“I am a chimera. Nothing more,” I replied. For some reason, this answer didn’t please the dryad.

“But that’s just sooo boring. And you’re much more than just a chimera. You should have a name. We could go with something obvious like Kai.” She seemed to consider that for a bit, then shook her head. “No, wordplay names get a bit tiresome eventually. Hmm.”

I stared at her as she paced back and forth, coming up with and discarding names. I didn’t particularly feel like I needed a name, and didn’t understand her insistence that I have one. Based on James’ memories, it seemed that it was expected of humans, and I am very much not one of them.

Uninterested, I sat at the base of the tree and grabbed my club. I really needed a better way to carry it, so I didn’t always have to hold it in my hand or grasp it with my feet in my flying form. It was quite inconvenient.

Inconvenient. That was a relatively new concept for me. Influence from James’ memories, no doubt. Still, convenience and efficiency were useful concepts to me, so I wouldn’t discard them out of hand.

While Dendra muttered to herself, I rifled through James’ memories, searching for anything that might be of use. It didn’t take long for me to come up with a few ideas which matched with some of what I’d seen from the humans of this world. Not only ideas for how to better carry it, but how to shape it into something even more useful.

Tuning out the strange dryad, I began to work on shaping the club to better suit my purposes. Using my claws, I shaved off bits of the bone, a little at a time, primarily focusing on the ball joint where it had once connected to the troll’s hip. I reshaped the large knob of troll bone into a sturdy spike. As dense and hard as the bone was, it took nearly an hour to complete that portion. When I looked over at the dryad, she’d somehow acquired a large, flat board of oddly smooth and dark wood, and scribbled numerous shapes on it with some kind of chalky material, which I guessed were some sort of written language. Some of the scribbles had been crossed out, and she glared at the thing as if it had stolen her dinner.

I looked back at my newly reshaped club, which now somewhat resembled something that James would have called a war hammer. The smaller knob of bone would act as the striking surface if I wanted to deal a blunt force strike, and the spike would work for penetrating armor, scales, and chitin. I’d half expected to break through the dense material and encounter bone marrow, as I normally would, but I found out that troll bones contained very little of that spongy substance. They also seemed to contain a lattice of metallic substance, which reinforced their strength quite well.

I’d need to scrounge up some sort of material to use to make a sling to more easily carry the weapon.

When I looked back away from the weapon, I noticed Dendra was watching me, her green eyes unfocused.

“Ah, it’s no use. I need more information to figure out what to name you. I can’t even decide on where you would fit in a relative chimera evolutionary hierarchy, except that I am pretty certain you’re not a Chimera Lord, or you’d probably be traveling with a pack of underlings. It’s never that straightforward with your kind.”

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As she spoke, the surface she’d been writing on withered and rotted away as if many years had suddenly elapsed.

“Hunt now. You promised good prey.” I stood up and stretched out, preparing to go hunt.

“Okay, okay. I’ll lead the way. However…” She reached one hand and plunged it into the soil at the base of her tree, and pulled forth a root which writhed like a snake. She stared intently at it, and the root twisted and reformed into a braided line about the thickness of one of my fingers, with numerous leaves sprouting from it. Dendra then moved toward me and stood on her toe in order to drape it over my neck. The loose ends moved and intertwined with each other, causing it to form a loose necklace. “This will act as the cutting that you will plant for me. Until then, I will be able to use it to communicate with you, as long as you do not travel more than a couple hundred miles from here. For now, what you need to know about your target is that it will be quite dangerous. It’s called a thunder drake, although it actually isn’t a drake at all, no draconic blood at all. Really, it’s just an overgrown shock lizard that can fly and discharge bolts of lightning.”

She stopped a moment and looked at me as she considered something.

“Do you have a way to catch it if it tries to fly outside your reach?”

To answer her question, I simply shifted into my flying form. I was down to three seconds for the change now. Definitely improving.

“Oh ho. I see. You’re even more capable than I originally thought. You’ll want to try to strike its underbelly and joints with your wyvern quills, if you can, as you probably won’t be able to pierce the scales on the top easily. It will be a bit larger than you in that form. You should be able to sense when its gathering power for a lightning attack, so back away from it when you do, and try to make sure that something else is closer than you are. Immediately run away if there’s more than one. Their attacks get far more dangerous when they work in concert.”

I shifted back to my normal form and listened without interruption as she poured out the details about the thunder drakes I would be hunting. There was a nesting ground for the creatures some ways to the west, and their population was starting to get a bit unmanageable, which would inevitably result in forest fires until some migrated away, according to Dendra. If I could kill a dozen or so adults and raid some of their nests, that should bring them back in hand for a few decades, and be more than enough to integrate their abilities.

As soon as she provided me with all the relevant information, I turned and headed west, in the direction of the thunder drakes’ territory.

“Hey!”

I looked down as I bounded away, to see a tiny version of the dryad clinging to the necklace of roots. Well, that would explain how she would communicate with me.

“It’s rude to leave without saying goodbye!”

“Probably, if I were human.” I responded.

“Hmph. Go figure, I find the one smart ass chimera in all the worlds. Anyways, I want you to hold off on your normal sleep cycle after you get your first couple of kills. I want to see if you can consciously guide your adaptations. Oh, and also, have you tried to make any other forms?”

“… No.” I felt a bit dumbfounded that I hadn’t thought of that before. If I could make a flying form, why not more?

“Well, I suppose we can see what else we can do in that regard when you have some free time to experiment. Ooh, maybe you can make a super cute and fluffy and cuddly form that I can squeeze and pet and…”

“No.”