Every family meal is memorable chez Q!
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.
q is the last Q created by the entire Continuum, the end of Q reproduction for almost a billion years. There are Q who are younger than her who started their existence as mortals, but since we only induct mortal *adults*, this didn't prevent q from acting as if she was the only baby in the Continuum for practically all of eternity. All Q who were created by the Continuum were created as, effectively, adolescents; none of us ever went through an actual infancy or childhood the way my son did. But there are differing levels of maturity in adolescence.
I want you to picture a twelve year old girl wearing outrageous amounts of pink lip gloss, who covers absolutely every possession she owns and most of yours with sparkly stickers, who never walks when she can bounce, who talks endlessly and bombards everyone who'll listen with nonstop questions about completely irrelevant subjects that, in fact, she fully understands and doesn't even really want answered, as she makes obvious by the fact that she'll interrupt your explanation to ask another question that has nothing to do with the previous question. Now imagine that she behaves like this for seven hundred million years. I mean, technically she's an adult -- she participates in the full Continuum overmind, something my son does not, yet -- but she abstains from every genuinely important vote, and has been known to completely derail proceedings she disapproves of by tying up the Conclave in endless questions (well, not literally endless, or she'd still be asking them, but several thousand years of q's questions certainly *seems* endless.)
q is *now* a college student, or at least, that would be the closest analogy I could use to describe her to mortals. Billions of years ago, when we were still generating a fair number of new Q, the Continuum sponsored a... well, I've described it to mortals as a university, so let's go with that. A symposium, a center for sharing our knowledge with other Powers. Traditionally there have always been Q there as students as well as teachers, symbolizing and exemplifying our commitment to learning everything there is to know, our role as the questioners of reality. But for the last aeon or so, q has been the last one left. I expect this may change with entities like Amanda and my son in existence now, but my son's not advanced enough for the university and Amanda is taking a more hands-on approach to her own education.
So, q, who for most of our history has been *the* most immature Q in the Continuum, is finally showing signs of growing up. And of course she's been considered mature enough to participate in the Q equivalent of sexual activities for millions of years. She *is* a full-grown adult, no matter how many times she covers your favorite solar systems with a nebula because "nebulas are sparkly". (Don't even let me get started about her derailing mortal starship transit lanes by plastering them with ion storms...) Now that she's finally out of her "nebulas are sparkly" phase, many Q are starting to develop an interest in her (immaturity isn't an attractive trait in a partner when sex consists of sharing minds.) But she hasn't forgotten that for most of her existence, few Q were willing to join with her, and she spends most of her time at the university with members of other Species of Power anyway.
Thus, you can rather imagine my surprise when I walked in on my son and q *feeding* each other *stars*.
My son (who insists on being called Q nowadays, although really he's much more of a q than q is) has a bit of a dilemma, which he proclaims loudly to any Q who will listen to him, except me, because he finds it embarrassing to discuss this in front of me for some reason. He wants to join with other Q. We don't have hormones, but we have drives and impulses, and now that he's finally reached an adolescent maturity level and can protect his own ego in a joining, he wants to do it. Well, fine, great. Little boys grow up, after all. Just... don't tell me about it, was my philosophy. Unfortunately for him, the Q have recently discovered, with Amanda and with him, that we *do* have generational taboos. Nobody wants to join with my son because they remember him being an infant, and because they feel that he's too young (and because they know he has a *very* protective father, and I will totally kick their omnipotent backsides if they do anything to my boy I don't approve of.)
He thought Amanda was the perfect solution to his problem, but Amanda was his babysitter, and has *very* human taboos about sex with people you took care of as a baby. q, however, more or less ignored him completely for his entire childhood, so now, I suppose, he's thinking that even though she's nearly a billion years older than him, the fact that she's an arrested adolescent makes her the only game in town for him. I mean, I'm guessing. I *could* know exactly what he thinks on the subject and exactly how far he got with her, but I *really* don't want to.
Anyway. Eating is gauche enough all by itself that I'd have had to chew him out just for that, because I'm all for a bit of rebellion against social norms but no son of mine is going to rebel by being completely disgusting... I mean, *eating*. That's just... gross. And to find him with q, *snuggling*, feeding each other *stars* like some sort of illicit adolescent foreplay... could they not have had the basic decency to make themselves a private pocket dimension to do that in? I do *not* need to know about my son's sex life, I do not need to know about my sparkly nebula little sister's sex life, and really, I am actually much much happier pretending that neither of them *have* a sex life, at least not with other Q and MOST ESPECIALLY NOT WITH EACH OTHER, particularly when it involves EATING STARS. I mean... Q memories are eternal. I'm never going to unsee that.
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.
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.
q is the last Q created by the entire Continuum, the end of Q reproduction for almost a billion years. There are Q who are younger than her who started their existence as mortals, but since we only induct mortal *adults*, this didn't prevent q from acting as if she was the only baby in the Continuum for practically all of eternity. All Q who were created by the Continuum were created as, effectively, adolescents; none of us ever went through an actual infancy or childhood the way my son did. But there are differing levels of maturity in adolescence.
I want you to picture a twelve year old girl wearing outrageous amounts of pink lip gloss, who covers absolutely every possession she owns and most of yours with sparkly stickers, who never walks when she can bounce, who talks endlessly and bombards everyone who'll listen with nonstop questions about completely irrelevant subjects that, in fact, she fully understands and doesn't even really want answered, as she makes obvious by the fact that she'll interrupt your explanation to ask another question that has nothing to do with the previous question. Now imagine that she behaves like this for seven hundred million years. I mean, technically she's an adult -- she participates in the full Continuum overmind, something my son does not, yet -- but she abstains from every genuinely important vote, and has been known to completely derail proceedings she disapproves of by tying up the Conclave in endless questions (well, not literally endless, or she'd still be asking them, but several thousand years of q's questions certainly *seems* endless.)
q is *now* a college student, or at least, that would be the closest analogy I could use to describe her to mortals. Billions of years ago, when we were still generating a fair number of new Q, the Continuum sponsored a... well, I've described it to mortals as a university, so let's go with that. A symposium, a center for sharing our knowledge with other Powers. Traditionally there have always been Q there as students as well as teachers, symbolizing and exemplifying our commitment to learning everything there is to know, our role as the questioners of reality. But for the last aeon or so, q has been the last one left. I expect this may change with entities like Amanda and my son in existence now, but my son's not advanced enough for the university and Amanda is taking a more hands-on approach to her own education.
So, q, who for most of our history has been *the* most immature Q in the Continuum, is finally showing signs of growing up. And of course she's been considered mature enough to participate in the Q equivalent of sexual activities for millions of years. She *is* a full-grown adult, no matter how many times she covers your favorite solar systems with a nebula because "nebulas are sparkly". (Don't even let me get started about her derailing mortal starship transit lanes by plastering them with ion storms...) Now that she's finally out of her "nebulas are sparkly" phase, many Q are starting to develop an interest in her (immaturity isn't an attractive trait in a partner when sex consists of sharing minds.) But she hasn't forgotten that for most of her existence, few Q were willing to join with her, and she spends most of her time at the university with members of other Species of Power anyway.
Thus, you can rather imagine my surprise when I walked in on my son and q *feeding* each other *stars*.
My son (who insists on being called Q nowadays, although really he's much more of a q than q is) has a bit of a dilemma, which he proclaims loudly to any Q who will listen to him, except me, because he finds it embarrassing to discuss this in front of me for some reason. He wants to join with other Q. We don't have hormones, but we have drives and impulses, and now that he's finally reached an adolescent maturity level and can protect his own ego in a joining, he wants to do it. Well, fine, great. Little boys grow up, after all. Just... don't tell me about it, was my philosophy. Unfortunately for him, the Q have recently discovered, with Amanda and with him, that we *do* have generational taboos. Nobody wants to join with my son because they remember him being an infant, and because they feel that he's too young (and because they know he has a *very* protective father, and I will totally kick their omnipotent backsides if they do anything to my boy I don't approve of.)
He thought Amanda was the perfect solution to his problem, but Amanda was his babysitter, and has *very* human taboos about sex with people you took care of as a baby. q, however, more or less ignored him completely for his entire childhood, so now, I suppose, he's thinking that even though she's nearly a billion years older than him, the fact that she's an arrested adolescent makes her the only game in town for him. I mean, I'm guessing. I *could* know exactly what he thinks on the subject and exactly how far he got with her, but I *really* don't want to.
Anyway. Eating is gauche enough all by itself that I'd have had to chew him out just for that, because I'm all for a bit of rebellion against social norms but no son of mine is going to rebel by being completely disgusting... I mean, *eating*. That's just... gross. And to find him with q, *snuggling*, feeding each other *stars* like some sort of illicit adolescent foreplay... could they not have had the basic decency to make themselves a private pocket dimension to do that in? I do *not* need to know about my son's sex life, I do not need to know about my sparkly nebula little sister's sex life, and really, I am actually much much happier pretending that neither of them *have* a sex life, at least not with other Q and MOST ESPECIALLY NOT WITH EACH OTHER, particularly when it involves EATING STARS. I mean... Q memories are eternal. I'm never going to unsee that.
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.