The Feather is Mightier...
By Lishesque
Part 3
Everybody stared.
"Hey, why did she get a nice thwock sound when I only got a splat?" The Doctor pouted.
"Because she's Q, and she's prettier than you," came a voice from somewhere.
"Oh." said the Doctor, "Who was that?"
"The author. She talks sometimes."
"Oh."
Q was looking very displeased, and on the verge of throwing a tantrum.
"What's wrong babe?" Tom asked, checking Q out.
"Well, apart from the fact that I've just lost all my powers as an omnipotent being," drawled Q sarcastically, "MY BIKE HAS NOW GOT A DENT IN IT." The last part was directed at the author, who Q blamed for the large dent that could be seen on her beloved bike.
The author cringed and shrank down into her seat. Sorry. I didn't mean to. Really, I'm really really sorry. I could make it up to you, I could. I—
Someone poked the author.
Ouch.
"Get back to the story."
Yes Ma'am.
Anyway. Q, the Doctor and a dented motorbike were on the table, much to everyone's surprise.
Q, having recovered from the shock of falling on someone's table and seeing her bike dented (not to mention losing her omnipotence) was very, very pissed off. She stood up, jumped off the table and prodded B'Elanna in the chest.
"Give me back my powers, damnit."
"Disenchant the scroll first," retorted B'Elanna.
Q rolled her eyes. "I can't disenchant the scroll without my powers, and besides, even if I could, I wouldn't… because if I did, you wouldn't be able to give me my powers back."
She had considered adding a "like, duh!" at the end of that but decided it was taking the Aphrodite role a bit too far.
B'Elanna did not like the "I am Q and therefore superior to you" tone and was about to tackle Q to the ground and wrestle the beautiful woman for an hour or two when she was rudely interrupted.
Tom, who had been left to one side and was feeling decidedly unappreciated, decided that it was time for a rousing rendition of his latest song. Grabbing one of Neelix's pots from god knows where, he began to sing while beating out a rhythm of sorts on the pot.
"Tommy the mighty (bang), he's very tidy (bang)…"
"Uh Tom… You really don't need to sing that at the moment."
"Everyone admires him (bangbang), he's so handsome it's a (bang) sin!"
"Really Tom, it's quite all right. We'll be fine without your--"
"Whenever (bang) things get grim, he'll take it on the chin. (bangbang)"
"Tom!"
"If you're in (bangbangbang) jeopardy, don't call the cavalry – there's a better (bang) remedy… although he doesn't come for free (bang). He's every man's trustee (bangbang), he's every woman's fantasy…" At this, he waggled his eyebrows suggestively at Q. "Plus he's good company…"
"Tom!!!"
"HE'S TOMMY (bang), TOMMY THE MIGHTY!! (bangbangbangbangbangbang)."
Tom finished his song and found a ring of angry glares directed at him.
"What?"
B'Elanna answered his question by snatching Neelix's pot from him and hitting him over the head with it. Unfortunately for Tom, the pot seemed to fit his head a little too well and he couldn't get it off.
"What'd you do that for?" Tom's muffled but sulky voice could be heard from under the pot.
"Consider it a favor to everyone." B'Elanna said, "Since people won't have to look at your ugly green, spotty face anymore."
"You were the one who put it there."
"No, I just made it green and spotty. It's always been that ugly."
"Hey, stop squabbling already. I need my powers back."
B'Elanna glared at Q. "Did you enchant this thing?" she demanded, thrusting the scroll forward and accidentally smacking Tom with it.
"Erm. Yes."
"Why?"
"Because I'm Q… and it's what I do. I just wanted to see some fun." Q pouted.
B'Elanna sighed and muttered something that sounded like "KahlessthisQishot...um, I mean, serves you right that you lost your powers."
"Look, just give me back my powers-- then I can fix the dent in my bike! …and unzap the scroll, of course."
The Doctor looked up suddenly. "No, no. Write mine back in first. I've just made a highly important discovery: being human is overrated. I'm bored with poking myself."
Silence descended on the room. Someone muttered, "Did he just say what I think he said?"
A few people snickered, while some looked vaguely confused. B'Elanna just shook her head. "No poking jokes! Honestly, get your minds out of the gutter people!"
"It would be more logical to restore Q first," Tuvok suggested. "If she can fix the scroll, then perhaps everything will go back to default."
"That makes sense," B'Elanna said, and she swore that Tuvok mentally rolled his eyes in a "well of course, I always make sense" kind of way.
"Okay. Um… 'Q was as she was before,'" B'Elanna recited aloud as she wrote.
The woman next to her (and the bike) disappeared in a puff of smoke and everybody stared in amazement.
"Hey, it worked."
Then they heard a loud whistling noise that sounded as if a bomb was going to fall on them, from somewhere high up. The pitch became lower and lower and lower… until a shiny, blue, slightly dented bike landed on the table with a loud clang, earning itself another big dent.
A moment later, Q fell out of the air above the dented vehicle, bounced off if it, bounced off the table, and landed in a heap on the floor with her hair all messed up.
She sighed.
"She is as she was before," Tuvok said approvingly, "It is all in the wording." He liked the scroll's logic.
"Okay, what if we fill up the scroll completely?" asked B'Elanna.
"Once you run out of room, that's it," Q said, looking glumly at her dented bike, "Everything just stays the way it was when you wrote it." She picked herself up from the floor and dusted off her tight leather pants.
Tom, who had been following the conversation as well as he could from beneath the pot (which wasn't very well), spoke up. "Look, just write, 'Everything was as it was before.'"
Q raised an eyebrow at the potted head. "Then we'll go back to our baby cribs, and you'll go back under your rock." She turned to B'Elanna. "Did you write him here?"
"Not exactly, I--"
"Ah-- 'B'Elanna awoke with a Jerk,'" The Doctor read aloud from the scroll.
Q giggled.
"I don't get it. What's so funny about waking up?" Tom's muffled and slightly peeved voice asked from inside the pot.
Not so long ago, in a galaxy not too far away, there lived a Starfleet Captain and an ex-drone with extremely large heels. They lived on a quiet little planet, full of lakes, rivers and seas, which were, in turn, full of fish. Okay, so they didn't live there. They were there on vacation, actually, and they were fishing. Or rather, the ex-drone with the large heels was fishing, and the Captain was going mad from coffee-deprivation.
"Seven, can we please, please, pretty please, go back to Voyager?"
"No, we may not. First, I must catch the Yellow-bellied Spotted Herring-like Fish – an extremely rare species of fresh water fish, found only in this quadrant, on this planet, in this particular lake."
"Well, can I borrow your heels again, then?"
"Of course," replied Seven, and stepped out of her ultra-high heels. Janeway immediately pounced on them.
"What should I name this fish?"
"You mean 'Yellow-balled Spotty Earring-like Fish' isn't its name?" The Captain asked distractedly. Her attention was fixed on the pair of heels, which were clasped to her breast.
"No." Seven pondered. "I think I shall name it, 'Haysev belanerus.'" She stated this with a self-satisfied smile, and promptly returned to her fishing.
B'Elanna sat on the edge of the conference table. "I have to deconstruct the story, starting from the beginning-- which means I have to bring Seven back, first."
"Okay, how about… Seven of Nine saunters in, with no clothes…" The Doctor suggested. He seemed to have lost a little tact, some wit and a great deal of common sense in becoming a human being.
"Writing 'Seven of Nine' could make any Borg drone named 'Seven of Nine' appear," cautioned Tuvok.
"And writing Annika Hansen might make a six year old from the past show up," Q added. She liked little girls, but she didn't like little girls like that. And besides, she wanted to see the real, adult Seven, with real, adult-sized brea-- erm, she wanted to see Seven in person, I mean.
"Why don't we describe her?" Tom had finally removed the pot from his head, and joined in the conversation.
"'Suddenly-- there was the arrival of the woman--'" B'Elanna paused.
"Biosuit, mention the biosuit," The Doctor piped up.
"'--wearing a biosuit-- and, um-- blonde hair -- with er… a cortical node?'"
"Wait, does anybody really know what a cortical node is?" Tom asked. "And does the scroll know it?"
B'Elanna stopped. "Well, what's something that's unique to Seven, apart from her being part Borg?"
Tom's eyes brightened. "Ooh, I know. Her big h—" He broke off, seeing the very sharp daggers being projected at him from B'Elanna's eyes.
"Her big h--?" Tuvok, raised his eyebrow.
"Um." Tom tried desperately to think of something that would save him from the half-Klingon's wrath. "Her big…h…h…heels?"
"Why, that's the best idea you've had all day, Tom." B'Elanna clapped him on the shoulder, making him stagger. "Nobody on this ship has bigger heels than Seven."
Next to Tom, Chakotay nudged him and asked "Hey, what were you going to say instead of heels?"
"Hoohoos," Tom whispered back, looking fearfully in the chief engineer's direction.
Luckily for Tom, B'Elanna was not paying attention to them because she had rolled open the scroll once more. She dabbed the end of the quill in her mouth, thought for a moment, and then wrote:
The woman with the large heels of Seven of Nine, who is a part of Voyager's crew, appeared.
Whoosh.
Seven blinked at the spot where Janeway had been sitting just a moment before. Then she shrugged and turned back to her fishing. She idly wondered why she had ever thought fishing irrelevant in the past. Then she dismissed that thought as entirely irrelevant, and went back to the only relevant thing: fishing. She was currently fishing for her dinner: the rare and very tasty species Juliwenchus hodearus…
Janeway materialized, each hand clutching one of Seven's shoes.
"Captain!" A surprised chorus of voices rang out.
The Captain had a funny sort of expression her face, as if she'd been caught doing something that she shouldn't have been doing. "Um. Hello everyone."
"Captain, why do you have Seven's shoes in your hands?" Tuvok enquired.
"Erm…" Janeway said.
The Doctor coughed and looked slightly guilty.
Q smirked and said nothing.
"Captain?"
Everyone else was waiting for an answer.
"I well um… ahem… I uh… well… uh…" was all that Janeway could manage, so everybody turned to the leather-clad woman for an explanation.
Q just grinned and turned to the Doctor, who looked terribly embarrassed. He mumbled something, which nobody could understand, so he mumbled it again. This time, B'Elanna managed to catch something along the lines of "captainfeetbribecoffeeheelssevenalcovelick."
"What???" B'Elanna burst out. "You've gotta be kidding me."
The Doctor shook his head.
"Are you seriously telling me that Janeway bribed you to make Seven's heels coffee flavored because she has a serious thing for Seven; that she has an even more serious thing for coffee; that she has a foot fetish, and that furthermore, she has been in Seven's alcove licking Seven's feet whenever Seven regenerates?"
Everyone looked to Q again, who gravely confirmed it. "It's true."
"Oh Kahless."
B'Elanna looked as if she was going to be ill. Even Chakotay winced, although half the people there later swore that he had done so without moving a single facial muscle.
After many minutes of wincing, retching and comments like "man, that's sick", B'Elanna and the others managed to regain control of their stomachs enough to ask another question.
"So… where's Seven?"
"She's fishing," Janeway managed, and rushed out of the room for a cup of coffee. Seven's shoes were still clutched tightly in her hands.
Having finished eating the Juliwenchus Hodearii she had caught for dinner (they had indeed been very tasty), Seven decided to try for one or two of the Neon Green, Purple Polka-dotted Dragon-shaped Japanese Carp-like fish (also known as Ryuchan carolatris). Much to her dismay, however, she had run out of bait. Discarding her fishing line, she resolved to do it the old fashioned way:
Assimilation. <insert dramatic music>
For a moment, she considered stripping off her biosuit and jumping in the lake with assimilation tubules extended, but she changed her mind at the last nanosecond -- a large splash might scare off all the fish. Instead, she lay down by the riverbank with her hand dangling in the water, and waited for a bite. And in the mean time, she could count all the fish that were stacked up nearby:
One… two… three… four… five… six… seven…
Q ran her fingers through her hair for the fifth time, trying to push it into some form of tidiness. It wasn't working. "Why won't it stay right? Basic hair-care wasn't such a drag as an omnipotent being." She scowled.
Tom sidled up to her. "I think it looks good on ya." He winked.
Q didn't bother to reply. Instead she adjusted her leathers, which seemed a little too small for her, now that she thought about it. "And tight leather pants were never this tight before."
"Ah, get off it," the Doctor grouched, "at least you aren't balding. I never knew how terribly unflattering it was as a hologram."
B'Elanna was sick of hearing the others' incessant grumbling and stood up. "I'm going to check on Engineering," she announced abruptly, and left.
Tuvok decided to get some rest, and the Doctor went off to find Janeway. He figured that a Captain who had been deprived of coffee so recently was not the safest thing, and decided that he should give her a good dose of caffeine before she traumatized too many ensigns. Q patted her bike goodbye before following Tuvok and the Doctor out of the room. Unfortunately, none of them noticed the scroll that had been left lying on B'Elanna's chair. A scroll, left all alone, in a room with Tom and Chakotay. If any of them had spoken Scrollish, they would have heard it scream blue murder.
"Nooooooooooooooooo! Dooon't leeeaave meeeeeeeee."
"Two thousand eight hundred and twenty three… two thousand eight hundred and twenty four… two thousand eight hundred and twenty five…" Seven continued counting.
The scroll lay on the table, trembling, as footsteps came closer… and closer… <step… step… step…
This was The End, the scroll thought – It was All Over. And it sadly wondered if it had been a good scroll during its short (but productive) life… and whether there was such a thing as scroll heaven.
The footsteps drew nearer. The scroll squeezed its little scroll-eyes shut and hoped The End would be a quick one.