Scaring people for fun and benefit. Well, mostly for fun.
OOC Note: Crossposted from theatrical_muse, today.
Prompt 255: BOO! How would you go about scaring someone?
You know, I'm actually inordinately fond of scaring people. I suppose that means I'm a bad person, but I don't really care.
I don't, however, enjoy scaring people *just* to scare them. I'm aeons past that. (Well, except for the Borg. Terrorizing the Borg is not just fun, it's an important job that every Q should take a turn at. We need to make sure they maintain a healthy respect for and fear of us, and don't turn that marvelous analytic engine of theirs onto trying to find *our* weaknesses, especially now that we've realized we have some. Since we probably look to the Borg like the fantasy of perfection they want to achieve, they would most certainly devote a lot of their mental energy to figuring out how to assimilate us, or duplicate what we've done, if not for the fact that they're well aware that at any time, for any reason, from anywhere in the universe, one of us might spontaneously decide to turn one of their cubes inside out while it's traveling at high warp. Mm, Borg bits. But I digress.)
What I'm very fond of doing -- and very good at doing, so the Continuum has had me in their Rolodex as the go-to guy any time this kind of job needed to get done -- is terrorizing mortals into evolving, saving their own skins, or both. Oh, occasionally it doesn't work, and no matter how much of the fear of Me I put into them, they can't get it together to pass my test or solve the problem I'm trying to get them to solve, and this usually results in massive quantities of death and destruction... usually *not* doled out by yours truly. Mind you, I can generate quite terrifying consequences to an individual for failing a test... but it's almost always nothing in comparison to what the universe is going to do to them if they can't produce the results I was hoping to get them to perform.
Let me give you an example.
The planet Laon used to orbit around a dwarf yellow star, kind of like Earth around Sol except further away, so it was darker and colder. The people were mostly albinos, and kept it that way by aborting "defective" babies with pigment. This was just a tiny symptom of their overall problem -- a love of their own status quo, of stagnation, a terror of evolution. They kept all their people similar-looking and similar-thinking; they were telepaths and empaths, and they liked to exert mind control on their dissidents to keep everyone in line.
They also had a deadly fear of space. Highly advanced technology -- they lived in tall skyscrapers built with antigravitic technologies, healed any injury they suffered, had tripled their own lifespan, were great at keeping most of their planet clean and pristine and using renewable energy efficiently... but they were afraid of the sky. In their mythologies, the sky was never Heaven, or the home of the gods; they had chthonic gods, and the sky was the home of demons. They huddled in their homes at night because the stars were the eyes of devils that might want to swoop down and eat their souls, or something stupid like that. And so, for all their advanced technology, they were totally unaware that their sun was unstable and about to go nova within the next 200 years or so. And had they figured it out, they wouldn't have done anything about it, because they'd have been in denial to the end. Just think about how good the Kryptonians, with all *their* technology, were at figuring out their planet was going to blow up. Mortals really don't like hearing that their entire way of life is going to have to change, or they'll die. Usually, in such circumstances, they deny it until it's too late, and then they do all die.
Now, I *could* have just fixed their sun, but where's the fun in that? They were boring people whose habit of suppressing dissidence offended me. I wanted to see them shaken up a little, forced to evolve. Of course they weren't going to evolve into anything that might interest me if their sun went nova, so I needed to scare them off their planet. And this was going to take some doing, as terrified as they were of space.
I appeared to them as a woman, because they were a matriarchal society and tend to look at women as authorities. In every other respect, however, my chosen form was designed to screw with their heads. I looked like a member of their species (humanoid, with unusually big eyes), except that I had *dark* hair -- not just a little hair pigment, but a lot. (Sue me, I like dark hair on species that have the stuff.) I was tall, nearly 2 meters when their people usually clock in at 160 cm tops. And I told them I was a demon from space, here to claim their planet. I called myself Emaroth (it doesn't mean anything, but it has vague connotations of judgement and interrogation, which is kind of what I was going for with the letter Q also. What, you didn't seriously think an immortal omnipotent species that's been around since before Sol was a wink in the galaxy's eye actually is named after the seventeenth letter of the Terran Roman alphabet? It's a translation. Mortals can't comprehend our actual name.) They decided to call me Daisheneon as a title (it's a pun, and means either great empress or great demon, both of which suited me just fine.)
I told them that I had laid claim to their entire planet and all the people on it, and every year I would take 1,000 of their best and brightest to serve me in Hell. And then I did it. Except that "Hell" was actually a harsh, hot, climactically violent planet that can't decide whether it wants to be a rainforest or a desert, and every year I dumped 1,000 healthy, highly intelligent adult Laon'l with as much genetic variation as they'd actually left in their species there.
Back on Laon, they were scared witless... or in some cases, scared witful. The dumber ones tried to destroy me (didn't even get close), mind control me (burned out their brains), or propitiate me. (That one pissed me off, actually. Some of them were sacrificing children to me in hopes that I would be satisfied and leave them alone. I had no great love for mortal children then -- in fact now that I have a kid of my own I *still* have no great love for mortal kids -- but I find the concept of child sacrifice to be the ultimate hypocrisy. The idea is supposed to be that you sacrifice children because they're worth more than you are, but no one who actually commits child sacrifice sincerely does believe that the children are worth more than their own precious skin. Besides, children can't consent to be sacrificed. So I resurrected the latest batch of kids when I found out about it, and dumped the sacrificers into the planetary core.) For obvious reasons, nothing they tried to do to or for *me* worked, and I spent my time taunting their leaders, telling some that they looked pretty smart and were they sure they didn't want to go to Hell with me?, others that they could guarantee their safe place on Laon because they were just too idiotic to be worth taking with me.
When you set up the sacrifice of a class that doesn't include the leadership class, leaders are willing to make sacrifices. Virgin daughters, the teind of youthful Fae to hell, children, wives or husbands, whatever. Politicians, on every world, are self-serving, and they're more willing in general to sacrifice loved ones than themselves. But politicians do tend to think they're the best and brightest. And I took some. The very first year I removed the Lao'llehen, the chief executive of the planet. She was kind of old, but her genes were good so I deaged her to a fit young thing who could still fight giant lizards and have babies before I dumped her in Hell. The vice-Lao'llehen took me *really* seriously after that. Scientists all think they're the best and the brightest too, and I took some of those as well. So the people who actually had the power to direct the planet's resources to escaping me were *very* motivated to do it.
They figured out within the first fifteen years that they couldn't escape me by burrowing into the planet; I laid claim to all of it. They could only be free of me if they got *off* the planet. Three generations later they had a workable generation ship. A mere twenty years before the supernova, a billion Laon'l evacuated their homeworld in generation ships, and fled to a world that they called, creatively, New Laon. The million or so people who refused to evacuate because they figured I'd never get around to taking them were all very surprised when their sun blew up, but only for about a millisecond or two before they were too vaporous to feel surprise, or anything.
Meanwhile, in the 180 years I'd been harassing them, I'd populated the new planet (which they called Scamara... which, funnily enough, means "Hell" in Laon'l and now means "Home" in Scamaran) with 180,000 Laon'l, enough to overcome any founder effect. A third of them died, but 120,000 is still a viable starter population for a colony. And *they* evolved. They had no choice. Most Scamarans are pigmented now, and their psionic abilities have gone from mostly being wifty empathy and some telepathy to really hard-core telepathy and some telekinesis. And their society has dissent, factionalization, arguments, conflicts, and very little orthodoxy of any kind. They're highly adaptable people... now. The original Laon'l still mostly suck, but even they've generated a few dissidents now and then.
Of course they all blame me for blowing up their star. Once the light got to them and they could actually see what had happened to their original homeworld, they were *very* upset with me, being that they weren't bright enough to figure out that the thing was going to blow up anyway -- they think I destroyed their world out of spite that they got away, or something. Both peoples invoke the name of Emaroth whenever they need to swear at something, and they still scare their kids with stories about me. I haven't gone back there in material form... they don't need to be terrorized again. Not yet, anyway. We'll see if their luck holds out.
Muse: Q
Fandom: Star Trek TNG
Prompt 255: BOO! How would you go about scaring someone?
You know, I'm actually inordinately fond of scaring people. I suppose that means I'm a bad person, but I don't really care.
I don't, however, enjoy scaring people *just* to scare them. I'm aeons past that. (Well, except for the Borg. Terrorizing the Borg is not just fun, it's an important job that every Q should take a turn at. We need to make sure they maintain a healthy respect for and fear of us, and don't turn that marvelous analytic engine of theirs onto trying to find *our* weaknesses, especially now that we've realized we have some. Since we probably look to the Borg like the fantasy of perfection they want to achieve, they would most certainly devote a lot of their mental energy to figuring out how to assimilate us, or duplicate what we've done, if not for the fact that they're well aware that at any time, for any reason, from anywhere in the universe, one of us might spontaneously decide to turn one of their cubes inside out while it's traveling at high warp. Mm, Borg bits. But I digress.)
What I'm very fond of doing -- and very good at doing, so the Continuum has had me in their Rolodex as the go-to guy any time this kind of job needed to get done -- is terrorizing mortals into evolving, saving their own skins, or both. Oh, occasionally it doesn't work, and no matter how much of the fear of Me I put into them, they can't get it together to pass my test or solve the problem I'm trying to get them to solve, and this usually results in massive quantities of death and destruction... usually *not* doled out by yours truly. Mind you, I can generate quite terrifying consequences to an individual for failing a test... but it's almost always nothing in comparison to what the universe is going to do to them if they can't produce the results I was hoping to get them to perform.
Let me give you an example.
The planet Laon used to orbit around a dwarf yellow star, kind of like Earth around Sol except further away, so it was darker and colder. The people were mostly albinos, and kept it that way by aborting "defective" babies with pigment. This was just a tiny symptom of their overall problem -- a love of their own status quo, of stagnation, a terror of evolution. They kept all their people similar-looking and similar-thinking; they were telepaths and empaths, and they liked to exert mind control on their dissidents to keep everyone in line.
They also had a deadly fear of space. Highly advanced technology -- they lived in tall skyscrapers built with antigravitic technologies, healed any injury they suffered, had tripled their own lifespan, were great at keeping most of their planet clean and pristine and using renewable energy efficiently... but they were afraid of the sky. In their mythologies, the sky was never Heaven, or the home of the gods; they had chthonic gods, and the sky was the home of demons. They huddled in their homes at night because the stars were the eyes of devils that might want to swoop down and eat their souls, or something stupid like that. And so, for all their advanced technology, they were totally unaware that their sun was unstable and about to go nova within the next 200 years or so. And had they figured it out, they wouldn't have done anything about it, because they'd have been in denial to the end. Just think about how good the Kryptonians, with all *their* technology, were at figuring out their planet was going to blow up. Mortals really don't like hearing that their entire way of life is going to have to change, or they'll die. Usually, in such circumstances, they deny it until it's too late, and then they do all die.
Now, I *could* have just fixed their sun, but where's the fun in that? They were boring people whose habit of suppressing dissidence offended me. I wanted to see them shaken up a little, forced to evolve. Of course they weren't going to evolve into anything that might interest me if their sun went nova, so I needed to scare them off their planet. And this was going to take some doing, as terrified as they were of space.
I appeared to them as a woman, because they were a matriarchal society and tend to look at women as authorities. In every other respect, however, my chosen form was designed to screw with their heads. I looked like a member of their species (humanoid, with unusually big eyes), except that I had *dark* hair -- not just a little hair pigment, but a lot. (Sue me, I like dark hair on species that have the stuff.) I was tall, nearly 2 meters when their people usually clock in at 160 cm tops. And I told them I was a demon from space, here to claim their planet. I called myself Emaroth (it doesn't mean anything, but it has vague connotations of judgement and interrogation, which is kind of what I was going for with the letter Q also. What, you didn't seriously think an immortal omnipotent species that's been around since before Sol was a wink in the galaxy's eye actually is named after the seventeenth letter of the Terran Roman alphabet? It's a translation. Mortals can't comprehend our actual name.) They decided to call me Daisheneon as a title (it's a pun, and means either great empress or great demon, both of which suited me just fine.)
I told them that I had laid claim to their entire planet and all the people on it, and every year I would take 1,000 of their best and brightest to serve me in Hell. And then I did it. Except that "Hell" was actually a harsh, hot, climactically violent planet that can't decide whether it wants to be a rainforest or a desert, and every year I dumped 1,000 healthy, highly intelligent adult Laon'l with as much genetic variation as they'd actually left in their species there.
Back on Laon, they were scared witless... or in some cases, scared witful. The dumber ones tried to destroy me (didn't even get close), mind control me (burned out their brains), or propitiate me. (That one pissed me off, actually. Some of them were sacrificing children to me in hopes that I would be satisfied and leave them alone. I had no great love for mortal children then -- in fact now that I have a kid of my own I *still* have no great love for mortal kids -- but I find the concept of child sacrifice to be the ultimate hypocrisy. The idea is supposed to be that you sacrifice children because they're worth more than you are, but no one who actually commits child sacrifice sincerely does believe that the children are worth more than their own precious skin. Besides, children can't consent to be sacrificed. So I resurrected the latest batch of kids when I found out about it, and dumped the sacrificers into the planetary core.) For obvious reasons, nothing they tried to do to or for *me* worked, and I spent my time taunting their leaders, telling some that they looked pretty smart and were they sure they didn't want to go to Hell with me?, others that they could guarantee their safe place on Laon because they were just too idiotic to be worth taking with me.
When you set up the sacrifice of a class that doesn't include the leadership class, leaders are willing to make sacrifices. Virgin daughters, the teind of youthful Fae to hell, children, wives or husbands, whatever. Politicians, on every world, are self-serving, and they're more willing in general to sacrifice loved ones than themselves. But politicians do tend to think they're the best and brightest. And I took some. The very first year I removed the Lao'llehen, the chief executive of the planet. She was kind of old, but her genes were good so I deaged her to a fit young thing who could still fight giant lizards and have babies before I dumped her in Hell. The vice-Lao'llehen took me *really* seriously after that. Scientists all think they're the best and the brightest too, and I took some of those as well. So the people who actually had the power to direct the planet's resources to escaping me were *very* motivated to do it.
They figured out within the first fifteen years that they couldn't escape me by burrowing into the planet; I laid claim to all of it. They could only be free of me if they got *off* the planet. Three generations later they had a workable generation ship. A mere twenty years before the supernova, a billion Laon'l evacuated their homeworld in generation ships, and fled to a world that they called, creatively, New Laon. The million or so people who refused to evacuate because they figured I'd never get around to taking them were all very surprised when their sun blew up, but only for about a millisecond or two before they were too vaporous to feel surprise, or anything.
Meanwhile, in the 180 years I'd been harassing them, I'd populated the new planet (which they called Scamara... which, funnily enough, means "Hell" in Laon'l and now means "Home" in Scamaran) with 180,000 Laon'l, enough to overcome any founder effect. A third of them died, but 120,000 is still a viable starter population for a colony. And *they* evolved. They had no choice. Most Scamarans are pigmented now, and their psionic abilities have gone from mostly being wifty empathy and some telepathy to really hard-core telepathy and some telekinesis. And their society has dissent, factionalization, arguments, conflicts, and very little orthodoxy of any kind. They're highly adaptable people... now. The original Laon'l still mostly suck, but even they've generated a few dissidents now and then.
Of course they all blame me for blowing up their star. Once the light got to them and they could actually see what had happened to their original homeworld, they were *very* upset with me, being that they weren't bright enough to figure out that the thing was going to blow up anyway -- they think I destroyed their world out of spite that they got away, or something. Both peoples invoke the name of Emaroth whenever they need to swear at something, and they still scare their kids with stories about me. I haven't gone back there in material form... they don't need to be terrorized again. Not yet, anyway. We'll see if their luck holds out.
Muse: Q
Fandom: Star Trek TNG