“Alright then,” Edward Elric said as he started his first class of Alchemy 101 while the train carried them across the countryside. He had actually needed to stay up half the night before, thinking of where to begin. It was actually pretty hard considering he had already been pretty good at alchemy when he started learning from Page. But there was no way Brianna was that far along… or smart. “To understand alchemy, you first need to understand it’s principle law: equivalent exchange. To create something, you-”
“Yeah yeah,” Brianna interrupted with a wave of her hand. “I know, you can’t actually destroy the matter, you have to change it to energy or alter it’s atomic weight by adding to the material around it, or subtracting from it. I already know all that, I just need you to teach me how to…” Brianna stopped for a moment, wondering how to explain this. Then she just duplicated the way Ed seemed to transmute matter.
“I don’t wiggle my fingers,” Ed deadpanned after the girl slapped her hands together and held them out.
-Lesson #2-
“Okay, let’s see what you got.”
Brianna blinked at Ed’s demand, and then stared at the object in front of her. It was a simple pot of dirt with some weird symbol doodled on the front in chalk. The only thing she could really tell was the thing must have some mystical significance. “Okay… what exactly am I supposed to do?”
“It’s easy Brianna, just use alchemy to make the seed in the pot grow,” Al said in an encouraging tone from behind her. “Just don’t make it grow too much.” The train car wasn’t all that big after all, and Al really had no idea just what kind of seed was in there.
Brianna looked back down at the pot. “Oh-kay. Just how exactly do I DO THAT?”
Both the brothers collapsed onto the floor at the question.
And things just continued on…
For the next few months, Alphonse Elric didn’t really know who suffered more: Brianna for having to learn alchemy and equations that she apparently already knew from Ed, Edward for having to be the one to actually teach her the stuff and put up with her short jokes, or Al for having to be the one to endure both of them when they were put together.
Al liked the girl well enough. She even treated him like a kid from time to time; a wonderful experience that hadn’t happened since he was put in his armored body. But her and Ed’s personality’s almost constantly clashed when it came to the big decisions. Half the time Brianna was just happy to take a backseat to the brothers. Al couldn’t really tell if it was because she was just giving Ed some respect for being her teacher, or she was used to the role, but whenever Ed did something stupid or took an action that might get him hurt the too tall girl became much like a big sister that always seemed to think she knew what was better and her younger brothers were complete idiots.
Edward Elric just plain despised her. Brianna was a know-it-all, rude, pushy, obnoxious talking chimera that was way too damn tall and made fun of his height at least once a day. Not to mention she was WAY too damn hot to be sharing a hotel room with a couple of teenagers! Stupid sexy chimera; Ed acidentally walks in on her when she's changing ONCE and she still wasn't him live it down. The worse part was, she wasn't mad at him for doing it, she just teasted the hck out of him with peeping tom comments.
Brianna accepted Alphonse’s condition easily enough. It creeped the hell out of her at first, the whole ghost armor reminded Brianna way too much of that Rook guy, but after the first two days she got used to it. She never did learn just how that happened to Al though. Getting used to Ed’s alchemy; that was the hard part. Although she knew the equations, could do the math, and could even channel alchemic energies once Ed showed her how, it seemed to matter almost jack in the end because of one simple reason: actually being able to measure atomic mass precisely with nothing but her bare hands and a gut feeling was impossible.
Brianna could do the usual stuff: make walls burst up out of the ground, turn a piece of metal into a weapon, fix a broken object, and all the things a run of the mill alchemist could accomplish. She had even been able to properly estimate crude equations that produced effects that couldn’t be done by an alchemist correctly unless he or she knew exactly what to do. But she couldn’t remake materials into completely different ones, she could turn dirt into stone, but making something without materials that were closely related on the table of elements just couldn’t be done.
That little fact severely limited Brianna’s options. But she did have some choices available to her.
From the way Ed talked about the Philosopher’s Stone, the catalyst could easily be used to create anything she imagined out of stuff just lying around. After Al and Ed used it for their own purposes, Brianna could build what she needed. But from what Brianna understood, those boy’s had been after that thing for years; and more than one of the people she met through them admitted that the stone might not even exist.
There was another option. She could try and become a state alchemist like Edward was. As a state alchemist, all she would need to do to get the needed funding was throw out a couple of cheap gadgets in order to make the higher ups interested, and then use the money meant to fund her research in order to buy the materials she needed to build another transporter and get home.
“So…Ed,” Brianna began while the countryside passed by outside the window of the old fashioned train. Although here, it wasn’t really old fashioned. The whole car was nearly loaded to bear with personnel from the Eastern command post; even Mustang and his little entourage of loyal lackeys were along for the ride. “Were uh, going to central.”
“Uh oh,” Ed muttered.
“What?” Brianna asked.
“Every time you start talking in that evasive way, it always means trouble for me,” Edward replied in a sour tone.
Brianna frowned at the comment. “No it doesn’t.”
“Yes it does,” Ed countered.
“Prove it!” Brianna demanded.
“Well there was the time you tried to tell me you accidentally transmitted a town’s water supply into nitroglycerine,” Ed said as he held up a finger. “Then there was the time you tried to explain that the Earth was round to that backwater village and nearly got us burned at the steak. Oh, and that time you got nervous while hitting on that Ishballen priest.” That time they had almost gotten crucified.
Brianna frowned at that last one. “Hey, I wasn’t evasive that time, my hat just blew off and he was looking at me like I was some kind of monster he needed to take a pitchfork and torch to.” Which they practically did. But Brianna guessed that Ed may have kind of had a point there… maybe.
“Can it at least wait till we’re back at headquarters?” Ed whined. “They’re dragging all the state alchemists not on any long term assignments down to central because it’s time for that yearly alchemist exam. I don’t really care about that, but at least this trip will give me a chance to look at the library for more clues about the stone.”
“Ummm… yeah Ed, about that… you see…” Brianna paused as she thought of how to phrase this.
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(Posted Thu, 25 Aug 2005 06:24)
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