For a brief time in the First Era, there was a rash of unseemly experimentation by the wizards of House Telvanni, seeking a practical application of the Psijic Endeavor. They imagined the possibilities of being able to mass-produce this effect, creating slaves with a natural chitinous shell, perhaps, or the ability to breathe in poisonous fumes. No accounts remain of any human trials, but they did perform them on a number of Vvardenfell's native fauna. The wizards would bring forth two creatures, and use potions and spells to put them into a deep sleep. The specifics of the next step have been lost to history, but, either through powerful Illusion magicks or a pact with the Daedra Prince Vaermina (or perhaps both), they would fill the beasts' dreams with secret images and suggestions that, somehow, they did not truly exist. This caused the animals, shockingly, to begin to actually disappear. However, in the moment before zero-sum (when they have completely faded out of existence), the wizards would use spells of Recall to translocate both creatures to the same location, at the same time ending their dreams and freeing their primitive minds from existential torment. The creatures would begin to reconstitute in the same space, in the process creating one new monster with the qualities of both. One account mentions an attempt to combine a cliff racer with a slaughterfish in the hopes of making a flying guard for their towers, but instead creating a "flying maelstrom of teeth and fury, which killed three slaves before we were able to put it down with sustained blasts of fire." As the reader can probably infer, the resulting CHIMerae, as the wizards referred to them, were notoriously short-lived and mindlessly aggressive. Supposedly, all the surviving beasts were donated to the arena in Vivec, where they were marketed as exotic Daedra and made to fight to the death for the crowd's amusemant, and as far as surviving records indicate, the experiments were never attempted nor spoken of again.

CHIMerae. This one has collapsed in a fit of the giggles. Also, zero-summing animals: a wonderful concept which I http://www.gamesas.com/topic/1419619-the-marukhati-collected-whirling-scrolls-online-pt-vii/page__view__findpost__p__21738039 too.

There's something incredibly funny and yet entirely logical about Telvanni seeking "practical applications" of the more obscure concepts in Tamriel. Have there been any other groups (moth priests, mirror logicians?) that have applied such bizarre thought-experiment-theosophy to mundane tasks?

Oh yeah, I like this idea. I know a lot of people really liked the alien creatures in Morrowind, but I always felt like they were "weird just to be weird." That's just my opinion, but your post will probably make it into my headcanon so it doesn't feel too weird fighting nix hounds and guar

I like that it fits in with the original label for the Velothi descendants, "Chimer." The changed mer also happened to be changers of others.

I can't remember what the Psijiic endeavor was off the top of my head, because I don't really see how combining two minds/bodies fits into it. I'll head over to TIL.