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Sam tried to sleep. She tried very hard. It had already been nine when she had gone to bed, with her father's dinner wrapped up with a note on the table. But she had tossed and turned for a couple of hours afterwards. Her eyes were heavy with the need for sleep, but her body rebelled and her mind was completely unbound. No matter how much she wanted to say she was mulling over too many things, the fact of the matter was that there was only one thing on her mind that night. She had completed the circle. Her theory was finished, and all that was left was to put it into action.
No, she told herself. She would have to wait for another day- a safer day; a day when she knew her father would be working until late. But a thought wormed its way into her mind. Her father would be gone for the night. Even though it was supposed to be his day off, he had been called in for duty, and he still wasn't back. It was close to midnight now, which meant that Sam would have another couple of hours of solitude.
Damn, what would her mother say if she saw Sam sneaking around her father's schedule in the dead of night? Would she frown? Would she be ok with it, but want Sam to be honest with her father? The age-old question intruded upon Sam's thoughts again: What was she like?
Ok, that was it. Sam wasn't going to lay down for another couple of hours with these torturous thoughts running around her head. She sat up, throwing the covers off. The girl's eyes turned to her bedside table, which bore her reading candle and her nightly book. Tonight, instead of a book telling tales of knights and dragons, or of dramas between teenagers, a book of alchemy, its cover decorated in a delicate and complicated circle, sat upon the wooden surface of the bedside table. Its pages were old, but neat, and its leather covers held both pages of and not of the book. The messily placed pages full of notes Sam had taken for years shuffled noisily as she picked the book up and made her way out of the her room.
Sam's house was odd when compared to other houses. Most houses were a box, with one room turning into another. With Sam's house, it was all on one floor. The front door opened straight into the kitchen and dining room. Then two hallways came off the sides, each with two rooms. Sam's room was the first on the left hallway. She made her way across the kitchen, glanced at the cold dinner with guilt, and entered the first room on the right hallway.
This was the study. At the moment, it was messy, but Sam fought to remedy that. She didn't necessarily organize things, but she did place books on shelves and shuffle papers to fit neatly together. She at least needed the floor space to draw the circle. Finally having shoved everything to the corners of the room, Sam looked at the empty floor and frowned. There was something missing, something she needed to… Oh, yes! Sam glanced around, and then ended up having to dig through the cluttered 'neatness' she had created in order to find a proper piece of drawing chalk.
Digging finally completed and chalk in hand, Sam opened the book she had brought with her. After shuffling through some of the papers, she grabbed on specific one. It was the circle she had created, conveying all scientific theory involved in this transmutation. The girl took a good look at the sheet of paper. Then she set it down and went to work, drawing the circle as perfectly as she could and with an intolerance that wouldn't allow a single line to be out of place. The circle complete, she set down the chalk next to her picture of the circle and moved to grab a bag. She put all the materials that were in the bag in the center of the circle. It was stuff she had gathered over the past few months, and she figured it would compensate for what she was asking for.
There was complete silence in the house for a while. Sam went over everything in her head. She checked and double-checked. There was nothing that would interfere with the circle- it had a wide range of clear floor. The circle was as perfectly drawn as she could get it. The materials had been strenuously calculated and bought. Everything was perfect. Everything was set. Now, all she had to do was perform the alchemy.
Sam closed her eyes, the voice of her father resonating in her head. He had told her once that her mother, when performing alchemy, always offered a prayer beforehand. Taking a steadying breath, and with the light of the circle surrounding her, she offered her thoughts silently.
Almost immediately, she could tell that something was wrong.
"Shit."
Shieb: Welcome to my Fullmetal Alchemist fanfiction. I'll have fairly short chapters, but they'll get longer as the story progresses and I add more pieces to it. Updates generally go with when I can and strongly correlate with the muse. Also, you're allowed to tell me what to do. So if you want Sam to do a particular thing at a particular point in the storyline, tell me, and it just might show up!
