Upon his escape from the accursed void and the trash planet, Lord Brudo retreats to where his family won't find him. He actively looks for someplace welcoming and warm to stay. This is Brudo's big chance for a fresh start. He's alone, off the trash planet and back to a realm where he's honestly just so glad that other people exist. Brudo has never been so happy to see other living beings in his whole life; however, he realizes that he has nowhere to go. He is a peasant, a penniless drifter in a place where he is not welcome, a man that has fallen very far from the grace he once had.
Ironically, Brudo used to look down on the homeless, and the paupers of Mewni. He scoffed at them, smug from his place of privilege, and even worse, he rubbed those traits off onto his children. But only now has he come to realize how having nothing truly feels. Brudo walks the long path, through the woods, all the way to his father's empty castle. It's bitter cold outside, and all Brudo has on is a tank top and a pair of old jeans. He left his jacket back on the trash planet and has no inter-dimensional scissors to go back or even teleport himself to the castle instead.
Along the side of the road, he spots a farm. In the massive cornfield, there is a scarecrow. Brudo approaches the dummy tied to a stick, and tears the shirt right from its body, leaving a dopey, smiling, naked figure made of sticks and hay for which to scare the birds away. Brudo slips the rough, hay-covered flannel shirt over his body to try to keep warm. The shirt is a bit small on him, but Brudo doesn't care. He shoves his wings through the sleeves. It fits just well enough for him to get by.
Brudo hardly looks like the man he once was. He has lost a significant amount of weight in the void, not enough for him to become thin, but enough to where one that is familiar with him would notice. He certainly doesn't look like any king or lord anymore, and he no longer thinks of himself as one. He's Brudo, just Brudo now, an ashamed and washed-up old has-been whose wife and children have grown to hate him, and whose subjects never respected him in the first place.
Brudo thinks about Ludo a lot. At first, he wonders why Ludo didn't visit him but then figures that he didn't want to anger his mother for seeing him, figuring it would serve no purpose other than to stir the pot. Brudo doesn't blame Ludo for not visiting him. After all, it was he and Lady Avarius that gave Ludo the cold shoulder first. Brudo is angry at himself. He starts to question himself. Why didn't he check on Ludo? Why didn't he make sure he was okay back when Castle Avarius was still standing? Why didn't he check to make sure he didn't go and make matters worse? Brudo kicks himself for failing to be a good father.
He makes his way to the front door of King Pludo Greenwood's Castle, reaching under the rug where he left the key the last time he was there. He prays it is still there, or that he didn't misplace it in his drunken stupor last time he was there. Brudo does find the key though. He breathes a sigh of relief and opens the door. As he turns the knob, the harsh night wind blows the door open, slamming it against the wall, and Brudo struggles to close and lock it again. He is cold, and he rubs his feathered arms, shivering as he traverses the castle's long hallway.
Everything is as it had been left from the last time he and Ludo visited the castle. Wine is spilled on the floor and has been there for so long that the roaches have gotten drunk off of it. Tables and chairs are knocked over. The entire castle had remained in stasis during Brudo's departure. He surveys the scene for a second before delicately picking everything up off of the floor. Brudo lifts the table and chairs and puts them back in their appropriate place. He feels his foot adhere to the sticky floor beneath him. He grabs another bottle of wine from the cupboard and sits down in silence, contemplating indulging himself in his drunken sorrow. Brudo stares at the table below him in an almost zombified state, with his stringy, grayish-white hair dripping onto the table from the rain.
Picking up his pipe and lighting some tobacco to calm his nerves, he then pours a glass of wine into the dirty bottle and goes to light his pipe. Striking a match, he hovers it over the pipe but then freezes. All of a sudden, he decides he just doesn't want it anymore, like he's lost all appetite for it. He takes the glass of wine and goes over to the sink. He pours the whole thing down the drain. Angrily, he grabs more bottles, opens them all up, and dumps them, several at a time down the metal sink until he drains them all. The sink is lightly coated with a red tint. He throws the bottles on top of a full trough of trash. Bottles stack on top of each other.
Very tired, Brudo ascends the winding stone stairway, lighting the torches and candles as he winds round and round until he gets to his very own dorm. As he crosses the hallway to meet his old bed, he looks into the lonely room where his father once slept. King Pludo's room is covered in webs. A neatly made bed lays there, undisturbed for years. A man had died in that bed, sad, and alone, with no son, left to rot in his own despair.
Lord Brudo: "Good night, pop."
Brudo knows that nobody is there, but he feels his father's spirit looming over him like an accursed buzzard, silently mocking him and calling shame on him for disgracing his name. Surprisingly, Brudo's old room is exactly how it was when he last left it. Curiously, Brudo looks in the closet. His old clothes are still in there, some jackets, very proper and classy, picked by King Pludo himself for Brudo to wear if he was to ever be seen anywhere near his father with any level of dignity. None of Brudo's taste back then was his own. His father had chosen everything for him to eat, sleep and wear. King Pludo catered to every aspect of Brudo's life.
King Pludo had expected nothing but the absolute best from Brudo. His jackets were meant for a much more fit and trim man. Brudo looks in the mirror at the old, bald man before him. Crows feet stretch across the wrinkled skin between his tired, bloodshot eyes and the feathers on his face. Feathers elsewhere are molting randomly across his body. His plumage is not as proud and as lush as it once was. His once full head of well-kept hair is half gone and in greasy, unkempt ruins garnished by a vineyard of split ends. Strands and curls from the side of his head drape over his shoulders like the head of a mop. His beard is different shades of platinum blondish gray, stained with food and wine and knotted.
Brudo beholds the mere shell of the man he once was. He re when he was a strapping young lad: handsome, with a full head of hair, lean and athletic, neat and trimmed, and well-groomed. Back then, he fancied himself a ladies' man. He did everything his father wanted. One thing, however, never changed, and that was that Brudo was unhappy. He looks in his dresser, scrounging through his old stuff, stumbling across a series of photo-booth strip images of him and Lady Avarius as a young couple.
In the images, Lord Brudo and Lady Avarius share several poses: one with Brudo's arms around Lady Avarius, one in a different, more romantic pose, one of them making goofy faces towards the camera, another of them laughing, and another of a romantic over-the-shoulder kiss. Brudo smiles as he gazes at one of the few fleeting moments of happiness in his life. The final image is a romantic shot of Brudo draping his head over her shoulder, her reaching up and laying her hand on his cheek. They both smile and look lovingly at each other. Lady Avarius in her youth was stunningly gorgeous, undesecrated, and her right eye unscarred, and Brudo was once relatively attractive for his kind and in peak physical shape.
Brudo climbs into bed, holding the photo-booth strip to his chest for dear life, smiling with his eyes closed as he indulges in his nostalgia. He turns his head to his left. He notices how his king-sized bed feels awfully large and cold without a second body there. He wraps his arms all the way around his pillow and closes his eyes tightly, pretending in vain that his dear wife is there. As anxious as Brudo is, he still finds himself drifting off to sleep.
Lord Brudo: "Good night, my lady."
Brudo gets up before the sun rises on that day. He starts tidying everything: his room, his father's room, all of them. For hours, he spends scrubbing the walls, ing how his father would make him scrub them with a brush, the toilet with his own toothbrush, every single nook and cranny until it was crystal clear. The odd part was, that Brudo's father HAD servants, and STILL made Brudo do his own work, just to discipline him. He was to read every day, military strategies, s, and journals of famous generals. Some of them were quite fascinating on their own, but others were quite technical and Brudo found them difficult to comprehend.
Brudo feels that if he had continued to absorb all of this knowledge that he could become the greatest leader the world had ever seen. He re how when he took those books with him, he would read them to the children when they were young. Ludo and Dennis, even in their infancy, were brought up on the tales of General Reginald Alshain, who considered himself the sole rival of Queen Solaria and was the only monster to ever cause physical harm to her. Queen Solaria bore a half-foot-long scar on her chest from the talons of General Alshain, known as "The Falcon" by his acquaintances, and is considered a folk hero in monster lore for proving that Solaria was not as immortal as she made herself out to be. He would be the one to lead the attack that would lead to her untimely demise. From then on out, he would garner several titles, such as "The Sun Eater" and "The King of the Everlasting Night".
Brudo tries to sleep, but dreams of his wife and kids haunt him throughout the night. Brudo is forced to watch countless acts of cruelty, both toward him, by his father, and from him, toward his family. He re all the times he had brought home his semesterly report from the military training academy he had attended, with nearly perfect scores all across the board. Brudo isn't dumb, at least he wasn't in his youth. What he had excelled in was physical education. Brudo ran track and field every day for years at the academy and loved it. It was the greatest freedom he ever felt when doing so. In the early days, he struggled with mathematics but was willing to stay with his tutor for hours and hours until it clicked with him, and eventually, he became a natural at that as well.
Consistently, Brudo brought home excellent grades, ones that any normal parent would be proud of, but not his father. Although Brudo consistently nailed top honors at his school, anything less than a 4.0 was a bad grade in his father's eyes. Once he had achieved perfect grades, merely once, and his father had still not congratulated him, but for that one time, he had escaped his wrath. For every 10th of a point, King Pludo would verbally and physically abuse him. For every 10th, was a sock to the gut. Brudo's father, even well into his old age, hit like a sledgehammer and didn't ever hold back.
Every full point was a kick to the ground. Only in his early youth would Brudo ever dare to get anything less than a 3.0. The first year only, in mathematics, of course, his weakest subject, he had pulled a narrow 2.9, and his father had kicked him right in the face. He was not ready for it. There was nobody to protect Brudo. His mother had died at a very young age, and Brudo was left with his dear old dad to rule over the entire castle by himself, with no siblings.
Graduation day was one of the greatest days of Brudo's life. He had only gotten but a single 3.9 on his final grades, all the rest 4.0s, and had received the highly coveted Monster's Award of Academic Excellence from the school, and wanted nothing more than to rub it in Pludo's face. However, his father was not impressed. He never was. A smile was alien to King Pludo. It was almost like he was incapable of performing one.
Brudo had met Lady Avarius at a dinner party King Pludo had gone to attend, taking Brudo and warning him not to embarrass him. Pludo had introduced them. She was in the center of the room with a glass of champagne, happily gossiping like hens with the other women at the party. They giggled and laughed. Never before had he seen such perfection. Lady Avarius stood across the room from him, with a pine green silk dress and a boa draped over her shoulder. Her hair was shoulder-length, bouncy, and perfectly catered so that every feather had not one vane or down that was out of place. He took one look at her and one thing crossed his mind, "you're too good for me". Lord Brudo flashes back to the day that he met Lady Avarius as he dreams.
King Pludo: "Lady Avarius, I am King Pludo Greenwood, and this is my son, Brudo."
Lady Avarius: "Greatest pleasure to meet you, Brudo, as well as you, good sir."
Lady Avarius extends her hand to greet Brudo, and Brudo nearly chokes on his tongue. Emerald eyes shine through yellow orbs, piercing Brudo like laser beams. He struggles to get the words to his mouth. His father looks at him with a great scowl.
Lord Brudo: "Great... greatest pleasure is mine, Lady Avarius."
Pludo rolls his eyes and facepalms, walking away.
Lady Avarius: "So, is he always that uptight?"
Brudo is shocked. He doesn't know how to respond. His robotic programming is starting to short circuit, and his mind can't handle it.
Lady Avarius: "Tell ya what, how about we ditch this party, Brudo? Nothing but a bunch of snobs here anyway."
Brudo looks at her, dumbly.
Lady Avarius: "Oh come on, silly."
She grabs his hand, pulling him with her. He follows involuntarily outside to a carriage.
Lady Avarius: "Driver, take us to 'The Secret Place'."
Driver: "Again, my Lady? Who is the lucky gentleman tonight?"
Lady Avarius: "Oh hush you! So sassy!"
Driver: "Yes, my Lady."
Lord Brudo: "So uh... is there a first name to go with that beautiful last name?"
Lady Avarius: "It's Zefira, but I hate that name. I'd much rather be called 'Lady' if that's all good and fine with you. Everyone calls me 'Lady' Avarius, so it just kinda stuck that way, almost like a nickname. It makes me feel, well, like a lady. I even sign my name that way."
Lord Brudo: "Zefira..."
Lady Avarius: "Yuck!"
Lord Brudo: "Sorry, never again, 'Lady' Avarius."
What a weird quirk. Brudo's father would never let him call himself "Lord". Pludo never referred to his son as Prince Brudo or Lord Brudo, not once in his whole life. Brudo always referred to his father as Lord Pludo though.
Lord Brudo: "Honestly, no amount of my father's training could ever prepare me for meeting a pretty girl like you. WOMAN! I mean WOMAN like you."
Lady Avarius laughs.
Lady Avarius: "Brudo, I wanna show you somewhere magical."
Lord Brudo: "Butterfly Castle?"
Lady Avarius: "No, better. We're almost there, by the way."
Brudo looks outside to realize that the carriage has taken them all the way up into the Jaggy Mountains. Lady Avarius grabs Brudo's hand and drags him outside.
Lady Avarius: "This is it. What do you think? Isn't it beautiful, Brudo, to see the whole thing at once?"
Lord Brudo: "It sure is."
Lady Avarius stares out into the distance. The wind blows through her hair, her bangs oscillate softly and every feather dances briskly in the wind. She looks back at Brudo with a big smile on her face.
Lady Avarius: "I like to come here, to escape. Sometimes I need to get away from the polished life of luxury, the fancy parties, the snobs. At times I forget who I am, so I come here, to remind myself of who I am. Up here, I can be free. You ever just want to be free, Brudo?"
Brudo looks at her.
Lord Brudo: "Every single day of my life."
Lady Avarius can see the pain in his eyes. She folds her warm fingers around his hands.
Lady Avarius: " me."
Lord Brudo: "I'm sorry. What?"
Lady Avarius: "Fly with me."
Lord Brudo: "I, I can't."
Lady Avarius: "Of course you can."
Lady Avarius pushes him over the edge of the mountain and Brudo begins falling like a rock. After a few seconds, Lady Avarius starts to become very worried. Brudo is just plummeting straight downward, screaming loudly.
Lady Avarius: "Brudo?! What are you doing?! Fly! Oh no! I'm coming!"
Lady Avarius dives off the edge of the cliff. Like a bullet, she aims straight down to gain momentum to catch up to Brudo, who keeps screaming and flapping wildly to no avail. Mere seconds from hitting the ground, Brudo feels a nudge at his collar, Lady Avarius snags him, pulling him forward. They both tumble into the snow at the bottom of the mountain. Brudo loses consciousness after having all the wind knocked out of him. Lady Avarius summons the carriage, and the unnaturally fast driver meets them at the bottom. She drags his limp body onto the carriage and sits him up. She pats his face, trying to raise him out of unconsciousness.
Lord Brudo: "Who? What?"
Lady Avarius: "You went out like a light. What happened? Did you forget how to fly?"
Lord Brudo: "Fly? I never learned."
Lady Avarius: "How can a bird not learn how to fly?"
Brudo removes his shirt in the carriage.
Lord Brudo: "Look. My father, he clips my wings."
Lady Avarius: "Oh my goodness! How cruel!"
Lord Brudo: "He's been doing it since I was a boy. He always kept my feathers very short. I've been grounded my whole life. I guess he figures if I let them grow in, I'll fly away someday, and he'll never see me again."
Lady Avarius: "That's so awful. I'm sorry I nearly got you killed."
Lord Brudo: "Don't worry about it. I'd rather be tossed off that mountain every day than spend another moment with my dad, especially if it meant I could continue to be with you."
Lady Avarius: "That's the strangest... and sweetest compliment I've ever gotten."
Lord Brudo: "I can't believe I'm a bird that can't fly. It's so unnatural, and embarrassing."
Lady Avarius: "They'll grow in if you let them."
Lord Brudo: "He'll never let me grow them in."
She stares at him, and he finally realizes he has no shirt on.
Lord Brudo: "Oh my gosh! I'm indecent!"
Lady Avarius feels him up with her eyes. He blushes at her, and she just giggles at him.
Lady Avarius: "Here, put this back on. We're almost back at the 'party'."
Brudo slips the shirt over his head. He looks somewhat disheveled and untucked.
Lady Avarius: "Much better. I like you better this way."
Lord Brudo: "Yeah?"
Lady Avarius: "Hey, how about next week you come over to my place? I'll show you what a REAL party is."
Lord Brudo: "I can't. I'm supposed to stay in that night and clean the whole castle again."
Lady Avarius: "You have servants, right?"
Lord Brudo: "Yeah, but he expects me to do it, because of 'discipline'."
Lady Avarius: "What a square."
Lord Brudo: "What?"
Lady Avarius: "A square, a stiff, a stick in the mud."
Lord Brudo: "Yeah, but he barred my windows."
Lady Avarius: "That's creepy."
Lord Brudo: "Yeah."
Lady Avarius: "I'll tell you what, Brudo, you let me figure something out. I will get you out of that miserable castle and into my castle where we can have some fun. Brushing walls is no way to spend a Saturday night."
Lord Brudo: "That would be swell!"
Lady Avarius: "Swell?"
Lady Avarius snickers.
Lord Brudo: "What? What's so funny?"
Lady Avarius: "You're such a dork, but I like you. I think you're cute. I want to get to know you, Brudo."
Lord Brudo: "I'd really like to get to know you too."
Lady Avarius: "Well, it's been fun, Brudo. Have a good night."
She gets out of the carriage, delicately and elegantly descending the stairs of the carriage and back into the affair. Brudo does his best to make himself tidier, tucking in his shirt and slicking back his hair. He pulls out a bottle of shoe polish, rubs it back into his hair, and exits the vehicle.
Driver: "Here, sir."
The driver throws Brudo a towel, which he uses to clean his hands.
Lord Brudo: "Thanks."
He returns to the party. The party is so dull that his father has never even noticed Brudo was gone. As it turns out, King Pludo is too busy bragging about himself to the other elites.
It is at this point that Brudo wakes up. It's morning. Brudo gets right to work on cleaning his father's house, dusting off everything, scrubbing the appliances and everything in there as meticulously clean as he had when he was young. He clears the webs from his father's room, freshens everything, and even rewashes old laundry that was never intended to be worn again. As he cleans his father's room, which he reserves for last, he discovers something is amiss.
His father's portrait is crooked on the wall. In an attempt to adjust it, he accidentally causes it to fall over. He picks up the painting and notices an oddity about the wall. A part of the wallpaper is peeled, and he can see something behind it. Curiously, Brudo pulls the canvas back, revealing a safe. It suddenly dawns on him that his father used to use that safe all the time and he had forgotten about it. He had watched his father open it but once. Distinctly, he re his father setting his birthday as the code for the safe. Brudo tries the combination, and it doesn't work. He then tries his own birthday, which doesn't work either. He sits there on the bed, puzzled. He looks at a picture of his mother to his right, a tall and gawky woman with a mysterious smile.
Lord Brudo: "Mother, give me a clue."
Then it hits him. He hadn't tried his mother's birthday, Sagnog 26 (February 26th). He puts the code in and the safe clicks. Inside the safe are several documents. One is the deed to the castle, a deed Brudo never knew his father wrote, and most certainly didn't discuss with him. Underneath the deed is his father's will, which Brudo also didn't even know existed. According to the document, Brudo was left as the sole heir to the castle and its fortune. Brudo is shocked, as his father never gave him anything. Beneath the will is a note, written in excellent penmanship with a feather quill pen, very distinctly one of his own. The letter reads as follows:
Dear Brudo Greenwood-Avarius, my son,
You will probably read this letter long after I have ed. As a man who fought in the Great Mewman/Monster war, who has survived a battlefield bathed in the blood of monsters everywhere, as well as the harsh winter mountains alone for a month with barely any food and clothes, and with a wounded wing, I assure you, this is still the most difficult thing I had ever had to do. My hands ache and writhe as I hold the pen, laying on my death bed, but it is imperative that I write this. It is of infinite importance to me that I relay unto you this message before I can no longer do so.
I tried, Brudo, I tried to make you stronger than me. I tried to make you better than me. I wanted you to have more than I ever did, but I also wanted you to be humble about it. Only in the deepest irony, do I finally see, as a man who lays here, alone and dying, that I have driven you, my only son, out of my life. I pushed you all throughout your youth. The harder I pushed you, the farther you moved away from me. I won't sugarcoat it. I'm a bad father. I always have been. And I'm not bad in the sense that I didn't care, but bad in the sense that I had never shown you any sort of comion at all.
It hurts me like a dagger to the heart to see with my old eyes that you're not beside me now at my bedside, but I do not blame you for it, not one bit. I wouldn't want anything to do with me either if I were you. My father was the same way to me, and his father before him, and so on and so forth. I want to say "I love you", but I don't deserve to utter those words into your precious ears. it would be disingenuous for me to only say so knowing that the ghost of death stands patiently at my dorm. So instead, I have but a single request for you, my son, and don't worry, I'm not asking you to scrub or shine anything.
I want you to end this vicious cycle of torment surrounding our family. I want you to be a better father to those many children you have than I ever was to you. Show them comion, lest they wind up bitter and hateful like us. Love them equally and eternally. This note, as well as my vast fortune, and this castle, are all I have left to offer you. They are rightfully yours, as the only true heir to my throne. May you and Zefira, and all your wonderful children, Yudo, Crudo, Chudo, Menudo, Kudo, Fudo, Tudo, and even young Dennis and the little guy, Ludo, may you all find true peace, love, and happiness in your lives, and avoid a fate like mine. Be strong. Be proud, my only son.
Your father, King Pludo Greenwood.
Brudo cannot fathom so much as a single emotion upon reading his father's letter. The shock is too strong. Brudo finds himself unable to shed a tear or show sympathy, or anything. He just sits there, puzzled. He lays the letter on the bed and goes to get a shower. Brudo hasn't felt the joy and rejuvenating effects of a hot shower in what seems like forever. He turns on the showerhead, and hot water shoots onto his face. He stands there, letting the water just hit his face and run down his body for several minutes. It had never felt so good. All the dust and dirt, all the grease and grime, all of it, just slip right down into the drain. It isn't the thick coating of dirt that Brudo wants to clean, but his soul. Brudo's wish is to wash every bit of mud off of his heart and let it run down the drain, never to be seen again.
The soap feels good. He scrubs and scrubs. skimming through his wet arm feathers, looking at the scars on his skin from the plucked plumage of his youth, now covered in aerially plausible plumage. Brudo had gotten away from his father when he married Lady Zefira Avarius and moved into castle Avarius. It was then that he let his feathers grow out, and thanks to all the plucking, his plumage has grown in so much thicker than it would have otherwise. It was like nature itself was getting back at King Pludo.
Brudo feels so good after that shower. He puts on his clothes, after washing them, and ventures once more out of the castle. Through the Forest of Certain Death, he goes to a familiar location. He stands there in the sun as it beats down on the charred ruins of his old home, Castle Avarius II. The door still stands burnt in the doorway, held up by its frame alone. He touches the knob and has memories fly back to him. He re the first time he went into that house, he and his wife and many children. Brudo was furious.
Lord Brudo: "How could that little brat do that to us?! That insignificant little ingrate! After everything we did for that boy, he has the gall to kick us out of OUR HOUSE! That's it! I'm canceling all our credit cards, everything that little creep took from us!"
Lady Avarius: "Brudo, you really should mind your blood pressure!"
Lord Brudo: "My blood pressure?! My BLOOD PRESSURE?! MY blood is fine! It's HIS that you should worry about when I wrap my wings around that tiny little neck of his!"
Lady Avarius: "You'll do no such thing! Now please, sit down, and calm down, before you give yourself a heart attack!"
Brudo inhales and exhales deeply. He starts scratching his head and pacing around like an angry, hungry lion.
Lord Brudo: "Well, what do you propose we do?"
Lady Avarius: "What CAN we do? He has a whole army. He has all our money."
Lord Brudo: "Can't Moon Butterfly do something about this?"
Lady Avarius: "Do you want other people to find out about this, Brudo? We'll be the laughing stock of all of Mewni! We'll be known as the parents that got tricked and kicked out of their own home by their pint-sized child. Besides, it's Ludo. I say we give him some time alone up there. Eventually, those brutes will kick him out on their own, then he'll come crawling back to us, begging for forgiveness."
Lord Brudo: "You think he'll beg?"
Lady Avarius: "His will is not strong, Brudo. It's only a matter of time before those brutes turn on him... wait... what am I saying? What if they hurt him, Brudo?"
Lord Brudo: "If they DO turn on him they better kill the little creep, because if they don't, I WILL!"
Lady Avarius: "Don't SAY that!"
Lord Brudo: "OR WHAT, ZEFIRA?!"
Lady Avarius: "Will you knock it off?! You're scaring the children!"
Lord Brudo: "Maybe they ought to be scared! It's about time I got some respect from my family!"
Brudo punches a hole in the wall. His flashback ends, and Brudo is standing there still holding a knob. He turns it and goes inside. He starts sifting through the rubble. Brudo pulls from the debris a ruined painting that used to hang from the fireplace. Most of the figures are blacked out or distorted, but he still knows who each one is. He looks at Ludo and another flashback hit him. This time, the flashback goes all the way back to the original Castle Avarius, where a younger Ludo was measuring his height with a pencil in the doorway.
Ludo: "Father, watch!"
Lord Brudo: "I'm looking."
He isn't, he just says he is, when in fact, he is just reading his newspaper. Ludo stands on his tiptoes and pencils in the height mark just above his head.
Ludo: "See! I grew! I must be like a skyscraper by now!"
Lord Brudo: "Two feet. You're two feet tall. You have been since you were 5 years old and you will continue to be that height."
Ludo: "But father—"
Lord Brudo: "Ludo, you're 15 years old and haven't grown so much as a speck in a decade. Your brothers and sisters are weeds compared to you. Just look at Dudo, Menudo, and Fudo's markings, all three of them grew a good foot in a year, although to be fair, Fudo mostly just grew horizontally. That boy needs to go on a diet. And you, you need to go on the opposite of a diet, boy. You're skin and bones. How in the world do you ever expect to grow?"
Ludo: "Dad, I eat all the time. I just have a high... a high... uh, what's that word?"
Lord Brudo: "Metabolism?"
Ludo: "Yeah that one."
Lord Brudo: FUDO! GET IN HERE, BOY!
Fudo: "Yeah, dad?"
Fudo walks in, shoving his hand down a whole bag of pork rinds and literally pigging out on them.
Lord Brudo: "You're going on a diet, fatty! Give Ludo your junk food and go take a jog or something!"
Fudo: "What? Dad, that's not fair! You never do this to the other kids!"
Lord Brudo: "My other kids don't look like stuffed turkeys! Now, do what I said, or you're grounded for a month!"
Fudo gets angry and throws the bag to the ground.
Fudo: "FINE!"
He punches Ludo right in the gut, winding him, and leaving Ludo to gasp for air as he storms out the door.
Ludo: "Dad, are you just gonna let him do that to me?"
Lord Brudo: "Stop being such a little crybaby, it's embarrassing! Maybe if you stopped putting on the waterworks, your brothers would respect you a bit more!"
Dennis: "Hey dad?"
Lord Brudo: "What, Dennis? Can't you see I'm busy lecturing your brother? Don't you have something better to do with yourself?"
Dennis: "I just wanted to know where you put my jacket at."
Lord Brudo: "Why am I responsible for YOUR jacket, Dennis? Go find it, or you're grounded just like Fudo!"
Dennis' eyes start to water.
Lord Brudo: "Aw, what? Are you gonna cry now too? What did I raise, a house of sissies? AND YOU TWO! Zudo and Yudo, stop fighting over that doll right now or so help me, I'll rip its head off and neither of you will have a full doll to play with!"
His flashback ends. He ascends the broken stairs, up towards his room. He nearly falls through one of the fragile stairs as he treads. He looks into his old bedroom, where he and Lady Avarius slept. He flashes back again, back to the original Castle Avarius once more, where he's accompanying his very pregnant wife into the bed.
Lady Avarius: "Oh boy. Easy. Easy."
Lord Brudo: "There, got ya in bed."
Lady Avarius: "Any day now, these eggs will come out. It got me thinking. What will we name the kids?"
Lord Brudo: "What? Oh, I don't know. My whole family bloodline consists of names ending in 'Udo'. OOH, that's a good one right there, Udo."
Lady Avarius: "Okay."
Lord Brudo: "And we can use so many others like Zudo, Crudo, Rudo, Ludo, Menudo, Sudo."
Lady Avarius: "How about Dennis? I like Dennis."
Lord Brudo: "Dennis? That doesn't rhyme."
Lady Avarius: "Please, Brudo?"
Lord Brudo: "Ugh, okay, you can name one of them Dennis... but not the oldest."
Lady Avarius: "That's fine."
Brudo climbs into bed. He pecks his wife on the cheek and rubs her round belly with his hand.
Lord Brudo: "We're gonna be great parents, I can tell. I bet these kids will all be beautiful, just like us."
Lady Avarius: "They will, and I'll love them all."
Lord Brudo: "WE'LL love them all."
They look at each other, happily, and kiss. Brudo's flashback ends. He's just standing there, a sad, miserable old man among the wreckage. He goes back downstairs, and from there he steps outside. He pulls his father's will and deed out of his pocket and looks at them again, and then looks at the house behind him. He scratches his head.
Lord Brudo: "Well, looks like there's work to be done."
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