Second Life -- The Monsters Are due On Maple Street [Stage 3]
They had all changed back. They had their memories again, although they still remember most of their fake lives, but those memories now seemed as hazy and false as they were
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There was a slow clap.
"Bravo! Marvelous! This was the pièce de résistance of this prosiac little small-town drama!"
It was a man, in a red Starfleet uniform, a man that had shown up once before, back when Picard was captain. Some of them might have seen him then. Others had never seen him before.
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"One of those what's real in one world is fictional in another things. He's a recurring character in a TV show on my world. What just happened is basically his entire schtick, except he usually just annoys members of Starfleet."
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Q blipped away and reappeared closer to Kang, now holding a container of popcorn.
"I admit, I did have a something of a wager resting on this entire fiasco, and it certainly was a popcorn-cruncher watching you all wallow in mundane misery, but I'm not the one responsible for this."
He turned to the frozen mayor.
"Am I, Q?"
Q popped a kernel of popcorn in his mouth.
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"You can never have too many gods using you mortals as playthings," he spoke up, casually walking through the crowd of meatshippers and towards Q. "Why do you think we even allow you to exist?"
They were his toys, if nothing else. And turning his attention away from them and towards Q, he kept walking
"You always interrupt at the best parts. I this close to starting a riot. Two more minutes, and this place would have torn itself apart under the weight of its own self-righteousness and stupidity."
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"I interrupted nothing. Certain parameters had to be met either way, and they were. You wagered that the townspeople would tear them apart or turn them over to the authorities for horrific treatment. All the lovely people of Fairplay."
Q blipped over to Felicia and gestured, briefly eying her chest with raised eyebrows, before looking back to the other Q.
"Clearly, that didn't happen."
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It was all in letting the dominoes fall, really.
"This species is good for that. They can spout off about being tolerant of others difference, so long as those differences are something they can willfully ignore. Once those differences are thrown in their faces, however... well, you've mucked around with these monkeys enough times to know how they'll react."
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Q blipped closer.
"You also wagered that they'd break under the yoke of their mundane, oppressive lives and most likely be driven to suicide, murder, psychosis, or minimally, general depression. I know, I know it's difficult to admit defeat, but--" There was a pout. "--no one likes a sore loser."
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He had to sigh, though, as Q did have a point about them not being broken by this reality. "You'd think that going from lives that were so interesting, to ones that were so dull and empty and dreadfully boring, they'd fling themselves off the tallest building they could find."
He popped over next to Fate, and put his arm around. "I mean you, the little lesbian, buried so deep in the closet it would take your beloved years to dig you out. You were miserable and lonely and hurting... Why didn't you just hang yourself?" Without waiting for an answer, he popped over to Hiccup. "Your mother ignored you. Your father didn't, but you wish he did, considering he did nothing but remind you of what a waste of oxygen you were. You even had Linkin Park CD's, slitting your wrists wouldn't have been that hard. Kind of messy, but you wouldn't have had to clean it up anyway." Moving away, he popped up in front of Jaime. "Then there's you, the biggest let down of all. All you had to do was stand on ( ... )
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Do you concede defeat or not?
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He shook his head. "I can't even look at them," he stated. "I am a God. I am omnipotent, and being the presence of such flagrant imperfection, I just... I can't -- I can't!"
He turned his back to the crew, and took a second to collect himself. He reached in his pocket and pulled out a five dollar bill. It wasn't actually a five dollar bill, it was some abstract Q thing that their puny minds interpreted as a five dollar bill. Not that it mattered, it obviously wasn't worth very much to either of them.
"Next time, we go double or nothing."
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And then, he remembered a very important thing, something that the recent events, and back and forth between the two beings had distracted him from. "...our original mission was to make contact with someone, see if we could get them to ally with us. It's one of you, isn't it?"
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"It was his little game at the start, not mine. He sent the false intel and created the construct around the star to draw you in. I just showed up and convinced him to make it more interesting than his original plan--which, incidentally, was destroying you all. Creatively."
Q snapped his fingers and they would all find their memories returning, of the mission briefing, of landing on the construct, and fanning out, of there suddenly being a flash as they were taken--
"The portal is a false one, by the way, so you're fortunate that you didn't jump through. You would have been destroyed. It was to give you the illusion of the option of running away so you had to choose to trust the rest of these neanderthals. As for what happens now..."
He blips over and leaned on Jerry Stenson.
"Everything will go back to what it was before you arrived. They'll never remember you even existed."
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"Is all you care about... yourself?" He placed his hands over his chest. Somewhere in the background, the other Q pinched the bridge of his nose in quiet exasperation.
"Do you not see me here, distressed? I am a God and I am distressed!! And you want to know about your mission and your families here and-- ugh!" Diva Q stopped his rant and looked over at the other Q, who fixed him a fake sympathetic look, one that he had worn countless times before, and would likely wear countless times again. "How could they be so selfish? Do they just not know how badly they let me down? Do they not care what miserable failures they were? Do they not realize that they failed to meet a single one of my expectations for them? Do they ( ... )
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