Author's Notes:

1) This is the first installment of a short, action-packed series in which all characters will remain as close to their canon-personalities as possible within the idea that this takes place after our koopalings have been through a war and are at least several years older than as seen in the games or original television series.

2) There is a character within the pages of this story in which whom originates from a website called "Lemmy's Land." She is a yoshi-koopa hybrid that was a popular OC on the aforementioned site known as 'Karma Koopa.' She has been bound to Ludwig Koopa by a strange, magical connection known as a 'met-bond,' and this binds two koopas together, often against their will, in hopes that procreation will two koopas would have 'met' and are 'bonded,' hence the name. They feel one another's physical pain and cannot be separated by much distance physically. This is one of the few magical properties that koopas contained, according to the source author, known by name as "Karma Koopa."

~ Prologue: Reflections ~

One would never know by merely looking at me that I was the once and future king, Prince Ludwig Von Koopa. My accent has become much faded over these past few years; this mottled Mushroom dialect has become a filthy stain upon my tongue. Sometimes, though, this is all we can do.

I remember that day sometimes clearer than I remember what I used to look like. The flames licking your scales isn't something you merely forget. The Battle of the Shells is what the history books are calling it, but it was the day my blue hair singed and my shell scorched to the color of burned and smoky glass. I keep my head shaved—I wouldn't want the Mushroom Brigade to find me now— and my shell is as green as the grass of all the other unaffected koopas.

We're never ready for the death of our parents, regardless if we see it marching in the distance or if Death is already standing at the door before you've opened it. When King Bowser Koopa died, that was the end of endless chocolate pies, toiling in my lab, and of a love that blossomed into something irrevocable. That was the end of my world, and the beginning of the long struggle of survival that follows.