TNI: The Ranch


1/4/01
"Dead Again"

A little more spying on Martina reveals that her little mage-flame seems to get a little bigger at mass. But aside from that there is little progress on the Martina front, for reasons that will become apparent below.

Thielo gets a call from Detective Ralph Marino, in Albany. He wants to know if they remember anything suspicious from when they lived at 413 Maple Street. Thielo doesn't remember anything useful. Eventually the detective levels with him and tells him that the new owners have dug up a body in the back yard while gardening. It's a few years old.

"Can you think of any reason why a body would be buried in our back yard in Albany?" "No." "Well, it's nothing then." - Thielo to Alexandra

"If we had buried a body there, you would tell me, right? ... "Why did we move to Chicago? ... It seems out of character for me to have done it..." - Alexandra.

Thielo and Alexandra talk to Damien, who promises a lawyer and to have someone get the coroner's report and such. He's a little annoyed by the fact that they can't actually say they didn't do it but are pretty sure they didn't.

The coroner's report turns up in the evening and reports that the body is a male, thirties, 5'10", medium build. It notes a sharp penetrating object through the ribs as a possible means of death. The body has been there for perhaps two years.

"Thielo, I know you don't like to talk about this..." - Damien to Thielo's retreating back.

Thielo and Alexandra talk to the rest of the team about it, but no one has any helpful thoughts. Darwin delivers some police interviews of the neighbors to Thielo early in the morning, and he reads through them. They're mostly boring, except for a few that remember arguments between the Strausses, and one who remembers that the arguments were about Thielo cheating on Alexandra. Thielo removes those bits and leaves the rest.

Alexandra talks to her crossbow, which remembers that they shot the bad man who was making her sad, and that she loved it the best.

Afterwards, Thielo talks to Damien and reveals to him that he was built as a replacement for the original Thielo after that one presumably died of consumption. Or something. He asks Damien to have someone get the original's dental records.

The dental records come back and reveal that the corpse is indeed the original Thielo, or at least it has his teeth and build and age. Thielo reflects on all this and decides that he's clearly better than the original who wasn't as good as he thought and that Lexa was right to kill him. (None of this is conveyed to Lexa, who is still wondering who she killed).

"If I were there, I would have killed him myself. Cheating on Lexa! Bastard." - Thielo to himself.

Alexandra builds a raunchy angel bell sculpture. Later it turns out she didn't mean it to be so naughty. And Orchid mentions a diary about the Comte Saint Germaine, and how he's really old and knows a lot about avatars. Then they go observe Martina at mass as mentioned above.

The lawyer does turn up and briefs the Strausses on what to say. The police talk to them again and ask mostly the same questions, but seem pretty baffled. There isn't enough evidence for them to go anywhere, and things seem to be dropped for the moment.


LB:
Alexandra's current theory on who she killed is that it was someone from the Albany Mafia, which wanted Lexa to come be a mechanomancer for them (and possibly the Don wanted Lexa for himself, which is why Thielo doesn't know about it). Lexa had to shoot a mafia thug, and then they had to flee to Chicago. Okay, yes, this is really a fairly implausible theory, but it's higher on the plausibility list than "You shot Thielo and your current Thielo is a robot duplicate."
LB:
Damien asks Thielo about the Thielo in Boston. Thielo says that's the beta, who apparently has some weird mind link to Thielo. Thielo has a tracking device in his arm, that Angelina has the finder for! Woo! Though Damien thinks that there are also Thielo-detection tests that could be devised using the fact that Thielo sees auras. Of course, nobody but Damien and Thielo is in on this conversation, so the rest of us are as unenlightened as ever.
MIN:
The full quote from above:
L:
If we had buried a body there, you would tell me, right?
T:
Probably not, because you wouldn't want me to, but as far as I know we didn't.
MIN:
More particularly in the conversation between Thielo and Damien, Thielo said that the prototype has some sort of mental resonance with Thielo, that he had contacted Thielo, and that the prototype knew when he had been injured. Damien and Thielo do a few experiments and decide that a good test for Thielo-ness is to have a cardboard box with two compartments and to put a living being in one of the compartments. The real Thielo would be able to guess right every single time because of his aura vision. Tests based on mage-like auras and auras of favorite items are also discussed.
MIN:
When Thielo figured out that Lexa killed the original, Thielo was about to freak. His whole outlook on life was based around the fact that Lexa needed "Thielo", and that he was merely adequate compared to the original. Happily, Thielo made his self check, and has since decided that the original was a lying, cheating scumbag, and that Thielo is far better than the original. Conservation of delusion is maintained.