Q

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 )

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) )

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? )