Time to learn more about Madeline! 

Madeline de Verninac was born in 1754 on a version of Earth with a timeline somewhat different from our own, to a wealthy aristocratic family in the Swiss Confederacy. 

When she was nine years old, Madeline accompanied her family on a trip to the Vatican, where she got lost in the Vatican Library and accidentally wandered through a portal to the Archive of Thoth, a library which exists outside of ordinary spacetime and serves as the base of operations for the loose-knit group of interdimensional scholar-adventurers known as the Order of Eight Directions. 

The Reality Patrol considers the Order of Eight Directions an interdimensional terrorist organization, and membership in the Order automatically gets a person added to the Reality Patrol's Most Wanted List. Anyone who finds their way to the Archive of Thoth is accepted into the Order, so Madeline has been a member since the age of nine. 

We'll learn more about the Order of Eight Directions when we return to the main storyline in Volume Two!