She sat tensely, watching her keys to see if they would move. The connection to the old forests was very weak in the city, but she had taken a branch from one of the spindly street trees down into the subway's old abandoned platforms with her, hoping that the city connection and being surrounded by the earth might work. Keys as an invitation, and because she had nothing else on her, not even her wallet. Her keys had been in her pocket when they came for her, and so she still had them. The drum she'd stolen from a street performer, and the shame of that still lingered. She would return it, she promised herself, she would look until she found him and she would return the drum that she'd stolen. She drummed softly, ancient drumbeats promising things that even the oldest magic books would not agree entirely on. Apparently, when this ritual worked, the recipients became most disinclined to write treatises. One of those stories was listed as a cautionary tale bout a researcher gone "native" (it was written in the 1950s, when such unfortunate terminology was common).


Inspiration: ChaoticShiny random generator: "A treebranch, keys and a drum within a square. "
Story potential: High.
Notes: What if dryads could be created? What would an urban dryad be like? What would her motivations be (thinking beyond the easy environmental stuff)? Tries to return drum, finds busker is student who has been having weird things happen to him recently (since ritual), he becomes part of story.

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.