Chimera-Con

[aldersprig]

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.

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Comments

[kelkyag]

<giggles> Oh *dear* ...

[konsectatrix]

Bwah! This is delightful. XD And it was made all the more timely as I was just reading about chimeric horse coat patterns. Poor, poor Dan.

OT - I think there is a broken italics tag somewhere? Unless the second half is meant to be italicized in which case I will shut up. =p

[aldersprig]

Fixed the tag, thanks!

I wanted to work in coat patterns but it just wasn’t coming up. Glad you liked it!

[thnidu]

[pʰmp̚]! (That's a muffled closed-mouth snort.)

Dan's unacknowledged drinking partner under...they can't drink each other under the table, they're already there!-- is from Down Under anyway, aren't they? Or, no, you said Dreaming, not Dreamtime. And it's not Neil Gaiman's Dream's Dreaming either. Whatever, it's fun! ... Not for Dan, though

[aldersprig]

Dreaming, in this case, is Changeling: The Dreaming, where Chimera are spirits of things dreamed up by people with a lot of - well, imagination.

Glad you liked it!

[meridian_rose]

LOL! Nice :)

[aldersprig]

:-D

[sauergeek]

Dan, your convention idea — never mind you'll be given grief about that (brilliant!) name — has been a smashing success. You've managed something that inspired the furries and cosplayers, drew unexpected guests, and got people to generate panels on the fly. About the only reason I can see you wanting to hide under the table is to get away from Hadley, and that's perfectly understandable.

But what I really want to know: where'd you pick up cheap plastic-bottle vodka that's magically infused? Because I'm not sure if I want to have my own or want to run away screaming, but I definitely want to know what it is and where you got it. I would've figured it was the high-end vodka that had the magic in it, not the $8-a-handle garbage that tastes like the wrong end of an oil refinery.

You may want to pay attention to that spirit. (Not the one in the bottle; the one you're pointedly ignoring.) It likely has ideas for better pranks, as the first one it tried seems to have backfired. And as Sean is actually running things, you're also nominated as greeter for the lion-goat-snake creature that just showed up. That spirit (not bottle!) may also have ideas about treating your newest guest with propriety.

[aldersprig]

I think it was a pretty good convention too!

I bet he got the vodka at that little liquor store that’s never open, the one with the weird staircase in back that you only wandered into by accident?

[sauergeek]

The little liquor store that is only open if you don't look to see if it is? The kind that sells desperation liquor in all shapes and sizes? That's an interesting, in the most dangerous sense, one. And the proprietor probably knew — or perhaps the liquor itself did — that Dave would be sharing it with the spirit of the Dreaming later.

Oh dear.

[aldersprig]

That one, yes! I see you’ve been there, too. Are you sure the proprietor and the store are actually separate?

[sauergeek]

I've been there, but I've never ended up sharing my rum with a spirit. Or at least I don't remember doing so. I'm not sure if the proprietor, the store, and the liquor are separate — or which one is in charge. And while I've tried taking a peek up those back stairs, I've never actually seen any hint of what might be up there. Have you?

[aldersprig]

It’s a lovely place, but I’ve never gotten anything quite that spirited, and no, I’ve never been brave enough to go up those back stairs...