Name: Ludwig von Koopa
Gender: Male
Parents: King Bowser and Queen Clawdia Koopa
Age: 15
Height: 5'0
Weight: 170 lbs
Hair Color: Cobalt
Eye Color: Green
Marital Status: Attached (though not especially willingly)
Offspring: None
Quote: "For an optimist, the glass is half-full. For a pessimist the glass is half-empty. For a genius, it's a Basic Input Output System with a buffer overflow just waiting to happen."

Ludwig von Koopa is the firstborn of Bowser's seven children. His birth was unexpected and a bit bothersome to his newly-wed parents as they hadn't planned on having children for a few years yet. Nevertheless, they did their best to accomodate their first son into their lives.

At a very early age, young Ludwig expressed a passionate interest in music (mainly by pounding endlessly on the music room's piano until manually removed by one of the irritated palace staff). After some debate and many headaches, Bowser began to look for tutors that would take the baby Koopaling under their wing and teach him the finer points of being a musician... and admittedly, also to get him out of his parents' hair until he was at a more manageable age.

It was decided that Ludwig would be sent to learn under Madam Venteska Leighbanmire, an eccentric, elderly female Magikoopa who was a former concert mistress in the infamous and long-disbanded Midnight Belfry Orchestra. For the next eight years, Ludwig lived in his teacher's domicile on the other side of Dark Land and was taught to play a wide variety of instruments. He very much favored the pipe organ for its loud volume and, because of this, suffered an acute loss of hearing from playing it so often and sometimes for hours at a time.

Between his hands-on lessons, Madam Leighbanmire also taught Ludwig the fine art of composing music of his own. He had composed his first symphony, Requiem For A Green Balloon, by the time he was five.

In living with Madam Leighbanmire, Ludwig also began to emulate her off-beat way of existance. He had adopted not only her thick Slavic accent into his own speech, but also such insanities as believing that if one ate lox with their toast in the mornings it would make them smarter. Also, like Madam Leighbanmire, he became strongly superstitious about the rule of threes. "Bad luck always comes in threes," his tutor had insisted. "Seeing one of something out-of-the-ordinary is bad news, seeing two of the same thing means danger. If you see three in a row, it's simply too late." Such ideas made the young Koopaling suffer dementia from which he has never quite recovered.

Ludwig returned home to Castle Koopa at the age of 10 when his lessons were complete and was surprised to learn that he now had three younger brothers and that Clawdia and Bowser had finally settled down and resigned themselves to the idea that they were destined to be parents. His siblings, Lemmy, Roy, and Iggy, had been raised in a much different environment than he had and therefore were much more rambunctious than Ludwig had come to be. Madam Leighbanmire had countered most of his childhood boisterousness with harsh discipline, explaining that young princes did not behave in such a way.

Finding himself, more often than not, irritated at his siblings' lack of self-control, their taunting (calling him "mushmouth" because of his thick accent, for instance), and their obnoxiousness, Ludwig became a shut-in. He had been astranged from his family for so long, the eldest Koopaling no longer felt like he belonged in it and became very bitter. In an effort to extend an olive branch, so to speak, Bowser assembled a rudimentary symphony out of a group of underlings, given strict orders to perform his son's musical writings, and gave Ludwig full access to Castle Koopa's basement (since it lacked a concert hall) to work with them.

Having found some solace in being a conductor of his own symphonies and hearing his music performed, Ludwig became slightly happier with his situation and began to make an effort to participate in his family's goings-on a bit more. By this time, he was three-fourths of the way deaf and was fitted with an inner-ear hearing aid to bring his hearing back to a more-or-less normal level.

He found that, of his three siblings, he most closely-related with Roy at the time and, to even out his own inadequacies, often teamed up with his already-aggressive younger brother against Iggy and Lemmy in a sibling-based war that would span out for the better part of a year. When Wendy was born, the four brothers formed a temporary truce in alliance against their little sister and took every opportunity to make her life miserable. After repeated threats from Bowser and many trips to the dungeon, this alliance eventually dissolved and Ludwig, Roy, Lemmy, and Iggy largely ended up giving Wendy a wide berth while ignoring one another.

By the time Morton and Larry had been born, Bowser and Clawdia had their hands so full with trying to keep up with their childrens' antics that, as the eldest and most subdued, Ludwig was often ignored. To keep himself from getting depressed, he looked for other hobbies to busy himself with that deviated from his previously one-tracked music obsession. After failing as a short-lived poet and an artist, he became deeply-interested in how things worked and was happiest when he was disassembling various objects around the castle and studying their parts.

When he got in deep trouble for taking apart the engine of his father's TerrorTank, Ludwig tried to make amends by redesigning the tank to be bigger and better than before until he had blueprinted out what would later be known as the infamous Doomship and commanded immediate construction of the behemoth. Bowser was surprised and quite pleased when presented with the final product and employed it immediately as a part of his arsenal. His father's praise made Ludwig feel happy and, to go on feeling happy, decided to make a full-time venture out of inventing and tinkering, putting his music on the back burner.

With his few decided successes in the field of inventions, there also came uncountable failures. Due to his skewed nature, many of his devices were farfetched at best, and useless at worst. Behind his back, his siblings teased him and referred to him as "Kooky" von Koopa as a result of most of his inventions being laughed out of the throne room when he presented them to Bowser due to how ridiculous they were. It irritated him to have his sanity and relevance questioned with such a demeaning nickname, but ended up letting it roll off his back, not caring when it eventually stuck.

In his neverending quest for ideas, Ludwig often stays up late so he can think in silence while the rest of his family sleeps, turning to eating chocolate as his "motivator" since the caffiene contained within helps him stay awake. Unfortunately, the calories therein haven't done much good for his weight and he has grown to be a bit pudgy as a result.

Older now and having been humiliated alongside his family in all of his father's wars against Princess Peach's heroes, the Mario Brothers, Ludwig keeps mostly to himself. As the eldest of the seven Koopalings, he can serve one of two purposes depending on his mood: the protective older brother, or the undeniable tormentor to whichever of his siblings crosses him wrongly. These days, he largely prefers the company of his youngest brother, Larry, as he is quieter than the others, willing to listen, and a fellow lover of creating... though Larry's interest is in cross-breeding plants in hopes of producing new and interesting specimens instead of inventing.

Ludwig often helps Larry with "security systems" for his bedroom to keep Roy and the others from snooping around in his things and, in return, Larry gives him his especially-vicious Pirahna Plants to use as he sees fit, either as a componant in an invention or as a weapon of defense against whomever he is currently fueding with.

Despite the fact that he is getting to the age where he ought to take interest in the fairer gender, Ludwig has little to no romantic inclinations. It's partially due to the fact that he finds love to be a waste of time, heart, and energy that could be put toward useful things, and also because, thanks to ill-fated timing, he ran into one Karma Koopa, a wayfaring Yoshi/Koopa hybrid who had stumbled upon Bowser's kingdom quite by accident and, due to forces beyond either of their control, formed a Metbond with her, dooming them both to having to be in close proximity to one another at all times. Ergo, the topic of "love" tends to rub him the wrong way more than a bit.

While he, under normal circumstances, can't stand Karma and she has made it more than clear that she doesn't much care for him either, they have been known to pull together in extreme situations and play off of one another rather well. Despite rumors and jokes, he hotly denies having any fondness for the hybrid when asked and makes a point to drive the idea home by getting into ear-splitting verbal arguments with her whenever possible.

Ludwig, these days, couldn't care less about Mario and Luigi as long as they stay out of his way, and is adamently looking forward to coming of age, being allowed to strike out on his own and take on king status of his own castle as it's giving him a bad case of cabin fever to be cooped up with his brothers and sister as they get older. He is not quite the warmonger his father is and plans to run a recluse kingdom with an "attack if attacked" policy... at least until his inventing skills are more reliable and he's fairly sure he can create an arsenal that not even the princess' pet plumbers can defeat.

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