Author's note: This is to tell you ahead of time, this story is about a fan-character in the FMA universe that later meets up with Ed and Al. The first few chapters will be about Alexia and her sister Sarah. This first one gives a little bit of background into the mindset Alexia had as a child and a little about her life before the story starts. Alexia also performs a human transmutation, and although the outcome is similar to Ed and Al's, I'm not trying to make them much alike… (If they succeeded, that would kill the loss of innocence from their child hood and take an important event from them that scars them for life, so I can't have them succeed, and if the outcome wasn't similar to Ed and Al's… they'd be dead and then there'd be no story.) Okay so now that all that's out of the way…

Mind of an Alchemist

As a young child, Alexia had the perfect mindset for an alchemist, although alchemy was unknown to her. She often wondered about things that were usually beyond imagination for a child. She would sit and wonder about death. When you die, does the soul continue on as if nothing happened? Can you be reincarnated? Where would child get its soul if not from someone already deceased, after all, you can't create something from nothing. Even human bodies are made up from different things that are brought to them somehow, whether through food or a glass of water. Everything that exists is made up of things that have already existed. Nothing can create itself. Our bodies are made from materials that have been on this earth since the beginning of time, so the components of our bodies must be thousands, if not millions of years old. If you could understand all the components of all matter, what's to stop you from rearranging the molecules to turn it into something new? It's like making a cake. If you have the right ingredients, you can make one, but if you could figure out how to regain the sugar and flour etc that you used to make the cake, you could use it to make other things as well. If you could find out how to create a life and sustain it, the possibilities could be endless. These ideas and concepts forming in her mind always scared her. It's not mankind's job to do these things, and if it was possible, how could she be the only one to find out about it? But… she couldn't really find anything else to say was wrong. How could it not be possible? It always left her wondering and the concept was so huge that sometimes she confused herself. But she always asked herself if this is possible, why am I the only one that's thought about it? That's when she discovered that she wasn't alone. She discovered alchemy.

By age eight, bother Alexia's parents had died and she was living with her 18 year old sister Tara and six year old sister Sarah. Although she had known the concept of alchemy as long as she could remember, she didn't discover alchemy itself until she was ten. She loved reading about alchemy. It was as if these books were the only things in existence that could understand how her mind worked, though she was desperate to try alchemy herself, like her whole life she had been destined to achieve the goals her mind had always told her were possible. She would spend most of her time reading until age 11, when she asked herself, why not actually try this? She turned out to be an outstanding alchemist and she was particularly interested in the biological studies, as they had never seemed to work for anyone she'd read about. She tried to figure out where they had gone wrong until she was convinced that human transmutation was possible if done the right way. When she was 12, Tara died in an accident. She believed that it was at this moment that her studying would pay off.

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"Are you sure this will work?" Sarah asked her older sister.

"What kind of question is that!" Alexia shouted. "I have worked on this stuff since before I even knew what alchemy was! Of course I'm sure!" She checked the transmutation circle she had drawn for any mistakes. She had checked it many times. They couldn't afford any mistakes.

"But no one's ever succeeded before."

"And I've read about them and worked out all of their mistakes," Alexia replied as she checked all the measurements of the things she needed to complete the transmutation.

"But don't you think…" Sarah hesitated, "that they had believed that they'd worked out all the mistakes as well?" she finished in a whisper. Alexia closed her eyes.

"Everything is perfect. There's no way we can fail. It's too late to back out now." Sarah nodded. Alexia took a deep breath to calm herself. She had always been confident that if she really tried, she'd be able to do this. Her nervousness was overcoming that strong confidence. If you're nervous, you can make mistakes, she told herself. That's the only way this could go wrong. Another voice inside her said that Sarah was right, but she refused to listen. This will work! "You ready?" Alexia asked. Sarah nodded again with a look of determination on her face. Upon seeing that, Alexia's confidence returned to her. It filled her heart, her mind, her soul. It rushed through her veins and pumped throughout her whole body to the tips of her fingers, which she placed on the ground before her. Light blared into their eyes. This is it. Suddenly she felt a searing pain below her left elbow. Blood splattered like mist up to her face. She clutched her elbow with her other hand and gritted her teeth. As she blinked the blood from her eyes, she became aware of one thing: I'm still alive. This was unheard of with human transmutation. Her heart pounded hope through he. She looked to the middle of the circle. It's worked. It must have! She looked up to see the fleshless face of her older sister and stared into the sightless white eyes. Alexia's eyes widened and her breath seemed to stop. The pain of her arm seemed to vanish, being overcome by her fear. She felt all the confidence and hope that had rushed through her turn to icy poison. "O-nee-chan!"Alexia whirled around to see Sarah being dragged through a shining white gateway by dark shadows, disintegrating before her eyes.

Footnotes: O-nee-chan a term used to refer to an older sister in Japanese. (Although FullMetal Alchemist is based in… England-- I think, judging on what I've guessed from evidence in the show—There's a reason I want her to refer to her that way, and it's just not normal in English to say "Older sister! Help!" but it's normal for Japanese, so I'm using it that way. If you don't like it, get over it. I'll probably use other Japanese terms and stuff, but I'll have a translation.)