Chimera

Standard chimera take shape as mutant animals stitched together from several species, so their bodies carry the features of every base creature used to make them. A recurring design is a powerful lion-lizard hybrid posted as a guard, and the video games add stranger combinations such as a crocodile merged with a wild boar, a pufferfish crossed with a bee, and a snake fused with a macaw.

Human chimera range much more widely in form. The crudest are badly deformed and barely functional, while more refined ones keep most of their original human body and gain animal features that sharpen their physical power. The military's prized outcome is the type that can slip between a wholly human shape and a beast-blended one whenever it chooses. One of Father's guardians even echoes Greek legend directly, taking the form of a three-headed dog modeled on Cerberus.

Ordinary chimera are handled as living tools rather than thinking beings, and their blended instincts make them natural sentries. Father stations a vast horde of them through the tunnels beneath his lair, and in the 2003 anime the military keeps reptile-feline beasts inside Laboratory 5 to destroy any intruder who slips past its human guards. They react with raw aggression and territorial menace.

Human chimera are wholly different. Since each one started life as a person, the mind, the memories, and the sense of identity typically endure the change, even when the reshaped body inflicts endless pain and shuts them out of normal society. Conveying their thoughts to others can be difficult, yet the human being within is never fully erased.

Chimeric work belongs to the recognized field of bio-alchemy, but recorded progress in Amestris has been thin, built on a long trail of false starts. Capable alchemists can still achieve it: Shou Tucker made the craft the center of his career as a State Alchemist, and the swindling priest Cornello pulled it off with an incomplete Philosopher's Stone. Because the subjects are usually simple animals, the practice is not counted as Human Transmutation despite resembling it.

Extending the process to people is a separate, forbidden matter, and the authorities insisted for years that every attempt to fuse a person with an animal had failed. That was a lie. Tucker secretly transformed his wife, and afterward his daughter Nina together with the family dog Alexander, into human chimera capable of speech, while the State Military ran its own quiet trials. Other factions followed: the rogue Greed surrounded himself with chimera such as Bido, Martel, Roa, Dolcetto, and Ulchi, and Kimblee's converted soldiers Darius, Heinkel, Jerso, and Zampano later threw in with Edward and Alphonse. The name itself is borrowed from the fire-breathing monster of Greek legend, though the series applies it broadly to any fused creature.