Shiny Star

Shiny Star
Japanese Name:	オンリーワン／ナンバーワン・シャイニースター(願い星箱)
Creator:	Alice Kuonji

Wishing Star-Box: Only One / Number One - Shiny Star (オンリーワン／ナンバーワン・シャイニースター(願い星箱)^?) is a Ploy created by Alice Kuonji that grants wishes. Left alone, it can manifest into a Foreigner-Class entity that is said by Aoko Aozaki to be humanity-ending threat.

Characteristics

Role

Fate/Grand Order

The Shiny Star was created by Alice after being inspired by a children's gumball machine she saw. Creating the Ploy, she filled it with many wishes to accumulate stars that were generic things like "Give me money", "Give me friends", "Give me a lover", "Give me a dog", "Give me a job", "Give me a family", "I want advancement", "I want a passing grade", "I want to get married", "I want success", "I want security", "I want to be loved", "I want to do it all over again", "I want to recover those losses", "I want to regain that sparkle", "I want to forget those days" and so on. By turning the handle, out will come a wishing gumball. If the wish a person gets from the Ploy is truly their number one and only wish, then that wish will be the number one wish in the world and come true. However, the flaw with this is that it is practically impossible for a person's wish to be unique; too many people want success, promotions, lovers, reviving the dead, etc. No wish can be both number one and only one, so Shiny Star couldn't have functioned unless the person's number one wish somehow is something no one else in the world shares.

Alice was forced to dismantle it due to having too many Ploys, as unused Ploys will fill up with curses as time passes, which she can't let overflow. Having no use for Shiny Star, it became one of the Ploys she chose to dismantle. While she was dismantling her ploys in a cottage on Mt. Kumano, she heard about and took a trip to the inn at Kumano Springs in 1997. There, Wanwan-sama, a Kudan desiring a vessel, stole Shiny Star due to its properties being identical to Kudan, and muddled Alice's memories to make her forget about it. Giving the Shiny Star to Kinomi Housuke, the latter's wish of "At least once, let Mizushima Masago's song be the number one in the world." turned out to be completely unique. This activated the Ploy, causing it to create five wishing hot springs to empower itself enough on other people's wishes in order to grant Kinomi's wish. Eventually realizing it was missing, and hearing about the wishing hot springs of the Inn, Alice returned in May 1999 with Soujuurou Shizuki to help navigate the mountain, where they encountered the Shiny Star empowered by Wanwan.

Due to Wanwan adding its property - the attribute of taking the wisher's life when granting a wish - to the Shiny Star vessel it stole, five people who used the wishing Hot Springs died through having their wishes granted, empowering and increasing Shiny Star's "Grade" to 5 Stars/SSR. As such, Alice was not powerful enough and temporarily "died" fighting Shiny Star. After which, the Ploy went wild and became something not belonging to the laws of any proper universe. Everything began to be attracted and everything began to be repelled, the Shiny Star turned oxygen into toxic gases that would burn a person's organs if breathed, the ground folded over, forming spires of rock, and it turned the former mountain into a Singularity. It created storms of 100 m/s winds that continued to move faster, limitlessly-increasing heat, and seemingly bottomless amounts high-density True Ether; enough to disintegrate the world, threatening to make humanity extinct, which lead Aoko be called to stop it. Unfortunately, even she was not powerful enough to stop it: physical attacks did not work on the Shiny Star, it had no pause between its attacks, had no telegraphed movements, and it was impossible to tell what it even was. So Aoko used the Fifth Magic to send the month's events into 2001, creating a second Singularity there powered by herself. However, she needed an opening to send the Singularity into the future, which she received when Soujuurou attacked the Shiny Star; sacrificing himself but giving Aoko the chance she needed, without her knowing of his act until 10 years later. While she tried to contain and minimize its spread in the 1999 Singularity, she would send copies of herself to the 2001 Singularity to stop people from using the wishing fountains, with them being "killed" by Wanwan in the wisher's place, depriving the Shiny Star of power from the wishmakers. After managing to decrease its Grade to 2 Stars, and destroying Wanwan's physical body, she then undoes the "Retroflow/Singularity" magic forming the 2001 Singularity, causing that time period to snap back to the 1999 one. As two Shiny Star's can't exist in the same time period, they will overlap, and the 1999 Shiny Star will detune to 2 Stars, making it possible to beat it and save Soujuurou before the Singularity collapses and his death in 1999 becomes part of Proper History.

Arriving, they find the Star turning the air into True Ether, the space into a fairy tale where things like oxygen, water, and sunlight are unneeded. A star on the planet rather than in the space, it draws those lights from the sky to it; according to Alice, once Shiny Star can no longer be seen past the light, it will be "complete" and it will have surpassed the Great Three. Although the Star has been detune somewhat, as Aoko could not approach within fifty meters of it before due to the strength of the magical energy gusts, it still has the potential to surpass the Great Three despite the Singularity overwrite, with SHEBA's observation shutting down in the face of it due to surrounding itself with some unknown matter. After attempting to fight its weaker version, it's revealed that Aoko's plan did not truly weaken Shiny Star at all. Contact with Shiny Star is still impossible as it deprives the space around it of meaning, changing it to a place where there is no past or future, no success or failure. Shiny Star has been written off of the recorded universe, so everything about it remains unchanged from as previously recorded; a level of event manipulation usually requiring a Stellar Class Saint Graph, but which Shiny Star is able to achieve due to the shooting stars circling it; the wishes of humanity. Even though Kinomi's wish was unique, wishes aren't inherently better or worse than others. In order to make his wish "number one" and grant it, Shiny Star is absorbing and manually rejecting each wish individually, allowing it to pile up so much stardust and magical energy to use as fuel. The storm around it is not intentional, but the side-effect of drawing every human wish on the planet to itself. It's a human extinction case instead of destruction of civilization because humanity will die out from losing all its wishes. It still is rejecting wishes even as it is being fought, and has already rejected 3,047,217,423 wishes so far, making the Shiny Star invincible due to being a Ploy following its given rules.

In order to depower it, Kinomi must sincerely give up his wish. Yet upon the group discovering his wish, the group realizes that to relinquish such a heartfelt wish is both wrong and impossible. Tobimaru Tsukiji, however, reveals a flaw in the Shiny Star's logic: in 1997, Kinomi's wish was unique. However, while searching for him at the request of Masago's parents to return his fan-letters, Tobimaru watched recordings of Masago's shows and became a fan, enough that he also wished that she would become number one. This happened in 2001, while Shiny Star's search for matching wishes happened in 1997, thus it couldn't have known the wish wasn't unique anymore. This revelation disables Shiny Star's world, stopping it from remaking the world by magic and letting it become "third-rate" and vulnerable, eventually leading to its destruction.