There had been forty darks since the man died. A red light blinked in the corner of Rex's eyes, an alarm that matched the red light blinking on the new-man-place. The Man had not emerged. After thirty darks, the Man was supposed to leave the new-man-place. He would smell funny, but he would smile and call Rex's name and scratch him behind the ears in just the right place. Then he would go in the shower and put on skins that made him smell more like the Man should.


Inspiration: DeviantArt painting of dog alone, staring out of overgrown ruin. https://www.deviantart.com/art/Alone-701194787
Story potential: Low.
Notes: So the dog goes on a quest to find someone to fix the cloning tank, and he finds a child, and it ends up becoming part of the pack. Meh.

The post of Writer for the Sleeping Child was a fairly prestigious one, and well-paid, and it wasn't as if anything bad was happening to the Child. The Child--slept. The Child would always sleep, until it was no longer a child. Then it would wake up and be taught all the things about the world that a non-sleeping child would have learned from the time it could open its eyes and look around. Except how to talk, and certain other aspects that were significantly distressing to most people who interacted with the former Child. He was pondering what he would do when the Child woke. He had not had it for its full life; there was a previous Writer who had decided to stay on for the next Child. He did not think he could do that. He knew too much of her sighs and the slight lisp with which she talked, he knew what many of the symbols meant and annotated them in the Writing as should be sent. Some Writers adopted the Child when it awoke, took it home with them and made it part of their family. If he had a family, he thought he would have done that, but he did not. He knew very little, really, about even normal children, and so he worried that he would not be able to take proper care of her. His family still lived out in the country, by the foothills, a journey of a week's length that he made only once a year, in time for the annual Moon Dreaming festival. He would not be able to rely on their support as another unprepared father might. And he could not move back, first because his entire life as far as he could remember living there was devoted to escaping, and partly because his only chance at making a good income to support a family was to stay in the city. He did want a family, he just wasn't particularly good at talking with women, and he knew none of the ways that a solitary man might acquire a family. If his sisters had lived nearby, he assumed he most likely would have been married for a good ten years already.


Inspiration: http://www.danielmerriam.com/index.php?option=com_ponygallery&Itemid=0&func=detail&id=150
Story potential: High.
Notes: She wakes up early, say at--oh--ten. And no, there is not nor ever will be anything romantic between them. Ew. But because she wakes up early, she retains more of the powers of the Dreaming Child than normal, at least when she sleeps. And then plot ensues.

"Oh, no," Mira groaned, when she got home and took her toddler out of his snowsuit and emptied out the pockets and found...it. "You're not supposed to take things out of there. You're not even supposed to be there! How can I...maybe if I wait until tomorrow to return it, they won't have noticed. I can't go back tonight. That would be too suspicious. And they'll think I stole it and then felt guilty, which is just as bad as stealing it and not feeling guilty. And if I say that you took it, then I won't be in trouble for theft, which is good, but I'll still get fired because we really aren't supposed to let anyone else in and I think that even a toddler counts and besides, I clearly wasn't watching you close enough, not that that matters and--" "Kitty!" proclaimed Che, lifting up the rock that he'd taken from the Very Special Museum of Specialness. "No, honey, it's not a kitty. It's a fossil, which is a kind of rock, and--" The rock unfolded in Che's hand and mrrped up at her. "Oh, no!"


Inspiration: Cassius bringing me everything in the house.
Story potential: High.
Notes: Cute. I may be highly biased because of my own toddler, though, but this could be the start of something awesome. And not just cutesy, either. Needs some darkness/texture added to it, this isn't a kid's story. Or, well, it could be a kid's story from Che's POV, but Mira's going to be dealing with a lot more. In fact, could be fun to write it both ways.

Discovering that the baby you never planned to have, almost decided not to keep, but in the end kept and went back to a village not too near but not too far from where you came from, and claimed yourself a widow of the war--discovering that baby can spit fire is no small thing. Nobody asked what side your husband was on, of course, because dragons were monsters invading from across the oceans, sailing on giant rafts of monstrous trees lashed together, or landing on small islands and overnighting before sailing in to the port. You don't remember when the war started. Most people don't, now. Your father was a young man when the dragons invaded. Or first flew to our shores. You've heard a few older people muttering that the dragons weren't the ones who started the war, and we could have avoided all this if only--


Inspiration: "Spitfire" - Prodigy
Story potential: High.
Notes: Not sure if there's enough unique here to power a story, but maybe. The child is not a child of rape, but a consequence of a one-night stand after she was saved from some wartime danger by a dashing soldier. The dragons started invading because something worse across the sea was invading them. And it's coming next. The dragons are now in hiding and almost impossible to find, but she's by god going to have to go on a quest for them so that her child can be taught safely. Maybe re-read Mary Brown before writing this, either for inspiration or to avoid duplication.

The happiest cry of the dolphinate calves sounded like a crying human child. It confused her wiring so much that she found herself running to the dolphinates when there was no need and then ignoring her own grandson when he started crying while he was playing. She had to train herself to learn each individual calf's voice, so that she could separate that cry from the cries of human children. It took a month. It was a very confused month, for her. She was grateful when her daughter went on a long vacation with the grandkids, out to one of the rare landlocked cities. By the time they came back, she had mostly overcome the tendency. But it meant that she recognized the happy cry of a calf when it went by her window in the middle of the night, at a time when the calves should all be safe and curled up in their caves in the bay nursery.


Inspiration: Screaming baby. Which is why I must go.
Story potential: Medium.
Notes: Eh.

Amelia Earhart is well and truly dead, but her legacy lives on in us. Not that she would have known or even understood it, but I often thought that if she was possibly able to grasp it, she would have been one of the first to embrace us. She always did reach out for the boundaries and stretch herself beyond her limits. Fear was not an obstacle to her. For all I know, she would have embraced the realization that she was the mother to a new race. Of course, instead our "father" abducted her in the middle of a flight over the ocean, killed her, dissected her, brought her back to life to run various brain tests on her, killed her again, and disassembled her down to the molecular level so that he could create us. It's what scientists call a "destructive test." I won't say there's no coming back from it, but I will say that there's no coming back from it sane. Sometimes I wonder if our father's earliest attempts were what started the zombie legends. Not sure if it was because he tried to return the abductees (likely those who were buried still alive enough for his purposes), or because he imprinted the insane brain patterns on his first children. I know there were other children before us, but--


Inspiration: When I hit "I feel lucky" on a blank google box, I got this: https://www.google.com/doodles/amelia-earharts-115th-birthday
Story Potential: High.
Notes: I like the twist of "yes, she was abducted, and no, she's not alive."

The sorrow of the trees, that was what she felt when she was just a sapling. Her mother walked away from them, out to find her father who had never returned to them after that one moonlit night when she was conceived, but her mother had lost her heart, as was the way of their people. And when a tree loses its heart, it must regain it again or the tree will fall. She remembered some sunny mornings of being a toddler playing in the sunlight with her mother, before her mother left. But once she was old enough to have her own nutrients and not to need her mother's branches to protect her from the harshest winds and the drought, her mother left to find her heart. The daughter left behind stayed a sapling for a very long time, as if she hoped her mother would come back and awaken her if she only waited long enough. It took a forest fire to rouse her into the form with legs, and she stumbled and staggered alongside the graceful deer and the other animals--


Inspiration: The painting from Flickr. http://www.flickr.com/photos/35475855@N05/6789097553/
Story Potential: Medium.
Notes: It is important that this is *not* an ecological fable. Because otherwise? Too trite, too easily done. Instead, dryad goes to the city and finds...a different thing.

The chime into the gene pool was what worried her. A sound--a sound, an idea, a meme could carry beyond mitochondria, beyond simple gene spread. And now, when the gene pool was producing, was when it was most vulnerable. There had been--something--encoded in that simple chime, the simple sound that should never, ever have been able to reach so deep into the womb of civilization. She had recorded and designed the tapes herself. They had *not* included that chime. In fact, when she pulled the tapes for study, they still did not. Not in the system, that sound. And all the (very expensive) security had not detected an intruder. And all the (very extensive) video and vital signs recording hadn't noticed--


Inspiration: "The Gene Pool" by Stewart Copeland
Story Potential: High.
Notes: I love this idea, though I'm not sure how it would fit and be relevant in the story, or--but oh, I like this idea.

She nursed her own child as long as she could, but it didn't take very long before the child was full and sleepy and her master noticed. Then he sent for his dogs. She did not want to watch as they suckled at her breasts, but eventually, she did, if only to wince and brace herself for a nip from their teeth if she moved wrong, or to push them away if they started getting rowdy--her master allowed her that much, at least. In time, she could not help herself from noticing the differences in the faerie hounds, their silky ears, and the way their eyes turned to her, sometimes, when the master scolded them, as if they asked her for help. She began to not fear their feeding time so much. She would whisper in their ears, stories of what might happen once her child was weaned.

Inspiration: News of the Weird: In Uganda, "for seven years had been forced to breastfeed her husband's hunting dogs as she was nursing the couple's own children. Farmer Nathan Awoloi of Pallisa explained that his dogs needed to eat, and since he was forced to send Jennipher's family two milk cows in order to win her hand, he felt his demands were reasonable. "
Story Potential: High
Notes: Well, it's creepy enough that it could work pretty well with a dark fairy tale.

The baby birds popped their heads out of the olympo tree to watch the parade of beasts go by, sad that they were too young to join in. Their mama and papa both joined the winding parade as it trumpeted and sang and stomped its way through the forest. They never came back. After it was dark again and they should be sleeping, the baby birds could not, because they were so hungry they felt that if they slept, they might die. And they would have. They chirped and peeped and complained even though it was the quiet time, when they should be sleeping. But they were hungry and did not want to die. Eventually a shadow came along and stopped in front of the olympo tree. "Oh," the voice said.

Inspiration: Seeing something poke its head out of the bole in the neighbor-across-the-alley's tree.
Story Potential: High? Medium?
Notes: Writing from this perspective's weird, but maybe the way this should be written? And who or what piped away all the animals? To what fate? Is this an environmentalism parable? I just don't know.