Who hunts in the middle of a crowd, without being seen? There are a lot of answers to that question, but it boils down to "someone in the service industry." Taxi driver, waiter, secretary, hairdresser...all the service industries, or servants before there *were* real service industry workers. It's an easy way to figure out where I should aim my career, devote my talents, and pickup side jobs along the way to prepare for the next time I need to shift personas. Following the trail of illegal immigrants is also a good way, although some of the jobs they take I can't, not without sticking out like a sore thumb. I envy the Chinese immigrants and the string of Chinese restaurant jobs that trail across America. Being a traveling farmhand that goes where there's seasonal work is only a real option for those times when I look like a total and thorough bum, and when I do, people are less willing to bet that I'll actually work instead of earning just enough for a bottle and then sleeping under their grapevines.


Inspiration: Rewatching Sherlock, A Study in Pink.
Story potential: High.
Notes: The minimum wage life is an interesting side to various kinds of urban fantasy hidden world lives, if you think about it. Could really add a different POV to it. Theoretically, I could even get a couple of part time, minimum wage jobs to get more background.

They wouldn't'a come for us if we'd been in one of the fancy, upperclass echelons. Oh no, you never hear about them riding up into those exalted heights and snatching "dangerous types" to be put down. But us who were installed in the downbelow? Oh, yeah, you hear stories about that all the time. All about how we're a danger to society, and how that one child was mauled months and months ago, and isn't it a tragedy how lowers don't understand the dangers? Well, they understand the dangers all right, and that's why they get us. They know we've got a strong enough loyalty core that we'll defend even against--

Inspiration: Google-fu on "frog" - wound up on a page discussing the bulldog controversy.
Story Potential: Medium.
Notes: Eh. A good bit of setting, and it's got some punch to it.

Take an old vase, add pretty stones to the bottom to weigh it down, and half-fill it with water! her personal aide chirped. Then add any leftover bits of shampoo or soap, and use it to store your toilet brush! Instant ease for cleaning, and a pretty, clean way to store your toilet brush! Her hand half-rose to tap the mute button for her aide, but then she stopped. Her aide tried its best to make every single thing she did better. It wasn't the aide's fault that she was stony-broke and scrubbing toilets on her knees in the public tram stations in order to make enough money to pay flophouse rent and buy about half as many groceries as she would like. She was grateful she couldn't pawn her aide, that it came so personalized and interwired that--


Inspiration: A Flylady email with--yes--that very tip.
Story Potential: High.
Notes: Aide upgrade, pulling herself up by her bootstraps, social engineering, etc--could be great fun! A certain level of research would be required to make the social engineering parts work, but that would be part of what would make it a great story.

The slums were a muddy ocher color. They said it was because of the color of the dirt on that planet, but I always thought that enough of us had bled our lives out into the ground that the color itself changed in sympathy. We'd sold all we had in hopes of a new beginning on a faraway star. We were promised a certain amount of land, of the currency of the place, of livestock. We were promised education for our children, a good policing system, and a safety net that would protect the less fortunate. We didn't get any of that. I'm still not sure exactly why. Some of it had to do with how long they sent ships out to that planet for. In the beginning, maybe all the things they promised were true. But then the colonization company started to need to make more and more profit to satisfy its shareholders, and there was already a network of colonists--

Inspiration: "slums"
Story Potential: Low.
Notes: This isn't really a story, merely a framework that many others have explored before me.