Quote Originally Posted by Knight13 View Post
Er, it was stated directly in the comic that any Spark that got their hands on a Muse just ended up breaking it and learned jack all. Tarvek is the only Spark we know of who has been able to reverse engineer Van Rijn's designs to any degree. And while Tinka may be damaged, she's still largely functional (or was before the Gesters cut her head off).
Fair enough, but that wasn't the claim I was answering to, it was "he was the only one of them that was able to get one of those clanks back to even a partially functional state"

If he has managed that at all - i.e. restore Tinka - it was only with access to the manual, and only off-page. When he tried to do it without the manual, he produced a better-than-average clank (Anevka) but terminally damaged Tinka in the process. He may be a tad less ham-fisted than the average spark, but he still admits that without help, Tinka will eventually shut down, and that there is nothing he can do to help. IIRC It is only hearing that the manual exists that he gains a measure of hope he'll be able to fix his own mistakes*.

We also know that "any Spark that got their hands on a Muse just ended up breaking it and learned jack all" must be false, since Lucrezia got her hands on one of the muses and learned a lot, eventually loading the Kastle into the muse head while loading the muse brain into Von Pinn. I don't remember who said that in the comic (Tarvek, maybe?), but the statement is not to be trusted.

Grey Wolf

*At this point my memory is so fuzzy I'm not even sure if I'm quoting the comic or the book. So I'll state for the record that I consider the comic superior cannon, if one and the other disagree. Although I suspect that the Foglios think it the other way around, with the book being a revised version of the story - specially where Tarvek is concerned.