Mina stands fully upright with an almost human balance, long arms, narrow hips, and feet planted as if she is always ready to cross a room for an interesting conversation. Her tan face is broad for a gnome, with a somewhat broad nose, high cheekbones, and a huge open smile that makes her look delighted even when she is worried. Her shocking white hair erupts in stiff, windblown tufts in every direction, each lock seeming to point toward something she has just noticed. Bright amber-brown eyes flick constantly from hands to doorways to neglected objects, rarely resting on a speaker's face for more than a few heartbeats. She moves with quick, economical steps, but when waiting she leans her weight onto one heel and gently sways as if listening to music no one else can hear. The unexpected contradiction is that her exuberant face and restless hair belong to someone who can become utterly still when another person is telling the truth.

Mina is generous with strangers but exacting with friends, offering a traveler her last meal while demanding that a companion return a borrowed needle. She is delighted by almost everything, yet her delight is not naivety. It is a discipline she uses to keep grief from becoming the only honest emotion. In public she is bright, humorous, and quick to volunteer. In private she is organized to the point of severity, counting supplies and rehearsing possible disasters. She forgives cowardice more readily than cruelty, but she has trouble admitting when a person she loves has become dangerous. When angry, she does not raise her voice. She becomes polite, precise, and impossible to distract.

Mina was born in a hillside gnome quarter built around an old human road shrine, where her family repaired travel cloaks, dyed wool, and embroidered protective sayings into hems. She was expected to become a careful textile worker, but she became fascinated by the stories carried by travelers rather than the objects they carried. At sixteen, she joined a caravan as a singer and interpreter, learning that a well-timed song could calm a frightened mule, expose a liar, or persuade a suspicious gatekeeper to open a door. Two years later, the caravan was trapped during a rockslide caused by careless excavation. Mina spent three days in a dark pocket beneath the road with a wounded courier and a terrified child. She kept them awake by recounting every story she knew, then invented new ones when memory failed. The courier died before rescue arrived, but the child survived. That experience changed Mina from a performer who wanted applause into a keeper of voices, determined that no person's final truth should vanish unheard. She now works as a traveling letter-reader, witness, singer, and occasional mediator, while quietly searching for the mining company responsible for the collapse.