I'd been reborn in 1904 and one thing that had always puzzled me was that though

I remembered typing in a male name in the computor I didn't remember what a "computor'

was.Nor could I recall my past appearance or any details of that life.

I'd plopped out of my 1904 birth mother fully aware I'd made a deal but

completely unaware of being in her womb for 9 months or anything concrete from

earlier.

It was as if a few minutes before she went into labour I'd suddenly swelled into

existence inside her,and not a split second earlier.

And except for the shock of my sudden creation I'd felt perfectly comfortable

,as if I'd been a chimerae for a long time.

Others of my kind had been pondering these same issues,and had spent a

decade tracking down their fellow kind and planning expeditions to the ancient sites

of the Aztecs.

The Great War came,and they idled,gobbling up humans and puzzling over

rebirth,past lives and time travel.

Meanwhile we'd taken to calling ourselves dragons,and allt of us had

learned some control over the transformation by the end of the Great War.The

Great War had thrown countless educational opportunities into our snouts and

we'd learned how to be selective on where,what and how much evil we gobbled

up as we transformed.

I'd taken to rematerializing as small venemous serpents when I fed off of

small human acts of evil or as huge winged crocodiles and other dragons if I

fed off the evil of other chimerae.

So on that hot summer night in 1919 I was a German speaking talking

rattlesnake slithering through the bordello of Madame FiFi,whose body had

mysteriously dissappeared and whose clothes lay neatly arranged within one another

and laid out on the floor full length.

The Carcross ,Virginia police had been snooping into my affairs and I was planning

for Madame FiFi to vanish,only to reappear elsewhere.

I was slithering up the grand stairway when the foot appeared in front of me.I looked up

to find myself looking at a woman dressed in a explorers outfit . immediately

recognized she was like me and wondered whether to stay a snake or regenerate

as a girl.

" Stay as you are,I can carry you out of her more easily as a 10 pound snake

then as a 150 pound rattlesnake egg."

" Besides if your eggshell breaks you'll drip all over my outfit'

So she carried me to her rattling Model T,put me on the seat beside me and

" How would you like to break into Robert E Lee's gravevault and do some sleuthing

for me" she sprung on me.

I openned and closed my mouth a few times at that one and then she

said

" Would it interest you to know that the General was rumoured to be woman?"

" A chimerae?"

So it was that I found myself slithering through a rusty gate into the grave vault

of the Lee's.Amanda had kept guiet despite my repeated tail rattlings and snout tappings

for further information.

If I wanted answers I'd have to go in as a rattlesnake.I slid under the heavy

bronze door that sealed the mammoth vault.From the ledge above sat several

sculpted gargoyles,and I was startled to note several of them looked like reptiles

I'd been over the years.

I crept into the vault and noted the coffins lining the wall alcoves.The Lee vault

had been reputedly used for the burial of 19 family members.Yet there were more,

much more then 19 rotting rusty coffins in this vault.

There was a rotting purple curtain separating the second half of the vault and strewn

along the floor lay the paitings that had fallen off decaying wall hooks.

There stood Robert in his baggy clothes and greying beard.Here sat Robert

without a beard.There danced Roberta ,wide hipped and gyrating in a Richmond

bar.

And they all had the same eyes,the glowing reddish green brown flecked eyes

of a certain chimerae.Eyes I knew only too well.

I mentally undressed the baggy clothing off the General and noted where they would

have hidden the curves of a woman in disguise.

" Hot Damn,Roberts Roberta" I growled out in German.

" And she's me!"

I slithered under the tapestry and beheld the two coffins lying side by side.Above them

hung a glowing globe of a alien construct.It seemed to excude a light ideally suited

for my kind.

There were more relics about,as well as uniforms and " womanly " military

artifacts hanging from rotting leaning wooden stands.In later years I would visit

archives and read musty decades old articles about a " Confederate Dragon".

In that vault however were paintings showing the beast had been real.And

devouring Union troops.

Roberta must have had extraordinary control over herself if she'd been able

to be selective in her serpentine form.I myself usually feasted indiscriminately

when I went silly.

Knowing what I'd find I popped open the latch of one of the coffin lids.Inside

lay the skeleton of a elderly woman in a funeral shroud.

The wife.I closed the lid of her coffin and turned to the other.

The coffin lid swung open.

The corpses clothes had rotted away,as well as the corset,petticoat and other

articles.But her breasts were plump,her hips firm and the rosy complexion of her

cheeks made her look like she'd just gone to sleep 10 minutes ago,not been dead

for nearly half a century.

The chimerae body was perfectly preserved,and but for the old fashioned hairstyle

she could have been my twin sister.

Yet she'd been born in Jan 1 1831 at 4:01AM

and died 4:01AM Jan 1 1870.She'd have been 39,though it

was a tall girl that reposed in her coffin.

Roberta must have gone through quite a few regenerations.Especially during the

Civil War.

I inspected her body for a while.On the off chance our bodies could cheat

death I tried to revive her,but she was quite dead,though lovely.

I closed the lid,regreted i could not take some of the relics with me and slid through

the narrow cracks of the grave vault to where Amanda lay waiting for me.

As we drove away in her rattly swaying flivver she told me what I already

was beginning to suspect.That had been me back there in the grave vault,and chances

where some of the other coffins in there also contained the perfectly unnatural remains

of females who had all suddenly died on the same day back in 1870.

A mass dieoff of chimerae all on the same day 39 years after they'd been born

fully formed and with no past memories besides the one that they'd signed a contract

in 2012.

For the past 15 years other chimerae had been finding relics of our past

existence and signs we'd been trying to leave messages for our future or past

reincarnated unnatural selves .

And each time we were reborn the memory banks were wiped clean.No one knew

how old we really were.They'd found feathered snake mummies up in the Andes

from centuries earlier as well as traces of our lives in ancient Egypt and our

dabblings in dragon plagued medievel Europe,

The others had been troubled by the old legends that dragons ate dragons.

If dragons really were just chimerae,it meant as the hour of our death approached

we'd be exhibiting some nasty behaviour towards each another.

A race instinct to hide our existence perhaps?

A way to ensure we all went together with no " stragglers " left behind?

The ones in the know figured the only dragons that ever existed were

just us.Hopping about through time,going from one mass scaley feeding frenzy.

die off and rebirth to another.

Amanda stopped the car and let me slither out and her teeth seemed sharper

and whiter than before as she left me with these parting words

" Maybe someday we'll meet again in person.Though I hope not"