Kathryn the Ice Queen

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Kathryn the Ice Queen, @, is the boss of the Ice Queen's Realm in EvilHack. She is a powerful human sorceress under an evil curse - upon her defeat, the curse is lifted and she becomes the much more powerful and peaceful Kathryn the Enchantress, @.

Kathryn appears on the last floor of her realm within the central room of her castle; she is unaligned in her Ice Queen form and lawful in her Enchantress form, and cannot be tamed, genocided or otherwise killed in either form.

Descriptions

Generation

Kathryn the Ice Queen is always found inside her castle on the third and final floor of the branch, and resides within the left inner chambers. She will always generate hostile, and is guarded by Bourbon and Ozzy; they generate peaceful, but will become hostile and protect her once she is attacked.

Kathryn the Ice Queen's starting inventory consists of an enchanted, erosion-proofed athame of frost, a pair of gloves, a pair of high boots, an amulet of reflection, a ring of slow digestion, and one of either a cloak of magic resistance or a cloak of displacement. If encountered on her birthday, she will additionally generate with roughly 4 times her usual HP and a potion of full healing.

Strategy

In addition to ascension-level gear, the Ice Queen has the full range of monster spells to cast at her disposal, with her spellcasting geared towards a cold-based offense; this includes temporarily weakening the player's resistances, including resistance to cold in particular. In short, cold resistance is especially important here (as well as for the branch overall), along with acid resistance to blunt the worst damage from her acid blast spells; weakened cold resistance will cause your HP to slowly deplete, so unless you are capable of passively out-healing the frost damage, it is best to defeat her quickly. Defeating Kathryn will transform her into her Enchantress form, also pacifying Bourbon and Ozzy.

Generation

Kathryn the Enchantress always appears after her Ice Queen form is defeated, and will be generated peaceful unless you are an Infidel. She retains whatever inventory she still possesses from her previous form.

Strategy

In this form, Kathryn has almost every resistance available in the game, alongside attacks and spells that can easily cleave through most of an ascension-worthy character's full healing-and-nurse dance-bolstered HP. As such, she is orders of magnitude more difficult than any other monster in the game, and is considered very difficult to defeat in normal play; even if somehow defeated, she will immediately resurrect at full HP, so there is no benefit to attacking her outside of bragging rights. If Kathryn the Enchantress is angered accidentally, she can be pacified by throwing a candy bar at her.

Due to her generation method she is not typically a threat, and setting her off is easily avoidable with careful play. However, she does not like Infidels in the slightest: if you defeat her previous form as an Infidel, you will free her from the curse as normal, but this incurs a -2 alignment penalty and she will remain hostile; she will then stand in place for 100 turns, after which she will un-paralyze herself and pursue you if you have not left in that time frame. This should give an Infidel just enough time to loot the crystal chests, free and saddle the trapped pegasus, retrieve any eggs under it, and beeline for the stairs before they risk meeting death at her hands.

Origin

Kathryn is the daughter of EvilHack's developer, and her companions Bourbon and Ozzy are based on the family's German Shepherd dogs. The Ice Queen is loosely based off of Elsa from the movie Frozen - Kathryn was eight years old when work began on the Ice Queen branch, and had watched the movie with her father so many times that the number is too large to be represented here; Elsa was her favorite movie character at the time. As implied by the encyclopedia entry, she is also somewhat based on the White Witch, the main antagonist of the Chronicles of Narnia books by C. S. Lewis.

Encyclopedia Entry

"The White Witch? Who is she?"
"Why, it is she that has got all Narnia under her thumb.
It's she that makes it always winter. Always winter and
never Christmas; think of that!"
"How awful!" said Lucy.

Every moment the patches of green grew bigger and the patches
of snow grew smaller. Every moment more and more of the trees
shook off their robes of snow. Soon, wherever you looked,
instead of white shapes you saw the dark green of firs or the
black prickly branches of bare oaks and beeches and elms.
Then the mist turned from white to gold and presently cleared
away altogether. Shafts of delicious sunlight struck down on
to the forest floor and overhead you could see a blue sky
between the tree tops.
[ The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe,
by C.S. Lewis ]