“No,” Ed told her. Crushing any hopes Brianna actually had of getting home.
“Why not?” Brianna demanded.
Ed just leaned back against a nearby tree and put his hands behind his head for support. “More like, why should I? Life is equivalent exchange girl. Ignoring the facts that you might not be able to do alchemy, and I just met you, do you have any idea just how much time it takes to train someone in alchemy?” It wasn’t just the channeling of alchemical energy either, there was lessons in chemistry and mathematics so the newbie alchemist wouldn’t blow herself up, showing her all the different forms of transmutation circles, teaching her how to draw a transmutation circle… the list just went on.
Of course Brianna wasn’t going to give up that simple. So she tried again. “Please Ed?”
“No.”
And again.
“Pleeeeeeeaaaaaase?” Brianna asked, using the combined cuteness of both her sisters with pouty lips and blinking eyes.
“No.”
So she tried with her sexiness a bit later…
“Come on Ed,” Brianna purred as she leaned over and wrapped her arms around the much shorter boy. Hey, she technically wasn’t even six years old yet, so it wasn’t that bad to sleep with a teenager. He would be the one that was bedding someone who wasn’t even in the double digits yet. “I could really make it worth your while,” she whispered into his ear before pulling him back against her chest so her breasts rested on his shoulders.
“I-I really don’t think that falls into the equivalent exchange equation!” Ed shouted before jumping away from Brianna as fast as he could. That girl did NOT just offer what he thought she offered. She COULDN’T have… she wouldn’t have. Besides, she was…uh what was it again? Oh yeah! She was too, uh, tall! And friendly, WAY too friendly.
Then she tried the Simpson method until they got to town…
“Can you teach me alchemy Ed?”
“No.”
“Can you teach me alchemy Ed?”
“No.”
“Can you teach me alchemy Ed?”
“No.”
“Can you teach me alchemy Ed?”
“No.”
“Can you teach me alchemy Ed?”
“No.”
“Can you teach me alchemy Ed?”
“No.”
“Can you teach me alchemy Ed?”
“No.”
“Can you teach me alchemy Ed?”
“No.”
After they reached the town and Ed and Al got some horses while Brianna followed on foot, she tried the suck up method…
“Come on Ed,” Brianna yelled as she ran along the wooden cart they had bought. “I mean, all I wanna do is learn alchemy from the best alchemist I’ve ever seen!” Plus, judging by the people’s reactions and shouts of dark magic when Edward actually made the wagon he was riding in, alchemist weren’t all that known about, and obviously very rare.
Ed looked back at the woman following her easily down the well-beaten road and then to his brother. “Uh… how fast are we going?”
“I think about forty,” Al overestimated.
Ed just groaned and nearly fell off the wagon s he collapsed in the hopelessness of the situation. She’s NEVER gonna stop chasing me! Ed thought as tears fell down his eyes.
There was also the bargaining method…
Brianna racked her brain for any other reason she could think of to teach her alchemy except for the fact that she really, REALLY, needed him to. She couldn’t trust Ed to build it himself. The guy seemed pretty selfish and petty to her, and that was not the kind of person that needed to know how to build a nuclear reactor; she needed one to power the teleporter.
But she could see the small village built around the train station just up ahead, and although Ed and Al had ridden the horses into the ground a few miles back, Brianna still didn’t have much time left, despite the fact they were on foot. She needed something to entice him. Sex didn’t work, which Brianna supposed was sort of a good thing actually, but neither did asking nicely, or even begging.
Edward had mentioned that equivalent exchange thing. But what did she have to offer other than mechanical expertise?
Wait… mechanical expertise. Maybe that was all she really needed. Judging from that logging town and the fact the train pulled into the station looked like something out of a western, cybernetic technology like Ed’s arm and Al’s body were pretty much the highest level of technology they had. But although somewhat brilliant considering the materials that were used, Brianna knew she could do ten times better with just the basic tools that this world had on hand.
“Okay, okay, you want a trade right?” Brianna said as they neared the edge of town. She got a bit of hope when the two boys in front of her stopped. “Well… I’m a mechanic. You know, tune up machines and junk. If you want me to I could really fix that arm of yours into something so you don’t even need to make it into that little sword-thingy. You know what a gun is, right?” The girl was pretty sure she had seen a rifle or two in the mob that chased them out of town.
For a moment Brianna just stood there and waited for his response. Then when she heard him clap his hands together, like Ed did every time before he could use his alchemy, she blinked in confusion. “You know, I’m SO TIRED OF PEOPLE THINKING THE REASON I HAVE THIS ARM IS TO MURDER!” Brianna let out a small cry when he spun around with his arm in that sword configuration and nearly sliced her head off.
“Uh… brother,” Al spoke up.
The three of them stood still for a moment, Ed looking away from Brianna with his eyes closed in a pose one expected to see from a winning video game character, Brianna was ducking low, still in the position that let her avoid the psycho kid’s attack, and Al just stood there frozen; if he had a mouth it probably would have been hanging open. As if to complete the scene and start everything up again, a loud wind blew through the trees.
“YOU LITTLE JACKASS!” Brianna shouted before kicking the shorter kid in the leg. “OW!” Unfortunately for Brianna, it seemed one of Ed’s legs, like his arm, was also made of metal.
“DON’T CALL ME-a chimera?” Ed’s usual reply when someone comment on his height was cut short when he looked up to the taller woman, about to beat the daylights out of her. When Ed had slashed at the girl and taken off the bandana on top of his head, it had revealed just why she was wearing one of those things in this heat. Her ears, they were… well… not human.
Whatever heck the boy was talking about was lost on Brianna as she dealt with the pain of kicking a prosthetic leg made of steel. When she finally recovered and saw Ed just staring at her, Brianna did what any irate girl that was pissed off at some pipsqueak would do. She brought her fist down on his head hard enough to plant the boy into the ground.
The action seemed to snap the bigger guy out of whatever had stopped him cold though. “BROTHER!”
“Opps,” Brianna mumbled. “I didn’t mean to hit him that hard.” She cautiously poked Ed’s unconscious body with her foot and got to response, then blinked at the piece of cloth hanging from his blade arm. After a second of wiggling her hears around, Brianna confirmed the fact that they were indeed visible. “Well this is just great.”
A few minutes later…
“And so after she knocked you out I made her a hat to cover her ears and we…” Ed let Al’s explanation of how he woke up at the towns local inn and missed their train drift off into the background, submerged by Edward’s own thoughts and recent discovery. Brianna, who was currently sitting with her hat off in the corner of their room, was a chimera. A talking chimera, Ed reminded himself. That probably explained her unusual height and speed, as well as why his head felt like it had been hit with a sledgehammer.
But the fact about Brianna’s species also brought out some of Ed’s most distasteful memories.
Lt. Colonel Maes Hughes sat next to Ed in the mess hall, but thankfully the guy didn’t seem to want to talk about his newborn daughter for once. “After the first chimera was made, it only said four words ‘please let me die’. After that, the thing wouldn’t eat or talk. She starved herself to death.”
“Why does it hurt so much big brother?” the four legged monstrosity that had once been a little girl and the family dog asked.
Ed closed his eyes in an attempt to keep those memories from coming, to keep out the face of that thing that looked like a dog with eyes too big and a large streak of orange red hair running down her back.
Talking chimeras; they were a kind of creatures that the military had been interested in for only a few years now, even if Ed couldn’t see any real reason for them apart from the increased intelligence they obviously had. But from what he had seen so far, there was a huge cost to create them, and the side effect made them useless. The cost: to create a chimera that could communicate, the alchemist needed to use a human. But the side effect was much worse. The side effect: when the person and animal were merged, whatever was created was in such pain that it would kill itself rather than have to live in constant, unbearable agony.
Brianna didn’t seem to be in any pain, but Nina hadn’t exactly been writhing on the floor either. The freak that made those chimeras did say that the first one he made, the one that used his own wife for material, he said age had something to do with it. But Brianna had to be what? Mid twenties? Early thirties? At that age there would have been no way she would have been able to adapt to the pain.
But that made Edward think of a very horrible explanation of Brianna’s supposed comfort. Unless she wasn’t transmuted recently Ed thought to himself. But that made no sense! This girl would have to have been living undiscovered as a chimera for YEARS! Maybe it had something to do with Brianna’s form, aside from her height, physique (no natural woman had a chest THAT big), speed, strength, and ears, she seemed completely human. Maybe that made it easier to deal with, or maybe, if she really had been a chimera for years, Brianna had been able to gradually build up a tolerance for the pain.
Whatever the explanation was, they all eventually led to one conclusion. Brianna’s resistance was obviously wearing down, and she was either trying to learn alchemy to undo the thing, or at least find a way to deaden the pain. But the point where she could no longer take it was obviously still a bit off; else she would be asking for alchemy to be used on her instead of trying to learn it.
Edward didn’t really know much about the creation of chimeras. Although he was doing his best to research human transmutation, it was more to work on full humans than half animals; his expertise would be useless to Brianna. To top it off, because of him the Sewing Life Alchemist, the one State Alchemist that might have been able to help her was gone. Ed had even thrown away the chance to pick up his research to, as Al put it, make sure no one suffered the same fate as Nina. How funny it was that an action that seemed so right came back to kick him in the face.
That seemed to be the way every good deed he tried to do was turning out lately.
Ed blinked when he realized Al had stopped talking, and probably hadn’t been for some time now. The alchemist had been so lost in thought that he hadn’t even noticed. “Hey Brianna.”
“Yeah?”
“You still want me to teach you alchemy?” Ed asked in a depressed voice.
Brianna blinked at the question. “Uh… yeah.” Maybe she had hit him harder than she thought, despite her finding the lack of a cracked skull when she examined him. “But why are you saying yes now?”
Ed let out a mirthless chuckle at that question. “Same reason I told you no before. Equivalent exchange.”
Brianna rolled her eyes at the stupid answer to her question. Maybe the kid was trying to be cool or something. Al did tell her Ed liked to showoff sometimes she was carrying his unconscious butt here. Well, she also knew how to break his little attempt to get all mysterious thanks to the same conversation. “Well okay, I’ll be your student. I just hope you have a stool to stand on when it comes to lessons my miniscule master.”
“Uh oh,” Al muttered to himself.
“WHO YOU CALLING MICROSCOPIC?”
Brianna nearly fell back in her chair laughing while Edward tried his best to beat the living tar out of her. It would have been a lot easier for him if Alphonse didn’t put him in a bear hug the second Ed jumped clear of the bed. This can NOT end well Al thought to himself while Ed continued to struggle with murderous intent in his eyes and Brianna laughed at him.
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(Posted Wed, 24 Aug 2005 04:46)
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