were like a normal power, but the Spark is an intrinsic part of a Spark's mind, something they need to function properly, and so he was assaulted with constant headaches whenever he tried to get anything done. In addition, Maipole was a brutal place where selling out one's fellows to the police was encouraged and children were shot in the street. Klaus's introduction to Mayfield included attempting to save the life of a girl who'd had her arms ripped off using nothing but vodka and a hot knife to cauterize the wounds. Though quite used to bloodshed and dangerous places, this introduction left a huge mark on him and colored his early interactions with the town.
Klaus had always been a person who was used to being able to confront problems by having the largest gun or the most to bargain with, and barring that, having the power to think up new and inventive ways to make a larger gun. By removing his Spark and all of his power, reducing him to a suburban husband (complete with fake assigned family), Mayfield effectively removed all of his usual courses of action for dealing with a problem. The idea of being unable to really do anything to change his situation was completely foreign and very unpleasant, and for a while, he railed against it.
Soon, however, his priorities began to shift. He met people in Mayfield he formed connections with, something he'd never allowed himself to do before as a political leader but all he really had left in this place. His assigned daughter, Chrome, was one of the first people he truly began to care for, to the point that he kicked down a door to get to her when she 'regained' the loss of her organs and was dying because of it. Having always been a person used to protecting those who needed it, even if from afar, he found a new purpose in protecting people in Mayfield. Eventually Chrome left the house to be replaced by Hiccup Horrendous Haddock III, one of the people who would shape Klaus's personality more than anyone else.
Another one of those people was Ples Tibenoch. Klaus gravitated toward him instantly given his scientific leanings, and at one point helped him with his clockwork and blood/oil integration (mostly by knocking him out, strapping him to a table, and sticking tubes in him. Consensually, but still). During the Valentines event of 2011, the two of them were mentally manipulated by the town to remember a past romance they hadn't actually had, and though they both figured out the memories were fake at the event's end the romance stayed on. It was a very quiet non-affair, really, mostly consisting of talks over tea and worrying about each other, but it gave Klaus's life in Mayfield a bizarre sense of normalcy.
Around this time, Lucrezia arrived, assigned as Klaus's fake 'wife'. This went about as well as you'd expect: though Klaus by this point had phase 1 and 2 of his Spark back and she was entirely Sparkless, he was still intensely wary of her. This turned out to be a legitimate reaction, because as soon as she was given a chance to get back her Command Voice, she infected him with a slaver wasp (a mind control device of her own design) and forced him to torture and kill Hiccup to test her control over him. This was the turning point in Klaus's stay in Mayfield: when it became less about fighting the town and almost entirely about keeping his ragtag group of friends safe. It was also when his relationship with Hiccup solidified into that of surrogate father and son: the next day, Hiccup had respawned and escaped to his forge, where he was offering to make weapons for anyone who wanted them (there was an event going on at the time that pitted players who had taken a deal with the town against those who hadn't), and Lucrezia ordered Klaus to kill him again. Instead, Klaus asked Hiccup to shoot him. He did.
A little after this, Klaus, Lucrezia and Hiccup had a talk about what had happened and, amazingly, Hiccup advocated for a truce in the household. Amazingly, Lucrezia agreed (Hiccup reminded her of her own murdered son, and lacking her Spark for so long had rendered her mellower and far less genocidal), and the three entered a sort of tenuous quiet period.
That is, until the Spring Cleaning event of May 2011. Residents were given targets and told to murder them for prizes or be punished. Though suspicious, Klaus decided to participate. His theory was that Mayfield was a huge experiment designed to test various types of mental and physical trauma, and that this event was designed specifically to incite guilt and emotionally manipulate the subjects. His intention was to be an outlier, someone who participated willingly as a sort of 'counter-experiment'. This seemed like a great idea until he found that his target was Ples. With no other option, he invited the man to a duel in order to make the fight more fair. Ples's evil second personality fought the majority of the duel and Klaus, hesitating despite himself, was shot dead.
Some time after this, Gilgamesh Wulfenbach arrived in town. His relationship with Klaus, while initially strained, changed quickly once Gil realized how profoundly his father had changed. Having Hiccup in his life as a second chance at parenting properly had given Klaus new perspective on how he'd raised Gil, and he went out of his way to try and be a better father. Sadly, he disappeared soon after, as did Ples.
Klaus soon made new friends in Mayfield's Homestuck troll population. He had been working as a kindergarten teacher (a cruel joke derived from his assertion that ruling an empire was like teaching kindergarten) for some time, but around his one-year anniversary in Mayfield he was joined at that post by the Signless Sufferer, who he was quickly made friends with by whether he liked it or not. This by extension included him in the troll rebel group, where he made friends with the Disciple and had troll romance explained to him (apparently, he and Lucrezia were fated kismesis and it was ~sooo romantic~).
Lucrezia was still around, after all. She and Klaus had kept their truce going and Lucrezia, without her Spark, continued to be non-threatening and even strangely friendly. Her time in Mayfield had changed her as much as it had changed Klaus, and the two fell into less of a hatred and more of a friendly rivalry like they'd had when they were much younger. This continued right up until Lucrezia disappeared. It should be noted that if she'd stuck around, she would have regained her Spark and immediately begged him to remove it to keep her sane and safe and happy like she'd been before the Other War, a testament to the strength of their strange relationship at that point.
For a while, things were fairly quiet for Klaus, save for some more low-key events like being switched into Lucrezia's body for a day or being swapped in species to a troll for a similar length of time.
And then shit got real. In late April 2012, Klaus was canon updated to a point several days past where he was taken previously. Where previously he had entertained thoughts of leaving Mayfield and perhaps working to save his world and carefully tended empire from the canon Lucrezia's influence, he came back from his update enraged and despairing over his perceived failure. Lucrezia had won. She had control over him and through him, his empire and more importantly, his son. His hatred of the Lucrezia from his own timed warred with his much more confused and painful feelings for the Lucrezia he knew in Mayfield: he attempted to talk with her about what he'd seen and the talk went poorly. He entered a horrible Spark rage that he wasn't snapped out of until the Signless approached him and attempted to stop him via the usual troll methods of papping and shooshing. Klaus threw him twenty feet into a wall and then calmed down (after this point, Signless considered them romantically involved as moirails, something Klaus still didn't quite understand but also didn't argue with). Soon after, Lucrezia disappeared.
A second Gilgamesh showed up in Mayfield around this time; I say second because he had no memory of his previous time in the town. Klaus determined to re-build the relationship he'd started to have with the previous iteration of his son. Understandably due to his upbringing Gil was hesitant, but the two of them formed a strange sort of bond, with Gil even asking his father to help him build a prosthetic leg after he lost one of his in exchange for his Spark back from the town.
Signless was taken from the town around this point. Klaus comforted a grieving Disciple, and then awoke one day to find she'd been moved into his house. I'll be taking him from then, mid-august 2012.
Personality:Despite being a relatively off-screen character for much of the canon (which, to be fair, is over ten years in the making and thus has a LOT of screen-time to be divvied up), Klaus manages to be one of the most emotionally complex of the characters and is very much on the level of the main leads in that regard.
Klaus is a leader to the core. As a Spark, this is understandable: he has the natural charisma and need to be in charge that all Sparks do. However, he has manifested this in much more than just squabbles with neighboring Sparks, which is what I believe qualifies him as a true leader. He managed to take control of an entire country in a mere span of years and keep that control since, despite waning popularity as the decisions he had to make became increasingly difficult. And still, those Sparks and Nobles he absorbs, as well as their troops and followers, generally side with him once beaten and become loyal to him, adding to his unstoppable force. He is gifted in the realm of politics and is able to foresee the outcomes of any action he may take in regards to the country as a whole, rather than just how it will affect him. However, his 'politics' often takes the form of being the man with the largest gun or the most to bargain with. He believes in heading off conflicts before they even have a chance to occur, rather than waiting for things to get to a point where he absolutely has to step in; in effect, he espouses a policy of zero tolerance. For instance, he keeps the children of the Fifty Families (the often-Sparkless nobility that he oversees) on his airship castle to ensure that not only are they educated properly and taught how to use their Spark, if they have one, but to also keep their parents on a tight leash. It may seem like extreme measures, but in a country still war-torn, fearful, and often at war with itself, it is a very necessary precaution, and thus-far it has worked very well for him.
He does not, however, enjoy being the Tyrant of Europa. He enforced order because someone had to, and he knew he was the only one who could manage it and maintain it. This perhaps reveals a bit of arrogance -- Klaus feels that most of the people around him, with the exception of the other strong Sparks he associates with, are fools who would be lost without someone to guide them. He is not exempt from the general Spark stereotypes, after all, though he generally seems to be unaffected his Madness in the way that many Sparks are. He has likely learned to control it in order to present a more civilized and 'together' picture to the nobles he so desperately needs the approval, or at least grudging respect, of. After all, he is not technically allowed to be ruling at all: he is a contstruct, and the laws of the Families say that a construct cannot rule.
Klaus did it anyway. This is a habit of his, really: He very often disregards rules simply because he knows there is no one that will truly oppose him. When a young noble dies under his care, he orders her to be ressurected despite the fact that her family would most likely be very much against it, stating that it is her choice and if she is displeased with the decision she can take it up with him. He cares very little for what the stuffed shirts think, especially because most of their useless rules and regulations are what cause the wars in the first place. Hence, not bothering to negotiate about them and instead merely ignoring them and effectively saying 'what are you going to do about it?'
He would much rather be left alone to his research instead of quibbling over laws. Klaus, like most Sparks, is a scientist. His particular strength as a Spark is analysis: he can recognize patterns that many others would not see, and can often recognize the 'styles' that run in Spark families. This is how he realized that Lucrezia was the Other: the works of the Other bore very striking similiaries to her inventions. He also was able to combat Agatha properly because she used many of the principles that her father did, and Klaus, as Bill's closest friend, was able to accurately predict based on experience what she was likely to do. Like all scientists, he also has a chosen area of study: his particular interest is the Spark itself. This is one of the reasons that he keeps so many Spark children on his castle: observing them as they grow and Break Through into their abilities has led to some of his most interesting findings on the nature of the Spark. And then, of course, there's all the brains he's cored, destroying them bit by bit until the Spark is no longer present in order to discover what causes it in the first place. This often leaves the subjects a gibbering mess, or a half-memoriless vegetable, but hey -- it's for SCIENCE.
It is hard to say where Klaus falls on the scale of morality and 'good vs. bad'. He believes that he is acting in the way that is best for the country, and that he is justified in his actions because they are for the greater good. That is his justification for the brain-coring: he must study the Spark in order to understand it, to be able to test for it and then disable it in those too unstable to handle it, thus reducing the number of Spark-caused wars or massacres. He has killed countless people on the path to where he is, both politically and scientifically, and is an iron-fisted tyrant who will not tolerate those who attempt to get in his way (and believe me, there are many of them. During his stay in the Great Hospital, during which time he was incapacitated, he had several assassination attempts per day.)
Despite all of this, Klaus does have a softer side, hard as it is to imagine when he's coming after you with a six-foot sword. In fact, Lucrezia states that he used to have an 'annoying soft-hearted romantic streak'; this is now very much hidden, but it does sometimes manifest. Generally this happens in the company of his son Gilgamesh, of whom he is extremely protective and fond (good luck getting him to show it, though -- at one point he awkwardly ruffles Gil's hair and the young man is so dumbstruck by this that he's speechless, pointing to the rarity of such a display of affection). Gil is one of Klaus's top priorities -- when trying to escape from the Great Hospital, the very first reason he gives for his desperate need to leave, even before saving the country or stopping Lucrezia, is that he needs to save his son. This also tends to extend to most children, especially younger ones. For instance, when a young boy is caught in his Dangerous Equpiment lab trying to see a Slaver Engine (a machine that manufactures slaver wasps) and gives him an excuse about having heard a story about a dragon from mars that shot slaver wasps and wanting to see what could do that, he doesn't have the boy punished. Instead, he invites him to stay behind and help clean -- on the condition that the boy tells him said story while they work.
His time in Mayfield mellowed Klaus considerably. Forced into a place where his title meant nothing and where he was in effect powerless even after his Spark had been returned to him taught him that not everything can be fixed by force and that interpersonal relationships are perhaps more valuable than he'd previously allowed himself to admit. In a way, Mayfield broke him: two years of being constantly hurt, of constantly losing people, of constantly having it enforced that he was at the mercy of someone he could not touch or combat, beat the fight out of him and reduced him to living day by day. He's tired, to put it simply, and relies far more strongly on interpersonal support networks than he did in canon when he was in charge and didn't need the emotional support as much, or at least could afford not to have it. He plans much more for the short term now instead of for the long term, because he has so much less control over his environment and those he loves may be taken from him at a moment's notice.
He also has a new and strange view on death. Though ressurection is possible in Girl Genius canon and it's highly implied Klaus has already died and been ressurected once, in Mayfield he died more times than he can even really remember (shot in the head several times, axed to pieces, literally fell apart due to radiation poisoning and reduced to a pile of hamburger meat in an event where all previous deaths and injuries came back at once are some of the more notable ones). In Girl Genius, ressurection is very risky and even if it works the mind may be permanently damaged and ressurection could result in a brainless vegetable or a bloodthirsty monster. In Mayfield, ressurection took only about a day and had really no long-lasting effects, and so death became nothing more than a slap on the wrist, effectively. Klaus thus has less fear of death, viewing it more as an annoyance and a personal failure than as something to be feared and avoided at all costs as a permanent thing. He's more willing than ever to take stupid risks (even more than in canon) because the worst that can happen is he might be out of comission for a day or so. Also, by the point in canon I'm taking him from, he's expressed through a coded message that he wishes to be killed, likely to prevent Lucrezia using him to take down the empire.
His views on people he knows from canon are also different, most notably his feelings about Lucrezia. Instead of blind hatred, his feelings for her a big painful mess that he really doesn't like to think about. He really desperately wants to go back to the happy times he and she and the Heterodyne Boys had when they were younger, especially now that he knows she's capable of her old personality when not Mad, but he also knows he can't allow himself to get caught up in romantic notions of the past and ignore the horrible things she does in the present. In addition, he's more aware of how his chosen parenting style ruined his relationship with his son. Even though that was his intention, to sever his relationship with Gil so that Gil could run the Empire without needing his hand held in case Klaus was killed, he feels much more remorse over their stunted relationship and has begun to prioritize rebuilding that emotional bond over shaping Gil into the perfect leader (another example of prioritizing the short term over the long term). From the short time there was an Agatha in Mayfield he learned that she was not, in fact, a monster like her mother, and began to see her as more of her own person and a good person at that.
There were also a few denizens of Mayfield that made a great impact on him. Though not mentioned in his history due to space constraints, Garviel Loken had a particularly big impact on Klaus's views on morality. As a Space Marine, Garviel operated on a very strict code on honor and morals that Klaus always found to be fundamentally flawed and especially resented having projected onto him by his well-meaning friend. It doesn't help that quite a few of the times Garviel warned him against doing something while citing this code, he turned out to have been right (Garviel was one of the people that warned Klaus away from conducting his 'counter-experiment' during the Spring Cleaning event). Though Klaus still tends toward making snap judgements and then trusting them above anyone else's advice, Garviel is one of the main reasons he often consciously reminds himself to stop and listen to what his friends are telling him. Though he's still morally gray as ever and this likely won't change, he does often look at a situation from the point of view Garviel might take when thinking about what he ought to do.
Strengths: Though he won't have the Spark as a pony in the way it manifests as a human (since it'll become magic), it's worth mentioning. The Spark, also referred to as the Madness, is a hyperfocus state with three phases that a Spark enters in which their mind kicks into a different sort of gear. They make connections more quickly and can put together truly amazing inventions and ideas very fast, at the expense of that same hyperfocus, loss of judgment, increased excitement or aggression (depending on what's causing the Sparking) and mania. The best way I've found to explain it as that when a Spark is in the Madness Place they can see and understand the world around them on a much deeper and broader level, and thus make connections and see solutions humans without the Spark couldn't. The deeper into the Spark they get, the deeper and wider this understanding of the world gets. Phase one is the sort of transition phase; you start at base one and ramp all the way up into two, which is regular Sparking, then all the way up through two and to three, which is extreme Madness and almost always a state entered through anger (think of it like a berserker rage mode). No one knows what comes after three because most Sparks get themselves killed at that point, either by their own folly or because they're endangering others.
Klaus doesn't display this mania and loss of judgment like other Sparks do when he's Sparking at normal levels, likely because he's mature and has had at least thirty years with his Madness to learn to control it to his liking. However, this means when he does go Mad, he goes very, very mad (he had to have a house dropped on him to break him out of his third phase murderous rage in canon). If it's alright, I'd like him to display this same general shift in temperament when using his magic, taking into account the 50% rule (even though the Spark isn't technically a supernatural power so much as an actual physical miswiring of the brain; it's strong enough I'm counting it). Since Spark has three phases, he'll only ever display symptoms associated with a low two, which is about his normal level anyway.
He's also seen a ton of shit in his lifetime. There's very little that surprises him anymore and because his main specialty is analysis and synthesis it's very easy for him to apply previous situations he's been in to new ones he's encountering.
Physically, he's exceptionally strong. He's seven feet tall and made of muscle, likely reinforced due to his status as a construct. He's able to throw another man through a wall and punch his way through solid metal even when not at his full capacity of health. He's an excellent fighter, both on the field in melee and directing the combat from the sidelines through strategy: there's a reason no uprising has ever been able to get past him in twenty years.
Weaknesses: Klaus can justify just about anything, and he'll often resort to talking his way into being in the right instead of owning up to his mistakes. He's very stubborn once he's decided he knows what's the best course of action and it's very difficult to talk him down, though since his time in Mayfield he's gotten much better about this and usually will listen to people he knows and trusts.
He tends to make stupid snap decisions or put himself in danger in order to help others, and he doesn't value his own health and safety really at all (when he's so injured that he can't move besides small finger movements he still nearly burns down the hospital trying to escape just so he can get back to the empire and the people he believes it's his duty to keep safe, and of course this tendency only got worse in Mayfield where death meant very little). He often thinks he can take more than he can, and though he can take quite a lot, it's still a dangerous mentality to have.
Though Mayfield helped with this some, he still does in general have problems with interpersonal relationships (understandable for a man whose friends in his younger years all went missing or were killed or turned into genocidal maniacs). It takes him a long time to warm up to a person and even then he may not really be the best at interacting with them in a normal and relaxed way. Either he comes across as overbearing and frightening or distant and uncaring; he's bad at giving interpersonal cues that would suggest otherwise. Even his relationship with Ples, who he cared for very much and was very close to, was marked with a lot of fumbling and awkwardness on his part, and it took him months to approach anything close to passably 'fatherly' with Hiccup even after their relationship had reached that level of closeness. A lot of this can be blamed on the setting but some of it is undeniably Klaus's fault.
Physically, he has very few weaknesses. He's a big target, certainly, but he's been shown to be dextrous and light on his feet, so he's no slow lumbering giant. He is a construct held together by stitching, though, and his body likely needs maintenance to keep it in tip-top shape. In addition, given his tendency to get himself in dangerous situations, it's likely that any given time he'll be recovering from some injury or another.
Pony/Animal Type: Alicorn (if that's not acceptable to the mods, he'll be a unicorn).
I have several reasons for this. The most obvious is that he's both very strongly associated with the mind and his world's equivalent of magic (the Spark; he is an exceptionally strong one and has demonstrated that he is on the cutting edge of current technology and ability), and with the air (the capitol of his empire and his base of operations is a kilometer-long airship of his own design which never lands, and if he didn't need to go there for political reasons or to fight battles he likely wouldn't have set foot on solid ground in years. Also, his sigil is winged, likely indicating ascension in rank or political favor).
Not only does he rule arguably the largest empire in the known world, but he is a living legend that almost everyone knows something about. There are books and plays written about him, and even if not all of them are flattering given that he's a political figure, he is still acknowledged as one of the most influential heroes and strongest Sparks of his time by basically everyone. Everyone will admit even if grudgingly that he brought stability and safety to a world that had nearly been completely destroyed. He's wise and exceptionally fair (which gets him negative attention when he simply cannot please everyone) and rules his empire as best he can, building roads and schools and ensuring that the next generation of Sparks is well-trained to handle their gift if he can manage it. His methods may be unorthodox but they're what's best for the country and that is his main concern.
Slightly less deep reasons: he's goddamn huge (canonically seven feet tall) like an alicorn and, as a baron, has noble blood.
Cutie Mark: The Wulfenbach sigil, specifically the tower portion (see the Pony Picture; or this elegant and finely crafted link if you imagine it sans wings). This represents power as well as protection.
Pony Picture: Here! I have a wingless version if you don't allow alicorn status.
SAMPLES
First Person [Text]:
An open inquiry, to whomever may be able to help:
I want someone to explain, clearly and concisely, what magic is and how it works. I've been to your library and the books on magical theory are lacking any clear biological basis. Lists of spells are informative, but not in the way I would like.
What is it about unicorns and our horns in particular that allows us to perform magic with greater scope and efficiency? Does the horn act as a conducting rod for a specific type of energy or element not present in other places across the multiverse? If so, has this energy been studied or isolated in any way? You would think a world built on the use of it would have a greater understanding of the underlying scientific principles.
As we all know, magic is merely science that has not been studied closely enough yet to be comprehensible to all people regardless of intelligence. Thus, I propose the formation of a group dedicated to better understanding 'magic' not as a force which needs no explanation and is simply used with no thought for how it works but as a phenomena with a perfectly reasonable and presumably discoverable explanation grounded on facts. Any and all interested, please respond promptly.
[The scroll is written in clear, concise penmanship, black ink. The signature at the bottom reads 'Baron Klaus Wulfenbach, Tyrant of Europa'.]
Third Person:
Klaus didn't think he'd ever quite be comfortable in Ponyville. It was no Mayfield, certainly, and a small part of him knew he ought to be grateful, but two years of conditioning were hard to unlearn. The native ponies reminded him far too forcefully of the Mayfield drones: always cheery, always friendly, always just a little suspiciously oblivious. Perhaps it was just his cynicism but such a sudden explosion of non-native beings, most of which had not been ponies previously to their arrival and none of which knew exactly what they were doing in Equestria, should have elicited a far more guarded and cold response. When an alien with unknown origin and intention stepped into your front yard, you didn't greet him and invite him in for sugar cubes. It was common sense.
Their use of technology baffled him as well. For creatures without thumbs or indeed even separate fingers they were remarkably proficient at building everything from mundane furniture to complicated machinery. Those who had magic like himself he could perhaps forgive, but the rest of them had absolutely no excuse for defying logic so soundly. He'd fallen into a routine in Mayfield. He knew its rules and its exceptions and all the things he just had to accept. This place was another matter entirely and he still felt perfectly justified in feeling personally insulted by all the affronts to common sense he saw every single time he walked down the street.
Like, for instance, an electric blue earth pony trying to get what looked like a brightly-painted cannon to do more than sputter sadly. She had it pointed at a drab storefront for what looked like an art supply shop. This cannon-wielding was a sort of aggressive display he hadn't at all been expecting to see in this place, and it piqued his interest enough that he trotted over to investigate.
"Horsefeathers," the pony muttered to herself, hitting the side of the cannon with a hoof. It clunked sadly.
"Is there an issue?"
"Darn thing won't work! This is what you get for trying to paint your store the fast way, Bristle." She plonked herself down next to the cannon with a pout, ears dropping.
Klaus regarded the cannon critically. Nevermind that the idea of painting something with any degree of accuracy with it was absurd (perhaps absurd enough to work? He'd seen situations like that before), but there were clearly fundamental issues in the design. He picked the machine apart in his mind's eye, trotting around it in a circle a few times. Without him noticing, his horn had begun to glow white.
"I think I see your issue. One of the internal mechanisms is likely jammed. This device is too compact for the required machinery to fit comfortably."
"What? Hey!"
He ignored her shout, pulling the cannon apart with his magic and regarding the parts critically. As he'd thought, a few gears had gotten jammed on each other and clogged the whole thing. A bit of careful rearranging and streamlining would fix that.
A few minutes later, the blue pony stared at the reassembled cannon.
"I've streamlined it and removed several unnecessary components. You had a whole superfluous gear system, and relying on a full palette instead of internal mixing of pigments was slowing down both firing time and color selection. It ought to work now."
He didn't stick around to see the result – he knew it would work – but the gasp of 'woah!' and the splat of paint on wood from behind him were enough. He still didn't trust the native ponies and he certainly didn't like their impossible technological innovations, but that didn't mean he wouldn't take the chance to tinker with them if he could. At least on a pure design level they made sense, which was comforting. From that day on every time he passed by the art supply shop Bristle the blue pony would wave to him, and every time he found himself minding less and less.
