"I love you," the bitty love bot whispered from the pillow on the other side of the bed, where her boyfriend used to sleep before he said it wasn't working and they should see other people, by which he apparently meant they should stop seeing each other at all and as far as other people, she didn't know, but she'd seen him post selfies with cute girls. A different girl each time.

"I love you," the bitty love bot whispered as it sat on the corner of the kitchen counter, while she microwaved a frozen dinner for one, a dinner that had the smart portion size but only half the flavor of the luxurious home-cooked, butter-heavy meals she used to cook for the two of them.

"I love you," the bitty love bot whispered to the picture of her, the picture that used to be a picture of them before he left her and she tore his half of the picture up. She was at the gym, and she did not take the bot with her there.

"I love you," the bitty love bot whispered, its voice blending with the shower as she sat in the tub and sobbed with the shower beating over her bowed back.


Inspiration: https://marywinkler.deviantart.com/art/Bitty-Love-Bot-542060528
Story potential: Medium.
Notes: I think I want this to go in a romantic,happy direction. Maybe she throws it out, it finds another boy, and somehow the two get together??

The object of the game was to capture the state, and the way it was played was by wagering everything: family, money, power, and love. Love, you say? Well, as much love as a person of discipline would allow themselves to have when they were playing the game of states. That is what I would have said before I met and fell in love with her, the gorgeous ragamuffin who (I thought) could never help me in the game of states. I thought I could keep her on the side, so that she wouldn't influence anything one way or another. It wasn't as if she would expect someone in my social position to marry her, after all, or to marry any other woman, for that matter. It might be legal now, but it would be a social faux pas. I had not built my life to operate as an "eccentric," and a non-standard spouse (to put it mildly) wouldn't fit in with the persona that I'd built since I was old enough to have it explained to me what a persona was and what the goal was and why I was one of the only people who could play the game and why it was so deadly important to win it.


Inspiration: Googled "Seize the Day" -> Policy Research Paper, "Seize the State, Seize the Day: State Capture, Corruption, and Influence in Transition."
Story potential: High.
Notes: Politics and power are always fun. Throw in a forbidden lesbian love and there you go! Novelish.

They don't warn you when you start eating hearts that eventually the heart you'll eat is your own. I have enough self-control to keep it to just the tiniest nibble every ten years or so, and I satisfy (ha!) myself with licking it in-between. You may have guessed that this results in constant hunger and a hollow spot in my chest even as I go on, but that much I kind of guessed would be the case, I just didn't understand why. It really took a while for it to sink in that my dreams of eating my own heart were not so much dreams, and were the cause of my sudden lack of energy, fainting spells, hollow feelings, and generally deadened aspect. Someday, if I live long enough, I might be able to persuade my heart to grow back. I’ve heard rumors that Koschei the Deathless started out as a heart-eater, and wound up able to grow his heart back enough and hide it well enough to live forever. Or perhaps he was just attempting to hide his heart from himself, and when the girl recovered it, she found a half-gnawed specimen of horror. Though you'd think that's the sort of thing a fairytale would keep in.


Inspiration: Google "quizzical" -> http://www.pressxtojustin.com/79890/376958/illustration/mola-rammed
Story potential: Medium-high
Notes: Interesting, could be good, this is more of a bare-bones and less of an anything that would actually mean something.

The jeweler--if you could call one who abused his profession so religiously a jeweler (he insisted that he was simply returning to the historical roots of his profession)--pushed away the velvet tray cradling the jewel and flipped his loupe up. "It's fake," he said flatly. "No," she said numbly, "no, that's not possible. He loved me and this, keeping and getting this, this was the reward for--I can't tell you, but I almost died. Those dear tome did. It was the last thing he did, passing this into my hands. It can't possibly be fake. He said he would find me, he's following on the next ship out. He'll be here in six months. I tell you, it's not possible that it's fake. I need this to live off of until then." The jeweler sighed and looked at her with sad old eyes that looked like they'd seen an awful lot of the world before deciding to stick with inanimate stones. "I can give you 10o credits for it, and I might be able to sell it as costume jewelry." She reached out and grabbed it without thinking, wrapping her hands around it. Maybe he was just trying to rip her off, to get her valuables for nothing. She bolted from the shop without responding, and the soft sound of the door shushing closed behind her sounded like a sigh.


Inspiration: The little fake jewel on my desk.
Story potential: Low.
Notes: It's not a jewel, it is valuable, she won't find that out until she's gone through a lot of hell.

Shadows walk through the hours of the day when there should be no shadows. Death comes for those who should not die. Those who should die...transform into something else. All the world is falling apart. This is what the TV said, before it went blank, before it switched over to an automated broadcast emergency channel controlled by who knows what. That's what the radio said, before it went dead. That's what the newspapers said, while there were still any printed on a regular basis. Some of the newspapers have started back up again, but they print on strange and erratic schedules and half the time they seem to be spouting lies designed to trap people into places where they can be gathered in large groups. By something. IF people are being gathered by something. If that something, for which we have no name, even exists. Love can save us. We have been told that love can save us, and I do believe that. I believe it with all my heart, because without the prospect of something that can save us, we are a dead species, at least in the form that I remember existing before the shadows walked when shadows shouldn't. I'm just worried that I won't find anyone to love, to save me. My family is gone. I have no close friends. I try to make close friends, but I think they sense my desperation and read it as a hunger and fear that I am part of the something that we have no name for.


Inspiration: "Love is Gonna Save Us" - Benny Benassi
Story potential: Medium-high
Notes: Now to find a good, plausible *creepy* reason why love will save them.

Rabbit was in love. His machine-gun turrets rotated involuntarily when he saw her, and his sights telescoped in to focus on the lovely fur that covered her breasts. She had the latest stealth modifications, he saw, so she was the latest line of scouts from CoreHead. His leg thumped involuntarily against the rack of the seat he was cuffed into, waiting for the next battle release. She was free--and that said something, too. Of course, she wasn't the heavily armed monstrosity that he was, the one that could take out a city on his own. She was a Bunny, not a Thumper. He'd never understood until this moment why the stealthers all were made female, but he figured that if his protocols hadn't stopped him, he would have rolled over without even trying a good rabbit-kick, if she said it would make her happy. Maybe a non-mod Boss Human wouldn't have had that reaction, but Rabbit didn't know. He guessed some of them were susceptible. And there were some Bunnies that had other roles. You saw a lot of them in the cathouses, or in bars, or sometimes in specialty movies. Maybe that was why the WarBunnies were adapted from that line.


Inspiration: A "bunny in love" icon.
Story Potential: Medium.
Notes: Ah, furry GMO super-soldier luuuuv!

Two months since Rudy did a flying Dutchman when his safety line snapped while he was out working on the external antennae array, way up high there where there were no safety net floating forty meters out, where the beacons were all turned off because otherwise they could interfere with the signal. He should have remembered that his beacon was off and flipped it on, but maybe he was hit by a piece of flying debris when the smaller array came loose and swung on him. If it had been turned on, it would have automatically started broadcasting a mayday when both his boots let the surface of the station for more than a 120 seconds, but it was turned off. Laura and Grant kept going, because what else do you do? You go to work, you come home, you comfort your surviving spouse when she breaks down in tears in the middle of dinner, you sleep in the bed and try not to think of how empty it feels with only the two of you in it.


Inspiration: Trying to think of story ideas for the 4th Street Fantasy storytelling circle, wanted kind of a retelling.
Story Potential: High.
Notes: And then the flying Dutchman ship comes to the station just out of reach, demands supplies, mysteriousness ensues, Laura goes over because she believes Rudy is there, Grant is stopped, finale later he does make it, on some other station, or at least that's the rumor. There needs to be other plot stuff here, too, to make it truly interesting. Like what makes the spaceship a flying Dutchman, and are they pirates or under quarantine, or what?

I have always loved you. In six of the time-streams I kill you--twice because you cheated on me, once because you were dying of cancer, twice because you were leaving me because I cheated on you, and once because I was insane. In eight time-streams we married, but we always divorced. Twice, after fifteen years of marriage. Sometimes we have children, but that doesn't correlate to any of our love problems. Once, the children died, and you killed yourself. In one time-stream, I never worked up the courage to even talk to you, and you never realized you were being stalked by a mad scientist. You had a good life, but I died young. I wonder, sometimes, if that's the time stream I should work to make immanent, but the thought of never seeing your eyes light up when you see me is intolerable.


Inspiration: "Lovesong" - Snake River Conspiracy
Story Potential: Medium.
Notes: Eh. It could be a decent flash story, but it doesn't really pull me in.

When a dog shows up on your doorstep with a heart on its nose, you don't have a choice. You have to follow it. Those are the rules of the Hounds of Hearts. No, I'm not talking about a real human heart--don't be gross! And I'm not talking about a tattoo--though some say that there was a serial killer for a little while who'd trained his dog to fetch and given it a nose tattoo. They say that the hounds came for him, and now he's madly in love with the prison warden and eager to be in jail to please her. They say he's happier, in a way. Nobody knows where the Hounds come from, but all agree that they're one of the better manifestations of the Needs.

Inspiration: Flickr photo of a dog with a paper heart on its nose.
Story Potential: Medium.
Notes: I like the worldbuilding that just kind of spins out of this scenario, but while it's intriguing and all, this doesn't have that spark that makes me want to writerightnow!

The squarehead stopped him before he reached the gate of the factory. "State your name and business."

"I just want to see Kitty," he said quickly. "Nothing official, no business, I just want--."

"No business is not allowed."

"It's her break time in five," he insisted. "Her legally allotted break time. That's like not being in the business at all. I can see her if she's not in the business." He waited, watching the nanny circuits in the squarehead click through their paces, and hoped that would be enough to allow him in. What any roundhead would know without even having to think about it, some of the squareheads--the ones who went too far to the machine--would agree to because it made squarelogic. The same kind of squarelogic that--


Inspiration: This photograph of a piece of really awesome graffiti art.
Story Potential: Medium-high.
Notes: Not a new idea, really, but I like the setting idea. And hints of some difficulty with Kitty.