Mina is the only daughter of a successful Greenwich Village beat poet, Theo Archer. Her mother, Julia Darby, was an unsuccessful but talented artist who killed herself when Mina was only two. Her father was fifty when she was born but encouraged her to explore her creativity as a child. Throughout her teens she dabbled in painting and writing, but her true talent and love was in music. She learned piano very quickly and easily and then at 13, she asked her father if she could learn to play the harp. He consented and she had found her true calling.
She continued studying voice, composition and performance at the Julliard School of Music while working as a waitress and as a bartender on the side. One of her father's rules was that while he was happy to pay for her school, it was up to her to pay her own way in the world. He taught her that achievements in life were best earned the hard way, something that seemed like a hard lesson at the time. But later, she was grateful for the lesson because it taught her the value of a dollar and not to take anything for granted.
She was 22 when she fell in love with another musician, Malcolm Mosby. They had started a band, Metronome, with her on harp and vocals and he and two others on strings. It was essentially an alternative twist on classical Victorian. It caught on in the underground Indie scene in New York, and shortly after they released their first single, the pair became engaged.
But just six months later, Mina received news that her father had passed away suddenly of a heart attack. She was devastated to lose her only real family in New York, and turned to Mal for support. The timing of this couldn't have been worse Mal snapped one night, becoming disturbingly irrational and violent, trying to kill Mina in her sleep. She managed to break free and call the police, and shortly after this Malcolm was diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic what he had experienced was his first psychotic break.
Mina tried to keep them together, but Mal hated the side effects of his medication and soon the pair and the band split up. It broke her heart to see Mal spiral downwards, but she felt helpless to pull him out. When she could no longer stand to see him decline - and could no longer put herself in jeopardy - she moved to join friends in California and work on a solo career.
Mina moved to Berkeley at 25, and began a long process of composing and performing her own pieces and shows, eventually building a name for herself as a solo artist. The money she'd inherited from her father helped make her dreams of success come true and paid the bills while she wrote and performed and networked with other musicians. Her career started to take off when she started playing music festivals, and soon her music was being licensed for use in a film, which really brought her name into the spotlight beyond the indie music scene.
But just as her career was bordering on fame, Captain Tripps hit. She'd been at a music festival in Oregon when the worst of it hit, and soon she found herself alone and on the road. She had at first traveled with some friends who were at the festival with her, but everyone soon died off. She'd been tempted to approach a few random people she'd seen on the road in the distance, but she would follow them from a distance and often was disturbed to see that many carried swords. She decided it would be better to arm herself and stay on her own, the dreams of Nebraska calling her southeast. Those dreams were soon replaced by a new destination: Boulder, Colorado. She set off on her own, traveling some of the way on foot and when she could, on scooter. Fuel was a problem though, as the pumps had shut off when the power grid went down. So it was slow going, and now on the night of August 7, she finds herself nearing the outskirts of Boulder without even knowing it.
