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. When you spent most of your time bouncing between dimensions, it helps to be self-employed; portals to other realities in the midst of traditional workplaces tend to produce more police reports than paychecks.

2. There are some things that can’t be undone, not with all the time and money in the world. As she looked over the shattered pieces, she realized this might be one of them.

3. In school tests started with a class bell and ended with a ‘pencils down’, outside of school things weren’t so well defined…

4. “I swear, if you start one more sentence with ‘but we’re never going to use this in real life’ I’ll–”
“But we aren’t!” the student whined, “That’s what the computers are for!”
“And if the computers break?”
“Then the computer guy will fix them!”
“And if there’s no computer guy there?”
“Then, seriously, this class is the LAST thing I’m going to be thinking of!”

5. “Are you ready for this?” He held her banner at the ready, but she could see the worry in his eyes. For the first time since she known him, the concern seemed genuine. She’d saved the world, and now it was time to pay the price.

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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