Q

OOC: crossposted from theatrical_muse today.

I actually rather like the letter format. It allows you to say things to people without giving them any opportunity to talk back to you, so they can't interrupt or misunderstand before they're done reading the thing. Also, it allows you to talk to people and then destroy the letter without them ever actually reading it. I know, I could just have a conversation with someone and then wipe their memory (well, if they're not a Q, anyway), but that seems like cheating.

( The great thing about sending letters to dead people is, they're dead, so you don't even have to go to the effort of not sending it. )

( Maybe I'll actually send this one... and maybe not )

( Definitely not sending this one. I think. )

Well, as you can see, I've caught up with myself.

A few thousand years ago (I think by the time systems mortals count by, it was only three or four, but really who can pay attention?), I noted that I'd found alternate iterations of myself, and in particular I wondered if q_tm might be my future self.

He was. I was. Oh, your language just is terrible at these concepts.

Anyway, for a while, I had completely forgotten that I used to use this primitive system to interact with mortals when my kid was too little for me to leave him for any length of time and too dangerous to mortals for me to bring him on any excursions. I ended up re-finding the system (this is what happens when you try very, very hard to avoid remembering all of eternity... things you'd have actually preferred to remember slip through the cracks too), and found this nifty nexus of... well, questions. With entities from all over the multiverse, answering the questions or having little snippets of their memories presented within the nexus as answers.

Here's the thing. I have explored the entire universe. Now that my son is an adolescent, he's not exactly fresh and new either. I need something new to learn. So I thought at first I'd check the place out because there might be something new to see, and then I started answering the questions because I dearly love the sound of my own voice, and then I discovered that I could use them as a tool to actually explore myself. I mean, the Q don't ask me deep probing questions and I'd just lie to them anyway if they did. There are a lot of things I discovered I never really think about myself unless someone actually asks me.

And then I answered a question which made me face the fact that in the long run, my existence will be utterly pointless and futile. Unless I die. In which case it will be equally pointless and futile but I won't necessarily live long enough to notice.

At this point I decided I was sick of introspection, and ran off to go do something more entertaining. And then my kid got old enough to start getting into *serious* trouble. And now I'm stuck babysitting him more or less full-time again, as part of a bargain I made with the Continuum to keep them from taking his powers away.

So... I consolidated my identities on this silly system, and here I am again. Miss me?

OOC: Reposted from theatrical_muse from 12/29/2006, 49 of 50 posts.

What is your worst quality as a significant other?

Am I supposed to take this question seriously? I mean, by definition, everyone who thinks I have bad qualities as a significant other must have questionable taste, to reject a being like me. Am I actually supposed to care what such beings think?

(sigh) Very well, as a thought exercise I'll *try* to pretend to take their objections seriously.

( Dumb things that beings with no taste in lovers have said about me )

OOC: Reposted from theatrical_muse from 10/24/2006, 47 of 50.

Ancestry and inheritance mean something rather different to immortals than to mortals, I imagine.

( Eternity has its own problems )

OOC: Reposted from theatrical_muse from 8/20/2006, 45 of 50.

I'm bored. Time to answer more silly questions!

( No, know, no. )

OOC: Reposted from theatrical_muse from 5/16/2006, 41 of 50.

I only know two mothers from my own species, since we've only ever had two children.

( Why Q mothers are lousy )

OOC: Reposted from theatrical_muse from 4/2/2006, 39 of 50.

I may have mentioned before that April Fools' Day is one of my favorite holidays. Humans are normally such a stuffy, serious race, attaching such tremendous weight and import to their silly little lives and customs. The fact that they have a holiday to celebrate trickery and misrule is simply delightful. So yesterday I took my son to the Renaissance (no, not the Renaissance Fair -- traveling in time to a holiday in a different year when it's *not* that day today is cheating, but traveling to a holiday in a different year when it's that holiday today is just good clean fun), where he actually managed to *not* get himself accused of witchcraft this time (to be fair, the people of the Renaissance weren't entirely sure they were unsophisticated enough to believe in witchcraft.) He played the role of a traveling magician and did a few very impressive tricks (well, impressive to mortals; to the Q they were about as remarkable as driving your car to the grocery store to get milk, but then again, in the Renaissance that *would* have been pretty impressive.)

After that, we dropped in on a former playmate of my son's -- admittedly, a not entirely willing former playmate. (When my son was a tad younger than he is now, he picked up on my fascination with humans, and particularly with a specific human starship captain, and snagged a human starship captain of his own to play with. Unfortunately, being a child, he wasn't exactly all that nice to his toys, so my not-yet-ex-then and I had to step in and take him back to the Continuum or he'd have killed the poor guy.) We turned their ship computer sentient and had it fall in love with the captain, infested their engine room with pink and chartreuse tribbles, and made the Vulcan science officer speak in iambic pentameter for the rest of the day. Good times, good times. The really funny part was when the starship captain figured out it was my son behind the whole thing, and gave him a stern talking-to, which included the line "Do your parents know where you are?" My son attempted to explain that I had actually *brought* him on this trip, but since I positively refused to manifest when he asked me to, it was a rather amusingly embarrassing situation for him. No, I'm not above playing practical jokes on my own kid, either.

What are you happy about right now?

That is. It's not often I get to have much fun lately -- the kid takes up so much of my time -- but he's finally old enough now that I can enjoy a little father-son bonding with him, take him out for excursions and the like. And as much fun as it is to play tricks on people, it turns out it's even *more* fun to have someone young and impressionable to share your amusement with. Teaching my son what constitutes a really funny joke is even more pleasurable than playing the joke out itself. It's also still quite a lot of fun to torment human starship captains, and I can't do that with my usual starship captains any more since I've actually developed some empathy for them (oh, the horror). I can't play tricks on Kathy or Jean-Luc without feeling bad about it. Jim Kirk, however, really deserves a few more jokes played at his expense.

So let's talk about fun and mockery.

( How fart jokes brought down an emperor, and other stories )