Hey, it's been a while! AdventureAddict here with another exciting new chapter of My Body, Your Soul! –crowd cheers- Tonight we have a very special guest, Edward Elric! –crowd cheers again- And—Eh, forget it, this isn't a talk show.
Ed: What? You called me out here for nothing?!
Uh… You can still say the disclaimer.
Ed: She's lame enough to do a fake talk show and you're questioning if she owns Fullmetal Alchemist or not? No one that lame is allowed to own FMA.
…-sniffle- You're so mean!
Ed: You called me out here for nothing!
Chapter Three
"Hey, Katie! What's with the weird outfit?"
I paused in my footsteps and looked over my shoulder. Tammie was grinning and waving at me. I smiled and waved back, waiting for her to catch up to me.
"So, what's up with the clothes?" Tammie said when she was close enough that we were walking to school together. "You look like you're dressed to be the hobo in a school presentation." I sighed. At least Ed's excuse looked believable with my outfit.
"I had to cover up my automail," I said. I was so relieved that I had at least two friends who knew about Ed that I could confide in. I had trouble keeping secrets from people, especially such a big secret.
"Oh yeah," Tammie said, getting a huge grin. "That stuff's not just a covering of your arm, is it? So it really runs just like the automail in the show? Can you take it out? What do all the wires look like inside? Kaaaatie, can I see?"
"Ah!" I yelped and jumped backwards as Tammie grabbed at me. I held my right arm protectively to my chest. I didn't know how I would manage to get my automail fixed if I let anything happen to it. A mechanic who would know how to work with automail would be incredibly hard to find. Tammie pouted as if I just told her Christmas was canceled.
"Look, I just don't want anything to happen to this automail," I said, biting my lip. "If it gets broken, I'd be in big trouble. My parents would notice if one of my arms suddenly stopped moving at all, or if it wasn't attached to my shoulder anymore."
"Fine," Tammie sighed heavily. "Why do you always have to use logic against me like that? I hate when you do that. She scowled and stuck her tongue out at me. I laughed and relaxed. It was funny how in a show based mainly around alchemy, Tammie had gotten obsessed over the prosthetic limbs.
'Winry at heart,' Ed muttered with a spiritual eye roll. 'But let's not test that theory and lend her any wrenches.'
I giggled. Tammie looked over at me and raised an eyebrow, obviously wondering what the joke was.
"Ed was just saying that it was funny how much you remind him of Winry," I explained. Tammie stared at me for a second, then grinned and jammed her pockets.
"I guess I do act a bit like her," Tammie laughed. She paused for a minute, letting a serious expression settle over her face before she looked back to me. "Speaking of Ed, he's… he's treating you nicely, right?"
"Of course, Tammie," I smiled. "He's been a gentleman the whole time. He even put up with me—"
'No! You promised you wouldn't tell about the nightgown!'
'Oh yeah, right, sorry. It's not like she would think less of you for it though.'
'Caaaaat…'
"He even put up with what?" Tamie asked, frowning. I chuckled nervously and scratched at the back of my head.
"He put up with all sorts of girly things," I said, thinking frantically. It was true, Ed had put up with some girly actions in my life that needed to be down anyway, such as the underwear that was definitely different from his. "I could tell he was a little embarrassed about me changing my clothes while he was in there, but he knew it had to be done, so he put up with it."
'Oh, yeah, that's so much better than telling her about the nightgown,' Ed muttered.
'You're just a nut,' I snickered.
'Why, thank you.' I grinned and shook my head. The guy was only proving my point. I guessed that he didn't mind being called silly. After all, he had been called much worse things in his life and not even batted an eye at some of them. And I knew that with an Ed, silly was definitely better than short.
'Don't even go there,' Ed said with a heavy sigh, picking up on the general gist of my thoughts. My grin widened. He was just too much fun to have around. I had no idea how I'd be able to pay attention through the rest of the school day.
"Hey, Katie?" Tammie said. I turned away from the conversation with Edward and back to Tammie. She looked as if she were a bit nervous or worried about something. Or maybe she was both. "This, might be a little awkward for you, but… Do you mind if I ask a favor of you? Could I talk to Ed directly, please?"
"Sure, Tammie, that's no problem," I said, feeling relived to hear what she was really nervous about. I had been beginning to worry that it was something much more serious. I took a deep breath, and let Ed step forward and pull the fog over my eyes.
'You know, if you get really good at this, someday you might be able to completely lose control when someone else is in your body. You won't even remember what happened while the other person was in control then.'
'Wow, that kind of sounds dangerous,' I replied back nervously.
'It is. Just like driving a car is dangerous. You just have to know what you're dealing with and protect yourself.' I nodded. That made enough sense.
"Okay, it's me," Ed said, turning back to Tammie. I wondered if I really was getting better at letting him have full control. He had pitched my voice a bit lower than I did when I talked. I wondered if he had been doing that the whole time I had been dealing with him in my body, or if I had only begun to notice it instead.
"Look, Ed, I just want to make sure nothing bad will happen to Katie like this," Tammie said, looking at Ed with a frown. I felt him flinch slightly. I could understand it. I never liked to be on the receiving end of one of her glares either.
"I'm not going to let anything bad happen to her," Ed replied in a firm tone. "I'm going to make sure to take care of Katie as long as I'm around her, inside her body or not."
"That's not what I'm worried the most about," Tammie said with a wave of her hand. "If Katie says you've been a gentleman, then you've been a gentleman. What I'm worried about is if there's any accidents or circumstances you'd be unprepared for."
"I'm not—" Ed started.
"Like the automail. You didn't think that would happen to her, did you?" Tammie said, and Ed closed my mouth instantly. "Look, I don't want to hurt you, Ed, but I don't want you to not be prepared for something bad to happen. I want Katie to come out of this in one piece."
"Me too," Ed mumbled. I could feel his thoughts sink deep into thoughts of how Tammie was right, and mulling over a hundred different what ifs. I bit my lip. I didn't like seeing Ed so worried. I was prepared to deal with hard circumstances if it meant having him around.
I was just about to speak up and tell him so myself when I was interrupted by a girl jumping into the area in front of Ed. He jolted, and I felt the fog lift immediately lift from my eyes. I had never seen him let go of his control so quickly.
It was Trisha, or as the kids at school like to call her, the shadow jumper. Tammie sighed. Trisha was a weird one alright. She liked to go around jumping on people's shadows. No one was really sure why she liked doing it so much. I wouldn't have minded her quirkiness so much if it were for the fact that she seemed to be a bit of a know-it-all at times.
"Gotcha," Trisha grinned, looking up at me. She was planted firmly in the middle of my shadow. "A nice jump like that to make a spirit jolt. I surprised you, didn't I?"
"Trisha, it's just a shadow," Tammie sighed. Ed jolted a bit at the name, but stayed silent. I couldn't help but think over Trisha's words. She had made a spirit jolt, specifically Ed. He had even jolted enough to let go of his control over my body.
But there was no way she knew she had affected a second soul inside my body. Nobody knew about Ed being inside me, and even if she guessed at something along those lines, there was no way jumping on a shadow would jerk at someone's spirit. Spirits and shadows were two different things.
"It's not just a shadow," Trisha laughed. We both waited for her to explain why exactly a shadow wasn't "just a shadow," but Trisha didn't seem to want to go on. That was one of the annoying things about her. She flipped between telling you too little and too much information. It was hard to know what to expect with her.
"You're different from how you usually are," Trisha said, peering closer at me. I gulped. Was it possible that she really could know about Ed? No, that was silly. There was no way. "I think I'll keep an eye on you for a few days." Trisha then winked at me, and turned around and ran in the direction of the school. Tammie and I stood there blinking for a half second.
"She's so weird," Tammie sighed after a bit, shaking her head and rolling her eyes. "She almost reminds me of Luna Lovegood, but at least Luna is more towards the lucid in a daze kind of druggie. Trisha… she must be on crack or something."
'…That was weird.' Ed said slowly. I nodded in agreement with his words, though Tammie took it as me nodding to her words.
'Do you think she's really crazy, or might she know something important?' I thought back. Ed frowned and pondered over the idea.
'I'm not sure. She could easily be either one,' he said slowly. 'But we should keep an eye on her just in case.'
'Sounds good to me.'
Thankfully, Tammie and I weren't very far from the school, but being stopped by Trisha had made us go from being on time to being late. I hated getting to school late, but unfortunately I was late quite often, since I wasn't much of a morning person.
I hurried through the halls of the school to my classroom. I groaned aloud when I saw that the class had already started. Curse that Trisha and her shadow-jumping. I figured there was no reason to even attempt hiding my tardiness. I was usually late getting to the school anyway, but at least I almost always made it to the classroom before the actual class started.
I could feel everyone look up at me when I entered the room. I hug my head and hung my coat on the coat rack, then unpacked my backpack and sat down in my seat. Mr. Keeley raised an eyebrow and looked at me with an amused smile.
"You have ten seconds to get those sunglasses somewhere I can't see them, Miss Greene," Mr., Keeley said with a wink at me. I jolted in my seat. I had forgotten about my sunglasses. I grabbed them off my nose and shoved them in my desk. I was just glad Mr. Keeley hadn't taken them away from me, no excuses.
"As I was saying, I'm sure you all had a very… exciting Halloween evening," Mr. Keeley said, focusing his eyes on me as he talked. I sank in my seat, feeling blood rush to my cheeks. "But I didn't get any candy of my own, so if I catch you guys sneaking Halloween candy in here, I'm taking it for my lunch. We're starting with Math."
I sighed and pulled my math book out of the desk just like everyone else in the classroom was doing. Why did Mr. Keeley have to start with math? He was a cool enough teacher, but Algebra really wasn't my strong suit. I especially hated when we had to start the day with an Algebra lesson. It made me go through the rest of the day feeling like I was stupid just because I couldn't work through a few math problems.
"Page 270," Mr. Keeley called out. The class groaned. "You have until 8:30 to work."
Immediately one student's hand shot up. Mr. Keeley went over to them, looking over their shoulder. I sighed in relief. It meant that I didn't have to deal with Mr. Keeley coming to my desk to look over my shoulder and see how I was doing. It made me feel so uncomfortable when he did that. He knew I was doing badly with Algebra and needed help, but I just didn't understand it the way he explained it.
'Maybe I can help.'
I sighed at Ed's voice. I appreciated the offer, but I wasn't sure if his help would work. Algebra was just too much for me. I could handle plain old arithmetic fine, but not algebra.
'You'd like to learn alchemy, wouldn't you?'
'Of course!' I said back quickly with a grin. The alchemy in FMA was amazing; of course I wished I could be able to do that. Would Ed spend an hour teaching me how to do alchemy instead of algebra? It seemed so much more useful.
'You've got to build yourself a toolbox before you can build a house,' Ed chuckled. 'Before you can start doing alchemy properly, you need to know a good chunk of Geometry and Trigonometry, and before you can learn either of those, you need to be able to do algebra pretty confidently."
'Great, I'm never going to learn alchemy,' I moaned.
'Don't look at the whole picture right now. Let's just focus on that first problem for now. We can work on harder alchemy later. These books usually start out the assignment with easier problems and work up to hard, so we'll just break it down one problem at a time, okay? If you don't get one of the easier problems, we'll stay on that one until you're okay with moving on to the hard stuff. So what's the first problem?' I sighed.
'x squared plus 10x equals -21 iff x is greater than -5.'
'Okay, let's start with the easiest bit,' Ed said. I could feel him getting excited about tackling a math problem. I rolled my eyes. What a dork. 'iff stands for if and only if, right? So this rule only applies where x is a higher number than -5.'
'…Okay.'
'So what would you do to make this easier to work with?' I groaned. Ed frowned and tried a different approach. 'Okay, then tell me what a problem similar to this would look like in plain arithmetic.'
'There wouldn't be two sides to the problem,' I grumbled.
'There you go! So let's take that 21 and add it to both sides. Read me what you've got.'
'x squared plus 10x plus 21 equals 0.'
'That's easier to work with. Now if we could just get it down to an x equals something, we'd know what x is, since x has to be the opposite of whatever the number is in order to reach 0.'
'Yeah, that'd be nice.' I sighed and drew a loop-de-loop with my pencil.
'You can do that here too.' I jolted and looked at the paper.
'Really? How?'
'You tell me how, Cat.' I nearly grumbled at Ed as he leaned back inside me in a lazy fashion. It was so easy for him, the stinker. I ground my teeth together and stared at the problem. I would show him.
'Factoring,' I declared after a minute. Ed grinned and sat back up.
'Right. So you take the two numbers that will multiply to 21 and add to 10, because that's what happens to the problem when you multiply out two parentheses. What—"
'3 and 7,' I shot back at him with a smirk.
'Great,' Ed grinned. 'So what happens when you split the middle term?'
'x squared plus 3x plus 7x plus 21 equals 0.'
'Okay, so now we factor the common numbers out of each half and make sure they match up.'
I grinned. I could do that. I factored an x out of the first half, and a 7 out of the next. Sure enough, the numbers did match up.
'Now the two (x plus 3) groups match up, so you mush them together,' Ed said. He was obviously reading over my work even if I didn't show him. 'And then you've got…'
'(x plus 3)(x plus 7) equals 0,' I beamed.
'Right. And since those are multiplied, at least one of them has to equal 0, so we set them both equal to 0 and see what we get.'
'-3 and -7,' I thought back. 'So that's what I put down as my answer?'
'Hang on,' Ed said quickly. 'Always look back to the information you were given and make sure you didn't forget anything. Read me that first line again.'
'x squared plus 10x equals -21…'
'Did we take care of that?'
'Yeah.'
'Okay, then keep going.'
'…iff x is greater than -5.'
'Aha,' Ed smirked. 'Did we remember that x can only equal numbers above -5?'
'…No.'
'Okay, then go through your answer and cross off any solutions that are less than -5.' I crossed off the -7 and left the -3 alone. 'Is there any other given information we didn't use?'
'Nope.'
'Okay, now we're done. What's your answer?'
'-3,' I grinned. I could feel Ed grin back at me. 'Thank you so much, Ed!'
'No problem, Cat. You know this stuff, it just overwhelms you when you look at the big picture instead of breaking a problem down step by step. Then it's a lot easier, isn't it?'
'Yeah, it sure is.'
"How's the assignment going today, Miss Greene?" I jolted at the voice and spun around to see Mr. Keeley standing behind me. I grinned at him and pointed to the completed first problem on my piece of paper.
"I'm already done with the first problem," I told him proudly. Mr. Keeley leaned forward, reading over my work. After a moment, he clicked his tongue and looked back at me.
"Miss Greene," he said, and I winced slightly. His tone didn't sound good. But how could that be? Ed had helped me through the problem, and Ed wouldn't get it wrong! "Tell me, what has changed you between yesterday and today that you managed to get through this problem in class and got it right as well?"
"I had a friend who noticed I was having trouble with my math, and he taught me how to break a problem down and tackled it one small step at a time," I grinned. So I wasn't in trouble after all.
"Well, give my thanks to that friend of yours," Mr. Keeley smiled. "He seems to have made my job a lot easier. He would be a great candidate for the student math tutor I've been looking for. I know a few students in the school who could use a little extra help but don't want it from a teacher."
"Well…" I fidgeted with my hands nervously. "I'm sure he'd love to help if he could, sir, but he has a tendency of biting off more than he can chew."
"Just a thought," Mr. Keeley shrugged. "Keep it up, Miss Greene."
"Yes, sir," I grinned back.
'You with your sirs and ma'ams,' Ed sighed. He sounded amused. 'Always so formal with everyone.'
'But formality is fun!' I laughed. Ed chuckled with me.
'So I have a tendency to bite off more than I can chew, huh?'
'Yes, you do,' I snickered. 'And don't you try denying that.'
'Fine, I bite off more than I can chew,' Ed said with a melodramatic sob. 'You're just a mean bully.'
'Am not, you're just a goofball.'
'Yeah, I suppose I am.' Ed smirked. 'There's something else that silly anime of yours missed out on.'
'Too bad,' I laughed. 'You're much funnier this way.'
'Oh, and the anime version of me isn't funny at all? I'm hurt, milady, very deeply hurt.'
'Nut.'
'Yeah, we established that,' Ed laughed. 'Now, are we going to tackle that next math problem or not?'
'Sure.'
I chuckled. It seemed like the school days were going to go by a lot faster as long as Ed was around. How many people could claim that Ed was their math tutor, anyway? It was the first time I set my pencil to the paper to tackle a math problem without feeling a sense of dread.
Ed: I'm bored.
Aw, come on, weren't you entertained by the chapter?
Ed: Peh. I'm just sitting in this stupid fake talk show room, remember? Because someone said 'Oh, yeah, we're doing a talk show! Everyone will love it! You should come! There'll be ice cream!'
I didn't say that!
Ed: Liar.
Anyway, hope you guys enjoyed that chapter, I have the next one written out, it just needs to be edited and posted, so keep an eye out for that!
