If I desperately need a few more characters, I might drop in a couple from Buck Godot, via a Martian Manhunter style accident. However, beware Tenn and Peller syndrome -- they need to be long-term inhabitants.
Actually, let's tot it up. How many Helens do we potentially have so far in the "Crisis of Infinite Agathas" plot?
Mirror-Agatha wandered in confusion for a while before finding that Klaus and Gil were still alive; she immediately went to them, and has been masquerading as Agatha since. Helen (along with Dave, Mell and/or Artie) rejoined the Circus, and has been masquerading as Agatha ever since. Sarah, who hasn't been out in the larger world for over a century, tagged along with the Circus, and has been masquerading as an animal (some sort of funky construct) ever since, and occasionally causing confusion by shifting into the Agatha form and others. Meanwhile, the real Agatha has been stuck in stasis in the castle, which is where she begins the game.
Jagers are very long-lived. On this page -- http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/cgi-bin/ggmain.cgi?date=20060712 -- they make reference to battles they were in a hundred years ago. They belong to the Heterodyne family, but long predate Barry and Bill. Note that Jagers can also apparently have kids, since a great-great-grandchild figures in the story. Indeed, it looks like they can crossbreed with humans, which is downright surprising. We might have someone who is part-Jager.
Opera is a major artform in the GG world. We clearly need to have either a play or an opera involved in the story somehow. This probably needs to figure into the Circus' plot.
This page -- http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/cgi-bin/ggmain.cgi?date=20061002 -- shows a card game in the GG universe. Suits include Muses and Sparks. Hmm. If I took a good period card game and adapted it, almost nobody would notice...
(Those which don't have some other home yet)
Casting thought: You have the luxury of nearly-full signups nearly two months before you're doing casting, and before a substantive part of the writing is done. Perhaps a very high-level questionnaire polling for certain general types of interest? (Earlier, you were somewhat surprised by the keenness with which some players wanted to play Jaegers; it'd be kind of painful to write a mostly-Spark-some-Jaeger game and discover that half the players wanted to play Clanks, crossovers, non-canon characters, lots of more-minor roles, "support-but-competent" characters like Wooster, etc.) Justin: while it's only going to be a partial effect, I do expect to do some of this. That's actually the way I always write, and a reason why I like to have full games very early -- I always wind up customizing the game to the players to some degree. With two runs I'm somewhat limited in how much I can do that, but I'll definitely be factoring in player desires when choosing which characters get in.
At least one page references there being multiple locations. How will these be divided? And how does travel between them work? Justin: unclear as of yet. Current guess is that the smaller room is Amagog's Castle, but we'll see -- I'm intentionally hanging loose and seeing where the story goes before deciding that. It might be a "GM needs to go Somewhere Else With Players" space.
Idea for a safety-net plot (ie, if someone's getting bored): A far-off Spark sees no reason that physical distance should interfere with their efforts (in one or more plots), and has invented a device which will let them project their mind into someone on the scene! (The idea being that if a player's main plots just aren't involving them for some reason, we can hand them an alternate character sheet to play for a little while.) The projection isn't perfect, however - details and nuances tend to get lost (in both directions). Thus, the character sheet isn't insanely detailed (important, since they'll be reading it during game-time), and when the player hands the alternate character sheet back in (either because they're happy to go back to their regular character, or because someone in-game has figured out they're possessed and forced them back to normal), they can write up to three short sentences to go along with the character sheet, so that there's some deliberately hazy continuity if/when the character passes on to another player. (Would probably want to prime the pump with this by handwriting an example set of three things - eg, "Don't trust Klaus!", "The psychotic woman has what you need, but wants payment", and "Moonlit conversation with Agatha - working together".) Justin: hmm. Possible, but tricky to integrate into the main line of the story, so potentially won't improve things enough. Still, the general idea of including some safety nets is a very good one. Maybe something involved Amagog's castle? Indeed, I'm contemplating the idea of being able to fetch Amagog himself from his new home in Cynosure -- that's a bit dangerous, but a potentially useful Deus ex Machina if we need one, and could be done by almost anyone.
2006-11-20: One thing that concerns me is the Spark balance of the game - too many of them will not merely clog up GM time like no tomorrow, but makes being a Spark...common. (To quote The Incredibles, "If everyone's special, nobody is." Not true, but if everyone's special in the same way, it's less interesting.) While the comic manages to balance out having many of the main characters be Sparks, they have a healthy populace of background characters to be held in contrast to, to rant at, to do their bidding, etc. Justin: a good point, and one I've thought about, but to some degree one we need to cope with -- a lot of the characters that people want to play are Sparks. (And having just a few Sparks is likely to unbalance the game badly anyway.) I think we just have to focus on balance here: making sure that the non-Sparks have enough oomph to work well anyway.
2007-01-11: Just re-read the game blurb on the Intercon site, and it gave me the notion: Even if we're not touching the Other as regards actual plots, we do know that the mystery of the Other hasn't been penetrated as of game-time. Having someone think that something's Other-related is certainly an option. (And if anyone's figured out yet that there's a new type of Revenant that doesn't just shamble around, suspecting others - particularly those acting strangely due to amnesia, being from another dimension, being in disguise/shapeshifted, etc - of being Revenants would make some sense.) Justin: Oooh -- I like that, especially because it's an extremely flexible plot idea, that can be used on almost any arbitrary people, so it's lovely for filling plot-web holes. Let's keep this in our back pocket for a little bit, but it's probably worth using. I'm going to create the Suspected Revenant plot as a placeholder for it.