28 | July | 2017 | Alder's Grove Fiction

It was Dan’s idea to call it Chimera-Con, a fact which he would never after be allowed to live down.

Their little city wasn’t really big enough for real conventions, so the comic convention, the anime convention, and the furry convention had joined together into one, as Dan put it, three-headed fire-breathing monster of a convention.

Cute. Clever. And it drew enough attention that they actually got some decent guests of honor.

Hadley Storm was a well-known urban fantasy author, the sort of thing that everyone read for a couple years early in college. Nobody had expected her to show up.

Them, maybe. It turned out there was a reason Hadley didn’t do too many cons, and the main reason was that Hadley had a chimera-split personality: that is, there were three people in Hadley, and they didn’t always get along.

On the other hand, one of them liked Dan a lot.

So that was interesting enough, but add onto it the stack of chimera fursuits (both the sort with three heads and, in two creepy cases, the fish) and Chimera cosplays (including the Yu-Gi-Oh! chimera, the My Little Pony Chimera, and a were-hyena, for some reason), and it was beginning to look like they’d been a little too Chimera-leaning in their advertising.

By that point Dan had a headache and Adele was laughing at him, Sean, who was running the thing, was trying to figure out if they needed new panels, and Hadley Storm’s angriest personality had taken over their panel and was happily discussing chimer-ism.

Which is when things got even more interesting.

It turned out they’d missed the first few, because in humans it was almost never visible, but there was a small but growing minority – large enough that they’d scribbled three new panels into the program, saving Sean the work while giving him a headache – of people with chimerism.

At this point Dan curled up in a corner with a plastic bottle of vodka and refused to come out.
Which meant that he missed the group of botanists – one of whom was in a very nice Chimera (Clash of the Titans) cosplay – who set up their own panels down in the unused basement.

Unfortunately, it didn’t mean that he missed perhaps the most interesting guest to the con, because the spirit of the Dreaming that had decided this was a joyful place of chaos and imagination had found the same table to hide under after attempting to prank the Yu-Gi-Oh! cosplayer. This powerful chimerical spirit joined Dan in drinking magically-infused vodka, both of them pretending they couldn’t see the other.

By the time the lion-goat-snake creature breathing fire actually came through the door, nobody even pretended to be surprised.