alara_archive

And Justice for Q: John Berger. Q shows up on the Enterprise, Picard actually manages to take him captive with force fields and technobabble, and the Federation puts him on trial for exposing humanity to the Borg. The Continuum think this is hilarious, and agree to enforce whatever sentence the Federation enacts, as long as Q is permitted to choose anyone from all time and space to be his lawyer. Q picks Kirk. Rated PG (no sex, no bad language, no violence).

I absolutely love this story. Many fan writers try to pull off some sort of situation where technology can be used to contain Q in some way; few manage it, and few do anything interesting with it once it's done. This was a very nice handling of the concept. I liked the use of Kirk and I liked the arguments presented. Since I myself am of the opinion that Enterprise has made canon that the Borg were on their way anyway, and TNG strongly implied it in the first place, I was at first afraid that the writer would completely ignore the fact that Q prepared the Federation for an invasion that was coming anyway... but no, that's a plot point. Very well done. Also, pretty funny in places.

StarCrossed Stravo. (Incomplete, but huge.) Like many Star Wars/Star Trek crossovers, this uses Q as one of a large cast of characters, but it does some very interesting stuff with him. It's the only fic I've ever seen to *both* use the fanon that Q was Trelane, *and* acknowledge that Q is a lot older and more mature than Trelane, *and* treat Q as a sympathetic, even heroic, character. The universe is ending, a result of humans engaging in too much time travel. Gary Mitchell and Q are playing a game involving throwing the Star Wars characters, the Classic Trek Enterprise, and the NX-01 together into the TNG/VOY era. Gary's motive is primarily to torment Kirk and secondarily to make so much chaos it will be impossible for anyone to save the universe; Q's motive, though he pretends to Gary that he's more disinterested than he is, is to save humanity and the universe.

Has good roles for Wesley Crusher and Charlie Evans; for some reason, though, no female Trek superpowered allies show up. Some of the stuff with Janeway is a little weird. The Star Wars stuff goes heavily AU with a Luke who's on the Dark Side, allied with Vader, when the story begins. Not great for P/Q fans, since I don't think Q and Picard even interact with each other; mostly Q deals with Kirk, Janeway, and Gary, and occasionally the rest of the omnipotent community. This is *very* long and has a metric buttload of characters. Sadly, he hasn't finished it yet, but who am I to talk? Rated PG-13, I think (I could be wrong... the damn thing's huge, so I may have missed a sex scene.) No sex, possible bad language, violence but nothing like explicit torture.