Before there was Madane, before there was an empire, before there was even red hair — there was simply a girl standing in a desert. Alone, small against the horizon, in a world that seemed more question than answer. That girl became Mina.

She was the spark that set the story into motion. From that seed, the deserts filled with storms, Dexter padded onto the page, and eventually an entire cosmic empire unfurled. Even now, if you peel back all the layers of lore and shadow, Mina remains at the heart: one girl trying to make sense of a world that refuses to stay still.

Humour in the Face of Storms

Mina doesn’t meet Madane with silence or stoic wisdom. She mutters, jokes, and occasionally argues with the universe itself. Her humour was inspired by Terry Pratchett, particularly the wry defiance of Wyrd Sisters. Like Pratchett’s witches, Mina sees the absurdity in survival, finds wit in danger, and never quite lets the world have the last word.

Through her, storms sulk, deserts whisper, and fate occasionally gets spoken to rather firmly.

Alice Among the Timelines

Mina’s story isn’t a straight road — it’s more of a rabbit hole. Each step takes her deeper into the strange: deserts that breathe, timelines that twist, and physics that sometimes clock off early for the day. Her journey carries the same unpredictability as Alice in Wonderland — you never quite know where she’ll land next, only that it won’t be where she started.

The Bridge Between Worlds

Mina isn’t just a character; she’s a bridge. In Estonian, “mina” means “me.” The echo was deliberate. She was written to connect our here-and-now with a far-off future, making her both a character in the story and a thread between worlds.

She asks the questions a reader would ask: What is this place? How do you survive it? What happens when the rules don’t hold? In that way, she carries a piece of us all.

Excerpts: A Taste of Mina’s Voice

Her humour (Chapter 1):

“Yes, buddy, time to wakey-wakey, ham and bakey,” she muttered, scratching behind Dexter’s ear. “Except, no ham, no bakey—nothing but the heat of Madane’s sun, blazing like some sullen, unamused orange giant.”

Mina jokes to keep the silence at bay — a very human response to being stranded in a world that seems far too large.

Her frustration (later):

A raw, guttural “Aaaarhhh” escaped Mina’s lips and rolled over the alien dunes, carrying all the frustration she’d been swallowing since arriving in this strange, sandy nightmare. The desert, of course, didn’t care. It swallowed her scream greedily, letting the sound bounce off the distant ridges before fading into silence — a silence that felt like judgment.

Here we glimpse another truth: humour can only take her so far. Beneath the jokes, Mina is a young woman fighting to stay whole in a world that eats certainty for breakfast.

Why She Endures

At her core, Mina is someone who didn’t ask for destiny but got tangled in it anyway. She is stubborn, vulnerable, occasionally ridiculous, and entirely human. She was the first character to step onto Madane’s red sands, and perhaps the one who understands best that the desert is never really empty.

Because on Madane, survival isn’t just survival. It’s storms, shadows, and the occasional argument with the universe itself.

The Trickster Called Yeilis

And just when you think Mina’s only battles are with storms and silence, the desert introduces her to something stranger. One moment she is alone with Dexter, the next she is being watched by a man in a lab coat who introduces himself in the middle of her most private moment. Dr. Etherstein, he calls himself — though within minutes he’s flickering, shifting, unravelling into something far stranger.

By the time the bells appear on his cap, and the grin stretches a little too wide, the doctor has become someone else entirely. Yeilis.

He is guide, trickster, companion, glitch — a Mindgame installed in her head, designed to tether her to the Wyrd Keeper construct. He talks when she doesn’t want him to, vanishes when she needs him most, and sometimes leans close enough to touch — only to dissolve into nothing like a bad idea evaporating in sunlight.

To Mina, Yeilis is both a torment and a relief. He embodies the absurdity of her situation: a surreal guide who can’t be trusted, who juggles existential riddles with the same ease he startles her out of her skin. He’s real enough to argue with, not real enough for Dexter to acknowledge, and maddeningly delighted by her suffering.

Mina began as a single figure in the sand — and grew into the bridge between Earth, Madane, and the Wyrd Keeper construct. She is humour in the face of storms, stubbornness when the world eats certainty, and the voice that keeps asking: what’s real?

Her story is only the beginning. Step into Madane, and meet her where the storms whisper loudest.