sixthiterationlogs | (no subject)

WHO: Oliver Queen
WHERE: along the river in 6I
WHEN: 3 November, afternoon
OPEN TO: All
WARNINGS: TBD

When Oliver was younger, his parents used to refer to this as snow weather. It's just a little above freezing, from what he can tell and there's clouds low and heavy in the sky. It's getting darker earlier in the day; by his reckoning, there's only about eight good hours of sunlight now and there's not much of it to speak of. It reminds him a little bit of home, if Star City were in the middle of the pristine wilderness instead of an industrialized and globalized city.

He's not running today. Instead, he's walking along the river, trying to skip stones across it like he had as a kid. It was good luck to get one all the way across and he remembers his father being really successful at it almost all of the time and Oliver himself failing miserably about 90% of the time. Later, when he'd gotten older, it'd been him teaching Thea how to do the same thing. The stones along the river here are flat and smooth, just right for getting them to skid across the surface.

His first attempt isn't so great. It skips for a moment and sinks down to the bottom with a plop and a splash. His next is better, though, and it skips about halfway across the river before it falls beneath the water. There's a scientific principle to it, he's sure, but that's not what he's interested in right now. Right now, he's wondering what's going on in his city, what he's not able to prevent because he's stuck here.

Oliver closes a hand tight around a stone and curses beneath his breath, frustrated by his impotence in this place. This place holds him here just as much as it holds everyone else and no matter what he's done and what he's capable of, he's held by the same strange power that keeps them all trapped here. He's no better or worse than anyone else. Maybe he has a little edge on some of those who've never had to survive outdoors before but that's it. That's his only advantage in the world.

"Looks like I've turned into just one more madman railing at the sky," he says, frowning deeply. The heavy clouds don't respond.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

"Q? I'm not sure I know who that is."

Oliver has had his fair share of villains who use pseudonyms. Nobody wants to attach their real name to clandestine and vigilante activities, be they good or bad, and so he's had run ins with some creatively-named characters. Still, he doesn't recall anyone using the moniker of Q before and wonders if this is someone in the village that he just hasn't met or if it's someone only Picard knows.

"I can't say I'm surprised," Jean-Luc answers with a shrug. "He's... an entity, I suppose the best word would be, from home. A trickster who at least claims to be omniscient and omnipotent."

Mostly though, Q is an annoyance, regardless of when he should happen to turn up. Which is about equal parts the frustration of him derailing whatever else they'd been intending to do at the time and the fact that for whatever reason Q seems to have chosen him specifically as a target for the lion's share of whatever mayhem he happens to have in mind. Which certainly makes it more likely that he might be involved here as well, much though Picard has been generally doing his best to ignore that fact.

"A trickster? Sounds like some people I've run into before." Some of the enemies he'd come across in Star City had been more determined to sow madness and discord than to actually do direct harm. It was no less disconcerting from his perspective but the motivations behind their actions, at least, were a little less easy to interpret than a pure criminal.

"Do you have reason to believe he's actually omniscient and omnipotent? Or is that a baseless claim on his part?"

"I'm not certain about the omniscient part."

He'll admit that Q certainly claims to be. And generally behaves himself as if he is. But that's not a concrete guarantee either - he could simply be bluffing. Or, possibly, reading people's minds and he's never really cared enough to actually ask Q about the finer points of how his abilities work.

To say nothing about the fact that he's not entirely certain that Q would be willing to offer a straight answer.

"However, over the course of our... encounters with him, I've seen him freeze people in time, restore the sight of a man who'd been blind since birth with little more than a thought, grant an android a moment of genuine emotion, and throw myself and several other members of my crew into what would best be called fully realized alternate realities. If he isn't genuinely omnipotent, then he most certainly has powers beyond those which you or I could only dream at."

That kind of power sounds like it could go south in a second and it concerns Oliver. If it's this Q, at least Jean-Luc is familiar with him, but they're kind of at a disadvantage with no metas here and no weapons to fight back. It's a bad situation all around. He's concerned but he tries not to show it.

"I hope it's not him. I can't imagine us trying to stage some kind of resistance against someone like that when we have no powers and no weapons. We'd fail, no matter what we tried."

It absolutely is that sort of power. Enough so that he's been lucky that Q has only really seemed to be inclined to make his life more inconvenient. Or to drag him into trouble, sometimes, but either way, he and the Federation are both incredibly luck that neither Q nor the rest of his kind are particularly warlike.

"Against his powers alone, yes. But Q has always taken after the tricksters of Earth legend. Physically, we're no match for him. But defeating him - or getting him to consider one of his 'games' won - isn't necessarily about defeating Q himself."

He won't deny that it's almost exclusively frustrating, regardless. But there is still that way out, for all that it might not be the easiest to see at first.