A couple of weeks later Gavin comes back from the rest home mostly sane (although dolls and puppets still bother him a lot). Meanwhile, the Inquisition has located the elusive English cliomancer using the Strausses' planchette. She seems to move around a lot, but TNI finds that she spends a fair amount of time in England, on an estate in Lancashire. They begin covert surveillance, but leave SILVER out of it for now (covert surveillance is hardly the team's specialty, and there's still a Merchant in England who is probably mad at SILVER).
One Wednesday night Thielo is at WalMart at 2 AM on a charcoal run, when he finds a man leaning against his car wearing a large mask of some kind. He stops a good way away, and calls out. The man greets him as Thielo, in his own voice. Thielo looks at the masked man over his glasses, and discovers that not only is the mask probably enchanted but the man has a very large aura flame of a kind they haven't seen before. He runs for it, pulling out his phone.
The masked man seems to realize what the glasses mean, and says "no time for gloating then". Thielo has enough time to call Graham and say "WalMart, mage attack" before the masked man is suddenly in front of him and saying "I'm taking your face back!" Thielo blacks out.
Graham alerts Alexandra first, and she tells him to call the others, so shortly everyone is driving like mad for WalMart. Angelina and Esteban are first on the scene, and they find Thielo lying in the parking lot face down. Upon turning him over, they discover that he has no face - revealing the subtle levers and actuators that used to run it. He isn't conscious, though he doesn't seem to have stopped completely. After Esteban freaks out a bit he bundles Thielo into his car and drives off.
When Gavin and Alexandra arrive, Angelina stalls them saying that Esteban has taken Thielo somewhere for some help, and that she doesn't want to say more in case the mage attacker is still around somehow. Alexandra gets increasingly agitated and wants to know if Thielo is all right.
Meanwhile Esteban gets Thielo home and calls Damien to talk. Damien thinks they are going to have to get Alexandra to fix Thielo if he's seriously injured, and tells Esteban to bring him in to the Ranch. Angelina tells the others with her that Thielo is indeed being brought to the Ranch, so they start back there.
On the way to the Ranch from Esteban's Thielo wakes up and discovers that he has no face (and also no glasses, so he can only see auras). Esteban and Thielo and Dr. Staadler and Angelina (involving some phone conferencing, there) decide to bandage Thielo's face and bring him into the infirmary at the Ranch, where Dr. Staadler will do a better job of bandaging. They do so, and Alexandra gets to squeeze Thielo's hand before she is chased out of the infirmary so that the doctor can work. The doctor in question has a stiff drink before providing Thielo with a more authentic looking bandaging.
Afterwards the team gets the whole story from Thielo. Damien thinks about it and tells Gavin, Angelina, and Esteban to go out to the Strausses' lab/barn and make sure that the attacker isn't lurking in there to finish the job. As it turns out, he is - Angelina and Gavin find him floating in the loft ceiling of the Strausses' bedroom (Gavin, luckily, remembers to look up before they go in and avoids a major ambush). He's still wearing a big mask - it's a dragon head. Angelina shoots him with her shotgun, which bounces off! Then he breathes fire on the two of them before Angelina shoots a halon extinguisher at him, making him choke and fly out through the skylight. Gavin is amazed that Angelina brought a halon extinguisher. She does not share her reasons for doing so (which had nothing to do with the dragon). No one sleeps very well that night.
The next day is spent mostly in confusion about what's going on and who it's going on with. There's a big meeting with lots of theorizing and speculating about how to find, trap, deceive or whatever this attacker, whether he's gone or is still hanging around, what his motive might be, and so on. After the meeting Damien meets privately with Thielo to discuss the fact that this may be the guy who impersonated him previously. Xerxes calls into that meeting with some ideas about mask-magic which charges off of impersonating someone, and Damien and Thielo guess that this guy might have been doing that.
This leads Thielo to call his parents and discover that he was apparently in Germany visiting them the previous week. Everyone decides that the mage must have been charging then, and Damien decides to start Maria Pigatelli on digging up German records. Luckily, Thielo's home town has been on a scanning frenzy and most records are available in places that Maria can open up. She finds the following: (not all at once, so each one brings a fresh round of speculation) First, birth certificates for Thielo and Johannes Strauss, born the same day to Hans and Olga Strauss (Thielo's parents being Gunter and Ingrid). Then she finds death records for Hans and Olga, apparently dead in a car accident a few months later. Finally, she finds adoption records - Thielo was adopted by Gunter and Ingrid, and Johannes by Franz Strauss and his wife, the Strauss fathers all being brothers. Could the mage be Johannes?
As they are pondering these things, Darwin comes in and takes a dragon mask out of a box and puts it on, revealing that he isn't Darwin at all. He and Thielo wrestle, but Thielo can't get the mask off and lets go. Angelina bounces a shot off the mage with little effect. Gavin then calls on St. George and plants his sword perfectly in the hollow of the neck right below the mask, which actually doesn't bounce off or anything. Angelina shoots the mask right between the eyes, which breaks it, and suddenly the mage is a normal man again - albeit a normal man with a sword through his throat who looks just like Thielo. Alexandra has to be led out of the room, and Thielo tells the man that he, Thielo, is the real Thielo, and also leaves. Angelina decides to put the mage out of his misery and shoots him in the head rather than letting him bleed to death.
Afterwards, they find a hotel key in his pocket, along with a wallet with ID for Johannes Strauss and for Thielo Strauss. After Darwin finds the hotel and the room, Angelina and Gavin toss it and find a spider mask, a cat mask, an Alexandra mask, and Thielo's face. The two animal mask seem to grant some of the traditional animal powers. The Alexandra mask makes you look like Alexandra, but when she puts it on it knocks her out and seems to break the mask, which never works again.
Thielo's face is determined to have a small signature on the inside - "Johannes Strauss" - which is odd because most of Thielo was definitely made by Alexandra, it has her mark on it. Thielo also notes that the face has a non-mechanomantic aura. There's some speculation among those who are allowed to know what the face actually does magically. In the end, Thielo decides to put that face back on, because it will only take a couple of weeks to do where crafting a new one will take months. He does start work on a replacement, though, so that he can change later and won't have to use the one that Johannes made.
There is some further speculation about exactly who made what when and what actually happened with Thielo, Johannes, Alexandra, and the new Thielo some years ago (mostly in Thielo's head, however, and no definitive answer is reached). Unfortunately, the only person who might have shed some light on the subject is now buried in the back acres of the Ranch.