My parents hated me from the day I was born. They expected and wanted a solid colored unicorn boy but instead I came out a purple and black mottled pegasus girl. They never let me out of the basement and I never went to school. I was to stay quiet at all times and they would slip wilted salads under the basement door for me once a day. One night when I was about four years old they had company over and I was stretching my wings out a little just hovering in place above my bedding when I lost control, I knocked over a vase, some cheap thing that my mother got at a flea market in Manehattan. The next day my father blindfolded me and took me deep into the Everfree forest just beyond the borders of Ponyville and told me to count to one hundred, by the time I finished he was long gone and I was alone.
I wandered for a couple days crying and feeling sorry for myself, starving and dehydrated and just when I thought I was going to die for sure I came across a small spring surrounded by plants. I drank as much water as I could. I recognized some of the plants around the spring as the ones that my parents would slide under the door after they had wilted and ate, I would survive. When I eventually ate all the food by my current shelter, I did some exploring around to find another spring. I didn't find any more springs but I did find a clearing full of grass I decided to see if there was anything there worth noting, but there were no plants other than wild grass so I decided to head back. As I approached the side of the clearing that I came out of a manticore jumped out at me. I managed to fly away to safety but not before he snagged my ear and tore off the tip. I flew as far and as fast as I could completely losing myself in the forest flying in the opposite direction as my spring.
When I finally had to land I managed to find a small stream trickling through some rocks and drank until I couldn't drink anymore. I was starving and I thought that I recognized some berries from one of the salads that my parents had given me so I ate a hoof full of them and fell asleep. When I woke up the next day I couldn't see anything. I had to learn how to do survive all over again even how to walk without bumping into things and how to tell whether a plant was poisonous or not simply on feel and smell, I managed to figure out that leaves were generally less poisonous than berries and that poisonous berries tended to smell more bitter or sour than edible ones.
A couple months later, a cockatrice attacked me and all I had on me were some berries that I had yet to identify. A quick inspection told had me that they were poisonous, though I now know that they were hemlock. I grabbed a branch and hoped that it was pointy smearing the hemlock all over the tip; I swung it at the beast. The branch hit and it ran away. A few days later I kicked something feathery and limp, the cockatrice had died due to hemlock poisoning in its wing. At that time I felt a glow in my mind and a warmth on my rump right where my parents had little pictures my father of a house and my mother of a cup of tea and an image of a little pile of berries filled my mind. Was this my cutiemark? Was my talent using poisonous berries to defend myself? I decided that it was. Not much happened for many years after that, I built a modest shelter of sticks and leaves on the shore of a lake covered in edible plants. I would like to thank my poisoned snares for keeping me safe at my shelter. When I went to reset them every morning I would find anything in them from chickens to a baby hydra once. Over the years I found less and less of the beasts that lived in the Everfree because while they are not intelligent they are not stupid.
When I was about 20 years old I found the border of the forest closest to Phillydelphia the city of my birth. I decided to travel around like a tourist for a while and managed to find my old home and even found out that my parents were still living there. At the end of my stay I heard that my parents had died, there was hemlock found in their tea, too bad they denied to their dying breath that they had a daughter, because then the police ponies might have had a suspect. My name is Toxic Swirl and I have delivered justice.