She liked the #vespers held in the park. She could actually attend the evening service because it wasn't held on church-guarded holy ground, but she could appreciate nature's peace. The darkness also made it easy to pick up a snack afterward.

Inspiration: vespers
Potential: low
Notes: Eh, it's a vampire thing. Although I like the whimsical nature of the character, this isn't particularly a story idea in itself. And she does appreciate nature and creation, still.

Everybody expects bar stools to be built #sturdy, to support regular patrons and quickly end irregular fights. In Pat's bar, you might notice the extra-wide windowsills and wonder why. It's because of the vampire bats' conservation of mass.

Inspiration: sturdy
Potential: Low. As a setting, this is just funny to me.
Notes: Magic makes them fly, but it doesn't make them light. Urban fantasy or possibly humorous regular low fantasy.

When green code day came, Erin couldn't wait. She had a whole plan for what she would do. First a nice, long walk in the park to see the ducks and the dogwalkers. Groceries, of course, once the stores opened to the general public, and a check of the fabric store to see if they had anything that would match her living room wallpaper. She wanted to recover her couch, which was looking worn since everyone was spending more time sitting on it these days. Then a movie at the drive-in, starting at dusk and ending just before curfew. She'd gotten to know the neighbors who were also on the green schedule, and they'd made plans to park next to each other at the movie, so that the kids could make funny flashlight faces at each other through the car windows. Maybe she'd also pick up some plants from the nursery, she thought, something to give them new green life to enjoy for the next six days until it was green day out again.

Inspiration: Coronavirus
Story potential: Low
Notes: This is mostly setting. One possible future.

The mini-bats came at night, small swarms that could be stopped by mosquito netting but nothing else. Window screens did not keep them out, though soon enough we started lining the windows with mosquito netting as well, and draping layers of mosquito nets in makeshift hallways guests had to walk through to reach our homes. Still, we all became listless and tired from the blood loss. Our saviors from the mini-bats ended up being actual bats, bred from the DNA samples impregnated in mice and hand-raised to stay near human habitation. They took to eating their smaller lookalikes as readily as they would insects, and slowly we started to regain our strength. The child mortality rate went down.


Inspiration: Pokemon Go zubat
Story potential: Low.
Notes: Meh

The mermaid begged and begged to see the surface Land. The koi brought such wonderful treats back with them, though they vanished into the water within moments if left uneaten. At times, she'd been brave enough to go up to the surface, almost, near enough to see the surface, and even though she never saw the source of the cake, she saw the huge beams that ended in sculptures of some ferocious fish, like a catfish with the teeth of a human. The moment was there, almost within her grasp. Then came the day that the fish brought back signals that something new and different was here. Something on the water that was not food or water creature, though it tasted faintly like the sticks that sometimes fell into the water. It had no end, they said.
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Inspiration: Image of a tiny boat floating over koi.
Story potential: Medium potential
Notes:

The waves were choppy that morning as she pushed the boat off from the pier and settled down to row to the altar center, or what they thought was the altar center. Eventually, the buoy from the last successful sacrifice always disintegrated or floated away or fell apart, but that was part of the way it worked. Nobody would put extra buoys out unless they'd had a separate sacrifice, as if the altar might move around and they might end up sacrificing to nothing. She had a major request, this day, and so she'd gone to the trouble of buying a whole calf to take out on the waters. That was the rules. No fish, because there were fish enough, but something from the air if you had to or the land at best. She'd once heard tell of a thing called a camel, that lived only far out in the desert, and she figured that would be the best sacrifice of all--certainly nobody else would have offered up such a thing--but one had never come near her.


Inspiration: Picture of water, mountains, and clouds: http://www.flickr.com/photos/o_d_r_a_d_e_k/12175351336/
Story potential: Low.
Notes: Pretty picture, though!

Performing live without being allowed to look at the audience that you're performing for is a heck of a lot harder than you might think. Sure, normally when you're up on stage with the lights shining in your eyes, you don't see much more than blurs and maybe a few rows in the front anyway, but that's totally different than being forced to basically black out everything. And it's not like they could just put up a large one-way mirror or something for us, oh, no. They wanted to smell our sweat and hear the little rasps in our breath and effeng our ooblong or whatever that last bit they said was. I just hope it doesn’t mean they were secretly drinking our blood or something, because who knows with these guys? And that's the whole point, isn’t it? That nobody knows? So we went up there in sunglasses that were like the kind that really blind guys wear, ones that blocked out everything all around the edges. Except--and here's the thing--I had such a damned hard time playing drums without being able to see what I was doing that I talked our agent and the politicians and all into agreeing that if I just got a certain frequency of light to show through the glasses, and I painted my drums so they'd glow like that if we used the right stage lights, it should be okay, because it's not like I'd be able to see anything except a rough outline of where my drums were. Except.


Inspiration: Scarlett Johansson talking about playing a character without a body, plus a photo of musicians playing with their hands over their eyes: http://www.flickr.com/photos/soviette/10980108605/
Story potential: Low
Notes: Meh.

Sign on the dotted line, pass the telegenic test, and you could be queen for a day of a small island in the Pacific. During that time, you get to pass five new laws or repeal ten, you get to wear fashions that you could never afford in your life, you get the best treatment, the best food, the best entertainment, the best everything-you-ever-wanted. And then you get a choice. Your choice depends on how the residents vote. You may only get to choose the method of your execution, but they've only done that to one ruler, and that was...well, he deserved what he got, and maybe giving him a choice was a little too kind. You may get to choose between life in prison (or until a future ruler wastes her pass by pardoning you) or life as an indentured servant (no pardon there, but a buyout is remotely possible, although the ruler can't help there, at least not explicitly). You may be restored to your previous status. You may be handed a lottery ticket. You may...there are all kinds of things that may happen. One thing's guaranteed, though; you can't leave the island. Once you sign on, you're in the system, you're on the show, you can't leave without penalty clauses that will make you wish you could have gotten that execution. In some cases, depending on if you have any medical conditions, the penalty clauses may actually *be* an execution.


Inspiration: "Capital G" + "I Don't Like the Drugs"
Story potential: Low.
Notes: Eh. Sorta interesting for a reality show-based premise, but I don't want a thing with a reality show-based premise.

She saw the local primates eating the leaves and so decided to risk trying them herself. It probably wasn't the most scientific approach, but it was the best she had. And it worked. Granted, the first thing she'd done when she realized the situation was attempt to feed the primates a tiny piece of her last ration bar and watch to make sure it didn't die. The feeding was a success, the watching less so. She did get the sense that something was following her after that, and occasionally she got a glimpse of *a* primate watching her intently through the leaves, but she had no way of knowing if it was actually the one she'd fed. She decided to risk it anyway, and before she became too weak to recover from any possible negative side effects of the food. Good thing, too, since the first thing she noticed was that things were turning pink around her, and then--well, then the hallucinations started full bore. Great, she thought. She'd found the local primates' drug of choice and eaten enough to get a healthy wallop. She climbed--


Inspiration: Photo of a monkey eating a leaf: http://www.flickr.com/photos/41460120@N04/10960163236/
Story potential: Low.
Notes: Eh.

Ordering color is a bit trickier than you might expect. First, there are always the colors that people associate with the province or town, which in our case means quite a bit of different shades of blue. We need blue for clothes, flowers, the sky, water, and the cliffs that litter our province. It's an important part of everything, and because it isn't fixed in place--can't be, since this is a public resource and not just someone's painting or postcard--it tends to drain off and be drawn to the places that can afford very little color of their own. It wouldn't be so bad if that didn't take away our color, too. We get a fair amount of tourism, and part of that is the color of the nature landscape. I've got a standard ordering chart for different times of the year, so that we can pull back and replenish at least the most famous areas, the ones that are really important to both our identity and the tourist trade. Even in hard times, that gets ordered right after the food. After the basic package, though, it becomes a lot more tricky. There are certain shades of blue and green that belong with ice and snow, though a lot of places skimp on color in the winter, reasoning that gray and white are after all perfectly natural colors that will stick around on their own. Some clothes are color-fixed, but those are generally quite expensive, and a crowd scene becomes grim itself when everything around it is. It also emphasizes the class barrier in a way that I don’t think is quite healthy.


Inspiration: A reminder email about ordering new printer ink.
Story potential: Low.
Notes: Very low.