Prompt 67: The Dying God
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.
"Let me get this straight. You actually *die*? Every solar revolution on your worshippers' planet? For a third of that solar revolution? How does that even work?"
(It should be pointed out that Q, being a Q, has access to the Q Continuum, a repository of knowledge which contains damn near everything there is to know, and therefore almost never actually has to ask a question of someone in order to find out the answer. However, as an entity whose primary function in the Continuum is to gather knowledge about other sentient beings, Q prefers to ask questions even if he already knows the answer, let alone if he would otherwise have to look up the answer, because the way the being he is questioning chooses to answer him tells him as much or more about that being as the actual answer to the question would.)
The other being, who had a name that would be transcribed into the phonemes of human speech as "Haggoth", said, "Yeah, it's the whole harvest god thing. When the weather gets cold and my people can't grow crops anymore, I die, and I come back in the spring when there's enough warmth to support plant growth."
"What exactly do you mean by 'die'? Typically speaking, death's generally pretty final."
"Well, I suppose you could call it sleep. Have you ever gone to sleep?"
Q shuddered slightly. "Once. And once was enough." Most Q don't actually have personal experience of sleeping, though of course the Continuum database contains everything any being would ever want to know about the state or the experience of sleep. Q's personal experience came from having been Human for close to an entire day (day being the amount of time it takes the planet Earth to spin on its axis, given that that's the planet Humans are from), but it wasn't an event he particularly liked to think about. "If you ask me, I don't see any difference between sleeping, and temporarily dying."
"I suppose there isn't much difference, but generally, when mortals sleep, it's possible to wake them. What happens is that as it gets cold, and the plants die, I start to experience a sensation of cold and torpor myself. And then I crystallize into stasis. They have a feast day to celebrate my death, and they burn effigies of me, and then in the springtime they have a huge party to celebrate my re-awakening. And when I hear them calling me, when I *feel* their worship and their love..." Haggoth shivered. "There's nothing like it. You're missing out, I tell you. The worship and adoration of a large tribe of worshippers is just the most incredible high."
"Except for the part where it kills you. Every solar revolution."
Haggoth shrugged. "You know, we've all got our little vices. I may die all winter, but I've never had my fellows gang up on me and turn me into a mortal because I couldn't stop poking random mortals with sticks."
Q scowled. "That was *one day*. You're talking about a third of your existence, as long as you remain in their linear time frame!"
"It's not like I'm actually going to stay dead."
"Except if all your worshippers get wiped out by an asteroid while you're dead. Then who's going to wake you up?"
"My pantheon's got my back. Sarass -- you know, my consort? She'd never let that happen."
Q wouldn't have been nearly so confident of that. Given how often mortals' dying god/planet mother nature cults ended up elevating the dying god above the mother goddess when they went patriarchal and started trying to assert their dominion over nature, if he were the feminine consort/mother goddess of a harvest/dying god, he'd be seriously tempted to just never let his consort wake up, otherwise sooner or later the dying god of a humanoid race often ended up supplanting the mother goddess in worshippers, which translated into power. And more importantly, translated into the intensity of the high that entities of thought got from being worshipped. But then, he didn't know Sarass, mother goddess of the Pasho people on a planet whose people had no idea it even was a planet and therefore just called it "world", and he didn't know Haggoth particularly well either. He'd just run into the guy in a bar and struck up a conversation, because that was what he did.
"I can't imagine any buzz you could get off worship being worth *dying* for, even temporarily. Can't you just stay awake?"
Haggoth shook his head. "If I don't align with their perception, the worship doesn't align properly against my psychespace, and the hit's not nearly as good. I could stay awake if I really wanted to. And you know, one of these centuries I'll probably quit. It's just *incredible*, though." He took a deep draught of his drink (which is actually to say that he spread himself thinner and wider to receive more reflective thought energies, so as to take a rapid pulse of disorienting and disinhibiting sensation, but if he'd been mortal and he'd been in a bar, he would have taken a drink to get the same effect.) "I'm kind of surprised at you, Q. Everyone says you're a hedonist who'll do anything for fun, but apparently you don't want to be worshipped? Sounds like prudery to me. How'd you get to be such a joy-killing stick-in-the-mud?"
"The part I'm hung up on is where the joy comes in, if you have to *die* to get it."
"Man, you're totally stuck on that. It's not like I *die* die, like I'm mortal and I'm going to rot in the ground, right? I'm coming back. So I'm eternal, so who cares if I sleep through the winter for the next few hundred years? You're just jealous because no one actually worships you."
In fact Q worked hard to make sure that no one actually worshipped him, or that if they did, they worshipped him cautiously as a feared and unpredictable trickster god who might well do literally anything whatsoever, so that the attitudes and beliefs of mortals *never* influenced him into becoming someone different. Most entities who were hooked on worship let it eat away at some part of their personality and reshape them into what their mortals wanted them to be, though admittedly he'd before never met an entity who was so deep into his addiction he let it kill him periodically. "If I actually wanted anyone
to worship me, you might have scored a point with that, but I hate to tell you, that fell pretty flat. Jealous? Seriously? You're letting *mortals* dictate to *you*. You're letting them transform you. You're actually letting them *kill* you. I've met plenty of worship junkies before, but most of them manage not to let their mortals *kill* them."
"Apollo."
Q snorted. "Suicide because you can't get your fix anymore's pathetic, it's true, but not the same thing."
Haggoth shrugged. "You don't have to like it. I enjoy the worship, and I don't really care if I have to die every winter for it. Dying doesn't hurt, and the worship feels *fantastic*. You really don't know what you're missing out on."
"I've slept before. If it means that I'm missing out on an experience like *that*, I will cheerfully miss out on being worshipped until the end of time."
"Well, that's your call. You do your thing and I'll do mine." Haggoth turned away from Q and started chatting up a different entity.
Beings of Power often irritated Q immensely, more than any mortal could possibly do. They *should* be superior to mortals, and so often, they weren't. He flashed out of the bar, no longer willing to endure beings of natures like his own being intolerably inane. If he wanted to deal with stupidity, he could go find some mortals to play with.
As an afterthought he checked up on Haggoth's planet. The Q had access to much more of a range of temporal perceptions than most entities, having bound themselves to a completely separate timeline, so Q could see much more of the future than Haggoth could. An ice age was coming. If his worshippers didn't manage to invent science, which generally resulted in putting gods aside entirely, or manage to flee to the northern tropics, which would almost certainly cause them to give up their concept of a dying harvest god... then they'd either all die, or adapt to perpetual winter. And if winter came and never ended, one of these days Haggoth was going to go to sleep and never wake up.
Q *could* warn the guy. But he wasn't going to.
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.
"Let me get this straight. You actually *die*? Every solar revolution on your worshippers' planet? For a third of that solar revolution? How does that even work?"
(It should be pointed out that Q, being a Q, has access to the Q Continuum, a repository of knowledge which contains damn near everything there is to know, and therefore almost never actually has to ask a question of someone in order to find out the answer. However, as an entity whose primary function in the Continuum is to gather knowledge about other sentient beings, Q prefers to ask questions even if he already knows the answer, let alone if he would otherwise have to look up the answer, because the way the being he is questioning chooses to answer him tells him as much or more about that being as the actual answer to the question would.)
The other being, who had a name that would be transcribed into the phonemes of human speech as "Haggoth", said, "Yeah, it's the whole harvest god thing. When the weather gets cold and my people can't grow crops anymore, I die, and I come back in the spring when there's enough warmth to support plant growth."
"What exactly do you mean by 'die'? Typically speaking, death's generally pretty final."
"Well, I suppose you could call it sleep. Have you ever gone to sleep?"
Q shuddered slightly. "Once. And once was enough." Most Q don't actually have personal experience of sleeping, though of course the Continuum database contains everything any being would ever want to know about the state or the experience of sleep. Q's personal experience came from having been Human for close to an entire day (day being the amount of time it takes the planet Earth to spin on its axis, given that that's the planet Humans are from), but it wasn't an event he particularly liked to think about. "If you ask me, I don't see any difference between sleeping, and temporarily dying."
"I suppose there isn't much difference, but generally, when mortals sleep, it's possible to wake them. What happens is that as it gets cold, and the plants die, I start to experience a sensation of cold and torpor myself. And then I crystallize into stasis. They have a feast day to celebrate my death, and they burn effigies of me, and then in the springtime they have a huge party to celebrate my re-awakening. And when I hear them calling me, when I *feel* their worship and their love..." Haggoth shivered. "There's nothing like it. You're missing out, I tell you. The worship and adoration of a large tribe of worshippers is just the most incredible high."
"Except for the part where it kills you. Every solar revolution."
Haggoth shrugged. "You know, we've all got our little vices. I may die all winter, but I've never had my fellows gang up on me and turn me into a mortal because I couldn't stop poking random mortals with sticks."
Q scowled. "That was *one day*. You're talking about a third of your existence, as long as you remain in their linear time frame!"
"It's not like I'm actually going to stay dead."
"Except if all your worshippers get wiped out by an asteroid while you're dead. Then who's going to wake you up?"
"My pantheon's got my back. Sarass -- you know, my consort? She'd never let that happen."
Q wouldn't have been nearly so confident of that. Given how often mortals' dying god/planet mother nature cults ended up elevating the dying god above the mother goddess when they went patriarchal and started trying to assert their dominion over nature, if he were the feminine consort/mother goddess of a harvest/dying god, he'd be seriously tempted to just never let his consort wake up, otherwise sooner or later the dying god of a humanoid race often ended up supplanting the mother goddess in worshippers, which translated into power. And more importantly, translated into the intensity of the high that entities of thought got from being worshipped. But then, he didn't know Sarass, mother goddess of the Pasho people on a planet whose people had no idea it even was a planet and therefore just called it "world", and he didn't know Haggoth particularly well either. He'd just run into the guy in a bar and struck up a conversation, because that was what he did.
"I can't imagine any buzz you could get off worship being worth *dying* for, even temporarily. Can't you just stay awake?"
Haggoth shook his head. "If I don't align with their perception, the worship doesn't align properly against my psychespace, and the hit's not nearly as good. I could stay awake if I really wanted to. And you know, one of these centuries I'll probably quit. It's just *incredible*, though." He took a deep draught of his drink (which is actually to say that he spread himself thinner and wider to receive more reflective thought energies, so as to take a rapid pulse of disorienting and disinhibiting sensation, but if he'd been mortal and he'd been in a bar, he would have taken a drink to get the same effect.) "I'm kind of surprised at you, Q. Everyone says you're a hedonist who'll do anything for fun, but apparently you don't want to be worshipped? Sounds like prudery to me. How'd you get to be such a joy-killing stick-in-the-mud?"
"The part I'm hung up on is where the joy comes in, if you have to *die* to get it."
"Man, you're totally stuck on that. It's not like I *die* die, like I'm mortal and I'm going to rot in the ground, right? I'm coming back. So I'm eternal, so who cares if I sleep through the winter for the next few hundred years? You're just jealous because no one actually worships you."
In fact Q worked hard to make sure that no one actually worshipped him, or that if they did, they worshipped him cautiously as a feared and unpredictable trickster god who might well do literally anything whatsoever, so that the attitudes and beliefs of mortals *never* influenced him into becoming someone different. Most entities who were hooked on worship let it eat away at some part of their personality and reshape them into what their mortals wanted them to be, though admittedly he'd before never met an entity who was so deep into his addiction he let it kill him periodically. "If I actually wanted anyone
to worship me, you might have scored a point with that, but I hate to tell you, that fell pretty flat. Jealous? Seriously? You're letting *mortals* dictate to *you*. You're letting them transform you. You're actually letting them *kill* you. I've met plenty of worship junkies before, but most of them manage not to let their mortals *kill* them."
"Apollo."
Q snorted. "Suicide because you can't get your fix anymore's pathetic, it's true, but not the same thing."
Haggoth shrugged. "You don't have to like it. I enjoy the worship, and I don't really care if I have to die every winter for it. Dying doesn't hurt, and the worship feels *fantastic*. You really don't know what you're missing out on."
"I've slept before. If it means that I'm missing out on an experience like *that*, I will cheerfully miss out on being worshipped until the end of time."
"Well, that's your call. You do your thing and I'll do mine." Haggoth turned away from Q and started chatting up a different entity.
Beings of Power often irritated Q immensely, more than any mortal could possibly do. They *should* be superior to mortals, and so often, they weren't. He flashed out of the bar, no longer willing to endure beings of natures like his own being intolerably inane. If he wanted to deal with stupidity, he could go find some mortals to play with.
As an afterthought he checked up on Haggoth's planet. The Q had access to much more of a range of temporal perceptions than most entities, having bound themselves to a completely separate timeline, so Q could see much more of the future than Haggoth could. An ice age was coming. If his worshippers didn't manage to invent science, which generally resulted in putting gods aside entirely, or manage to flee to the northern tropics, which would almost certainly cause them to give up their concept of a dying harvest god... then they'd either all die, or adapt to perpetual winter. And if winter came and never ended, one of these days Haggoth was going to go to sleep and never wake up.
Q *could* warn the guy. But he wasn't going to.