There was nothing left in that area of space for him. Long, long ago, the man who had interested him for so, so long had died, and for a while he had drifted into despair. No-one understood, but how could they even begin? It wasn’t as though he could even dream of confiding in people of his kind in the first place. They were the least likely to understand. Talking with the lesser species was not an option. Pride was still important to him, and he couldn’t appear weak or unstable around the unworthy races. Besides, it would only serve to embarrass the Continuum, which would, almost definitely so, make things even worse. He found himself floating through the vast, unexciting universe, wishing for second chances. Wishing for missed opportunities to come around again. Hoping and dreaming in a disgustingly un-Q fashion for the clock to turn back so that he could say the unsaid, so that he could do the undone. Things he could easily grant himself with a thought, but couldn’t bring himself to. The human race went on evolving without his involvement, but even the miniscule advancements they kept on making weren’t enough to keep his interest.
It was almost human, the way he felt.
He couldn’t face it, either. Emotions rushed, they raced, they made things unimaginably difficult. For a Q, it was, to say the very least, embarrassing. The other members of the Continuum couldn’t ever comprehend his anguish, but they never did understand his fixations, his experiments, his plans. They were all content to simply exist, being omnipotent and knowing everything. Judging other species by their wonderfully high standards and never trying to find those little surprises, even in the insignificant lesser creatures that delighted him so much.
Just as they had, those wonderful, primitive little beings. Just like that one, so magniloquent, so brilliant. So very Jean-Luc Picard.
But Jean-Luc had long since passed away. Of course, there were others like him. But they weren’t him. Which… which… upset him. In a horribly unevolved way.
And that simply tormented him. That he was putting so much emotional investment into a creature so far beneath him. Yet he knew that wasn’t how he felt at all. And all he wanted was to forget. He had to, he knew he did… not just for the safety of the universe, not just because the Continuum would punish him severely if it all caused him to do something uncharacteristically stupid, but for his sanity, something that, even for a Q, was slipping away from him little by little every single Earth day.
And so he kept searching, rambling, hoping that perhaps there was something new in some untouched corner of space that the Continuum had missed somehow. Though it pained him to doubt his own thoroughness, he had to force himself to believe that there was, in fact, any little place that the Continuum had turned a blind eye to. There had to be something else out there. Though he had never been a fan of what the other races called ‘religion’… as he drifted far away from Federation space, he found himself begging the cosmos to guide him… because there just had to be something.
The longer he searched, the less likely it became. Goodness, how it made him ache! He felt things he could never describe in human terms – and would never have even dreamed of doing so – but if he had to find words… loss. Sorrow. Anguish. Despair.
Boredom.
It was probably a very lucky thing that he found the small, roundish, Earth-like planet when he did.
It was quite remarkable, actually, how much it reminded him of the planet that he had loved so much. It was what the Federation had called, if he remembered rightly (and he did, for he remembered everything) a Class M planet, with a stable environment and breathable air. For humans and other similar creatures, at any rate. There were large bodies of water and its sky appeared blue. There were clouds in similar formations to those from what felt like so long ago. There were lush green plants and tall, rocky mountains and all manner of oddly familiar things… and that was just what he could see on the planet’s surface from a distance. Examining the nearby stars and planets and other celestial bodies, it struck him just how much the entire galaxy looked the same as the one that Earth had existed in… Surely he hadn’t been travelling in circles for so long that humans had completely died out?
Oh, but what if he had? If this was Earth, and all of the humans had died out, or even worse! What if they’d colonised the rest of the universe? Oh, the Continuum would be furious…
“I’ll watch them!” he’d said many, many Earth years ago, eager to be doing something, anything at all after so many aeons of nothing-interesting. They’d made him promise, one of those things that couldn’t really be described in limited human vernacular but was well enough simplified with just one word. Promises in the Continuum were practically law. And since he now had no idea where his project had gone… Oh they’d all know in a matter of seconds. And then what? They’d banish him to some lonely moon… maybe encase him in stone… or maybe they’d make him mortal again and let the Calamarain finish him off for good. And this time there was no Enterprise to seek asylum on.
Shaking off the thought, he began to study the planet closer…
It was fast becoming a marvellous distraction.
It was so much like the tiny blue marble of a planet that had housed the ever-growing human race, and the more he studied it, the more coincidences he noticed. The more he noticed those, the less they seemed like actual coincidences. It was far too similar for that.
There were no humans as far as he could see, but there were other creatures. Things read about in ancient Earth mythologies and things seen in human literature, in their by-then-defunct television shows, in mythology, even! It was uncanny, really, how closely they matched what humans had written about and gathered around campfires to gab about. There were dragons, there were sea serpents, there were manticores and hydras and all manner of interesting things! Impossible beings – for the human imagination; for a Q anything was possible – roamed the lands and fought with one another savagely, but their battles were so fascinating and new and the sheer power that radiated from it all was immense! Oh, if Jean-Luc could see it…
For a moment, the joy he felt in his discovery vanished and he started thinking about why he was even here in the first place. The terrible human habit of learning had apparently rubbed off on him, only now he couldn’t share his discoveries with the reluctant captain. No longer could he appear by the man’s side as he commanded his crew to hit some ridiculously high warp speed or go to some colour of alert and cause havoc aboard the Enterprise. There wasn’t an Enterprise any more as far as he knew. And he knew for certain, having held the lifeless form in his constructed human arms, that there was no longer a Jean-Luc Picard.
He had to try to let it go. A Q in despair was not safe for anyone, most especially not itself. He had thought he’d learned that lesson long ago when he’d thrown a mini-fit in his youth and caused an entire thread of existence to end up tied in one gigantic knot. Oh, the anomalies that had caused.
Drifting in closer to the planet, he tried to push the memories away. This… this wasn’t healthy, and he knew it. And it was so very un-Q. Thinking about one mortal for this length of time – for what felt like aeons. The Continuum would laugh him out of their plane of existence. So he did not have much of a choice.
He forced himself to continue, but it was still ever so strange. How very similar it was to Earth. What was even more interesting than that, however, was, despite the dragons and the manticores and all of the other spectacular creatures, what appeared to be the most powerful species.
Ponies.
Magical, talking ponies, in many colours, some with powers like his own. They interacted much like humans. They had human speech but retained much of their own equine body language. Humans were much more evolved than he had ever realised, if these creatures, strong and graceful, shared some of their traits. Ah, but these things were much, much more powerful. They all had some form of “magic”, some less than others but it was more than even dear Jean-Luc could ever have hoped to attain. If he could have smiled in his Q form, he would have been positively grinning.
This could be… my new project.
There was still just one problem with his new project. He still had no idea which species was the dominant one. Whichever one it was would surely be the one to watch over and assess, but each creature was just as interesting as the next, many of them having some kind of power. Oh, and they battled each other so fiercely, too. Perhaps he should have watched and waited until their wars were over to see who came out on top. It wasn’t as though a couple of hundred years was really such a long time to wait. Instead, he took it upon himself to skim over their mythology. One particular creature really stood out to him, as it was made up of nearly every single animal that was capable of speech at the very least.
It was called, rather unfairly to the other things it was made up of, a draconequus. But then, he supposed that creatures of a similar limited vocabulary to humans would have been unable to come up with a name that fairly represented each animal the beast was made up of. And if dragons and ponies were the two most dominant species on this tiny blue planet, then it was really only within their nature to selfishly put their own names onto such a magnificent creature.
This was the animal he had to present himself as. How else could he hope to be taken seriously by every species? This way they would understand that he had done his research – and that he was a much more powerful being than they could ever begin to comprehend.
Now he was ready, with the past behind him. With a flash of bright white light and an audible snap, he materialised inside the biggest, most populated landmark he had found. There was a collective gasp, and in his new form, he couldn’t help but smirk.
“Drop your weapons,” he ordered the crowd, assuming they would all have weapons of some kind other than the powers they possessed. “I have come to study your kind. Rest assured that any attempt to stop me will result in black marks against your very existence.”
