Well, hey, they call me the God of Lies on Brax.

OOC: posted to theatrical_muse today.

Prompt 145: Tell the truth about something you usually lie about.

Uh, isn't that what I'm doing right now?

I come here and answer these questions more-or-less truthfully because when I don't tell anyone the truth, I sometimes lose track of what it actually is. I've been known to tell people ten different mutually contradictory stories about myself before breakfast. (Before their breakfast, I mean. I don't eat. Of course, I need to wake them up pretty early in the morning to get all those contradictory stories in, but I've never understood why mortals need to spend so many hours being unconscious anyway.)

No mortal can ever see me as I truly am, and all of the Q can tell when I'm lying anyway, so I suppose I've fallen into bad habits. I don't use language to convey truth, I use it to convey image. I go for the quick laugh, or I try to impress people with how much I don't care about their petty little problems, or I present myself as having whatever attributes I want them to think I have. Trouble is, doing that all the time makes it awfully easy to lie to myself as well.

Having a kid was like being forced to stare into a mirror all day, every day. I've learned things about my kind and about myself that I never imagined that I needed to know. Fish don't know they're wet, and apparently sometimes the Q don't know what it means to be a Q. Things that were so self-evident I never even articulated that they existed, because to imagine that a thing exists you must be able to imagine that it doesn't exist, suddenly came into contrast for me and I understood their existence.

I may have mentioned, multiple times, that I live for what is new, that I am always looking out for new things to learn and experience and understand. I started coming here and answering these questions, a large number of which are completely ridiculous for a being of my nature (how many questions can you possibly ask involving sleep, anyway?), as a way of studying myself. Because, apparently, I don't know myself nearly as well as I know the rest of the universe, and that is beyond ridiculous.

When I talk to mortals, or other Q, I pretty much lie about almost everything, all the time. If someone calls me on it I might admit to it, and I prefer not to be outright untruthful when it comes to describing objective, observable facts, but when I talk about myself?... Come on, there's no such thing as an IQ of 2005; the test was made to study human intelligence and it's scaled 0-200 and actually the outer extremes are probably unmeasurable, so why have so many Starfleet analysts writing up dossiers on me actually included that comment as if it were a fact? Yes, I'm probably at least ten times as smart as a human genius, but this is not testable on the IQ scale. Also, when one Q tells you that we evolved, and then I tell you that we've always existed, one of us is probably not telling the truth, and here's a hint: generally speaking, it's probably me.

So... I won't promise that everything I say in response to these questions is invariably the truth, because to be honest I have no belief in an objective truth anyway; when you have the ability to warp reality it gets kind of hard to believe that a reality outside your perceptions and opinions can exist. But I am generally much, much more honest here than I am anywhere else, since I'm more or less talking to myself... and I'm not going to quit lying to mortals (or to other Q for that matter) anytime real soon, but at the least I am trying to stop lying to myself. Most of the time, anyway.

Muse: Q
Fandom: Star Trek

But in that sleep of death what dreams may come...

OOC: Sleep ficlet for application for muse_academy.

Muse Name: Q
Fandom: Star Trek TNG
Prompt Number: Application
Title: Sleep
Warnings/Disclaimers: Based directly on the episode "Deja Q" of Star Trek:TNG.
Word Count: 1333

The thing I really don't understand about sleep is why it doesn't terrify you mortals.

You talk about sleep as if it's relaxing. Fun! Sweet sleep. Gentle sleep. Delicious sleep. Has it occurred to any of you that from your own perspective, the only way you can tell the difference between being asleep and being dead is that you wake up from being asleep? (Okay, obviously it *has* occurred to some of you, for instance William Shakespeare. But most of you seem to treat it as a fun adventure to another country, rather than what it is, which is THE TOTAL CESSATION OF YOUR CONSCIOUSNESS.)

( My one experience with the horror of sleep. )

I would do anything for love, except, well, practically anything

OOC Note: crossposted from realmof_themuse today.

2009.10 A.1. In the words of the singer Meatloaf, "I would do anything for love, but I won't do that." What is "that" to you?

*boggle* Are we actually seriously discussing the works of a musician named after food? And lousy bargain basement food at that?

Fine, fine. It's an interesting question, even if posed by a fat man who can't sing and names himself after his mother's culinary disasters.

There are many, many things that I would not do for love, which would probably be utterly unsurprising to anyone who knows me... in fact the more surprising idea is likely the concept that there's anything I would do for love. Oddly enough, I don't disapprove of the principle of sacrificing for love, entirely. But in my opinion, love itself becomes a travesty, chains that bind more cruelly than any captivity by an enemy could do, when your lover wants you to do certain things, make certain sacrifices for their sake. They prove in that moment that they are not worthy of love, and if you actually do it, you prove that you probably aren't either.

( List of things I would not do for love: )

( List of things I actually would do for love: )

Muse: Q
Fandom: Star Trek TNG
Words: 504