Q

Prompt 386: Do you have children? If not, do you want them one day? Talk about what being a parent means to you.

Yes. I have a son. I mean, I've only talked about him here approximately seven quadrillion times, so I can see how that might have escaped some people's attention, but I admit it. I am a dad.

I'd say "God help me", except that I'm the closest thing to a god I know, so it would be kind of pointless.

( Managing to have no idea what you're getting into is a neat trick for a nigh-omniscient being, but somehow, I pulled it off. )
Muse: Q
Fandom: Star Trek Next Generation and Voyager

OOC: Crossposted from theatrical_muse today.
Prompt 314: Write about a memorable family meal.

Oh, you have no idea.

See, the Q don't eat. We consider it... gauche. Oh, we might choose to consume food like mortals do when we're in a mortal avatar (I'm rather partial to ice cream sundaes myself), but in our true forms, what we consume is energy... and frankly, there isn't enough of it in the mortal dimension to feed us. You cannot possibly imagine how many calories it burns just to manifest a *tiny* pocket dimension, let alone populate it with realistic-seeming life forms. Omnipotence is tremendously slimming.

So we get our energy directly from the Q Continuum. Except when we don't. We're *capable* of consuming stars, but if we went around doing that all the time there wouldn't be many stars left, so we tend to view eating as... well, rather gross. There are sexual connotations to it as well; drawing energy from another Q is one of the things we do for fun and games around here, so watching another Q consume energy has some rather unavoidable implications for us.

At this point in the story, I probably need to explain q.

( Imagine your baby sister canoodling with your teenage son. Or don't. You might need brain bleach afterward. )
Muse: Q
Fandom: Star Trek (TNG and VOY)
This prompt involves characters and environments created by Heather Jarman in "String Theory: Evolution", a Voyager novel published by Pocket Books.

OOC: Crossposted from theatrical_muse, today.

Prompt 152: Road trip. / Prompt 168: Party!

By Earth's calendar, today is April Fool's Day, which, as I've mentioned before, is my favorite holiday. So my son and I are going on a time-traveling, universe-hopping road trip. We're going to hit every April Fool's Day party we can find containing remotely interesting people, until we've spent a full 24 hours of linear time at April Fool's Day parties.

The rules of the road trip are:

1. We alternate who gets to pick the next destination.
2. If either of us experience more than five linear minutes of boredom, we can call it for the next destination.
3. Whoever picked the destinations that produced the most minutes of entertainment before someone called it, wins.

Of course the boy doesn't know that I've spent the past sixty or so years of Continuum time mapping out the best April Fool's Day parties, so I am totally going to *annihilate* him in this contest. But now that he's essentially an adolescent, he can finally put up a fight, so it's actually fun to totally crush him in a contest now.

If any of you out there are throwing an April Fool's Day party... I might drop in. Or I might not. Plenty of parties out there in the timeline, after all.

OOC: Crossposted from theatrical_muse today.
Well, here I am again, after a hiatus of a year by your time or several thousand by mine, but who's counting?

As I look around this place, I realize I don't recognize any of you. Superb! Variety is the spice of life, especially when your life is as long and tedious as mine. Of course, most of you will prove not to be worth my time anyway, but perhaps I'll find a few of you worthy of having a conversation with.

But I suppose this means I need to introduce myself again... (sigh) Why can't you all just be as omniscient as I am, so I never have to do this again?

I am Q, of the Q Continuum. I'm immortal, mostly invulnerable, as nearly omnipotent as you're ever likely to meet... and usually bored out of my mind. This place provided some entertainment, once upon a time; I can only hope it can do so again.

( Impossible is not in my vocabulary. Okay, technically it is, since I know everything. )

Muse: Q
Fandom: Star Trek: TNG and VOY

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 )

And here I am stuck with a kid.

Oh well. I'm not bound to temporalinearity-- I could always go back to this day and have fun with it sometime TEN THOUSAND YEARS FROM NOW WHEN THE BRAT IS GROWN UP-- oh, I'm sorry, did a rant slip out?

Hmm. Maybe I'll take him to 15th century Earth. He likes Earth. And they threw some fantastic parties on April Fools back during the Renaissance. We could show up as jesters and make total nuisances of ourselves and the Continuum wouldn't say a damn thing because the humans would be doing the same.

That sounds like a fun plan. A little father-son bonding maybe. I spend too much time telling him "don't do that" and when *I* was younger and the Continuum did that to me it made me decide to completely flip them off and ignore them. Which would be bad.