Manticore

Modern depiction

## About

"It's either a **manticore** or a chimera." Artie's words were like a bucket of cold water on my addled senses.

"Are you sure?" I asked, sitting up straight.

"I got a friend in the Portland morgue to send me pictures of the dead girl's leg, and the claw pattern could be either, but it's not going to be anything smaller. Factor in the climate, the time of year, and some weird 'I think I saw a lion' posts on the Bigfoot boards, and those are your options."

I dug my knuckles into the side of my leg, hoping it would help me wake up. It didn't. “Shit."

"My thoughts exactly."

Manticore are intelligent enough that they can make moral judgments, and they can be trained not to eat humans, although they don't like having their diets restricted. Chimera aren't so forgiving. They'll eat whatever they can kill, and no one's ever successfully domesticated one. There was a third option ... "Any chance it's a feral Sphinx?”

"Body count's too low."

"... right. How do I kill a chimera?”

"Bullets. Lots and lots and lots of bullets." -Jammed

## Appearance

“You really tried to hug a **manticore**? Alex, I never thought you had it in you.”

“I was six,” I said, trying to recover my dignity as I put the Tim Horton’s bag down on the table. “It looked like a puppy crossed with a scorpion. Of course I wanted to hug it.” -Half-Off Ragnarok (p. 181)

## Abilities

She had spotted several new gouges in the concrete floor, which confirmed Artie's candidates for the monster in the warehouse: only the **manticore** and chimera had claws that could cut stone. -Jammed

## Habitat

“Trouble is, [Australia is] an island ecosystem. Sometimes things get in and turn out to be a great deal more destructive than they ever were in their original habitats. Game animals, mostly, imported by idiots thinking that Australia needs a native population of **manticores** or tailypo." -Shelby Tanner, Half-Off Ragnarok (p. 131)

"Why aren’t you back in Australia, making sure that nothing starts eating people?”

“Manticores,” she said, with a shrug.

“Manticores?” I echoed.

“Some damn fool imported three breeding clusters around the turn of the century, to use as game animals. They ate him and got loose—”

I groaned. “Of course they did.”

“—and now we have **manticore** issues in Queensland and the Northern Territory. I was hoping that by coming here, I could learn more about how manticores behave in the wild, and maybe find a few solutions.”

“There are manticores in Ohio?”

“Oh, yeah.” Shelby frowned. “Hadn’t you noticed?”

“No, I hadn’t. I’ve been studying the local fricken population, and trying to convince my basilisks to breed." -Half-Off Ragnarok (pp. 132-133)

"Why Ohio? I’m here because there used to be prides of **manticore** around here." -Shelby Tanner, Half-Off Ragnarok (p. 185)

The large, harmless cryptids, like Fern and Cylia, were among the hardest hit by the purges. They’re not teetering on the edge of extinction like the **manticores** are, but they don’t have anything resembling the kind of community they would have once, before the humans decided this planet was ours and ours alone. -That Ain't Witchcraft (p. 42)

## Culture

"Just look at what humanity’s doing, now that it doesn’t have anything bigger to keep it from spreading like a plague across the planet. They didn’t learn anything from killing the dragons and the **manticores** and the sirens." -Balance

“Originally, there were some who wanted to see this turned into a multi-cryptid settlement. Plant vegetable lambs and bring in some **manticore** for protection, start growing bird-fruit and get a few tailypo to come and hang around doing whatever it is that tailypo do . . . but it didn’t work out." -Dee, Half-Off Ragnarok (p. 211)

“I was nearly born in the middle of a **manticore** breeding pit." -Alex Price, The Measure of a Monster (p. 420)

## In Popular Culture

https://skindeep.fandom.com/wiki/Manticore

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manticore