(Disclaimer: I do not own anything in this story.)

Kooky was in a pink room wearing a pink dress. He was sitting at a tea table with a stuffed animal at each seat. His four-year-old little sister Wendy was running a jeweled pink hairbrush through his hair.

"Oh, Ludwig… I wish I had long pretty hair like you…"

The bristles were soft, so they didn't tug at the painful sticky snaggles where Ludwig had gotten candy in his hair.

Wendy put a couple of barrettes in his hair and put the brush down so that she could pour out the tea. Ludwig toddled over to the electronic keyboard that he had been playing on and began to play out the melody he had been contemplating while patiently putting up with Wendy playing makeover doll on him.

"No, no, Luddy, no piano until after the tea party," Wendy told him, grabbing him by the hair and putting him back in his seat.

Wendy snapped when Ludwig insisted on helping himself to the sugar and insisted that he ask for the sugar to be passed to him.

"Noooo…!" Wendy shouted in response to Ludwig's atrocious table manners as he dipped his cookie into the tea, getting tea splattered all over the pastel pink tablecloth, crunched down his cookie with his mouth open, spitting crumbs everywhere that he later snatched up, and slurped down the tea noisily, accompanying it with a belch.

"KOOKY, WHERE ARE YOU? IT'S TORTURE TIME!"

"IN HERE KING DADDY!" shouted Wendy.

Ludwig threw off his barrettes and stripped off the dress and ran out of the bedroom, praying that he wouldn't run into his father King Bowser.

But it was too late. Ludwig heard his father's thunderous footsteps to the left of Wendy's bedroom door, and when he turned around, he saw his father running toward him, with the instrument of torture in his hand.

Ludwig began to run down the hallway, but he was too fat and slow from his diet of gourmet junk food that he was no match against the speed of his father.

"AAAAUUUGH! WHY COULDN'T YOU JUST THROW ME IN THE DUNGEON!" Ludwig shouted German obscenities as Bowser ran the comb through the tangles, burrs and rat's nests, pulling out large amounts of blue troll hair that got caught in the comb.

"Holy Dark Land, Ludwig, a candy cane? You've got to be kidding me…"

Ludwig grabbed for an old French fry that Bowser threw out of his hair. Bowser swore as he pulled a sucker stick out of one of the tangles.

"I can't handle this, son. I'm going to have to call a professional."

Bowser took out his giant-sized 1980s cell phone, which he had customized to have his face logo on it. "Hello, Kiddie Cutz? I would like to make an appointment for my son… actually, for four of my sons…"

Ludwig's eyes popped out in horror. A day at the beauty shop was bound to be torturous. They would wash his hair… Ludwig cringed at the thought of a strange beautician's claws lathering his hair up. Ludwig never bathed, let alone shampooed, unless his father or one of the servants forcibly scrubbed him down. Even in Austria, though his mother expected him to be reasonably presentable to attend university, social events or to play concert piano, it simply wasn't the culture among the Koopas there to be bothered by B.O. or to practice hygiene beyond that which was required to not succumb to infection or filth-related disease.

And then they would take out the comb and the scissors, maybe the electric razor…

Considering the longer-term consequences… what would he look like? Would they give him a stupid Mohawk like his brothers Larry, Lemmy and Iggy? Would they shave him bald like his brothers Roy and Morton and his sister Wendy (all three of whom missed out on the hair gene that Koopas must have in order to grow hair)? Or would he look completely different and worse altogether? This hairstyle might be messy, but it was him. Despite his young age, Ludwig was mentally mature enough to understand the importance of expressing one's personal style and individuality. How dare his father try to hack it all away from him!