Q

Mon, 27 Jun 2011 14:21:19 GMT

OOC: Crossposted from Theatrical Muse today.

Prompt 388: Who do you owe an apology to?

"Owe an apology." That's an interesting phrase. It implies that a transaction of some sort has occurred, that an apology is some kind of payment for goods received. That one has the right to demand an apology of another.

I have to question that, seriously. An apology is an expression of one person's regret for their own actions. How can you owe another person an emotion? Your emotions are your own. No one has the right to tell you what to feel, and thus, no one can be owed any emotion, regret or otherwise.

I don't owe anyone an apology. No one did me services in exchange for my freely agreeing to pay them with an apology. It's not likely that I'd take that deal, either, unless I sincerely meant an apology and in that case probably I'd have apologized already... okay, maybe not. I'm not the biggest fan of apologizing at any time, if you must know. But even if I wanted to apologize, the fact that someone else was demanding it of me would make me lose all interest in doing it.

Now. Is there anyone I've harmed, where I regret harming them?

That, I would have to say yes to. But that's not what you asked.

There are those I wish I could undo the harm I'd done to them, or express to them my regret. Generally speaking, I haven't apologized to them, either because they're dead, or because I don't see the point. If I can fix the harm I did, and I regret doing it, then I'll have already fixed it and I don't need to apologize. And if I can't fix the harm, then what good does it do to say some words? That's hardly going to help.

But even if I felt that apologizing would solve anything, even if I were inclined to apologize... I still wouldn't owe one to anyone.

Muse: Q
Fandom: Star Trek TNG and VOY

comments

Gratitude

Sat, 07 May 2011 06:44:18 GMT

For musing_way.

Prompt 32: Gratitude

Data was in sickbay, half taken apart, Crusher and LaForge working frantically at putting him back together. Q felt awful. At first he'd thought the sick feeling he was experiencing was related to the attack on him, but the shot Crusher gave him -- after perfunctorily scanning him, and then turning aside to work on Data immediately afterward as if Q's injuries were so trivial she couldn't spare him a word, and given that he was the one the attack was aimed at, that hardly seemed fair -- had at least alleviated the pain in his head and in the places where he'd hit the floor. He was coming to the conclusion that what he was feeling had nothing to do with his human body.

He was alive, and mostly healthy, some bruises aside, but the Calamarain had been after him. Data hadn't even existed when he'd played his games with the Calamarain -- Data had had nothing to do with it. But Data was dying, and he wasn't.

( Debts that cannot be paid )

comments

Family

Sat, 02 Apr 2011 13:34:09 GMT

(For musing_way.)

"Do you have any family?" the child asked him.

Q is startled by the question. He's simply never considered it, one way or another.

What does "family" even mean, in this context? He examines the child's mind. To her, family means a unit of genetic continuity -- parents, siblings, grandparents. She's thinking of her own family, of a little brother and an older sister, of the parents of her parents, of the siblings of her parents and their children, her cousins. It's a small unit, isolated in her mind from the rest of her species, a special little group of "us" in a sea of "them."

Q does not have anything like that.

( What is family? )

comments

Scared

Fri, 11 Feb 2011 07:27:35 GMT

For musing_way.
(Warnings: From a human perspective the things that happen in this story would be upsetting, but are too fantastical, too much unlike the reality humans live with, to trigger most people. From Q's own perspective, however, this ficlet deals with gang rape and attempted murder, and his emotional state conveyed in the ficlet will reflect that. Be forewarned.)

( (Prompt 73: Scared) )

comments

Wanting a child

Sun, 28 Nov 2010 06:26:49 GMT

For musing_way.
Warnings: non-explicit energy being sex with significant age difference, somewhat graphic violence against energy beings (in other words, not human sex and not human blood and gore, but definitely the equivalents thereof.)

( Prompt 77: I want for a child )

comments

None of this is even slightly important

Mon, 04 Oct 2010 22:32:41 GMT

OOC: crossposted from theatrical_muse today.

This may quite possibly be the most trivial batch of questions I've answered.

Or maybe not. I've answered a lot of utterly trivial questions, after all.

Prompt 324: If you as a child could see yourself now, what do you think you would say?

"Man, everybody else in the Continuum got so boring! But at least I/you don't/didn't, otherwise I'd just have to kill myself, and since the Q haven't yet figured out how to kill ourselves I'd have a lot of technical problems with that."

Okay, maybe that isn't what I would have said. But if I was a child now and I met my future self who is the me I am now, I would most definitely say something like that.

Either that or "What's up with the humans? They don't look like they're all that."

Prompt 339: What's your favorite sport?

Taunting Klingons.

Okay, taunting anyone, actually. But taunting humans takes work, and creativity. When I really just want to kick back and relax and do something that requires less than .000001% of a picofraction of my vast intellect, I taunt Klingons. It's like taking candy from a baby, really, but oh such yummy candy...

Prompt 352: How do you respond to pressure?

How does anyone respond to pressure? By compacting and becoming denser and more tightly packed, of course. What, don't you know physics?

Prompt 354: Planes, trains, automobiles - what mode(s) of transport do you prefer and why?

I'm really fond of teleportation, myself.

If I had to pick one of the above... if I had to pick one of the above, I think I'd never leave home. How can you people possibly stand it?

Prompt 355: What socially acceptable practice do you disapprove of?

Marriage.

( It's not the getting married part, it's the monogamy. )

Muse: Q
Fandom: Star Trek TNG

comments

Prompt 67: The Dying God

Thu, 30 Sep 2010 19:37:29 GMT

Crossposted from musing_way, today.

"Let me get this straight," Q said to the entity sitting across from him in the bar.

Actually that isn't accurate at all. To say they were in a "bar" implies that they were in a physical, matter-based location where beings consumed alcoholic beverages in order to alter their mental states. The two entities in question, being non-corporeal, couldn't have been affected by alcohol even if there had been any there, which there wasn't, because the location they were actually in was also non-corporeal, and alcohol, being made of matter, could not have existed there. Neither of them were sitting, because sitting implies the existence of legs and a posterior, and neither of them were speaking English, or any language humans could have comprehended, or, in fact, any language at all, really... as beings of thought made real in energy, they communicated in pure concepts.

They were actually floating together in an anomalous region of extra-dimensional space whose unique properties reflect the thought energies generated by sentient beings back at them, producing an echo/interference effect which is somewhat disorientg, but in a pleasant way, to entities who are normally incapable of experiencing disorientation, thus producing a slight impairment that many entities find disinhibiting and relaxing, as well as a somewhat euphoric sensation. The location is popular among Beings of Power for precisely that reason, and is often filled with entities of different species, all of whom are generally powerful enough to be worshipped by mortals as gods, relaxing and socializing with one another.

In other words, they were both in a place where beings like them often went to hang out, converse, and get buzzed. A bar, by any other name.

And the information that Q transmitted to his temporary companion, which was expressed conceptually rather than in words, translates more literally as "response to your statement: amusement/mild disbelief/slightly less mild disapproval (embedded concept: suspicion that your concept was communicated as fiction for purposes of generating amusement) (embedded concept: if the concept you communicated was true, I strongly suspect that you are a moron): Request more detailed information to clarify that my comprehension of your concept matches your transmission." However, Q himself frequently argues that when attempting to communicate with alien beings about something that happened to him, it is much better to express the events in metaphors that accurately communicate how he perceived the event rather than attempting to accurately render an actual description of the event. Using language that closely describes his actual means of communicating with other entities like himself makes Q sound much more alien to the beings he's talking to than using language that assumes that he is "normal", however the people he's talking to perceive "normal" to be, and translating his experiences into emotionally similar experiences they might have in order to make himself appear "normal" to their frame of reference.

In other words, Q lies all the time to make himself sound less alien than he actually is. It's a Q thing. They all do it. Except for the ones that don't, but mortals never get a chance to talk to them, largely because they're completely incomprehensible.

So. Q was in a bar, sitting next to another entity, and he said, "Let me get this straight..." because Q never describes his own experiences to mortals in terms of what actually happened, and that's the best metaphor to use to describe what happened in terms that mortals easily understand.

( The dying god's a junkie? )

comments

A large bucket of fried questions. With mustard.

Fri, 03 Sep 2010 20:11:30 GMT

OOC: crossposted from theatrical_muse, today.

Haha! And you thought I was going to make another joke about catchup, didn't you?

344. Talk about something cheerful.
( Cheerful! Sure! I can be cheerful! )

345: Are you well organised?
( At a biological level I'm better organized than *you* are )

346: What haven't you finished?

Living. Learning. Changing. Growing. Raising my son. Developing understanding and wisdom. Having fun. Annoying the living daylights out of everyone in the universe.

I realize that to your perceptions, one of these things is not like the other, but from my perspective it's all part of my life, and I won't be finished with it until I'm dead, and given that I'm immortal, I'm expecting the universe to end first.

347: Where are you going?

Anywhere I want to, but that's the wrong question. I'm not going to a "where", except in the trivial sense that I travel all over the universe, all the time. I'm going to a "what". I'm going toward all the things I haven't finished yet.

348: What phrase or saying do you find most irritating?

"What do you dream about?" "What happens when you go to sleep?" "What was your favorite day?" "What will be on your tombstone?" "What secrets would you like to know?" "Money." "Death." "Earth's solar calendar." "Physical objects." oh, and really, just about any other phrase or question that implies that the person you're talking to necessarily has human limitations. Like being doomed to die someday. Or having to go to sleep on a regular basis.

You know, just because I'm immensely superior to all of you, with vastly more intelligence and nigh-infinite resources to draw from, doesn't mean I'm not a person, folks. An entity could start to feel left out around here.

comments

No

Sun, 01 Aug 2010 03:50:41 GMT

For musing_way, prompt 59: No.

He had everything planned out. It was more than slightly ridiculous that it should have come to this, that he should be depending on a mere mortal for anything whatsoever, but strictly speaking it was the human's fault that he was in this situation. He wouldn't have been so desperately lonely, so bored and unhappy, that he would need to stoop to asking to join a crew full of mortals, if the human hadn't thwarted his attempt to prove to the Continuum that he could still construct a brutal, impassable test by, well, passing his test. Or getting his weaker-willed crewman to pass it, anyway.

Okay, so strictly speaking the Continuum told him to take a hike because he'd never been supposed to offer the powers of the Q to Riker in the first place, so maybe the fact that Picard had kept Riker from accepting was a moot point, but Q was pretty sure that had he succeeded, it would have been a fait accompli and his political enemies in the Continuum wouldn't have had quite so much ammunition. Now they were debating his fate in a closed session, and he wasn't allowed to return to the Continuum until they summoned him, and he was... not worried, of course, he was a Q and the Q were never worried. Nothing he'd done merited a severe punishment. He'd get another slap on the wrist. He was sure of it. Well, pretty sure. Which, given his nigh-omnipotence, was better than absolute certainty from a human anyway. But that wasn't the point.

( Simply speaking, we don't trust you. )
Muse: Q
Fandom: Star Trek TNG
This prompt response is canon-based.

comments

Q