Agatha's Locket

There are lockets and then there are Lockets. The one of interest to us here is the gadget that was bestowed upon Agatha Heterodyne by her uncle Barry when she was a child. It was imbued with the power to suppress her Spark by giving her nasty migraine headaches whenever she started to get into hyper-concentration mode. The headaches were so bad that they would break up her concentration and force her to behave normally -- basically.

This may seem like a nasty thing to do for one's beloved niece, but there was method to Uncle Barry's madness. Many Sparks die young as a result of building their first clank -- a process known as "Breaking Through" -- before they have the wisdom to control the thing. As a result, either their clanks kill them, or the enemies they turn the clank against do. Barry didn't want Agatha to start acting Sparky until she was old enough to deal with whatever she made the first time out. Lo and behold, this crazy idea worked. Agatha kept the Spark-suppressing locket on until she was mugged by the von Zinzer boys at age eighteen, at which time it was stolen from her and her Spark started to make itself known. Her first clank followed shortly, with no significant ill effects -- and an awesomely powerful Spark was born.

Agatha would regain her locket much later, as a result of a complicated chain of events, and just in time, as when she put it back on, it negated her possession by The Other. Even better, by now her mind has developed to where she can do Sparky things even while wearing the locket, so she kinda gets the best of both worlds. Woe be to us all, however, if she ever takes the locket off again ... Fortunately, Zeetha, who knows Agatha well by way of Kolee-dok-Zumil, stopped her the one time she started to remove it, but a certain dramatic tension is going to surround this gadget for the foreseeable future.