After escaping from the massive airship known as Castle Wulfenbach, Agatha falls in with a travelling troupe of performers, where she begins training under Zeetha, swordmistress and princess of the lost city of Skifander. With Wulfenbach on her trail, it's going to take more than a spark of Mad Science for Agatha to traverse the treacherous wasteland of war-torn Europa.

In a time when the Industrial Revolution has become an all-out war, Mad Science rules the World...with mixed success. At Transylvania Polygnostic University, Agatha Clay was a student with trouble concentrating and rotten luck. Dedicated to her studies but unable to build anything that actually worked, she seemed destined for a lackluster career as a minor lab assistant. But then the University was overthrown and Agatha was taken aboard the giant airship Castle Wulfenbach - where it begins to look like she might carry a spark of Mad Science after all.

Agatha Heterodyne is the last heir to the Maddest of Mad Scientist families, and now she's returning to her ancestral home, the warped little town of Mechanicsburg, to claim her inheritance. Unfortunately, it turns out that she's not the only one with that idea in mind. When an impostor claiming to be the rightful heir appears, Agatha must convince the artificial intelligence that animates her family's castle that she is, in fact, the new Heterodyne. But as Agatha soon discovers, this will be no simple task, as the Castle itself is completely insane.