Well, here I am again, after a hiatus of a year by your time or several thousand by mine, but who's counting?

As I look around this place, I realize I don't recognize any of you. Superb! Variety is the spice of life, especially when your life is as long and tedious as mine. Of course, most of you will prove not to be worth my time anyway, but perhaps I'll find a few of you worthy of having a conversation with.

But I suppose this means I need to introduce myself again... (sigh) Why can't you all just be as omniscient as I am, so I never have to do this again?

I am Q, of the Q Continuum. I'm immortal, mostly invulnerable, as nearly omnipotent as you're ever likely to meet... and usually bored out of my mind. This place provided some entertainment, once upon a time; I can only hope it can do so again.

Write about the word "Impossible".

Impossible is not in my vocabulary. Okay, technically it is, since I know everything.

Impossible?

Excuse me, you must be talking to someone else.

I am a Q. My species is immortal (mostly), omnipresent (on a technicality, at least), and omnipotent (nearly). There is nothing that is impossible for us... just things that our fellow Q don't want us to do, things our own morality suggests might be a bad idea to do, and things we haven't quite figured out how to do yet.

Up until very recently, my people considered it impossible to reproduce in the traditional mortal fashion - that is, for two Q to combine "genetic" material to create a new being, who would start out as an infant and grow in power and ability over time. We'd never needed reproduction - all of us had either been involved in the creation of the Continuum, and therefore had been translated from mortal beings into the immortal, ineffable entities we are today, or had been created full-blown as adolescents by those early pioneers, in order to help out around the house. For billions of years we hadn't bothered to actually create any new Q; we occasionally invited a mortal to be translated into one of our number, but that's not reproduction, that's assimilation.

But two old friends of mine had the brilliant idea of reproducing a new Q from scratch by taking mortal bodies and having a kid with them. And then, after their antics upset the Continuum so badly that they were executed and events were triggered which eventually led to civil war, I upped the ante by figuring out how to reproduce a new Q *as* a Q, without the intermediary of a mortal form. I am thus the sometimes-proud-but-more-often-pissed-off daddy of the only Q ever to be born as an infant within the Continuum.

So see? Nothing is impossible. You just have to figure out how to do it. Oh, and then live with the consequences of what you've done for the rest of eternity.


Notes: This is a sequel to my story "Q & A" here on fanfiction dot net. The original was posted to livejournal under the account "qcontinuum"; most of it consisted of answering questions from the site Theatrical Muse, in character as Q, although the in-story justification is that Q found some sort of multidimensional nexus of questions and decided to start showing up and answering them because he was bored. As the story was originally written, it was a hypertext story, where there were a large number of linkbacks to previous sections; ff dot net might still be stripping links, so if they do, "created full-blown as adolescents" refers to chp. 32 of the previous story, "taking mortal bodies and having a kid with them" chp. 42, "sometimes-proud" chp. 33, "pissed-off" chp 31. I set the links to go to ff's own copies because if I were programming anti-spam de-HTML I would allow references to the site I'm actually posting to on the grounds that presumably if I had spammed it, administrators could take down my spam an cancel my account, so there ought to be very little spam actually posted as stories to ff net, but I've been with these guys since 1999 and i've known them to throw babies out with the bathwater for years, so I don't know if they actually allow internal references either.

"Q & A" takes place when Junior is still a small child, but after the pro novel "I, Q". This sequel takes place after the Voyager episode "Q2", at some unspecified point in Q's life.

I am rating this story T but since some of my posts on livejournal were posts to erotic prompt sites, some of which I think were really funny, I may do a side M-rated story for the erotica prompts.

Regarding pairings: Q's not monogamous. He will actually explain this to you ad nauseam, because he finds the idea of monogamy morally offensive. That's not me, that's him. He's also omnisexual and panspecial (John de Lancie referred to it as bispecial, meaning love for two species, but I can't see Q limiting himself to just humans and Q), so if you're offended by the notion of genderless energy beings having the hots for male humans I have no idea why you are reading this. So there are references to Picard/Q, Janeway/Q, Q/Amanda Rogers, Q/Suzy Q, and well pretty much anyone else Q is interested in that he can talk into bed or wishes he could. Also, for all 2 of you who are also fans of Suzy-Q, like I am... Q is still mad at her, but Q is not a reliable narrator. If you want to know what I think about Suzy-Q and her relationship with Q and their son, my stories "Hurt The Ones You Love", "Tainted", "Mistress of War", "Mother Q", "The Descent of the War Goddess", "Four Times Q Faced The Apocalypse", and "A Tale of Two Q" are either Suzy-Q POV or Suzy-Q centric. Q's opinion of his ex is... well, let's just say he's biased. She is not actually a total bitch. Well, no, actually she is, but she has her reasons and besides, Q's an asshole, so they were well matched and they still would be if Suzy-Q and Junior could kiss and make up, which they are both too stubborn to do, yet.