Schadenfreude. And revenge.
OOC: Crossposted from theatrical_muse today.
Prompt 279: Schadenfreude.
Prompt 143: Revenge.
Schadenfreude. What a delicious-sounding word. "Joy in damage", or "joy in shame." It's in the fundamental wiring of all sentient beings -- enjoying the suffering of others, as deep in all our natures as empathy is. And the most delightful of schadenfreude is the joy we take in the suffering of those who have *hurt* us.
It's not very often that a being is capable of hurting me. Most of the time, I have to admit, my pleasure in the sufferings of others is more your garden variety sadism with some vicarious thrills thrown in -- it's not really the *suffering* of others I enjoy quite so much as the excitement of watching them try to solve the puzzles I set for them or jump through the hoops I put in their way. But I gotta confess, watching other people squirm and sweat is kind of fun in and of itself. That being said, I don't get truly, completely vicious unless I think they deserve it. I mean, I might put some poor species in a deathtrap I really do know they have no chance of thinking their way out of just because I'm in a bad mood that day, but I won't indulge in the cruelest psychological torments I can come up with unless they honestly deserve it.
So some bad things happened to me, or were done by me, and overall I wasn't... the most mentally well of entities. As I've mentioned before, we don't do therapy in the Continuum. Instead, we would generally go to mortal species, and at that time the choice of most Q who actually needed someone to talk to would have been an El-Aurian, nicknamed Listeners... for reasons that ought to be obvious from their nickname. It was strongly suggested to me that I might avail myself of the services of one.
The one that I picked was, well, a meddler. She'd been roaming the universe, doing her anthropology thing, studying other species -- which was perfectly kosher and allowable by the rules of her society, as well as mine -- and she had been using her powers to *interfere*, something that both of our societies strongly frowned upon but that I found quite intriguing. At the time her name was Teyande -- a word that means "wanderer" with connotations of "maverick" -- although this didn't mean much because her species changed names like they changed hats, and believe me, do they ever change hats. Teyande was an Adept, member of a small sub-group of El-Aurians with the power to sense time... not like the Q do, where our abilities are direct and clear, but as they interpreted their own powers, it was more like sensing, and sometimes manipulating, fate. As a Q, I didn't believe in fate, which just made it that much more puzzling how their powers could *work*. How could one, say, stitch two timelines together so that they would merge into each other, without actually having any idea which specific events need to be duplicated in order for that to happen?
Because she could sense timelines, Teyande could tell when Bad Things were going to happen to people she was studying, and, quite against the policy of her people, she did things about it. Sometimes, with her power, but that was very very rare and mostly in her past; generally she did it by manipulating the mortals who would be involved in said Bad Things by listening, very carefully, and saying a few well-chosen words to redirect minds and hearts. Trouble tended to follow her around, because she was the sort of person who actively sought it, kind of the way cops notice crime. I thought this was downright nifty. In fact, I found her utterly fascinating.
So I dropped in to have a chat, or two. She was friendly enough at first, but a little... mmm, dismissive. She'd had dealings with my kind before, and seemed to be looking at me like I was... well, a kid. Which, given that I was approximately five billion years old and she was about five *hundred*, rather irritated me. I mean, you'd be annoyed if someone you were older than by several orders of magnitude treated *you* like an annoying adolescent. So, you know, maybe I created a bit of trouble for her. She *liked* trouble! She was always seeking it out, why would she do that if she didn't like it? I was adding a bit of excitement and adventure to her life.
And really, I didn't do anything all that bad. Not by my standards, certainly. I mean, around that time I was testing species, who... weren't passing, generally, and I'd condemned beings to their homeworld, winnowed some populations down, bumped a few species back several levels of technology, and, um, raised the dead on one planet because they were really annoying me. Like, um, zombies. Except they didn't want to eat brains, they just wanted to suck all the life force out of the living. So, if I maybe made a few temporal anomalies for Teyande to watch how she solved them, or possibly put her in a couple of alternate dimensions, or made her play out some adventure from her species' folklore, well, that really wasn't so bad, was it?
I also *tried* to talk to her, but she was more interested in talking to *me*. She told me I was chaos incarnate. She told me to go away. Repeatedly. Some listener! She hardly seemed open in the slightest to listening to what I had to say. But she was fun to watch and play with, so at least she was distracting me from what was really bothering me. And I liked her. I wouldn't really have let her get *hurt* if she'd failed to solve any of my little puzzles. I mean, I wanted her to take me seriously, so I was perfectly willing to scare her a bit, and maybe once or twice I dragged her youngest kids into my games because nothing makes the average mortal parent pay more attention than a possible threat to their child, but I didn't really want to *hurt* any of them.
And then she locked me out of the universe.
When everything was said and done and the Continuum had ransomed me back, I was no longer allowed to touch her, no longer allowed to do *anything* to any El-Aurian at all, or their property, without explicit permission. I couldn't get revenge -- and I wanted revenge. No mortal had *ever* frightened and humiliated me the way Teyande had. I steamed about it for some time.
And then I noticed that the Borg were on their way to her homeworld.
When I came to visit her, she'd changed her name again. Now she was Mairi, and she had some sort of leadership position on her world. She'd given up being the rebel, the renegade, the meddler -- now she was an entirely respectable citizen, no longer leaving her world for adventures, staid and proper. Made me sick. I warned her that her world and her people would be destroyed, because I knew her powers over time could tell her that that much was true. And I told her that I would save them, if she would grant me permission. All she had to do was consent to let me do anything to her I wanted.
To this day I'm not at all sure what I would have done if she'd said "yes", because I'd known she wouldn't. The whole conflict between us had started because she was too goddamn proud to know when she was out of her league, and she might be willing to instigate a little chaos in a cause she thought was good but god forbid anything happen to *her*, and she'd never before in her life been out of control, faced with someone more powerful than she was. She would never humble herself unless I broke her, and I couldn't break her if she wouldn't let me touch her, and she wouldn't let me touch her because she wouldn't humble herself. She thought she could handle the problem, that she could find the way to save her people herself. So fine. I let her try.
Of course, she failed. Miserably. Horribly.
And when she was lying prostrate in the dust that was all the Borg had left of her world, I went to her, and she begged. I didn't need to break her, personally, you see. All I needed to do was... nothing. Because the Borg would do it for me, so long as I didn't stop them, and without the permission of an El-Aurian leader I *couldn't* stop them. The treaty *she* made my people sign by imprisoning and terrorizing me ensured that. She broke, and wept, and begged me to do anything to her if only I would fix it. Six centuries of believing in the utter sanctity of the timeline, that altering time and changing fate is abhorrent, and she threw it away in a moment to beg me to do what she had always called anathema, to save her people.
Oh, I enjoyed that moment.
I told her about the Borg invading her home, threatening her baby daughter. I didn't mention that I had, in fact, rescued the daughter; I strongly implied that the Borg had killed or assimilated her. I made Mairi beg, and cry, and humiliate herself completely. And then I told her that she had nothing to offer me for my help... because what she'd just given me had been all I'd wanted.
And I left.
To be honest, I was kind of hoping that was the last time I'd ever see her, but she's hanging out on my favorite human's starship under the name Guinan now, so I can't entirely avoid her. At the moment she's one-up on me, because she stabbed me in the hand with a fork and gloated over my dying body the day I was mortal, but I've learned some patience. I'm going to live forever, and she isn't. I can wait.
Her daughter? The one I rescued? Loves me. Thinks of me as her favorite uncle. And hates her mother for abandoning her. And one of these days, I'm going to reunite them, and then we'll see some fireworks, I guarantee it.
Muse: Q
Fandom: Star Trek TNG
Prompt 279: Schadenfreude.
Prompt 143: Revenge.
Schadenfreude. What a delicious-sounding word. "Joy in damage", or "joy in shame." It's in the fundamental wiring of all sentient beings -- enjoying the suffering of others, as deep in all our natures as empathy is. And the most delightful of schadenfreude is the joy we take in the suffering of those who have *hurt* us.
It's not very often that a being is capable of hurting me. Most of the time, I have to admit, my pleasure in the sufferings of others is more your garden variety sadism with some vicarious thrills thrown in -- it's not really the *suffering* of others I enjoy quite so much as the excitement of watching them try to solve the puzzles I set for them or jump through the hoops I put in their way. But I gotta confess, watching other people squirm and sweat is kind of fun in and of itself. That being said, I don't get truly, completely vicious unless I think they deserve it. I mean, I might put some poor species in a deathtrap I really do know they have no chance of thinking their way out of just because I'm in a bad mood that day, but I won't indulge in the cruelest psychological torments I can come up with unless they honestly deserve it.
So some bad things happened to me, or were done by me, and overall I wasn't... the most mentally well of entities. As I've mentioned before, we don't do therapy in the Continuum. Instead, we would generally go to mortal species, and at that time the choice of most Q who actually needed someone to talk to would have been an El-Aurian, nicknamed Listeners... for reasons that ought to be obvious from their nickname. It was strongly suggested to me that I might avail myself of the services of one.
The one that I picked was, well, a meddler. She'd been roaming the universe, doing her anthropology thing, studying other species -- which was perfectly kosher and allowable by the rules of her society, as well as mine -- and she had been using her powers to *interfere*, something that both of our societies strongly frowned upon but that I found quite intriguing. At the time her name was Teyande -- a word that means "wanderer" with connotations of "maverick" -- although this didn't mean much because her species changed names like they changed hats, and believe me, do they ever change hats. Teyande was an Adept, member of a small sub-group of El-Aurians with the power to sense time... not like the Q do, where our abilities are direct and clear, but as they interpreted their own powers, it was more like sensing, and sometimes manipulating, fate. As a Q, I didn't believe in fate, which just made it that much more puzzling how their powers could *work*. How could one, say, stitch two timelines together so that they would merge into each other, without actually having any idea which specific events need to be duplicated in order for that to happen?
Because she could sense timelines, Teyande could tell when Bad Things were going to happen to people she was studying, and, quite against the policy of her people, she did things about it. Sometimes, with her power, but that was very very rare and mostly in her past; generally she did it by manipulating the mortals who would be involved in said Bad Things by listening, very carefully, and saying a few well-chosen words to redirect minds and hearts. Trouble tended to follow her around, because she was the sort of person who actively sought it, kind of the way cops notice crime. I thought this was downright nifty. In fact, I found her utterly fascinating.
So I dropped in to have a chat, or two. She was friendly enough at first, but a little... mmm, dismissive. She'd had dealings with my kind before, and seemed to be looking at me like I was... well, a kid. Which, given that I was approximately five billion years old and she was about five *hundred*, rather irritated me. I mean, you'd be annoyed if someone you were older than by several orders of magnitude treated *you* like an annoying adolescent. So, you know, maybe I created a bit of trouble for her. She *liked* trouble! She was always seeking it out, why would she do that if she didn't like it? I was adding a bit of excitement and adventure to her life.
And really, I didn't do anything all that bad. Not by my standards, certainly. I mean, around that time I was testing species, who... weren't passing, generally, and I'd condemned beings to their homeworld, winnowed some populations down, bumped a few species back several levels of technology, and, um, raised the dead on one planet because they were really annoying me. Like, um, zombies. Except they didn't want to eat brains, they just wanted to suck all the life force out of the living. So, if I maybe made a few temporal anomalies for Teyande to watch how she solved them, or possibly put her in a couple of alternate dimensions, or made her play out some adventure from her species' folklore, well, that really wasn't so bad, was it?
I also *tried* to talk to her, but she was more interested in talking to *me*. She told me I was chaos incarnate. She told me to go away. Repeatedly. Some listener! She hardly seemed open in the slightest to listening to what I had to say. But she was fun to watch and play with, so at least she was distracting me from what was really bothering me. And I liked her. I wouldn't really have let her get *hurt* if she'd failed to solve any of my little puzzles. I mean, I wanted her to take me seriously, so I was perfectly willing to scare her a bit, and maybe once or twice I dragged her youngest kids into my games because nothing makes the average mortal parent pay more attention than a possible threat to their child, but I didn't really want to *hurt* any of them.
And then she locked me out of the universe.
When everything was said and done and the Continuum had ransomed me back, I was no longer allowed to touch her, no longer allowed to do *anything* to any El-Aurian at all, or their property, without explicit permission. I couldn't get revenge -- and I wanted revenge. No mortal had *ever* frightened and humiliated me the way Teyande had. I steamed about it for some time.
And then I noticed that the Borg were on their way to her homeworld.
When I came to visit her, she'd changed her name again. Now she was Mairi, and she had some sort of leadership position on her world. She'd given up being the rebel, the renegade, the meddler -- now she was an entirely respectable citizen, no longer leaving her world for adventures, staid and proper. Made me sick. I warned her that her world and her people would be destroyed, because I knew her powers over time could tell her that that much was true. And I told her that I would save them, if she would grant me permission. All she had to do was consent to let me do anything to her I wanted.
To this day I'm not at all sure what I would have done if she'd said "yes", because I'd known she wouldn't. The whole conflict between us had started because she was too goddamn proud to know when she was out of her league, and she might be willing to instigate a little chaos in a cause she thought was good but god forbid anything happen to *her*, and she'd never before in her life been out of control, faced with someone more powerful than she was. She would never humble herself unless I broke her, and I couldn't break her if she wouldn't let me touch her, and she wouldn't let me touch her because she wouldn't humble herself. She thought she could handle the problem, that she could find the way to save her people herself. So fine. I let her try.
Of course, she failed. Miserably. Horribly.
And when she was lying prostrate in the dust that was all the Borg had left of her world, I went to her, and she begged. I didn't need to break her, personally, you see. All I needed to do was... nothing. Because the Borg would do it for me, so long as I didn't stop them, and without the permission of an El-Aurian leader I *couldn't* stop them. The treaty *she* made my people sign by imprisoning and terrorizing me ensured that. She broke, and wept, and begged me to do anything to her if only I would fix it. Six centuries of believing in the utter sanctity of the timeline, that altering time and changing fate is abhorrent, and she threw it away in a moment to beg me to do what she had always called anathema, to save her people.
Oh, I enjoyed that moment.
I told her about the Borg invading her home, threatening her baby daughter. I didn't mention that I had, in fact, rescued the daughter; I strongly implied that the Borg had killed or assimilated her. I made Mairi beg, and cry, and humiliate herself completely. And then I told her that she had nothing to offer me for my help... because what she'd just given me had been all I'd wanted.
And I left.
To be honest, I was kind of hoping that was the last time I'd ever see her, but she's hanging out on my favorite human's starship under the name Guinan now, so I can't entirely avoid her. At the moment she's one-up on me, because she stabbed me in the hand with a fork and gloated over my dying body the day I was mortal, but I've learned some patience. I'm going to live forever, and she isn't. I can wait.
Her daughter? The one I rescued? Loves me. Thinks of me as her favorite uncle. And hates her mother for abandoning her. And one of these days, I'm going to reunite them, and then we'll see some fireworks, I guarantee it.
Muse: Q
Fandom: Star Trek TNG