Tarvek Sturmvoraus

Tarvek Sturmvoraus is the Sparky son of Prince Aaronev VI of Sturmhalten and, on his mother's side, a descendant of the Storm King, whose throne he is preparing to claim. He is up to his lithesome hips in the Storm King conspiracy and is a Byzantine schemer, with a track record of complicated double and triple crosses.

Tarvek has a gift for constructing anthropoid clanks, is ostentatiously charming, and knows how to appreciate attractive young women. While he wishes to be generous to those who would accept his rule, he acts ruthlessly against threats to it.

Maneuvers and ambitions
Tarvek considers himself to be the Storm King by right and Klaus Wulfenbach to be nothing more than a dangerous usurper to be overcome. (The possibility that Klaus might hand over power to someone capable of keeping the peace does not occur to him.) Tarvek does not have his father's special devotion to Lucrezia Mongfish / the Other, but he does attempt to use her, just as he uses his father, his sister, Agatha, and everyone else.

Backstory
Before we met Tarvek, he spent years maneuvering amidst his father’s obsession with finding the Holy Child and restoring The Other. Aaronev seems to have cared more about Lucrezia than about his own son's ascendancy or his daughter's life. Aaronev convinced the Knights of Jove to serve the Other, apparently with the justification that the slaver wasps would be the most effective way to reestablish the Storm King's rule. Aaronev sacrificed many girls to the Holy Machine to bring the Lucrezia back, including Anevka, Tarvek's sister. It was Tarvek who built the injured Anevka a clank body (based on the van Rijn muse Tinka that had been appropriated from Master Payne's Circus of Adventure). Working on a Muse seems to have been the chance of a lifetime for the young spark.

Aaronev, Anevka, and Agatha
When Tarvek first appears, he is attempting to manage Aaronev's obsession rather than take power himself (which would have involved patricide, defeating a spark, and inevitable imperial entanglements). Though Agatha’s command voice registers as a match on Aaronev’s instruments and the drugged Agatha confirms her mother's identity, Tarvek resists and delays subjecting Agatha to the Holy Machine. Instead, he works to replicate her command voice with Anevka's clank voicebox. Tarvek expresses considerable and hard to discount enthusiasm for the laudable project of rebuilding the Muses. (It seems likely that he would be up to this task, given his successes with Tinka.)

Tarvek takes his identity as the Storm King seriously. He is charming, not menacing, toward Agatha throughout. Once his father's ally Lady Vrin is imprisoned, Tarvek attempts to release Agatha back to the circus and to allow her future participation with his projects to be voluntary, though he cannot fail to appreciate her value as the heir of Bill Heterodye. Evidently, he believes that the imprisonment of Vrin and his as-yet-unrevealed control over Anevka's clank body give him an adequately strong position to carry out all his plans and even show generosity. Presumably the Knights of Jove, the Council and other anti–Wulfenbach forces could be convinced to recognize his right to rule. Of course, he perceives Agatha to be anti-Wulfenbach as well.

He does not anticipate Dingbot Prime releasing the Geisterdamen.

The return of Lucrezia
When Lady Vrin and resurrects Lucrezia into her daughter's body, Tarvek's entire game board is upended. Faced with an ascendant Lucrezia, he "her ladyship," claiming to believe that Agatha is gone for good, while simultaneously inquiring into the secrets of the Holy Machine. Lucrezia is cautious about placing trust in her new ally and Lady Vrin is openly skeptical.

Worse, neither Agatha nor Tarvek fully explain their plans to each other as they scheme against Lucrezia. Agatha conceals her plan to use the dingbots' music to break her free of Lucrezia's control, making Tarvek desperate. Agatha builds a holoprojector the Baron that the Other is in her so that he can contain the situation. Tarvek doesn't consult with Agatha about how the revelation that the Other is in Sturmhalten will expose House Sturmvoraus's collusion with the Other and end Tarvek’s political ambitions, but instead sabotages the projector to publicly accuse the Baron of being the Other.

The downward spiral continues when Tarvek to the Other that he wants to reestablish the rule of the Storm King without her involvement. Evidently Tarvek cuts some sort of deal with Lucrezia to maintain her support for his plans. However, Tarvek Agatha's projector.

And then things get complicated.

Anevka and Lord Selnikov organize the people of Sturmhalten to storm the castle, but Lucrezia and Tarvek. Tarvek reveals the spark–infecting slaver wasp to the Geisterdamen, apparently to gain their trust and respect; he claims that he is preparing to relocate with them. The Wulfenbach assault arrives. Agatha's projector (activated by Dingbot Prime) puts Agatha for a while, leading Vrin to beat Tarvek half to death before Agatha can stop her. Eventually Lucrezia regains control and.

Infirmity
Unknown to Lucrezia, the stolen Wulfenbach handgun that she uses to shoot Tarvek. Wulfenbach troops transport the wounded Tarvek to Great Hospital in Mechanicsburg. Meanwhile, a strikingly performs the role of Andronicus Valois in the The Storm King (Opera) in Vienna.

Violetta springs Tarvek from Wulfenbach custody by dosing him with Moveit. When Agatha's Torchmen chase off their escape craft, the pair ducks into Castle Heterodyne for. After Agatha rescues him from a devil dog, Tarvek attempts to give her political manipulation advice, but finds her a player than the naïve actress who visited Sturmhalten. Tarvek's wounds overcome him and Agatha sets out to find Gilgamesh Wulfenbach when her medical skills prove inadequate to the task. When last seen, Tarvek in a the Red Playroom of Castle Heterodyne.

Tarvek's Spark
Tarvek is perhaps the most gifted builder of anthropoid clanks alive today. He has not shown great skill in any other spark disciplines, though he knows his stimulants.

Creations

 * Anevka's clank body, based on a Van Rijn prototype
 * A voice mechanism that can produce a good counterfeit of the command voice.
 * A clank head for the Other's consciousness (which identifies itself as Lucrezia Mongfish)
 * Assists with the construction of (and sabotages) Agatha's holographic recorder/projector
 * A device which simultaneously disabled all the Dingbots that Prime had constructed in Sturmhalten.

Possibly relevant outside information
On this page from What's New With Phil and Dixie, which features Krosp in his second appearance there, prior to the beginning of the Girl Genius comic, Krosp is applying for a post as a minion of the villain Volrath. The minion of Volrath that he encounters is Greven Il-Vec, whose name appears on the door of his office in the third panel as G. Il-Vec. Since Gilgamesh Wulfenbach and Tarvek Sturmvoraus are characters who, as the chief rivals for Agatha's hand, are parallel characters there is reason to suspect that their names were chosen to correspond to this.

Questions and theories

 * If Tarvek is in on the plot to install Zola "Heterodyne" in Mechanicsburg, doesn't that mean he'll side with Zola over Agatha?
 * Partial Answer: The Zola plot was likely years in the making, which would have made it the creation of his father, Aaronev. In any case, it long predated Tarvek's first encounter with Agatha.


 * Can Tarvek produce the heterodyne humming? Clearly, he  that has a similar appearance.  See Tarvek's humming.
 * Why was it so urgent for Tarvek to get to Castle Heterodyne? How did he get in?
 * Answered: As of, we found out that the Prince fled into Castle Heterodyne to flee Wulfenbach troops. According to , he slipped in through the Phosphorous Gate by using a.