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The Wishing Tree (1): A Destiny City Star Festival Tradition to be held every year; In Town Square, there is a beautiful tree with spreading branches. It is tall, but the lowest branches are easily reached. The city has decorated the tree with small, starlike ornaments and glistening lights. Thick leaves and beautiful purple flowers dangle from the branches, along with a myriad of different colored papers with handwritten wishes. Next to the tree is a stack of blank paper with twine attached, and a handwritten sign that explains:

Write your wish on a sheet of paper and tie it to the tree. Take one wish off the tree and do your best to grant it. When you have granted the wish, bury the paper in the park.

The papers are biodegradable and filled with seeds. There are no rules for wishing, but you are encouraged to wish for something vague enough that it can be interpreted in many ways so that it can be granted; you do not write your name on it, but it is encouraged to write something that doesn’t wish for self gain, but rather something that can make the world a better place. Some wishes dangling from the tree already include things like “I wish there wasn’t so much litter in the park,” “I wish someone would clean the graffiti off the old historic buildings,” and “I wish there were more volunteers at the shelter.”

If you choose to use the Wishing Tree, what do you wish for? If your wish is private, you may write it on the paper and choose a spot in the park and bury it yourself instead of hanging it on the tree.


Probably the Wishing Tree was a whole load of nonsense, someone's tradition writ large into Destiny City and paraded around like it was special. Probably. Probably?

Ash had seen enough magic by this point that it did give her pause, now that she thought about it. Teleportation was real. Identity-hiding glamours were real. Alien "cats" were real. It wasn't like he actually had any proof that wishes were fake, but that was kind of a devil's proof; and as much as he might've utilized those himself, they still made his eye twitch. The point of a devil's proof was, more than anything, to be ******** annoying. Someone could devil's-proof the existence of wishes all they wanted and she still wouldn't be anywhere closer to, of course, whether or not wishes were actually real.

Also, mostly, she'd gotten a little superstitious over the years now that she knew some magic was real, and that probably didn't mean that demonology was real -- because given the Negaverse, if the Ars Goetia was real, someone would've been reading it from the rafters and prancing their becaped self around with stupid little demons at their heels -- but it didn't hurt to have little rituals and little practices. Sympathetic magic, or something like that. Not that putting good vibes out into the universe was real, because that was absurdly stupid, but something a little abnormal. And every year his penmanship on Star Festival wishes got a little better, and every year his wishes changed.

What Ashton wanted, really, had never changed. She wanted to be successful, and powerful, and ideally rich enough to not have life problems, and to be a bit of a weird little freak and enthuse about dead things and the inherent horror and beauty of bodies! This was a normal want, she was pretty sure. Other people's wishes on the trees sometimes asked for things like passing their classes, for fights to end, for luck to turn their way, for some specific event to happen -- and sue her, Ashton was nosy, she read other people's wishes just about every time she walked by the tree. If they didn't want their wishes to be read, he reasoned, they would've placed them in more difficult places.

He wasn't going to fulfill their wishes, because why the ******** would he do that? He didn't know these people. They couldn't do anything for him without having some kind of connection. Maybe if she was bored she'd go and clean up litter at the park, but really, she had better things to do at the park, like look for dead birds. Not at this time of year! Mostly more in the winter. Sweating was unpleasant, and gross, and made her hair stick to her face and neck, and she had never looked good that way, she just looked like a drowned rat. More kudos to people who could work the 'drowned rat' look, but Ash could not, would not, and would never be able to.

Reading other people's wishes didn't help determine what she was summarizing her wish as this year, in oh-so-many words. So. That was a priority. If she could ******** focus for five minutes, maybe she'd be able to get some phrasing finally from her head to the pen.

How did 'I want to meaningfully progress in my career' work? That sounded appropriate. And if putting that wish -- that energy -- out into the world made any progress with the Negaverse where it felt meaningful and useful to be a part of as an organization, he'd take that too.

[wc: 594]