Once upon a time, there was a powerful king who was proud and arrogant and whose heart was said to be as frozen as the lands he ruled over. One night, when the was howling fiercely and the hail was falling from the sky like daggers, an old beggar woman presented herself before the king and asked for shelter, just until the storm passed. The king was repulsed by her ancient and haggard appearance and turned her away. The old woman warned him not to be fooled by the outward seeming of things for, just as her old and clever eyes had seen past the imposing man on his imposing throne in his imposing castle to the goodness buried deep within him, so too might she be more than she first appeared. But the king scorned the old woman again, mocking her as too simple to know where she wasn't wanted. Twice refused, the old woman cast off her disguise and revealed herself to be a beautiful and powerful enchantress, an elemental of ice and snow. The king fell to his knees before her and pled for forgiveness, but her wrath, once drawn, was not so easily swayed. She laid a curse on his gold and ruby-encrusted crown, the very symbol of his pride and arrogance, that all he had seen her to be, so would he become, until the day he was able to thaw his frozen heart and learn to love another, and that other was able to look past his outward façade and see the goodness within him the curse had left intact, and come to love him in return. But that's a different story.

Many centuries later, there was an intelligent and well-spoken man by the name of Simon Petrikov, whose good heart was readily apparent to all who met him. Simon was a scholar and a collector of antiques and rare artifacts. It was on a singularly pleasant afternoon when Simon was feeling in particularly high spirits and wandering through a town in Northern Scandinavia searching for more pieces to add to his collection, that he met a dock worker who had found a beautiful and old gold crown encrusted with rubies. Simon bought the crown from the dock worker for a pittance – Simon would have gladly paid a fair price for the item, and indeed did try to do so, but the dock worker was eager to rid himself of the thing and insisted that he was doing Simon no favors by giving it to him. Then, perhaps because the story of the frozen king had been long since resolved and resigned to myth and legend and mostly forgotten, or perhaps because while Simon was interested in the occult, he believed himself above such silly superstitions, or perhaps merely because it was a singularly pleasant afternoon and he was in particularly high spirits, Simon indulged in a fanciful whim and placed the crown on his head. This was a mistake. Chaos ensued, and in time so did a great many troubles for Simon, and eventually, though by no particular doing of Simon's own, so did a great many troubles for the world as a whole. But that too is a different story.

Our story begins with a woman who happened to be in that very same Northern Scandinavian town on that very same day on her own business. In the chaos, no one noticed when she was blasted by the magic Simon was shooting indiscriminately into the crowd and the ground and the air and was frozen into a solid block of ice. Nor did they notice when that block of ice encasing her fell into the sea, nor when the wind and the waves carried the ice further up into the frozen North, where it would stay for a very, very long time. Our story begins one millennium after that fateful day, and only a few months after a freshly-thawed Betty Grof awoke to find herself washed up on the shore of the strange and wondrous land of Ooo.