The click of the hammer pulling back made him smile. He'd got them then, and he knew it. They, of course, suffered from the natural misapprehension that they'd got him--or who they thought he was, a rich merchant traveling to see his squaw far out of town. He wondered what Frozen Deer thought of this whole scheme. She'd shaken her head at the incomprehensibility of the things he'd found important when he explained what he was doing. The bandits hadn't killed any of his kin or family, they hadn't killed the buffalo he hunted. She understood why he'd do it for the money, but part of what her job was was making sure that everybody had a guilty feeling when they took that as a reason for doing anything. And she knew that he'd see right through the shaking of her head. He'd been apprenticed to her for almost ten years, now, since he wandered into camp as a boy of a hair shy of fifteen, blood on his hands--

Inspiration: "Wind It Up" - Barenaked Ladies
Story Potential: Medium
Notes: If I *did* write it, I'd have to get rid of the Native American stuff--I'm so unqualified to get the culture and the mores and the mysticism and work it properly in with the sort of urban fantasy/new weird/western that this is.

Acceptance is headier than the finest of wines. He knew it, and yet he felt the sweet sway of its influence soaking into him as he basked in the approval of those who considered themselves to be his peers, or even his superiors. It had only taken a small matter of the child lying before him, bleeding its life out, to make them take him as one of theirs. He kept a close eye on the "child." The manikin he'd formed did not squirm any more, and the blood was beginning to pulse less dramatically. If a real child were lying slain at his feet, its skin should have paled more than the manikin--which had remained the same pink shade that he'd chosen when he created it. He filed away the note in case he should ever--

Inspiration: Getting accepted into iStockPhoto
Story Potential: High.
Notes: I like the infiltration idea. Not something that is explored much.

The viper coiled itself around the lamp base and hissed at him. He sighed. "And how, again, did the snake get in here?" he asked the nervous resident of the apartment. "Voodoo!" she hissed. "I accused my butcher of cheating me, and then I get home and the viper is here! I know that the butcher practices vodun, but I never thought that he would stoop to trying to kill his customers. Maybe he was just trying to scare me, to keep me from complaining, but now! I will tell all my friends. See if he can even stay open without us buying meat from him. He can sell all the black roosters he wants; the meat of his custom is us." She liked the phrase and repeated it. "The meat of his custom!"

Inspiration: "herpetology"
Story Potential: Medium.
Notes: I like the idea of the character, if not this bit--kind of a low-rent mystical pest control guy. Not a badass, not somebody who does exorcisms and fights Ultimate Evil--just the guy who gets rid of the cockroaches.