The marines were uneasy. They were used to guarding dignitaries: ambassadors, head cooks, sons of rich and powerful families who had their brothers gunning for them, the usual. Guarding a word was, well, weird. The word was written on a canvas, painted inside their helmets, and locked away in a hypno-secured portion of their minds, so that if any of them survived, so would the Word. That was unsettling enough, since it essentially turned all of them into targets instead of collateral damage or obstacles. If they lost the banner and the book, they still had to guard at least one other of themselves who might escape with the word. I mean, they'd been blood-bound to each other for years. They would have saved each other anyway, when they could, and eaten the dead to preserve their skills when they couldn't. But this set them all up as targets for elimination. At least, as the tusk-commander had joked, this package wouldn't make them follow it into whorehouses....


Inspiration: Word Bearers Chaos Space Marines.
Story Potential: High? Medium? This is not my usual, at all, but it could be fun if I felt like writing space marines.
Notes: I have no idea what that actually is, but I tried to imagine it.

She was in the park when she noticed the close attention the birds were paying to the man by the fountain. It was odd--she'd walked past the fountain a million times before, and always it seemed that there were people hovering about and looking. This was the first time she'd seen a man sitting by the edge of the fountain and leaning far, far out over it, to the base of the statue itself. It was strange, she reflected, that children never played in the fountain. People never threw quarters in for good luck, bums never tried to scrounge around for change in the fountain. Nobody ever sat on the edge of the fountain, either. It was always, instead, that they stared at it, or commented on it as they walked past. She was not one of the starers. She sped up whenever she walked past, because she did not like the way the strange, blocky shape seemed to loom,. It was a cold thing, a thing not of the park. Come to think of it, it was the first time she'd seen birds anywhere near it. Or squirrels. Or rabbits. Or any of the rest of the park's semi-urban wildlife.

Inspiration: "An Exultation of Larks," by James Lipton
Story Potential: High.
Notes: Who has two thumbs and a good idea? This girl!