Prompt: Dandelion seed.
Hans silently twirled the dandelion stem in his hand.
The feathery little seeds popped off and drifted away as his hand spun faster, faster.
If you make a wish on a dandelion seed, it'll come true!
What should he wish for?
He had a warm hearth waiting for him at home.
His food had always been there on the table for him.
His mother and his father were perfectly content with him and each other.
Absently, his tanned hand scratched at the familiar pink crescent on his bare ankle.
The bite mark still itched after several moons of healing.
Maybe for hunters to kill that rouge wolf?
No…it only bit me because I was between it and its cubs.
A tiny grin found its way onto his face.
Besides, I bit it back. Nobody's ever done that before.
He finally stopped twirling the dandelion and looked at its bedraggled white head.
I just want my life to continue as is, if that's not too much to ask.
He blew.
Prompt: Feather.
He leaped after the bird, his empty stomach gnawing and clawing at his ribs in its hunger.
It flew away with a rancorous coo, and he dropped back down to the filthy streets, his stomach continuing to rumble like the approaching stormclouds.
Soon rain poured down over the empty streets as the rich and the favored hurried by, and inside his alley, the boy shivered and moaned in pitiful hunger.
"Ah! There you are!"
He snarled and launched himself out of the box.
Anyone who wasn't speaking like him looking for someone like him meant trouble.
Before he could get halfway out of his box, a hand snatched his dirty shirt collar and he hung in the air like a drowned kitten, his overgrown blonde hair plastered to his scalp by the torrential rain.
"Do you know what this is?"
A feather was waved under his nose, and he squinted in confusion.
It looked like one from the bird he had eaten a week ago…right before-
His eyes widened in terror and he thrashed, realizing who must've been looking for him.
"You know, I do not truly understand why you broke into my lab for food when there was a diner nearby. You are either a very foolish or a very lucky child."
His hazy eyes narrowed.
"Lucky?! Whatever was in that foul place tasted disgusting!" he spat, and thunder crashed as there was an ominous chuckle from behind him.
"You're a very lucky young boy because what you ate was not designed for consumption. In all honesty, I expected to find a corpse. A reanimated one perhaps, but a corpse all the same. Have you died recently?"
"I'm too hungry to be dead."
His answer seemed to amuse the lanky man, and as he turned gently in the man's grip, he saw a glimpse of multi-layered glasses.
"How about you come and work for me? You'll be given food to eat and a place to sleep. All I want to do is study that liquid you ingested. Do you have a name?"
He squirmed uncertainly.
What was the worst that could happen?
Life on the streets was as bad as it could get, he was sure.
"Don't have one."
He was set down, and a gloved hand ruffled his sopping wet hair.
"The let's call you Schrodinger, because you came out of the box when I thought you were dead."
The doctor's –he seemed to be a doctor anyway– glasses suddenly acquired an ominous gleam as the newly dubbed Schrodinger felt that this was perhaps not the wisest of decisions.
"And perhaps we can even enhance what you have already become."
In the weeks and months and years to follow, Schrodinger was never sure whether to curse or bless the feather that had tipped Doc off about his visit to the lab and his consumption of the forbidden chemicals.
Prompt: She sings.
Rip clung to her brother's hand as their elder sister sang on the stage.
"She's really good!"
"Shhh!"
Rip obediently silenced herself.
Rip, age seven, and her brother, age ten, had the same blue-black hair, the same as the nineteen-year-old on stage had as she sang.
Rip's crystal-clear blue eyes followed her sibling worshipfully as she sang.
Rip wanted nothing more than to be like her elder siblings.
Her brother was the best shot in the entire town, and her sister's singing put the angel's to shame, or at least, in Rip's opinion.
Most everyone else's too.
"I'm going to learn to sing like that someday! You just wait! I'll sing opera as I hunt!"
She tugged on his arm to get him to pay attention to her vow as his eyes moved down and he chuckled.
Her brother gave her skull a noogie.
"Then you'll scare all the animals away, idiot!"
"Nu uh! I'll shoot them before they can!"
"SHHH!"
They both shut up this time.
Rip pouted, then squirmed out of the crowd and went to sit on the balcony outside.
Grandpapa was there, and he leaned forward in his creaky old chair to peer nearsightedly at her face.
She glanced at him nervously.
Although she would never admit it, Grandpapa scared her.
Maybe it was his age, or his crankiness, or his giant scar that went from chin to scalp, across one eye.
"I'm gonna be a hunter one day! I'll be the best!"
He snorted and leaned back in his chair, laying his knobby walking stick across his knees.
"I will! And I'll sing even better than my big sister! I'll sing better than the angels and shoot better than-ouch!"
He had cracked her across the head with his stick.
"Those who test God do so in sin. Don't go blathering about such things."
The feral, almost possessed hiss from his withered lips scared her more than normal, and she subsided into grudging silenced, rubbing her sore skull.
Suddenly he was back to his old, curmudgeonly self, and he crossed one knee over the other as he flicked open a newspaper.
"Read up on Der Freischütz. Better yet, get that flibbertigibbet sister of yours to take you to a showing of it. Then you talk to me about your castles in the sky."