Several seriously lame questions, and one I find rather amusing

[qcontinuum]

OOC: Crossposted from theatrical_muse, today.
Let’s get the lame questions out of the way first, shall we?


Prompt 265: What did you dream last night?

I didn’t. Because I DON’T DREAM, due to the fact that I am not mortal and I DON’T SLEEP.

Prompt 237: It's your birthday! If anything were possible, what would be your perfect way to celebrate?

I don’t have a birthday. Time for the Q doesn’t run in cycles that come back around again; it just runs. There was a day that I came into existence, but it was the only such day; there is no day that is just like that day except part of a different cycle. So the concept of a birthday is meaningless to me. Now, April Fool’s Day, there’s a reason to celebrate. But since time in the Continuum doesn’t match time in your universe anyway, I can come out on any April Fool’s Day I want and celebrate it; I don’t actually need to wait, or to put up with having to do it every year.

Prompt 263: Write about receiving a present that was not what you had hoped for.

Nobody gives me presents. Possibly because I don’t have a birthday. Or possibly because I’m OMNIPOTENT and therefore, anything I want, I can get for myself, instantly. If anyone did give me a present, I suppose it wouldn’t be something I’d hoped for, in the sense that I wouldn’t have expected it, but since no one ever has (well, if you don’t consider saving my life to be a present, which I don’t, because how would you get wrapping paper around that?), I never actually have gotten a present, hoped for or not.

Prompt 225: "Do not the most moving moments of our lives find us without words?" Marcel Marceau.

Wasn’t he a mime?

Prompt 212: What event do you wish you could have been a "fly on the wall" for?

To wish it would imply that it’s not possible, plausible or feasible. In fact I can go lurk as a *literal* fly on the wall if I want to for any situation whatsoever, including ones where in actual fact there would have been no flies, or walls. But, to be honest, it’s easier just to watch stuff from a noncorporeal form. Being a fly isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

Prompt 205: Talk about a moment in which you wished you had a camera.

Again. I don’t need a camera. I’m a Q. I have a perfect memory and even if I didn’t everything I experience is recorded to the Continuum every time I use my powers or look up information.

Prompt 182: You've just won an award! What would it be and why?

The Continuum’s “Infinite Patience” Award for actually putting up with these questions.


Okay, now that the ridiculous ones are out of the way...

I was going to classify this one as ridiculous too, and then I realized that I actually can say something interesting in response to this.



Prompt 199: You've woken up as the opposite sex this morning... now what?

Yes, “now what?” would be the question I’d ask as well, but I’d mean it in the sense of “and now what, am I supposed to care about this situation?” Firstly, I don’t wake up, since I don’t sleep, and secondly, I don’t have an inherent gender.

I do frequently present myself as male because it fits my archetype – among humanoids, the trickster, the rule-breaker, the avatar of Chaos and fun and misrule is usually male. Females who represent Chaos usually represent the chaotic force of sex, whereas males get to be both dangerous and funny… and sex, while entertaining enough, is really not all that important. Being funny is much more important than being sexy. So I prefer a male form.

But I’ve taken female form, when it suited me. So let me tell you some stories about times I was a woman.

Metraxia:

On the planet Metraxia, the humanoids who live there would be quite vigorous up-and-comers, being inventive, rapid-changing and generalists like humanity, except with significantly better reaction time. But they’re run by a horrifically repressive government, and they treat the female half of their species worse than cattle (you don’t have to break the spirits of cattle to make them act like cattle; they just do. Fellow sentient humanoids, on the other hand, you need to do horrific things to if you want them to behave like cattle.) I mean, these are people who thought it was a great stride forward for women’s rights that if a man rapes a virgin, he’s just automatically married her and has to support her for the rest of her life. The concept that, y’know, maybe she’d rather not marry a rapist? Not a consideration to the Metraxans. And this *is* a great stride forward, because previously, it meant that she was permanently ruined and would have to be supported by her family for the rest of her life, which would be vastly shortened because her family would put her to death for being a burden. Nice folks.

The previously mentioned horrifically repressive government of Metraxia does very nasty things to stay in power. Male dissidents (or men suspected of being dissidents, or male relatives of dissidents) are tortured to death if they’re over the age of about 9. Common criminals of either sex – thieves, murderers, etc – are enslaved and put to work doing really nasty, dangerous jobs such as mining, as are female dissidents who are elderly or considered unattractive. Attractive female dissidents, and male and female children unlucky enough to have dissident parents, are enslaved in brothels and forced to work as prostitutes, until they’re too old (teens in the case of the boys and middle-aged in the case of the girls and women), at which point they go to the mines. Again, real nice folks.

So I decided to teach the leaders a lesson. I showed up in a female form, precisely because they think so little of women and thus an omnipotent woman they couldn’t kill, rape or control would enrage and scare the living daylights out of them, told them exactly what I thought of their society’s tactics, and then turned the entire ruling council (which was, of course, all rich men from society’s top strata) into women and dumped them into their own brothels. Sadly, this doesn’t appear to have had the effect I wanted, because they haven’t changed tactics at all since I reversed it. Maybe I’ll have to go back there one of these days and do it again.

At the same time, I met this fascinating feminist revolutionary, Talith Estar, who was imprisoned in the brothels at the time, and thought her belief that she could transform her world – from prison, no less—was so audacious and ridiculously overconfident that I had to see what she’d do if I gave her the power to do it. So I granted her one wish. And her one wish was that I send her and all the other women in the brothels and mines and other imprisonments to a safe place where she could build a wondrous utopia without men. (She didn’t think of the boys, I’m sad to say – revolutionaries can be very short-sighted.) So I created an identical copy of her planet without any people on it, set it orbiting around a similar star, and sent all the women there. (On my own recognizance, I sent all the boys to Neverland. Better to never become adults than remain slaves, and I thought they were probably too damaged to ever fit in to a normal society again. Neverland’s full of boys who don’t want to grow up; I thought they’d fit right in.)

Of course her perfect feminist utopia is anything but, as the women there spend a significant amount of their time fighting with each other over stupid crap, but hey, at least they’re not slaves anymore. Unfortunately, now they all worship me as some kind of goddess, and frankly I find that really annoying. I was planning to give them some kind of parthenogenetic reproduction so they could keep their society going, but nope, not anymore. Either they get over worshipping me or I’m gonna let them all die out. Or maybe I’ll re-introduce a few men, see what happens. That could be good for some laughs.

Kyreer:

I used to have this close friend whose big thing was love. She often took female form among humanoid species because most humanoid species, despite claiming that women are somehow more susceptible to love, personify love as a woman, and she used to like to be the goddess of love or something like that. She also found it absolutely hilarious to make people, mostly male humanoids, do really, really stupid things for love.

Now, my thing, as you probably all know by now, is to make people do really, really stupid things because they are stupid and I know how to hit their buttons, not so much for love. So about a thousand years ago, we had this bet going, where she would try to get some laughs my way and I would try hers. Only, being that I don’t consider the personal destruction of an individual mortal for the sake of love very funny, I had to take it over the top. So I became Tajitan, a really sexy female demon from the mythology of the planet Kyreer, and I appeared to the two sons of the emperor of the planet. Whichever one of them defeated his brother, I said, would win my love.

They totally fell for it. They plunged their planet into a vicious civil war, fighting with each other for control over the world. What was even better was that their sister, Keth’wyn, saw through me completely. I mean, she thought I was doing it because I was an evil demon and I liked seeing people die, not because I had a bet going with a friend and I thought seeing war break out over who gets to pork a demon was totally hilarious, but she did realize that my entire goal was not to make either of the brothers love me but to make total fools out of both of them. What was even better was that, having seen through me, she launched this counter-revolution among the women of Kyreer, where she argued that men are frail reeds who will do anything for sex with a hot chick even if she’s a bitch, or a demoness, and that therefore the women of Kyreer needed to put an end to this war by demanding equal power with men, as men had just proven themselves to not only not be superior as they claimed to be, but actually to be idiots. What’s more, since a significant number of the men of Kyreer agreed that being made to fight and kill each other because some prince wanted hot demon lovin’ was just all kinds of ridiculous, her campaign worked. Both the princes were overthrown, Keth’wyn became the first Empress of Kyreer, and the first thing she did as Empress was to institute a check on the power of the Emperor/Empress by creating a representative body of nobles and commoners who had veto power over war and taxes.

Funny thing is? I would have totally done her. I mean, the princes were idiots and unworthy of my time, except for the laughs they brought me, but Keth’wyn’s intelligence, foresight and ability to beat my game when she wasn’t even supposed to be playing? I’ve mentioned before I find those traits really, really hot in a mortal. So I kept turning up as Tajitan to give her advice (that she didn’t take, because it was coming from a demon, so I generally told her to do the exact opposite of whatever I thought was a good idea), taunt her into expanding her horizons, and generally make a constructive nuisance of myself until she finally died. Toward the end I think she might have realized I was a little more complex than the demon she thought I was, but sadly, she refused my offer to make her immortal and take her off the planet to explore the universe with me, so in the end she went the way of all mortal flesh and I found something else interesting to do.

My friend mocked me, claiming that in the process of trying to play a game involving love, I ended up falling in love with a mortal myself. But I wasn’t in love with Keth’wyn. Not really. Okay, maybe just a little bit, but not like... um, some other mortals I’ve had dealings with more recently.

Laon and Scamara:

I actually described my adventures as Emaroth, demoness of Laon, recently, so go read about it if you care.

Dropping in on eleventh_doctor:

So you see there was this Gallifreyan Time Lord who’d always been rather amusing to watch, from a distance, especially after I too developed a fascination with humans (and meddling. Strike that. I *always* had a fascination with meddling.) But I didn’t feel any particularly overpowering urge to interact in person until the fellow underwent his eleventh regeneration (that’s the nifty thing about Gallifreyans; they’re mortal, but when their bodies die, they simply heal into a completely new form) and changed sex. I don’t actually care what gender mortals are, but I happened to find this particular, female, form more aesthetically pleasing than the previous, male, forms had been (possibly because all of them had hair?)

But after a few attempts to make friends, hang out, go on a date, give her the timeline where her species wasn’t destroyed back, all that sort of stuff didn’t work out – I must say that she was even more stubborn than Picard – I decided to drop in on her in a female form. You know, to put her at ease. I hadn’t noticed Gallifreyans being overly sexual at all, or overly monosexual when they chose to finally get it on, but given how much this particular Time Lord interacted with various humanoids, and given that most humanoids tend to be monosexual, heterosexual, and feature male sexual aggression, I thought to myself that perhaps she was simply unnerved by being the target of an apparent male’s advances, when, for ten lifetimes *as* a male, that would have been far less common for him. Perhaps it was too much of a reminder that I was more powerful than she was – Time Lords aren’t actually used to meeting people more powerful than they are, and I felt sure that the intimidating masculinity of my usual form was possibly too threatening. So I decided that she might actually be willing to have a civil conversation if I showed up in a female form.

It... didn’t work. I don’t really want to go into the details.

That time Riker made Picard take shore leave and he was going to stay in his room and read Dixon Hill novels the whole time until I showed up:
Yeah... not going to go into detail about that one either. Suffice it to say, a lady never tells.

OOC Note: The incidents with the female Doctor Q is referring to above pertain to eleventh_doctor. Q isn't going to describe the incident where he took female form because Q's mun made it up and doesn't want to go godmodding eleventh_doctor; however, her mun should feel absolutely free to take this idea and run with it should it seem interesting to them. :-)

Muse: Q
Fandom: Star Trek TNG