1. The clouds seal off the sky, a grim undulating wall of gray that thwarts her attempts to chart their course. By the fifth day she can only answer ‘at sea’ when the prince asks where they are.

2. Superstition holds that cats walk closest to the spirit world, but even here, where the barriers are thinnest, superstition is all that they can claim. Mice, on the other hand…

3. It’s easier not to try– and the days turn to weeks turn to months and it isn’t until some well-meaning coworker murmurs condolences that he realizes a year has passed.

4. They’d tried creating magical companion animals once, as a way of expanding their mana pools. Melding human and animal into a coherent whole… Their students’ students still whisper tales of the disastrous results centuries later.

5. The downside to waking from cryogenic slumber into a futuristic world is that no one knows how anything works. Kate glared unhappily at her current handler who was honestly confused as to why her charge kept asking such strange questions. If a hovercar worked, why did it matter how?

1. “We’ll go on grand adventures!” the shimmering Plot Bunny promised. “We’ll save the world and bring a thousand years of peace! We’ll kill the evil dragons and rescue princesses! We’ll solve ancient riddles and find buried treasure! It will be such fun!”

The Writer was not impressed.

2. The worst part about being told that you’re the only one who can complete a task that will most likely kill you, is realizing that the person telling you this is a) still an insufferable jackass and b) right.

3. Cooking stew has a certain calm to it, which might be why it was served eight times out of ten when the army was on the march. The scent of the cookfires permeated the camps all day, and it never tasted the same twice since they cooks relied on the hunting and gathering parties for supplies.

4. She could never tell if anyone really believed he was coming back, or if they had simply fallen into the habit of of belief– expecting without questioning that one day they’d open the door as they did every day at noon and this time he’d be on the other side, waiting to come home.

5. This would normally be where the story ends, if this were a story; the world has been saved, the prince has found his bride, and there’s nothing left to do. Only this isn’t a story and the loose ends that are left belong to people that aren’t the prince, or the dragon, or the little goose girl.

These story prompts are released into the wild per Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License, so sayth their author Martha McMahon Bechtel.

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