Ideas, Sandwiches and Alliteration

I have an idea floating around inside of my noggin for a story, but I can't quite figure out any sort of plot. In my head there are characters, places and events happening, yet there is absolutely no metaphorical glue to stick it all together; no rope to tie the points into cohesion.

The idea came to me when I was sitting at the bus station with my girlfriend in Canterbury town centre. For some reason there were a lot of feathers floating around and we were talking about where they could have came from, when all of a sudden she snaps one out of the air with a deft movement of  her hand. She holds it up to me so I can see it and I see that it is a very small fluffy feather, the type that young birds get before they achieve their fully fledged flight feathers (try saying that 400 times in a row). After looking at it, Laura drops the feather and I watch it flutter down to the ground, but falling into the deep pitch black of a drain. All of a sudden my mind is racing and I have amazing ideas for civilisations living underground and serial killers and a protagonist, but I just don't have a plot to hold it all together.

I have the bread.
I have the butter.
I have the salad.
I don't have the *insert preferred sandwich filling here* to go in my tasty lunchtime morsel.

So where do I go from here? I guess I am going to have to start saying yes to a lot of new ideas when trying to work out my story. I feel like the more that I try out new ideas in the process of trying to get at least 1 chapter down on paper, the easier it is going to be. Perhaps I will be worrying more about thinking of ways to incorporate new techniques and the story will just flow out naturally. In any case, I have a lot of thinking to do before I get started.

How do you get ideas for stories? Comments always appreciated.

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