This is the first drawing of Petroshka (originally Peter The Zombit) I ever drew. Its dated August 11th 2020 and was drawn probably about a month before joining InkBunny.
Peter began as a generic character in a discord roleplay simply called "Fe guard", eventually "PeterTheF.E.Guard" and finally "PeterTheZombit" (which it has remained to this day. The "FE" stands for "Fat Earth", the cult Peter accidently got involved with).
This Roleplay began many months before I joined. Basically my daughter and her online friends came up with the idea of doing a free-form roleplay (no dice and almost no rules) to keep them entertained during Quarantine. The main story involves a "family" of super powered furries/humans/hybrids that live in a house together. They have crazy non-sensical adventures, but mostly they just hang around the house and make jokes. Anyway in an attempt to spice things up I introduced my Fat Earth characters. At first they were just annoying pushy religious fanatics that would come in the RP, mutter some of their ridiculous nonsense (mostly about the physics of the "fat earth") and get summarily ignored :p
The first Fat Earth character was "Earl" which eventually became the chatbot "FATERFER" with a picture of Leroy The Reindeer from the original music video, and in the end became "EarlTheFatErfer". If you are unfamiliar with Leroy the Reindeer allow me to quickly explain. He's Rudolphs much older hillbilly cousin (he has a wife and child and a magic hypersonic flying pick up truck). When theres a stormy night and Rudolph is sick with the flu Leroy takes over for him using his pickup truck (basically tows santa's sleigh). He doesn't seem to have any powers on his own. That's pretty much it. I suppose a link is in order: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iIdnYAkqSes
The issue of whether "Earl" is another character, or is just a nickname of Leroy wasn't initially clear. However later on I incorporated the christmas lore into the RP so that the characters original lore was in their past. So some time after helping Santa and retiring he eventually ends up leaving his wife and child behind to join the church of Krampus, learning earth and spacetime magic as his disciple eventually reaching the rank of "Wizard" within the church. He acts mainly as the churches primary Pastor since Krampus is too old and too insane to actually run a church or gain converts (I'll talk more about Krampus in another submission).
Anyway, good old Earl eventually became such a nuisance that the other characters reacted to his presence, stubbing his foot and telling him to leave. He did but came back with his hillbilly family, mainly his cousins Rudolph, Rusty and six other unnamed Reindeer called "The Knights of Zetetica", and a stand off happened between the Fat Earthers that surrounded the house with shotguns poised at the housemates. A peaceful resolution was reached when one of the housemates, my daughters fursona "Yuki" accepted a copy of their bible, the mad writings of a self-styled 20th century prophet using the alias "Thaalthuulselah". After this, they left. From that point on however they became much more pushy and fanatical, more like a dangerous secret society, seemingly with connections and influence everywhere.
This is where "The Prison" comes in. It is a facility run and owned by the Fat Earthers and funded by the government to reform super powered criminals that normal prisons can't handle. The Fat Erfers are able to keep them in check because it turns out that by communing with the Earth the high ranking members of the church (wizards and up) are able to use real magic that can bend spacetime, and can affect such things as gravitational force and direction, time, and even the distance between objects. Krampus is the most powerful magic being of the church and has a special rank of "Warlock" which is considered above even Wizard. Being just a money making operation for the church however it is really more like a brainwashing facility for inducting both inmates and employees into the church. Prisoners are indoctrinated to "cure" them, and employees are paid to watch instructional videos and read pamplets in addition to running and maintaining the facility. The church most employs its own as actual security guards since they are the ones with actual powers.
Peter was moving from town to town trying to find work. He found out about the prison and took the job mainly because it pays really well (it's government funded after all). He was working there mainly as a janitor. He watched the videos and read the pamplets but didn't entirely buy into it, but figured, what the hell, I'm getting paid really well to listen to this batshit crazy schlock, might as well toe the line and keep the job. From his indoctrination Peter learns of the existence of "the farm" and its location near the equator of the earth, as well as the existence of forbidden blood magic (more on that later).
Meanwhile, do to previous altercations and because the church seems to have decided to target the housemates for conversion to their faith, several are taken to the prison and held there against there will, albeit for legit crimes (they kinda go around killing anyone who gets in there way being superpowered and all). Anyway, some of the housemates go to the prison to try to free their friends but are unable to defeat the master guard of the facility who is the most powerful magic user they have yet encountered, in addition to being physically imposing and almost unstoppable. Unable to defeat him they decide to kidnap Peter (simply "Fe guard" at this point) instead to interrogate him and discover the churches weakness. They punch him in the face several times, hence the bloody nose and the black eye seen in the picture above (the cut in his ear is from previous encounters when he has been subject to violence. Peter has a penchant for getting wrapped up in bad situations). Peter eventually reveals that they get their powers from their earth goddess and suggests defeating them by turning their own logic against them, exploiting contradictions in their beliefs and antagonisms between their gods in order to cause them to get confused and doubt enough to lose their connection to the earth and lose their powers.
As it so happens ... none of this proves necessary, as the churches leader is a senile batshit crazy old goat with little common sense, a short temper, and a short term memory problem. He banishes his most powerful guard for a minor annoyance to another dimension, then proceeds to completely forget what he's doing and free the prisoners to help him find a organic gocery to shop at ... :p
Around this point I wanted to turn the Fe Guard into a new character, and came up with the idea of making him a rabbit and basing him on the easter bunny. The housemates had mostly forgotten their prisoner but I kept roleplaying him still being tied up and in their house. I found some pictures online of a cynical looking easter bunny OC and used it as a chatbot icon. I can't show this image however because I don't own it. Anyway this was a big mistake because all I managed to do was draw the attention of the murderous housemates. Rather than simply let Peter go for helping them out they instead decided to kill him. This felt incredibly cruel and unfair, but I did sort of put myself in this position by trying to create an important character out of a minor one. However I didn't want to lose the character I was just starting to make so I had to act quickly to write him out of the situation. Peter gets stabbed in the neck and dies but as his blood spills out unto the floor (he makes the chair he is in fall over) he casts an earth curse he learned from his indoctrination of the church which punishes those who killed him. It causes the gravitational field around the house to increase to the point where the house weighs "an octillion tons" causing it to collapse, the sky turned dark and the housemates began to sink into the bloodsoaked ground. To undo this scenario, my daughter Yuki, reversed time, bringing Peter back to life and undoing the curse. Peter escapes to the nearby woods and now finds himself a true believer since he thinks the spell brought him back to life. This sends him on a quest to find the farm and learn more ...
And that is essentially the origin story of Peter. This also explains the "Zombit" (zombie rabbit) term, since while he is technically not an undead, he did die and come back to life, and besides I thought it sounded cool.
Yuki eventually complained about me using borrowed art and insisted I create my own art for the icon instead. This was a general pet peeve of hers on the RP and she insisted people make their own art instead of borrowing art from google. At first I wasn't really inclined because this RP was not very serious (can you tell by how crazy and random it is?). But then I kinda got interested in the idea of making an original character out of PeterTheZombit and I thought it might be fun to come up with my own design. Although inspired by the google art, I was successfully able to create a different character.
Here he is wearing a blue janitor jumpsuit, has a cigarette pack in his pocket (he's a compulsive and almost constant smoker), has strung out eyes from regular drug use (at this later point in his life), as the aforementioned bloody nose and black eye from the interrogation. He looks deeply depressed and lost in his mind. He also looks like life has taken a toll on him with a cut in his ear and bent up whiskers. Lastly I added the pink hankerchief tied around his neck to suggest the possiblity that Peter might be queer. Although not shown in this picture I also had the idea that Peter usually paints his fingernails purple, to match the color on the tip of his ears.
The image was created using ink, color pencils, markers, crayons, and some white out for the smoke effect.
Image 2 shows the cropped version that was used to create the original icon. Now you know the convoluted story of how this image came into existence.
Expect to see more art related to Peter/Petroshka's storyline, especially from the "fat earther arc".
