[He sort of...stops. Stares in a baldly obvious way when Ed clarifies what he means by traveling with chimera. And he answers his wondering in an absent way while the implications sink in—]
They're still out there. We didn't kill all of them. They ran away.
[—but he can't shake the sense of creeping familiarity. They were human but now they're partly something else and it was something that was done to them. It's not hard to follow that thought ("comes in handy," huh? How?) back to the hazy and headachey memory of being restrained, struggling, while his father readies a syringe of something—
Suddenly it's not quite as hard to imagine combining two creatures at all. He's just found the right thing to compare it to. He's dropped his eyes down to his hands, furrowed his brow and studied the tips of his fingers for a few long seconds. Raising his head again, in a way that's suddenly serious, urgent, but somehow a little more subdued—]
What does it do? That alchemy, to someone who's human. When you do that to them, what does it mean?
[Just what makes a human "chimera" different from a human?]
no subject
They're still out there. We didn't kill all of them. They ran away.
[—but he can't shake the sense of creeping familiarity. They were human but now they're partly something else and it was something that was done to them. It's not hard to follow that thought ("comes in handy," huh? How?) back to the hazy and headachey memory of being restrained, struggling, while his father readies a syringe of something—
Suddenly it's not quite as hard to imagine combining two creatures at all. He's just found the right thing to compare it to. He's dropped his eyes down to his hands, furrowed his brow and studied the tips of his fingers for a few long seconds. Raising his head again, in a way that's suddenly serious, urgent, but somehow a little more subdued—]
What does it do? That alchemy, to someone who's human. When you do that to them, what does it mean?
[Just what makes a human "chimera" different from a human?]