Wish - About Me · 2:51am Jan 11th, 2017
So, some folks have asked for a little background information about my OC - Wish. So, I decided to make a record of it here, so I can link to it on my profile page. Enjoy 
Background
Wish is from a reality where the Hearthswarming story turned out a bit differently - rather than coming together in mutual understanding, the tribes realized they all needed one another to survive, and chose to 'tolerate'. As such, racial tension exists in Wish’s world, and Hearthswarming Eve is treated more like an armistice. Wish is a black sheep because she was born of a union between a pegasus mother and a unicorn father. Her parents abandoned her as a foal out of fear, and she grew up bouncing around orphanages and foster care.
In Wish's world, two or more colors in your coat is a dead giveaway that you are a 'mixed breed'. Cross-species unions are not only taboo, they often result in birth abnormalities. Wish is the victim of one such abnormality - she has inherent magical power (despite not being a unicorn), but since she has no horn, she can barely control it. She refers to this ability as her 'wishing' power - she concentrates, wishes for something, her cutie mark glows...and something happens. How exactly the winds of magic interpret her requests is the problem. Wish has a considerable amount of power stored up in her, but it likes to play tricks on her and warp her 'wishes'. Just about the only time Wish's powers are predictable are in terms of keeping her alive. Naturally her cursed gift wouldn't benefit much if she perishes, so usually wishes for food and drink (when she actually needs them) work out at least somewhat decently. If Wish's life is in immediate danger, her powers can be dangerous to behold, since they will seek to subconsciously defend her.
Wish believes the power of her cutie mark to be a curse, but she still considers herself lucky – most cross-breed mudcoats end up with physical or mental handicaps instead. Wish spent a lot of time taking care of the ghetto mudcoat ponies that couldn’t take care of themselves, and as such she’s developed a strong motherly instinct – the result is that she tends to open her home to anypony with a sob story…this can sometimes be detrimental. Wish secretly harbors a desire for foals of her own, but believes herself to be a poor role model considering that she is above neither thievery nor selling herself when she’s broke (often). She will accept a handout, but she doesn’t like doing it – her misguided sense of pride drives her to performing the above heinous acts rather than simply accepting charity.
Skills/Flaws
Wish enjoys playing chess, drinking tea, jotting down the whimsical stories that pop up in her head, and finding ways to waste her considerable free time. She has a bizarre knack for balancing objects on her body - it's something she picked up from having too much time on her hooves in the ghetto, but she's so good at it, she probably would have had a cutie mark related to it if it hadn't been for her wishing 'abnormality'. She also has a passing knowledge of equine sign language from her time helping the less fortunate mudcoats around her, and she's considerably streetwise in urban settings.
Wish tries her best, but she's a creature of vice and will usually revert to said vices if left alone to do so. She also has a mild case of narcolepsy, tends to waste whatever money she ends up earning, and has trouble holding down a job.
World Insertion
Savvy readers will have noticed that Wish's background relies heavily on being from an alternate Equestrian reality that has some considerable prejudice issues. While this is Wish's original reality, it is a simple matter to alter her for use in many others, including the basic MLP canon. Changes would simply revolve around her downtrodden nature having less to do with the color of her coat and more to do with just being a street urchin in Manehattan. Her cutie mark abnormality still springs from some inexplicable genetic mutation brought on by the joining of her parents. Background info for Wish's parents does exist - if I write any fics where she is not in her original reality and actually does know them, the information would be included there.
Okay cool.
So you say her wishing power wants to keep her alive for its own benefit, so what would happen if she was to wish for something... Contradicting this?
4377845
Her curse has nothing to gain from her death, but it's still fickle like that. For example, if she were hungry and wished for food, she would probably get it...but it would probably be something like a bale of hay falling from the sky. That'll keep her alive, but a raw bale of hay isn't a very appetizing meal.
Or were you asking what would happen if she simply wishes to die?
4377864 yes, I'm basically asking that for the sake of the paradox. The old orange monkey eagle paradox is a favourite of mine.
Also another quick question how powerful is this wishing power, say for example that she wishes the sun to explode because the sun was glaring into her eyes or something, could her wishing power do such a thing.
I'm asking if it could do such a thing not that it would do so.
4377904
More likely than not, the rueful whimsy of the power would find some way to mess with a request like that, such has having a vendor from a nearby hot dog cart accidentally squirt ketchup all over her ("blood"), or suddenly freezing a puddle so she steps on it and slides into a wall. Not "death" just "here's what you get for making a wish like that".
As for how powerful it is...I haven't really plumbed the depths of that. I don't like characters that are overpowered, which is why Wish's power has a caveat in the form of it regularly backfiring, and thus she wouldn't be likely to tempt fate by making extremely powerful wishes. Though there was a time she wished for a rainstorm to stop, and it did...but the entire park she was standing in was subsequently subject to a small, localized tsunami from the rain that had already fallen.
The power is basically a convenient plot device
4378096 heh that's great nothing goes the way she wants endless comidic opportunitys await.
And an ingrained plot device must be usefull.
So smaller wishes are safer then large wishes, so can Wish just wish for a single grain of sand a trillion times?
And don't tell me that this would be pointless, because the she'd have saaaaaand.
And if Australia can sell sand to Saudi Arabia I'm sure wish can find a buyer.
4378276
What I am getting from the description of the wish power is not that smaller wishes are more likely to be granted, but that larger wishes gan have proportionally more unpleasant responses.
I am getting kind of a jerk dad reaction. The Cutiemark, (For lack of a better term for what grants the wishes), won't go out of its way to punish genuine needs, but will make you pay for wasting its time with unnecessary wishes. The punishment being proportional to the offense, but still trying to teach a lesson about there being a 'time and a place'.
4378276
4378470
Well, the other caveat is that the mark may sometimes respond to the wishes of others, too. That's one of the reasons Wish ends up not being welcome around other ponies - accidentally saying "Geez, I wish this coffee wasn't so hot," in her presence could result in your drink suddenly turning ice cold, or a cloud above you suddenly drenching you in frigid water. It doesn't always happen when somepony other than Wish makes a wish, but anytime a wish is made around that mark, even in jest, there's a chance something could happen.
It could just be some random quirk of magic, but Wish tends to think there's some sort of soft intelligence behind it, much as we make assumptions like our computers malfunctioning or rain ruining our picnics somehow happens on purpose. There could be something behind it, but it's hard to say for sure. On the other hoof, it can be so random that some might postulate that Wish is somehow infused with Discord-style chaos magic, made all the worse by the fact that at least Discord can control his!
4378596 well wish is very much correct there is indeed a intelligence behind her power.
well that is to say, unless you don't consider yourself an 'intelligence'.
4378616
Blame D&D, a game where I enjoyed being a plot device for the DM to keep the players moving through the adventure and prevent stagnation. Wish's "power" opens the door wide for any number of random things to happen, from the amusing, to the ridiculous, to the downright dangerous. You just never know!
4378934 okay if you had fun with that set up that DM must have been a master DM because being a plot device and thus have a ton of plot armour doesn't sound challenging or even any fun to me.
Like sitting in a castle for three sessions because nobody bothered to read the fine print of a quest.
4378952
That's exactly what being a 'plot device' in a tabletop game attempts to avoid. It means, quite literally, being a 'device' the DM can use to advance the game - having some sort of quirk about your character that the DM can exploit to keep the game from stagnating, when the party is wasting a session sitting around the inn trying to decide what they want to do next. For example, I once played a halfling who was skilled in 'use magic device', but had no idea what he was doing. He also liked to accumulate spellbooks. If he got bored, he would whip out a book and start randomly reading from it - thus permitting the GM to cause any number of random things to happen to the party
4378962 oh that kind of plot device, I was thinking more along the lines of the "all important orb of power and mystery" kind of plot device.
Your one sounds so much better.
4378978
Ergh, no no, not that thing, heh.
Your character is absolutely adorable. 10/10 would waifu.
4886837
Aw gee
Her story remains yet to be told. In prose, at least.