“So, you used to be a sphinx?”
“Well, to be more precise, my head used to be part of a sphinx,” she replied. “The rest of me came from other hybrids and chimeras. My skull was attached to a lion’s body, but my torso came from some creature with an owl’s head, and my legs came from something else entirely that had ninety-eight more.”
He raised an eyebrow. “How does that even happen?”
“I only know a little bit about it, honestly. There are groups that specialize in this kind of thing. Paramilitary types. They take apart the creatures they kill and stitch together the human-looking pieces. They call us antichimeras. We’re ‘the humanity extracted from monstrosity,’ or so they say. I get the impression that they don't really know what either of those things are."
“Well, aside from that, it seems like they did a pretty good job. You look completely human.”
“That’s because I am.”
“Really? There’s not even a little bit of lion left in you?”
“Not at all!” She paused. “Well. There is one thing about me that’s left over from those days. It’s a bad habit that’s neither human nor lion in nature, and only seems to emerge when both are combined.”
“And what’s that?”
“Oh, you’ll find out,” she grinned a timeless grin. “But first, you have to guess.”
Dissections of the classical sphinx may have been a precursor to creating the Electric Sphinx.
Go on dates with enough monsters, and eventually, one might tell you all about the Art of Monstering.
Making humans out of the inhuman can backfire in unpredictable ways.