Passing for mortal.
Aug. 25th, 2009 11:17 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
qcontinuumOOC: Crossposted from ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
theatrical_muse today.
Prompt 294: Passing.
If you want to know the truth, it's really not my favorite thing, passing. I've done it, of course. Any Q who wants to interact with mortals does it, fairly frequently. If you can't walk among them in the form of one of them and pretend you're one of their kind, you're not going to be able to pull off any other kind of direct interaction -- your ability to impersonate their gods or simply present yourself as a powerful alien being depends at least in part on your ability to pretend to be one of them. Otherwise you're going to end up like a Thasian or a Melkotian, appearing as a shadowy form or a big ball of light or a glowing disembodied face or whatever, and honestly? That's completely lame.
But I don't like pretending to be mortal. There are things I feel very, very comfortable about lying about, and there are things that I don't, and my status as an unimaginably powerful being of pure thought is one of the ones I'd rather be honest about. I really would rather interact with mortals in a way where they'll know what I am... which, since I'd also rather interact with mortals in a way that doesn't result in them *worshipping* me like besotted idiots, often results in me getting myself declared a demon, or at the least a very untrustworthy god. (They call me the God of Lies on Brax, which pleases me. If I'm going to be a god, let me be known as a trickster god, at least, not some sort of benevolent deity.)
My ex loves passing, though. She plays these games -- they'd translate best as "war games" or "role playing games" -- where she takes a mortal form and just plain doesn't use her powers until the body dies. She's quite stubborn about it, too. One time I had to go down there and kill her; she'd been captured by aliens who harvest body parts, and they'd bound her and drugged her so she couldn't get free or kill herself or use her powers and they were taking her apart, bit by bit. She'd made herself a body that would regenerate any injury (eventually -- we're talking lizards who regrow their tails here, not mutants with healing factors), and when they harvested her eyes and found out that she'd grow them back, they immobilized her. In the beginning, when she still had her freedom, she didn't use her powers to escape or free herself because she was too damn stubborn to lose, and she figured she'd escape within the parameters of the game; then they drugged her so she couldn't concentrate and hooked her up to tubes and wires, so she couldn't get free. By the time I rescued her by killing her body, she'd half-forgotten that she was a Q and could have annihilated their entire species any time she wanted to.
Me, I'd have wanted revenge (in fact I came very close to killing them all on her behalf), but Q is an experienced gamer and somehow manages to never get too emotionally involved when she passes for mortal, even when they torture her for weeks; she simply took off for the other side of the universe for a while, then came back and demanded so much sex, of such acrobatic and exotic nature, that I couldn't keep up with her. Which, you know, probably means she was trying to forget what had happened to her and get over it, but we're not therapists, so whatever. It was fun, if somewhat exhausting, and I even learned a couple of new tricks from some of the other Q she hit on to distract herself.
There was another Q, once, who wasn't so fortunate. He made the mistake of revealing that he had much more knowledge than the people he was going among, and they were a warp-capable species with, for mortals, advanced technology. They shot him with a stun weapon -- if they'd killed him, he would have automatically reverted to his Q nature, but when we fully incarnate in a mortal body we're actually vulnerable to being knocked unconscious if we don't see it coming -- and then burned out the psionic center of the brain he was wearing, which destroyed his ability to connect back to the Continuum. Effectively, that severed him from his powers. Then they tortured him for information. By the time we found him... we had to put him down, absorb him back into ourselves, because he was so damaged all he could think of was revenge and self-protection, and if we had let him have his powers back he probably would have annihilated that entire galaxy. We had to knock that species back to pre-warp status, erase the knowledge they'd acquired from our brother and destroy their technological capabilities, because otherwise they'd have conquered that galaxy with what they learned from him (and because the Continuum wanted revenge, honestly; we *could* have just wiped out that specific knowledge, but after what they did to Q, we enjoyed sending them back to their equivalent of the Dark Ages.)
Q says that it's the risk, the fact that it is theoretically possible for her to get tortured or killed doing this, that makes her games fun, and she can't imagine why I want to interact with mortals as myself -- unless she limits herself to mortal form, she says, they're just boring and incredibly annoying, and she claims I only want to be myself around them because I'm insecure. As if. I believe I have an entirely reasonable desire to never be in a position where I might be tortured or killed by mortals (and I had this desire *before* my powers were taken from me against my will and I was put into that position anyway), and besides, who wants to be limited? There was only one time I was remotely tempted to try to live among them as one of them, and even then, I wasn't passing... they knew who I was, and while I offered to put aside my powers and not use them... I probably didn't mean it. I mean, I meant it at the time, but I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have stuck with it if they'd said yes.
Muse: Q
Fandom: Star Trek TNG/VOY
theatrical_muse today.Prompt 294: Passing.
If you want to know the truth, it's really not my favorite thing, passing. I've done it, of course. Any Q who wants to interact with mortals does it, fairly frequently. If you can't walk among them in the form of one of them and pretend you're one of their kind, you're not going to be able to pull off any other kind of direct interaction -- your ability to impersonate their gods or simply present yourself as a powerful alien being depends at least in part on your ability to pretend to be one of them. Otherwise you're going to end up like a Thasian or a Melkotian, appearing as a shadowy form or a big ball of light or a glowing disembodied face or whatever, and honestly? That's completely lame.
But I don't like pretending to be mortal. There are things I feel very, very comfortable about lying about, and there are things that I don't, and my status as an unimaginably powerful being of pure thought is one of the ones I'd rather be honest about. I really would rather interact with mortals in a way where they'll know what I am... which, since I'd also rather interact with mortals in a way that doesn't result in them *worshipping* me like besotted idiots, often results in me getting myself declared a demon, or at the least a very untrustworthy god. (They call me the God of Lies on Brax, which pleases me. If I'm going to be a god, let me be known as a trickster god, at least, not some sort of benevolent deity.)
My ex loves passing, though. She plays these games -- they'd translate best as "war games" or "role playing games" -- where she takes a mortal form and just plain doesn't use her powers until the body dies. She's quite stubborn about it, too. One time I had to go down there and kill her; she'd been captured by aliens who harvest body parts, and they'd bound her and drugged her so she couldn't get free or kill herself or use her powers and they were taking her apart, bit by bit. She'd made herself a body that would regenerate any injury (eventually -- we're talking lizards who regrow their tails here, not mutants with healing factors), and when they harvested her eyes and found out that she'd grow them back, they immobilized her. In the beginning, when she still had her freedom, she didn't use her powers to escape or free herself because she was too damn stubborn to lose, and she figured she'd escape within the parameters of the game; then they drugged her so she couldn't concentrate and hooked her up to tubes and wires, so she couldn't get free. By the time I rescued her by killing her body, she'd half-forgotten that she was a Q and could have annihilated their entire species any time she wanted to.
Me, I'd have wanted revenge (in fact I came very close to killing them all on her behalf), but Q is an experienced gamer and somehow manages to never get too emotionally involved when she passes for mortal, even when they torture her for weeks; she simply took off for the other side of the universe for a while, then came back and demanded so much sex, of such acrobatic and exotic nature, that I couldn't keep up with her. Which, you know, probably means she was trying to forget what had happened to her and get over it, but we're not therapists, so whatever. It was fun, if somewhat exhausting, and I even learned a couple of new tricks from some of the other Q she hit on to distract herself.
There was another Q, once, who wasn't so fortunate. He made the mistake of revealing that he had much more knowledge than the people he was going among, and they were a warp-capable species with, for mortals, advanced technology. They shot him with a stun weapon -- if they'd killed him, he would have automatically reverted to his Q nature, but when we fully incarnate in a mortal body we're actually vulnerable to being knocked unconscious if we don't see it coming -- and then burned out the psionic center of the brain he was wearing, which destroyed his ability to connect back to the Continuum. Effectively, that severed him from his powers. Then they tortured him for information. By the time we found him... we had to put him down, absorb him back into ourselves, because he was so damaged all he could think of was revenge and self-protection, and if we had let him have his powers back he probably would have annihilated that entire galaxy. We had to knock that species back to pre-warp status, erase the knowledge they'd acquired from our brother and destroy their technological capabilities, because otherwise they'd have conquered that galaxy with what they learned from him (and because the Continuum wanted revenge, honestly; we *could* have just wiped out that specific knowledge, but after what they did to Q, we enjoyed sending them back to their equivalent of the Dark Ages.)
Q says that it's the risk, the fact that it is theoretically possible for her to get tortured or killed doing this, that makes her games fun, and she can't imagine why I want to interact with mortals as myself -- unless she limits herself to mortal form, she says, they're just boring and incredibly annoying, and she claims I only want to be myself around them because I'm insecure. As if. I believe I have an entirely reasonable desire to never be in a position where I might be tortured or killed by mortals (and I had this desire *before* my powers were taken from me against my will and I was put into that position anyway), and besides, who wants to be limited? There was only one time I was remotely tempted to try to live among them as one of them, and even then, I wasn't passing... they knew who I was, and while I offered to put aside my powers and not use them... I probably didn't mean it. I mean, I meant it at the time, but I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have stuck with it if they'd said yes.
Muse: Q
Fandom: Star Trek TNG/VOY