Mina Neuville
A passionate inventor who spent the entirety of her short life desperate to escape her brother's ever-looming shadow.Age: 23 at the time of her death
Gender: Female
Appearance:Mina is more-or-less average height and build, maybe somewhat on the muscular side as a result of the manual labor often required when working with machines. Her dark brown hair is usually kept short to avoid getting in the way, and more often than not is a tangled mess since she has more important things to do than worry about combing it. She has a tan complexion and a very plain-looking round face. Her thin eyes are a slightly lighter shade of brown than her hair, and no matter how much sleep she gets there are always dark circles beneath them, which are easily noticeable since she doesn't bother with makeup. She doesn't put much thought into clothes, either, just electing to wear whatever is most practical. She's also a little nearsighted, and frequently wore glasses before her death.
Personality:Mina is a very competitive woman. She treats nearly everything as a contest between her and everyone else, and is committed to come out on top. While this sometimes works to her advantage by giving her the motivation to give her all at everything she does, it more often only serves to feed her sense of inferiority.
Determination is another key aspect of Mina's character. If she has a goal to work toward you can bet she'll do everything in her power to reach it, and will refuse to give up no matter what the circumstances are. On the other hand, this sometimes causes her to behave stubbornly.
Unlike many people, who keep their feelings to themselves and hide behind a mask, Mina's emotions are almost always visible on the surface. She'll cry when she's sad, laugh when she's happy, and when she's angry she'll let you know. She also has little respect for formality and decorum when it comes to people she dislikes, and so can act rather rudely at times.
Background:Born to a wealthy family of entrepreneurs as Vilhelmina Juliet Williams, Mina had a mostly stress-free early childhood. She spent some of her time learning from private tutors hired by her parents, and most of the rest getting into trouble with her older brother Nicholas, who she idolized, at least for a time. Though Mina maintained a close relationship with her parents, she always felt as if they loved and praised Nicholas more than her, a feeling that only grew more and more as time went on. So she became determined to beat him in some way.
Then, not long before her eleventh birthday, both her parents were unexpectedly killed. Though the initial investigation and local newspaper considered possible foul play might be involved, no evidence could be found of this and it was ultimately written off as a freak accident, with most of the details kept under wraps.
Mina and her brother were taken in by Dr. Francis Neuville, a skilled mechaniker and close friend of their father's. There the two of them gained an appreciation for machines and a love for working with them. They became apprentices to their adoptive father and passionately learned everything they could about his craft, adopting his last name for themselves somewhere along the way.
Still, even now Mina couldn't surpass her brother. Nicholas was better at working with machines than she was, and so earned more of Dr. Neuville's praises. No matter how hard she tried, her creations were inferior to his. She grew ever more resentful.
In a grand attempt to prove she could be better than him, she spent months secretly building a small steam-powered boat of her own design. When she took it to sea to test it, at first it worked perfectly, just as she'd planned. She felt like she'd finally won. But in her emotional high she failed to notice a critical problem with the steam engine. It quickly malfunctioned, leaving her stranded in the middle of nowhere with no way to paddle the boat. She waited a day and a half before recognizing no one would be coming to rescue her, finally realizing her only chance at survival was to swim back to shore. She drowned before she came close.
Member
