Andrew Tinsel (Comprehensive Gerosha)

Andrew Tinsel is a minor character in Ciem: Nuclear Crisis.

Character bio
Little is known of Andrew's early life. However, he at some point met his wife Maggie Tinsel. They had one daughter together: Sandy Tinsel. Andrew worked for the NSA for many years. However, he went rogue when he learned about Lloyd Kolumn's diabolical collaboration with the Hebbleskin Gang to start a nuclear war with China and have Miriam Flippo blamed for it.

He went into hiding with his daughter after an assassin was sent to kill his wife. As he is in downtown Evansville on a bus one evening, several men with bazookas are placed on rooftops to search for his bus. The assassination attempt was foiled when Ciem intercepted it. This single act put Ciem on Kolumn's personal hit list, and he resolved to determine her identity by any means necessary. Ciem helps Andrew and Sandy slip into the night, while he gives her a USB drive containing incriminating information against Kolumn. Candi uses the information to learn what has been done to Miriam, and what she needs to do to keep Miriam safe until all their names can be cleared.

Andrew later resurfaces as living temporarily with Betsy Stanson. The two of them take Candi in and nurture her back to health after her bought of influenza leads to her being defeated in battle against Capp Aard. His fate after this is unknown.

Personality
Andrew is portrayed as a usually reasonable, and highly intelligent individual. However, he is an agent with a conscience. When his superiors violate that conscience, he takes action. He understands the risks involved in turning his back on his own agency, however, even for a noble cause. He may appear paranoid to some, but others who know what Kolumn will resort to understand him differently.

Development
After it was decided that Ciem 2 needed a remake for Classic Gerosha, the Dozerfleet founder decided to play up the spy genre subplots and themes much more than they had been handled in 2005. A slightly less contrived set of circumstances led to Miriam's arrest by Dirbine police, and different circumstances were involved than before in why Donte was temporarily out of the picture. However, it was reasoned that someone in the US government had to be in cohorts with the Hebbleskin Gang to give Duke Arfaas the clearance he'd need to pull off a stunt on par with what was happening in the story. The Dozerfleet founder rented the 1998 film Mercury Rising in late 2008, and immediately found inspiration in it.

Lloyd Kolumn was then introduced as the mole working for Arfaas. His appearance was modeled heavily on that of Alec Baldwin in Mercury Rising, playing the character of Nick Kudrow. Kolumn's over-the-top mannerisms spelled out that he was an intentional parody of Kudrow. Him sending assassins to wipe out the Tinsel family was a direct reference to the Lynch family being targeted in Mercury Rising also. The bus scene where Andrew and Sandy are sitting ducks was modeled after a scene in Mercury Rising where Bruce Willis' character is hiding from an assassin while on a train. Ciem intercepting the subplot is viewed as "what if the plots of Mercury Rising and Spider-Man 2 were merged together?" Andrew Tinsel is a variation of Martin Lynch who gets to live, eliminating the need for a Bruce Willis / Agent Jeffries counterpart.

After Ciem 2 was canceled, Andrew was set to return in an almost identical fashion for Nuclear Crisis. However, that novel was canceled in November of 2012. Since he was a joke character and the joke no longer made sense in Cataclysmic Gerosha, he and his entire family were written out of continuity in the series Sodality.