The grothnak was offering half-off deli meat again. She groaned. She was going to have to track down whatever hapless (and edible) tourist had gone missing and get a warrant, and she was going to have to do it before other hapless (and hungry) tourists finished devouring the evidence. Gah. However many times they talked to the grothnak about cultural differences and the unacceptability of cannibalism, being defined as the eating of sentients, it wouldn't make a difference. Somebody would have a body, they'd take it to the chop-shop to be rid of, and almost every time, the body would be gone before she could figure out who the victim had been. And she couldn't exactly ask the grieving relatives if they'd been to Grothnak's Deli, because if they had been, they really did still have their relative's body. Some of it.


Inspiration: I have no idea. Must have seen a half-off deli meat ad somewhere.
Story Potential: Medium.
Notes: This is cute, but it's not a story in itself, though it would make a good intro.

The rich meat smell made his stomach growl and his mouth water. He gagged, dry-heaving convulsions that would have sent the contents of his stomach flying to coat his cell, if he still had any stomach contents. They hadn't given him water for a day, and the slow smoky fire underneath him made him cough and dried out his nostrils. Slow-smoking him while he was still alive, they were. He'd have thought he had a better chance of escaping if they had simply planned to tie him to a tree until they could build a fire to roast him. Actual techniques for preparing their meat implied that they'd had a lot of time and practice to build up a cuisine, and that meant that nobody had gotten away yet. Still, eventually the town would miss its sheriff.

Inspiration: Smelling somebody else's lunch.
Potential: Low. Nothing new here.
Notes>: Heh. Small town America, now with cannibals!

She was starving. That was her excuse. That was what she told everyone, when they wondered how she could possibly have done it. Sometimes she even found herself believing it, she'd said it so often, with such conviction, from her trial onward. It was a lie, of course. She'd been very, very hungry, yes--but not starving. She would have survived long enough to be rescued even if she hadn't eaten S-tha. She'd even expected that rescue would arrive in time. Really, she'd just been curious how S-tha would taste. She hadn't liked S-tha particularly much, but she never would have hurt it. It had died in the accident that trapped her, though, and the first thought that had flickered through her mind when she'd seen the big, feathery aliens was how they'd taste.

Inspiration: Somebody saying they were starving.
Story Potential: High.
Notes: And...some sort of alien rapport/abilities/symbiosis is gained from the eating, but there's all kinds of complications, too. The center lie is what holds it all together. So--unravel it and what kind of story is there?

The unsolved mystery nagged away at her, whenever she saw the bakery. It was nothing that she wanted to think about. But at the same time, she refused to change her usual walking route to avoid the bakery; that would make her think of it because she *wasn't* seeing the bakery, and it seemed to her that would be even worse. Nobody knew how the stripper had ended up in the cake, at least nobody who'd admit anything, though plenty thought it was the fiancée who'd made the cake be baked a 2nd time--with the stripper inside. The worst part of it was, she understood from the men who'd attended the bachelor party, was that the cake had smelled really good. Like the best parts about cake and a pig roast mixed up together. They still got a weird hungry haunted look in their eyes when they talked about it, and there was some talk that Rob might have actually gotten a taste, after everybody else fled the room. She thought--

Inspiration: "Finished With Lies" by They Might Be Giants
Story Potential: Medium-high
Notes: This idea started out cozy mystery and wound up horror. Neat-o. I'm thinking there's some force trying to make people eat people. Lots of weird food accidents/murders, some people getting a taste for it. Question is, why is something trying to force the people of this town (world?) into cannibalism?