Hello, there. My name is Luigi. This is my story.

Some of you, though I expect not many, may recognize my name. Yes, I am the younger brother of fantastic hero Mario Mario. I'm just the second. Yes, that is the name of the chapter. And yes, we are twins. But of course, I just had to be born thirteen minutes after him. The most unlucky number. Yes, it'd be typical for my type of luck. But what you probably don't know is that Mario isn't the hero at all. I am. I'm just not one to take credit. I am here to tell you what really happens behind the screen. It's a bit complicated. But you're smart. You are reading this book, after all. I'll tell you what's fake and what's real throughout the course of this book. Let me start off with this. The accents? Fake. Yeah. We're from Brooklyn. So don't let us deceive you. We come from Italian heritage, though. Close enough. We fake it so that it's more interesting than our boring Brooklyn accents. This chapter's pretty much just gonna be exposition. If you don't read it, it's on you if you don't understand something.

We grew up pretty normally. Until something awful happened. When we were twelve, our apartment was attacked. But nobody else's was. Our sister was upstairs sleeping. She was ten, and we were twelve. It was by a huge dragon thing that came in and demanded that our Papa "hand over the kids." He refused, so a fight broke out, and after the dust settled, we saw our Papa on the floor, and a huge, colorful hole in the wall. We, being kids, were mesmerized by the colors. Before Mama could grab us by the collars of our shirts,we were sucked into the portal into a strange forest. Mario hit his head, so he was unconscious. I ran to try and find some food and water. We didn't know where we were, so it was pretty scary. Even with my awful luck, I found a freshwater stream and a blueberry bush. I grabbed as many berries I could find and ran back to the clearing to find Mario rubbing his head.

"Look! Look! I found stuff!" I said.

"Good job, Two." Mario always had his little nickname for me. But brothers are always annoying. At least, in my case. He snatched some of the berries out of my hand. He stuffed them in his mouth. He grabbed some more and ate them. Sounds like a pig, doesn't he? Well, that's what he was. And still is, in my opinion. We spent the rest of the day chatting, eating, and drinking from the stream. We set up a little camp in the clearing made out of branches and leaves. We made a pebble path from the camp to the stream. Mario doesn't have a photographic memory like me, so he wouldn't be able to remember the way. He never wanted my help, anyway. That will get him into a lot of trouble, I remember thinking. I remember all of my thoughts anyway. We were twelve and stupid back then. I'm not stupid anymore, but I can't say the same for Mario. No, I was never really stupid because of my memory.

I know what you're probably thinking. Why am I hating on Mario so hard? Well, let's see you get through this book without hating Mario at least once. I'm serious. He's done a lot of stuff that isn't typical good guy behavior. Theft, manipulation, abuse, countless other crimes. No he didn't, you probably think frantically, he's a hero. Who would know these facts better than his own brother, though? Do you see my point, or do you think I'm lying? I thought so. We'll see who's right. Anyway, back to the exposition.

We would later learn that the woods we were living in were and still are called Dimble Wood. We improved on our camp for nearly a year. By the time we were thirteen, we had made our shabby camp into a cottage. We took the chlorophyll from the leaves and flowers to make paint to paint the house. The sign that said "Mario Bros." was in green, and the area around it in red. Our last name is Mario, if you couldn't tell already. We were proud of ourselves, though Mario claims to have done the majority of the work to appear masculine to his girlfriend. Oh, no, it's not Peach. He's with Pauline now. But we'll get to that later. Back to the exposition. I keep getting distracted.

We were sitting at our wooden table, eating a breakfast of assorted berries in wooden bowls I had finished carving the previous day. I had found a strawberry and a raspberry bush that morning. We still hadn't found a village near our cottage yet, but we had never looked very far. I had made a fire pit out in the front. I had lit a fire that morning, and for the first time in a year, we heard a knock on the door. "I'll get it." I went to the door and opened it to see a small fungus-like child on our doorstep. "Yes?"

"You are cordially invited to her royal highness Princess Peach Toadstool's coronation. She told me to invite anyone I could find, and I saw the smoke from the fire, so...is it just you? Or is there another person in there?"

"My brother lives here with me. Thank you for inviting us, but we don't know how to get to the kingdom." I thought it must have been a kingdom, since it had a princess.

"Okay. So from here, you take a right at the twisted tree over there and keep going straight until you see the sign. Then you take a left and keep going straight until you see the stone path. That's one of the gates. You have to show your invitation to the guards, otherwise they won't let you in. Got it?" I nodded and thanked the kid. He left, and I closed the door.

"Hey, bro, we got an invitation to a coronation. It's..." I looked at the invitation. "tomorrow. It's her birthday, it says so here. Oh, hey! She's gonna be our age, dude!"

"Cool! Is she hot?"

"I don't know! She didn't give it to me! Why would a princess be in a forest?!" I told him exasperatedly.

"Well, let's go to see if she's hot!"

"It's not until tomorrow, and they won't let us in until tomorrow, you dolt! She obviously won't be out of the castle anyway."

"And you're obviously an idiot, Two."

"Shut up."

"You first, Second."

"So now I'm first."

"Huh?" I laughed at his stupidity. He punched me in the arm in return. It didn't hurt much, but I punched him back anyway. It turned into an all-out wrestling match. I won.

"Take it back, Red!"

"You first, Squirt!"

"I really don't think you're in the position to argue with me." He really wasn't. I had him pinned down on the floor.

"Fine! Fine! You win! I'm sorry!" I released him and we both started cracking up. "You're really good, Two. Nice match."

"You're not too bad yourself, Red." These wrestling matches didn't mean much, only that he didn't argue with me for a couple hours. He wasn't that bad back then. But that was back then