Truthfully, my story didn't start right at the Truth. It started in a high school biology classroom, with me staring at a box of dead frogs.

The yearly frog dissecting ritual.

In middle school, it was better. The teachers respected my request to not have to do the experiment and instead gave me a couple of worksheets on the anatomy of a frog to fill out, while everyone else participated in the barbaric academic ritual of slicing apart a dead animal to examine its insides. Not only was it nasty, but being an animal lover, I'd always thought it was unethical to take frogs from their natural habitat and cause their population to rapidly decline just for a stupid lab experiment.

But 10th grade bio wasn't like middle school.

Mrs. Stein (the Satan of biology teachers, let me tell you) wouldn't let me out of it, though. I made a very strong case about wildlife protection, if I do say so myself, and offered to do an extra credit assignment or something instead. I'd even brought reading material in case I finished early.

She glared at me, gave me a scalpel and a face mask and a frog and told me to do the damn experiment. I moaned, walking over to the lab bench in defeat.

Suddenly, an idea popped into my brain. Speaking of reading material… guess what I'd brought with me. None other than (do I even need to say it?) volumes 4 and 6 of Fullmetal Alchemist, my own personal copies of them.

I remembered one of the chapters in volume 5 involving the Elrics transmuting their mother. Did it mention how to do it?

It was a dumb idea. I realize that now. And it was a bad idea (didn't the series go on and on about how bad of an idea transmutation was?), and it was a work of fiction that gave me the idea, nothing real, nothing substantial. It shouldn't work. It wouldn't work.

But desperation makes people do stupid things. And if there was even a sliver of a chance it would work, then I'd be willing to try transmuting the frogs.

Quickly, I ran to my seat and retrieved the sixth volume of FMA from the paper-filled wilderness that was inside my messenger bag. I've never been known for my organization, but I had to be quick about it. That way, Mrs. Stein wouldn't see me taking a book to the lab station and I wouldn't get lectured for about the eightieth time about not taking unnecessary materials into lab and providing distractions; pay attention to what you're doing, proper lab safety requires you to have your full focus on the experiment at hand, don't you want to be a good scientist (why does she assume I give a crap about science? I'm only in this class because I have to be).

I flipped to Chapter 23. There it was; the picture of the transmutation circle. Rushing back to the lab station with a book in hand, I grabbed the scalpel and started to make an incision of the circle onto the lab bench before anyone can notice I'm vandalizing school property.

I glanced back at my handiwork, carved into the wooden bench. I accredited it to the many years I've spent taking art classes that it's almost a mirror image. I placed the dead frog in the center of the circle (I know that they were using the materials that made up a person when they tried Transmutation, but if I have the whole frog, why not just use that?), then contemplated how I was going to get a frog's blood for the soul. It's not like I was going to cut open a frog to do it, because that would defeat the purpose of transmuting one in the first place.

"What do you think you're doing?"

A girl's voice, filled with arrogance, in my ear. I turned, shocked, to see my snobby lab partner Sienna Robinson giving me a look that's one part confusion mixed with two parts contempt.

Maybe it was the look she gave me, or maybe it was the fact that she's tall and blonde and your stereotypical popular girl crossed with some sort of demon, but any pitiful words I could have given as an explanation for my actions right then got caught somewhere in the back of my throat.

Replying was unnecessary, anyways. Sienna just snatched the book out of my hand and glanced at the page I was opened to.

"Another stupid manga? That's for nerds. But wait, you are nerd. I suppose that's fitting- wait a second," realization slapped Sienna hard across the face as she held the book up to compare the illustrations to what I'd done to our lab station, and her face paled. "What the hell? You're doing that? To a frog? I really don't like the sound of this."

She gave me a smirk to hide how freaked out she was and called, "Mrs. Stein! Come see what Ana's doing to the lab!"

Dammit. Well, I couldn't wait to figure out how to get the blood- it was now or never.

I pricked myself with the scalpel, letting a drop of my own blood fall, and then brought my hands down over the mess I'd made. Pressing into the wood as hard as I could, I barely noticed the screams and yells aimed at me.

I didn't notice everything fade away into white.

I only noticed once the gate was stretched out in front of me, tendrils of shadows curling outward to try to grab at me, making me scream.

"Truth? TRUTH!" I could barely hear my own words as the tendrils reached me, curling over every part of me except for my eyes.

The gates opened, and I went in, being forced to look at everything, forced to feel everything. Taken apart, every part of me was taken apart, and then reassembled in a process so painful that what likely took a minute felt like a year. And I couldn't look away from everything that I was seeing- I knew too much now, I didn't want to know more, but it kept getting crammed into my mind.

Then, the gate opened and I was thrust out again, back to the whiteness.

"You conceited fool," said a very faint figure, only noticeable because of the blackness that surrounded it: the Truth. "Thinking something from a work of fiction could really be attempted- something that you were warned against trying - and that you could be the one to pull it off. You're a fool, Anastasia Owens, for thinking you can do the impossible. No human can. No human SHOULD."

"How do you know my name?" My words come out as a gasp, and the Truth grins its horrible grin as if it's enjoying my confusion and suffering.

"Because I am you. And I am the universe, and I am 'true knowledge', and the world and God and one and all and everything…"

"You talk too much," I interrupt. "Am I really a fool for trying the impossible? All the great geniuses of humankind tried the impossible. The people who invented electricity, telephones, the Internet, toilets, all of that; didn't they try the impossible and succeed? You don't know what's impossible until you do it for yourself. That is the truth."

"And you think you know the truth better than the Truth, the great being that gave you your knowledge and opened the gates for you in the first place? Then you really are conceited. But that does not change the fact that you only got the idea from a work of fiction. And you thought that you could make fiction real."

"Fiction is real," I retort. "At least in part. The situation, the magic, all of that might be false- but the emotions that go into it and come out of it aren't. No matter how improbable the scenario is, there are shards of reality in it. There is some reality in everything."

The Truth grinned again. "I know what your payment for gaining true knowledge is now. And because you tried to fight it, tried to talk back to me- I'm making you give two payments. One of those payments will be your reality; the other one of those will be your freedom.

"Have fun trying to find those 'shards of reality' now, Anastasia."

And with that, things went black instead of white as I drifted out of consciousness.

What wakes me up now is a deep man's voice shouting at me, asking if I'm dead, if I'll open my eyes. His voice demands to be obeyed, so I open my eyes and look at him.

Is this really happening?

I'm in Amestris, and Roy Mustang standing over me.