Series: (Super) Mario Bros.
Class: Heroic Plumber
Alignment: Super Nice Guy
Gender: Male
Species: Human
Age: Adult
Birthdate: July 14
Height: 5'7"
Weight: 198 lbs
Short Description: Mustachio'd Italian man in a green shirt and denim overalls. It's-a me, Luigi!
Info: Luigi's here alone while Mario rescues Princess Peach (again) back in the Mushroom Kingdom, and Professor E. Gadd figures out how to get Luigi back home! Fortunately, the L.O.S.T. device ("Logistical Organized Systematic Transcommunicator" system) provided by Professor Gadd keeps the Brothers in contact!
A short fellow, about 5'7", with dark brown hair. He wears primarily green. A green 'poor boy' styled cap with a round white patch on the front sits upon his head. The patch has a letter 'L' in green upon it.
He has a rather large nose, large blue eyes above it, and a smooth handlebar mustache beneath that nose. He wears a green shirt and a pair of denim overalls, a pair of heavy brown shoes, and white gloves on his hands.
And on his left ear he wears a large, round, red earphone of sorts, with a large round microphone pressed against his jaw. The red part on his ear blinks with a red light every so often.
- Super Movement: Much like his brother Mario, Luigi is able to run faster and jump higher than a normal human. The brothers are both able to jump more than twice their height, and even chain up to three jumps in the air. Luigi's individual jumps in particular are higher than Mario's, and he can run slightly faster than his brother. Additionally he can slow nis ascent or descent during a jump by "scuttling" his feet in the air; this gives him more control during jumps and increases his horizontal leaping ability. However, while it's easier for Luigi to get up to speed, it's also more difficult for him to stop running, since he is lighter than his brother and doesn't have as much mass to create inertia. Thus he needs a longer distance to stop running.
- Physical Condition: Whether it's due to Magic Mushrooms or not, both Mario and Luigi are able to take much more damage than a normal human being, and tend to recover from their injuries faster. This is not regeneration, and if they lose a limb it will remain gone (barring outside influences). However, they heal from wounds about twice as fast as a normal human. Additionally they're able to stand multiple-story falls with little more than getting banged up or knocked out, rather than breaking every bone in their bodies. It takes a whopping 100-foot fall to start causing injuries.
- Fighting Style: Luigi's fighting style incorporates powerful strikes, but a lot of overextension. It's not unusual for Luigi to fall on his head or face while performing these moves, either. Or even to use his head as a battering ram, turning himself into a missile with his head as the payload. While it doesn't seem to hurt him much (it's just his head, after all), he does require a few extra moments to get off the floor when he does this. Additionally, he has been known to fling ill-aimed moves or to "windmill punch" with his eyes closed.
- Block Summon: Luigi isn't always able to stock the items he needs to fight beforehand. When caught out without his inventory, Luigi can summon a block with a random item inside. This is indeed a large yellow cube with rounded edges, with a large white question mark on it. He needs to hit the box from below or stomp on it from above to get the block to relinquish the item inside. This item follows all usual rules for the item.
Resources
- Inventory: Having spent a good length of time in the Mushroom Kingdom, Luigi has access to a large variety of items that allow him to expand his abilities. These include various elemental flowers, magical suits that confer a number of abilities, and items that can either give him physical immunity to attacks and environmental hazards for a short time or make him grow to giant size. Luigi can usually only spare the energy to use these items the equivalent of once per scene, however.
- Comm: The "Logistical Organized Systematic Transcommunicator" system, or L.O.S.T., is an ear-mounted comm that can communicate with any communicator on its frequency. Currently this extends only to the duplicate L.O.S.T. comm that Mario wears.
- West Wing: Most of the west wing of Princess Peach's castle made the transition into NeoTokyo with Luigi. While most of the rooms are now open to the air and not very secure, there are a few that are not. Additionally, one of these secure rooms holds the mirror through which he can speak with the denizens of the Mushroom Kingdom. This mirror can be freely moved (as can the mirror on the Mushroom Kingdom side) as its link is via a botched magical spell. However, if either mirror is destroyed, the link will be broken.
Weaknesses
- Luigi is smaller and lighter than his brother Mario, and may be more easily swept, thrown, or moved around unwillingly.
- Because he's lighter, he also runs faster, but it takes much longer for him to stop running when he's at his stride.
- Being the meeker of the two Brothers, it takes a lot for him to finally stand up and put his foot down. He almost never bothers defending himself unless there are others in danger, too.
- He willingness to stay safe, and to flee when it looks like he's going to get hurt, has him marked as a coward when that isn't really the case at all.
- Even now, where he's only in contact with Mario via communication devices, Luigi is dependent on Mario for emotional strength. The Brothers share a bond, and that can be exploited by the cleverer and/or more enterprising of villains.
Background
Mario and Luigi are twins, but not identical; Luigi, as most people know, is taller and slightly slimmer than Mario. Luigi has, sadly, always been the more accident-prone, unluckier of the brothers. The brothers were actually born in the Mushroom Kingdom. However, a prediction made by Kamek, a high-ranking Magikoopa (a magic-using member of the turtle-like Koopa race) would paint targets on them both. His prediction was, of course, that the brothers would grow up to cause problems for Bowser.
With no way to prevent the two brothers from being attacked, their birth mother bundled them up and gave them to a stork to find them a new family far away from the Mushroom Kingdom, and Bowser's evil. However, while being transported to their new home, Baby Luigi was kidnapped by the Koopas, requiring the friendly Yoshis to bring the twins together again. Once the brothers were reunited, the stork continued his mission, now convinced of its necessity.
He brought them to Earth and left them at the first house that looked like it was owned by a family well-off enough to take care of them. It was an aging Italian family that the stork left them with, one who hadn't been able to have children of their own. So of course they were overjoyed to find the twin bundles of joy on their doorstep. They found with them only a note that told their names -- the one bundled in red was "Mario", the one bundled in green was "Luigi".
Mario, of course, became the more outgoing of the two, with Luigi mainly content to stay in his brother's shadow for the most part. The two became inseparable, perhaps as a side effect of Luigi having been kidnapped as a baby. Mario began to try a variety of different and exciting careers as the pair grew, but never stayed in any of them for very long. Meanwhile Luigi became a handyman, preferring the safe and less exciting life of "fix the broken thing". He discovered a love for plumbing, and moved to that field more permanently.
Eventually all of Mario's thrilling career choices went belly-up, and when he couldn't find anything else, Luigi invited him to start in the plumbing business. Everybody had plumbing, he said, so it would always be in demand. Mario was initially reluctant; fixing pipes wasn't exactly what one would consider breath-taking. But given a bit of time to learn, Mario discovered that he shared his brother's talent for the business. Sure, it wasn't as exciting as being a circus ringmaster, but it paid the bills. And there was a certain satisfaction in going into a job where the plumbing was completely ballsed-up and making it work like brand new again.
It should be noted, however -- "Mario" is indeed NOT their last name, but when Mario joined the business, he took over the PR and marketing, and offered his own name and face for the company. Luigi was fine with this, being the shyer of the two brothers. But with Mario's "no job is too big" claim, bigger and bigger jobs started coming in. By "bigger", one means of course that the actual city's drain system was experiencing drainage issues, and it was the Mario Brothers they called to fix it. While working on the large pipes underneath the city, the brothers fell into one. And as fate would have it, they were transported... to the Mushroom Kingdom!
When they arrived, the kingdom had been under Bowser's rule for some time. However, the pair of them freed the Princess of the Mushroom Kingdom and sent Bowser running back into hiding, really the first time that Bowser had tasted defeat. In the years that followed, with the Brothers stranded in the Mushroom Kingdom, Bowser tried many times to re-take the kingdom, and always Mario and his brother Luigi were there to beat him back. Though at least once the brothers had to team up with Bowser to fight bigger threats. It seemed fairly cyclical after a while -- Bowser would kidnap the Princess, Mario (and sometimes Luigi) would go after him and foil whatever plan he had.
A couple of times, this formula got thrown off a little -- sometimes Mario would get in over his head, and Luigi would always rescue him. One such case was when Luigi won a mansion in a sweepstakes. It was much different than the happy, friendly house depicted on the sweepstakes entry. It was downright scary! Mario offered to check it out first, because he wasn't afraid of the possibility of it being haunted. And even if it was, it'd just be another Boo House, right? When Mario failed to return, Luigi, along with Professor E. Gadd (who had made a few pieces of equipment for Mario in the interim as well) freed Mario -- and the other ghosts as well -- from King Boo.
One day, Professor E. Gadd brought a useful device to the castle for the Brothers to try. It was a pair of devices actually, a pair of ear-mounted communicator devices that would let anyone wearing them hear and be heard by anyone else wearing them. The "Logistical Organized Systematic Transcommunicator" system, he called it -- or L.O.S.T., for short. He encouraged the Brothers to try them, by having Mario go to one side of the castle and Luigi go to the other, to demonstrate that they worked. They did indeed work, Luigi and Mario could hear each other as if they were standing right beside each other.
And it was a good thing, too. At precisely that moment, a hole in the sky opened, and Bowser's airship flew out of it. Kamek had created a new spell, one that would isolate the Princess's castle in a limbo dimension and prevent any outside assistance. However, something went wrong with the spell. Instead of isolating the castle, it sent one wing of the castle -- the one Luigi was in -- to another dimension.
...That dimension was NeoTokyo.
Fortunately the L.O.S.T. still worked, so he could still communicate with Mario. In addition, one of the mirrors in the west wing of the castle had been altered by the botched spell, and acted as a two-way communication device. Mario suggested breaking through it, but Luigi quickly dissuaded him -- what if breaking the mirror only severed their connection rather than allowing Luigi to get back? Besides that, the Princess had been captured again; Mario needed to go save her (again). Professor Gadd was on hand, however, and promised he would continue working to figure out a way to bring Luigi back.
In the meantime, though... Luigi was more or less on his own in NeoTokyo.
Personality
Luigi is the less outgoing of the two brothers, yes. But that doesn't mean he is a coward, or willing to suffer any more ills than Mario is. He will stand up for what's right when he sees wrongs being done; though he may not do it with quite so much gusto, he still feels the plight of the downtrodden pretty intensely. Possibly more intensely than his brother Mario, in fact, because he knows what it's like to not be able to stand up for himself.
That said, there ARE things that frighten him. Mainly those involve Mario being in uncertain situations. While Luigi is fairly certain Mario can handle himself against Bowser and his minions (the Brothers have had years to know Bowser's capabilities, after all), when the threats are less well-known, this tends to frighten Luigi. He's used to Mario being the emotionally stronger of the two of them, and in a very real way, Mario is his hero. Actually LOSING Mario -- legitimately losing him, to death or the notion that he would never see Mario again -- would destroy Luigi on an emotional level. That's why the story was handled the way it was re: having means to stay in contact; playing a broken Luigi doesn't have the same appeal.
What a lot of people read as cowardice isn't that at all, however. Mario is a thrillseeker, and likes dangerous, adrenaline-producing activities. However, such activities usually run a higher risk of injury or death. So saving Princess Peach from Bowser, jumping and punching through area after area choked with Bowser's minions, is right up his street. Luigi, however, would much rather just fix drains and STAY SAFE!
Will he go help his brother rescue Peach from Bowser? Hell yes, in a heartbeat! Will he stand up and rescue someone else who needs help? In a New York minute! But, he would ideally like it if he and his brother could stay safe and not have to do any of that. Though keeping his brother safe would require Bowser to stop kidnapping Peach, but everybody knows THAT isn't happening. This is, ironically, why he has such a reckless fighting style. He's not going to get into a fight that he thinks runs the risk of killing him; if he willingly gets into a fight, it's because he's determined that either it's absolutely necessary, or he can survive losing it. If he deems that it's more likely he won't survive a punch-up with a threat, he's going to flee, even if it's just to try and come up with a better plan than hitting the threat with his fists.
Luigi is honest and humble, preferring for others to take much of the credit for saving worlds and princesses. He isn't specifically shy, though, and he doesn't like to be overlooked totally. But he generally stays out of the public limelight, since a lot of attention tends to freak him out. It tends to make him feel as though he's being held to higher standards than he can live up to. Which isn't necessarily false, since heroic tales have a bad habit of getting blown out of proportion. He doesn't want to be a victim of the "seven in one blow" sort of pressure, take on more than he's capable of, and fail at it because he wasn't ready for it.
He much prefers to mingle with people, and not be held "above" them somehow, even if he's saved them multiple times. A good example of this are the people of the Mushroom Kingdom, the race of Toadstool people. Even having saved them numerous times alongside Mario, he doesn't feel the need to be "above" them at all, and is willing to help them with even menial tasks. Hence why he was a common plumber there in the Mushroom Kingdom, up until he was brought to NeoTokyo.
Overall Luigi is a gentle-natured sort of person, soft-spoken and quiet, and tends to want the best for his friends and family. Even when he's "left behind", he has never once complained about Mario and Peach being an "item", despite being just as integral in saving her both the first time and several other times across their time in the Mushroom Kingdom. Luigi's just glad to see his brother happy!
His mild nature puts smaller creatures like children and small animals at ease around him, though not as sharply as if this were his main ability -- he's no Disney Princess, and an angry animal will still attack him. But he has an overall air of gentleness, so frightened creatures may be less likely to run away from/attack him out of fear. He's also endlessly patient with children and small animals, so he's likely to be a decent babysitter! Which could come in handy for supplementing his income!
Overall Luigi is earnest and hardworking, humble and gentle, and prefers to remain out of the spotlight. Though he likes to be recognized for his deeds, he tends not to like hero worship, because that gives him the idea that he has to somehow surpass his past achievements, when he's content to rest on his unlikely laurels. Ultimately he'd rather stay safe, and usually doesn't get into a fight unless he thinks he'll survive losing, which ironically makes him fight recklessly. He's anything but a coward, though, and just as willing to stand up for those in need as his more outgoing brother. Luigi loves his brother dearly, and the thought of anything happening to Mario is the thing that scares him the most.
