A little story about a magic potion.

[qcontinuum]

OOC: Crossposted from theatrical_muse today.

Prompt 220: If you could buy a magic potion, what would it be?

Magic potion? I have no use for such things – I'm omnipotent. Anything anyone could possibly need a magic potion to achieve for them, I can do for myself – if I haven't obtained something I want already, it's because doing so would conflict with my ethics or my other goals, and a magic potion would have the same problems.

But since I've vowed to at least *try* to answer the questions that don't apply to my personal life, let me tell you a little story about a magic potion. It wasn't me who sought the potion, of course, and the person who did didn't exactly *buy* it, but... well, let the story speak for itself.



The planet was called Hialtha by its dominant ruling tribe – a world that meant "Land", which is, distressingly often, what people name their planets. This was a world that had very little iron to speak of, but was rich in silicon. And so, although the people were still mired in superstitition and most of their technology was primitive beyond belief, they had learned to do the most amazing things with glass and other crystalline structures.

This might have been their downfall. A race of techno-thieves who seek to make themselves perfect at the expense of everyone else in the universe, a race that calls themselves the Borg but that the Hialthans called the Soulless Ones, saw the Hialthans' incredible skill with glass and crystal, and they wanted it for themselves. Normally they leave primitive, low-tech worlds alone, but this was one that had actually developed a technology they wanted. And what the Borg want, they take.

Resistance, say the Borg, is futile. It certainly was in this case. The Hialthans fought the Soulless Ones with glass flechettes and crystal bombs. The Soulless Ones had phasers. It was a totally unfair contest.

A young man was trapped in the glass-topped cellar of his home when the Soulless Ones invaded and took his family. He saw them shoot his father, saw them press their fingers to the necks of his mother and sisters, and saw them transform and become white-faced and blank-eyed, their souls stolen like all the rest of the Soulless Ones. The Soulless Ones ignored him – although he could see all that happened through the glass ceiling of the cellar, the glass was one-way and the Soulless Ones could not easily see him. And truthfully, they wouldn't have cared. He wasn't a threat, in their eyes.

He dug himself loose from the cellar and ran for his older sister's village, intending to warn her and her family of what had happened. But he passed village after village destroyed, swarming with Soulless Ones or deserted entirely. And he began to despair. How would anyone ever defeat any of these creatures? They would overrun the whole world, and there was nothing anyone could do.

And then he passed by a wizard.

He knew the man was a wizard, because the man was dressed as a wizard, and because only a fool or a wizard would not be running in fear as the Soulless Ones marched. So he fell to his knees in front of the wizard (this was less a gesture of respect than a reflection of the fact that he had been running for an hour, and was badly out of breath), and said, "Great sir! Are you a wizard?"

The man looked at his fingernails. (Planets can be such dirty places.) "I might be," he said.

"Great sir, do you know of the Soulless Ones overrunning our villages, killing and enslaving our people?"

"Well, if I'm a wizard, it would stand to reason that I know about that, wouldn't it?"

"Please, great sir. Isn't there anything you can do with your magic to save us?"

The wizard considered. "No, probably not. Although, if you were to ask me for something specific to enable *you* to defeat them, I might be able to manage that."

"You mean... something like a magic potion I could take that would make me strong enough to defeat them?"

"Hm... yes. Yes, exactly like that. I could probably do something like that, if you wanted it badly enough."

"Yes! Yes, great sir! I'll do anything, I'll pay any price! Give me a magic potion that will let me fight the Soulless Ones, and I'll do anything you ask!"

The wizard stood up suddenly. "Be very careful what you ask for, boy. Because the price will be higher than you imagine."

"I would even give my life to save our people!"

"Well, that's good, because that's what it'll cost you."

The young man's face turned blue, which was the color of Hialthans' skin when all the blood rushed away from their extremities, but he stood his ground.
"Even if that's your price, great sir, I'll pay it."

"Well, then. Here you are." He reached beneath his tunic and took out a vial, which he handed to the boy. "Drink this, and then go to fight the Soulless Ones. It'll give you the power to destroy them all, and protect the entire world from them, but it will claim your life. If you're truly willing to sacrifice yourself, then drink."

The young man took a deep breath, and then drank the potion.

"What will it do?" he asked. "Will it give me strength, or speed, or magical powers over them?"

"You'll just have to wait and see," the wizard said, and disappeared in a bright flash of light.

The young man was disconcerted by the wizard's disappearance, but then, at least this proved the man *did* have real magic. With confidence, then, he returned to battle the Soulless Ones.

A fallen soldier had a crystal sword. The young man picked it up, and raced back to the battleground. With a war cry, he launched himself at the first Soulless One he saw, swinging his sword.

The sword bounced off the Soulless One's armor harmlessly. Then the Soulless One grabbed the young man and pressed its fingers to his neck. There was a sharp pain, and a moment of intense heat, and the young man felt faint.

"You promised!" he screamed at the wizard, as his consciousness slipped away. "You said I would save the world!"

"Wait for it," he heard the wizard's voice.

And then he heard nothing but the chorus of a billion billion voices in his head, drowning out everything that he was.

But in his blood, the magic potion churned around the foulness the Soulless Ones had infected him with, and changed it. Instead of connecting him to them as a soulless minion, a single insect in their swarm, the potion crystallized in his brain, sending a signal to the Soulless Ones' blood and changing it just as he had been changed. In each Soulless One who heard the call, the blood turned to crystal and the crystal sent a signal, repeating the call, until every Soulless One on the planet and every Soulless One in the cube orbiting the planet like a dark moon had heard, and been transformed.

Far away, the Queen of the Soulless Ones sensed disruption in her minions. She sent specialized drones who could be disconnected from the rest of the Collective instantly to learn what had happened. And they too heard the call and transformed. The Queen had to destroy them, had to cut off the Borg's connection to the lost cube without ever being able to learn what had happened. For the only way the Borg could learn was to infect others with the dark potion in their blood and make the others one of them, subject to the call of the Queen. And any of the Queens' subjects who could hear the call of the wizard's magic potion in the young man's blood was instantly transformed.

The Borg decided that the glass technology of Hialtha was not worth the loss of a cube. It was not all that valuable, and if the Hialthans could destroy the Borg so thoroughly, the Borg would leave them be, for now. After all, resistance is futile and the Borg had all eternity. Eventually they would return to Hialtha, when they had taken the technology from somewhere else that would let them learn what the Hialthans had done. But there was no rush.

On Hialtha, the crystals devoured the brains of the Soulless Ones who'd been infected with them. Everywhere on the world, Soulless Ones dropped dead.

The young man lay dying, his brain slowly turning to crystal. The last thing he saw was the wizard appear before him.

"Well. I told you the price, and you paid it. You ought to feel proud of yourself. Not just anyone would sacrifice their lives to save their planet, you know."

"Was there... no other way?" the young man whispered. "Couldn't they have been saved? My mother... my little sisters..."

"No, you had it right the first time. They lost their souls when the Soulless Ones took them. They were already dead. More or less." The wizard knelt next to him. "If it makes you feel better, I can make sure the others all find out you saved them."

It probably didn't make the young man feel better, because by that time, he was already dead.

But the wizard kept his word. The young man's older sister, the sole survivor of the family, dreamed of all the events that had taken place. When she woke from dreaming her brother's death, she left her babies in her husband's care and returned to her old home town, where she found her father murdered, her mother and sisters transformed into Soulless Ones and dead like all the other Soulless Ones, and her younger brother dead and only partially transformed, as if whatever had killed the Soulless Ones had begun as soon as his transformation started. This convinced her of the truth of her dream, and after weeping for her family and getting her husband's kin to help her cremate their bodies, she began to travel the world with her children in tow, singing the song of how her brother defeated the Soulless Ones.

That was five hundred years ago. The Hialthans still haven't gotten into space – hard to build a warp drive without metal – but the Borg haven't come back. Annoyingly, the Hialthans have decided that the wizard was in fact an avatar of the chief god of their pantheon, come down to protect them, and they've made a complete fetish of the young man's sacrifice. Less annoyingly, the chief holy relic of this new religion are the remnants of the crystals formed when the potion interacted with Borg nanites (the crystals didn't burn when the bodies were cremated, you see)... a useful thing in case the Borg ever do come back, since if powdered and introduced to a mortal's bloodstream, the crystals will still do what they were intended to do, and kill any being containing Borg nanites that can hear their call.

On the other hand, the Continuum cleared up that loophole immediately after I pulled this little stunt (yes, in case your brain has the density of pure lead and you didn't figure it out already, I was the wizard). It used to be, the Q were allowed to provide direct assistance to a mortal species in danger if directly asked, as long as the assistance worked through intermediaries of that species. After I saved Hialtha, we were no longer allowed to provide technology in response to a request for aid, and could only provide *knowledge* if directly asked. This wasn't the first time they changed the rules to disallow anyone from doing what I'd just done, and it wasn't the last either. You see now why I had to fight a war with these people?

(By the way, it is technically not true that once transformed, Borg can never cease to be Borg, but there was no way that Hialthan technology or culture could handle the level of disruption or the medical care required if the potion had freed the minds of the Hialthan Borg without killing them. That *would* have required a direct act of Q to manage, and I wasn't allowed to do that. Since explaining Continuum politics to a dying man didn't seem entirely worthwhile, I simply told him there wasn't any other way. Okay, so I lied, but hey, the guy was about to die, and I'm not totally without compassion -- telling him "Yeah, we could have saved your mother and sisters but I didn't feel like it" would have been gratuitously cruel even for me.)