Name:
Melinda
Species:
Human
Place of Origin:
Appearance:
When Missy used L. Frank Baum’s imagination to take control of the Land of Fiction as a trap for the Doctor, she created a version of the Queen of the Mice called Melinda who was a partially-converted Cyberwoman and the lover of Peter, this world’s version of the Tin Woodman. She appeared as a beautiful woman with waist-length blonde hair, wearing a peasant blouse with a patchwork pinafore over it, and a bonnet covered in flowers.
Peter was originally a servant with beautiful blue eyes who worked in the Emerald City, and Melinda was a craftswoman hired by his employer, a wicked woman from the Emerald City, to make her a beautiful diadem with a platinum dove with a blue pearl for the eye. Melinda put herself deeply in debt and exhausted herself making the diadem, but when she brought it before the cruel woman, she said that she would not pay because the pearl was not blue enough, and she would only pay Melinda when she found a pearl the colour of her servant’s eyes. Melinda collapsed in despair, but, when she woke, found that the servant, seeing that she would die destitute and despairing otherwise, had torn out his own eye and given it to the woman to placed in the diadem.
Melinda fell in love with Peter, and they ran away together to the countryside, where Melinda married him and used some of the money from the diadem to buy a sapphire he used to replace his missing eye. There, he found new work as a woodman. However, the evil woman tracked him down, wishing to destroy him in revenge for deserting her and also so that there would be nothing to rival the beauty of her diadem in all of Oz. She gifted him an axe under the pretense of making peace, but it was cursed so that it would hack off his limbs, forcing him to replace them with mechanical parts. Melinda found out what was happening and got a potion from a wise woman that would end the curse, but it was too late to save Peter before his very heart was replaced, meaning he had no more emotions.
In grief, Melinda tore out her own heart and turned herself into a very humanoid Cyberwoman, who sought to convert others using an emotion-draining machine. With an army of Cybermats at her command, and a soporific poppy field to trap victims, she became known as the Queen of the Metal Mice, and still had the Cyberman Peter with her. When the Thirteenth Doctor, Ryan Sinclair, Graham O’Brien, Yasmin Khan, and an American teenager stumbled into this version of Oz, they were captured by Melinda just as Missy had planned. When they tried to resist having their emotions drained, Melinda called in Peter, now a full Cyberman but still wielding his axe and with one sapphire eye. However, Yaz remembered The Doctor telling her that Cybermen were weak to gold and used an old heart-shaped golden trinket Melinda had shown them as a keepsake of her old life while pretending to be human, cramming it into Peter’s chest and temporarily disabling him.
Later, when the teen, having now come out as transgender and taken the name Dorothy, took control of the Land of Fiction, she pledged to heal and reunite Peter and Melinda, among other changes she could make to the characters’ stories. (The Wonderful Doctor of Oz)