>>5781519“Found you—OH!”
Henzler was frozen at first by the same sight you had been—that of the large, rather burly and heavyset woman, puffing upon her massive cigar. Her arms were tattooed with all manner of creature and with curious, almost orcish patterns; you’d have almost thought her to be of mixed-blood, like yourself but with the savage folk of the Orcwilds or Goblin Wastes, but her skin as was a pink as any local human, with nary a tusk or fang in sight, and no more hair than typical of a human (which, admitetdly,w as still more than an elf). The terrible scar down her face, exposing the teeth on one side and running up to a pale and milky eye, made her just as fearsome as any half-orc, however.
Your own attention, though, had eventually drifted from the human specimen and to that which she was selling: what she advertised as a ‘true, natural chimera’. You’d never heard of such a thing, despite being a STUDENT of Chimericism, but the story the scarred woman spun of her adventuring party slaying the creature’s parent and finding it nestled amongst a rocky outcropping to the southwest… Well, it was compelling, and the creature itself give truth to this tale.
“The lioness’ head was fierce, aye,” the woman had told you, “but the goat’s head was the worst of them, lashing to and fro, smashing stone with impact when it wasn’t smashing up our shields or shattering our spears and swords. And whenever you drew close, the snake would lash out to bite. We lost a good man to that.”
In the cage, the cub—or kid, or perhaps ‘hatchling’ was the right word, but the seller did not know if it was birthed live or came from an egg—was its massive parent in miniature: it bore a goat head upon one neck, and a lion’s head adjoining, though right now really more like a lamb and kitten, both mewling and sad; from its tail came the scaly visage of a snake, wakeful and watching, hissing at you and occasionally doing false-charges at the cage when you placed a finger inside to etst it.
“That… Shouldn’t be possible, surely?” Henzler asked, staring at it fixedly.
“No,” you agreed, and you looked shrewdly at the seller. “How do we know you didn’t make this thing yourself, or have a hedge-mage do so?”
The woman had just shrugged, admitting: “Maybe some mad mage made it. I’d have no inkling. I just know that we found a biggun, we smote it dead, and then we found this. No mage in sight, neither.”
“But… A chimera cannot breed,” Henzler had pointed out, still unable to look away from the tripartite denizen of the cage. “They are… There’s too many issues, with development. They need constant magical attention, for new offspring to be made, except in the most masterful and stable lineages.”
“Right,” you agreed, “like owlbears and griffins… And even then, a few generations without special care and the problems start emerging, and they usually go sterile.”
