And when you close your eyes, you experience, just for a moment, a feeling of being everywhere. You're at the heart of a sun, and lifted on the winds of a supernova. You're standing in the center of a plasma storm. You see with a thousand eyes and feel matter and gravity at your fingertips. You laze back on a quark, and breathe in the sharp cold vacuum of space, walk the boards of a sentient starship made of light, and place a spark into the belly of an active volcano. In the darkness you lean in and exhale, and a cloud of dust stirs and sparkles, throwing dazzling light in every direction, and a new star swirls into life at the heart of it all. But all of this is a thought, a moment, confusing and short lived, and everything goes dark--because he knows you're there.

A crash of purple lightning rips across the darkness, which has become - now  - a storm rippled sky. End to end, it snaps and forks, and comes around full circle, casting shadows through the columns of the Grecian temple in which you've found yourself. Somehow it remains illuminated even when the lightning is gone. The smell of ozone hangs pungent, strong enough to taste on the tip of your tongue, a prelude to a downpour, and yet the storm is broken into a circular field of stars directly above, like a wishing pool so clear that it almost looks as though were you to breathe too hard, you might disturb some unfathomable surface into ripples. A single lone figure in robes of red and black sits on a high pedestal, in a glimmering throne, positioned so as to loom over the empty room. In shadow he sits, his face at first obscured.

This is his dream and he has absolute control of it. Enter at your own risk.

Five white, dazzling spotlights cast identical glare down on the single spot in which you stand, and an echoing, authoritative voice - Q's - calls out, loud and terrifying as a roar of thunder.

"Identify yourself and face judgement!"

Just can't get rid of me, can you? Today I felt - quite out of the blue - completely overwhelmed with the desire to introduce you, my fair friends, to the Q Continuum, a place that I have called home since before the idea of such a thing was even conceived. Now suffice is to say that a duller place has never existed, but there is none the less a warm coal burning among the chilly cockles of my saltwater heart for those familiar shores.

I already distributed my pamphlets over what I could of the city, but just in case you didn't arrive upon one, I thought I should share the bounty of my activities with those less fortunate. Suffice is to say that creativity among the Q has been extinct for some time, and it would be a shame to waste the fruits of my labor.

Linked over here like woah.

Your thanks and wholehearted appreciation is unnecessary. I can only hope to have enlightened you poor creatures to the existence of something far greater than yourselves.

[ Functioning. It applies to both his own body, and the communications device, but sadly not his powers. He'd worn himself out trying to zap himself back out of this miserable existence, and now Q was suffering--suffering from a bruised ego, a sore head, and - perhaps most unfairly - a grazed knee. Mortal, but not not Q. Trapped, but not wholly aware how. And the ticking of the clock is making his headache worse. A most disagreeable state of affairs. And now here's his face, at first much too close to the camera, and then withdrawn to a more reasonable distance, revealing Voyager era command red, and four pips at his collar. Not for a moment does his scowl subside. ]

Oh, I'm sure you think you're very clever. Do you have any idea who I am? You'd be well advised to send me back where I came from immediately. Otherwise--well, I can't be held responsible for what might happen. [ Not from him. Oh, no. But the Continuum might have something to say about it. Or his family. At least he hadn't actually fallen into the fountain. He'd come close, but with at least some small part of his once magnificent power available, he'd saved himself the splash at the last second. He leans back, inspects the fingernails of his left hand disinterestedly. ]

Well? Hurry up. I haven't got all day. I'm getting bored.


[ ooc: I'll tag this right up when I'm 100% sure what Q's tag is, thank you for bearing with me! ]