At a harsh mid-winter day, a very young Red Sonja was thrown head-first into her first fierce battle without knowing much about what it was all about.
Consequently, she was outfitted with nothing more than a slim, but razor sharp lightweight sword and, without any regard to her modesty, let alone the freezing conditions, a tiny scale mail bikini. Even worse for her, in an effort to distract the enemies, she was not even allowed a bikini top.
Quick and agile, Red Sonja managed to outmaneuver her much heavier equipped, yet slower opponents and perform several dogfight kills while dodging sword strokes, spears and even arrows.
But defeat against the outnumbering enemy eventually seemed inevitable. Stricken by panic, young Sonja glimpsed a passage out of the slaughter chaos and fled the battle field at the last possible moment, pulling along a group of persecutors.
While wasting their remaining arrows in the wind, Sonja's persecutors were initially outrun in the deep powder snow by the considerably lighter girl, but started to catch up again as she got increasingly tired. She narrowly escaped by throwing herself into a river where the current pulled her away.
As the persecutors, presuming for sure she would drown, returned to the battlefield to claim their share of the war booty, Red Sonja clung to an ice floe and drifted far downstreams before struggling ashore at an opposite river bank. Nearing the brink of complete exhaustion, she stumbled onwards to an abandoned hut and was barely able to lit a fire and grasp a warm carpet before collapsing on a straw mattress.
Red Sonja later learned that she was the only one among her fellow warriors who had avoided to be killed or captured and enslaved, and became convinced her scale mail bikini, which she had been told was made special for her by a wizard, somehow contained the reason behind. No matter how much suffering it claimed during winter, the metal bikini remained her signature outfit for well over a decade.
Not until several years after, as her skills and self confidence continued to grow, did she dare to start adding items like boots, gloves and ornaments. And finally, as her breasts grew along, the item she had been longing for most of all: A matching scale mail bikini top.
