Backstory
About twenty-two years before the beginning of the current story, a fragile peace has been framed through the actions of brothers Bill and Barry Heterodyne and their allies, including their closest friend, Baron Klaus Wulfenbach. The peace was apparently cemented when Lucrezia Mongfish, daughter of one of the more villainous Sparks, consented to marry Bill Heterodyne; the concurrent disappearance of her other suitor, Klaus Wulfenbach, appears to have passed without comment.
A bit over four years after Wulfenbach's disappearance, the peace is shattered by an attack on the mechanically sentient Castle Heterodyne; Bill and Barry return to find Lucrezia apparently kidnapped—and, though the details are kept secret from all but their closest associates, Bill and Lucrezia's son Klaus Barry had been killed. The Heterodyne's frantic search for Lucrezia was punctuated beginning about six months later with a series of attacks against the other major Spark houses of Europa. These attacks, instigated by a mysterious person called only The Other, involved bio-engineered constructs known as slaver wasps. Victims of slaver wasps, called revenants, usually became insane, but could be controlled by the Other through means not understood at the time. The Heterodynes turned their attention to the defense of Europa—while still searching for Lucrezia.
At some point, the attacks ceased. However, neither the Heterodynes nor Lucrezia Mongfish were to be found. Wulfenbach, traveling with a new son but without his new wife, returns to find Europa full of revenants; fifty "houses" of Sparks had all but been destroyed, and the remainder were in a mad scramble for power. Wulfenbach uses his own not inconsiderable charisma and skill to establish a "peace of the biggest guns", and polices Europa's sparks while trying to put together the fragmented pieces of the puzzle. The area of the Baron's Peace encompases most of Central Europe north of the Alps, from the Alsace to the Black Sea, with Romanian and German as the principal languages.
Meanwhile, the absent "Heterodyne Boys" have become increasingly popular folk heroes, with many of their known exploits (and not a few wholly imaginary ones) captured in a series of popular novels and plays. Traveling shows often present the Heterodyne plays to audiences in towns of all sizes.
The story opens about twelve years into "The Baron's Peace."
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