Thread:Butterapple101/@comment-1931440-20151113045213/@comment-1931440-20151113161203

There's also a few more things about the characters I think I should mention:

Nadya is the True Princess, Pyotr is the searching prince, Ivan is the goofy friend who is still very significant, and the main antagonist is the thunderstorm  from PatP, remade into the legendary Storm Bird. The cute animal sidekick is Arkady, your average cantankerous cat.

You should know enough about Nadya from her profile, and she doesn’t have that much of a backstory. If you’re a My Little Pony follower, just picture Fluttershy with Rarity’s priorities. She is the daughter of a knyaz/duke of the tiniest, most easily overlooked, barely-a-duchy of the territories She’s mostly ordinary-looking besides a generic cuteness, she’s polite and demure while having no self-confidence or a threshold for stress, and she wants to live a boring, cushiony life where nothing bad happens to her. But of course, a lot of craziness comes her way.



Pyotr is pretty much the opposite of the Prince Charming archetype. He’s sullen, surly, sarcastic, but he’s not so bad once you get to know him. Arguably, Pyotr’s backstory is the most important of the main trio. First of all, there’s the question of why he has to marry a “true princess”? Here’s my justification: a witch has cursed him with a heart of stone — literally. The prince carries it around in a pouch, and the cavity in his chest where it fell out is also stone. It comes with the cool power to have his to protect him from pain. Like, if Pyotr punches a wall, his fist will turn to stone, or his head if something is thrown at it. Unfortunately, without his heart, the prince has lost use of his senses, can’t sleep without night terrors, and animals hate him. According to the witch, the only given cure is “the hand of true nobility.” At the insistence of the Capital’s duke and the Tsar’s advisor, the Tsar and Tsarina are gathering up all eligible girls of nobility to test out whether or not the prince’s disembodied heart reacts to them, to find the cure.



Ivan Kuznetsovich is Pyotr’s oldest and only friend. He’s a Romani-born peasant (because I can’t picture a Russian fairy tale without ruska roma) who wants to follow in his grandfather’s footsteps as the royal court jester. He’s there to dance, sing, make merry and provide an optimistic viewpoint; Pretty much like any happy, funny sidekick. As the one who told Pyotr about Granny Bones’ wishing well as a kids, Ivan feels responsible for his buddy’s curse and one of the most determined to help him. He’s also the narrator, which gives an explanation as to why people are bursting into song.



The Storm Bird at first appears to be an ancient, primordial force of destruction who may or may not be under Granny Bones’ control. Then it’s revealed that Duke Solovey, the Tsar’s confidant, is using magic and Pyotr’s curse to find the pure heart so he can become immortal. Unlike the average evil advisor, he’s not interested in usurping the Tsar. To Solovey, nothing is more noble than being the man behind the Tsar, so he wants immortality to do it forever. At least, that’s what he tells the heroes. Really, he’s just a man who can’t face his own mortality. He uses his Storm Bird form to topple the territories because he considers those of lesser nobilities (aka Nadya) expendable in the face of his mission and the Tsar’s royal family, and in his mind, you can’t be royal if your territory is rubble.



You can’t have the Princess and the Pea without the heroine failing to sleep on twenty mattresses, so I incorporated it into Solovey’s ritual to rip out Nadya’s heart. She needs to have fallen into despair (like Pyotr did as a boy) for it to work, so he puts Nadya into a magic sleep/trance, where she is in an inescapable, acid trip place, and being tempted to give up. She climbs a hill that turns into a giant bed, and just when she’s about to fall asleep, Nadya feels a dried pea in her pocket she’s been keeping since Pyotr and Ivan gave it to her during the night with the Romani. It gives the strength to go on, and she breaks free of Solovey’s magic.