Time went by. Shrike's 28th birthday in spring went by largely unnoticed, though he received from his father a card that was only three weeks late. Now that he and his father had become closer, he occasionally talked to his colleagues about what he and his father had done and what they had written to each other, which was a considerable increase in his topics about his family since he had previously not talked about the issue at all. He mostly spoke to Linke but some of the time both Linke and Envy were present to hear his stories. Envy just ignored him and thought about something else.
The first time Shrike talked about his father to just Envy, it just bore the conversation and responded with obnoxious disinterest. It was extremely annoyed but decided to not verbally attack him yet.
The second time Shrike brought up the topic of his father, Envy was a lot less patient.
"I was in North City last week," said Shrike after he and Envy had finished a shift of ventilation shaft inspection and were on their way to the mess.
"I know," mumbled Envy.
"Oh? I probably mentioned it before I left. Anyway, I met my dad again. He'd gotten a bullet graze on his left arm but it was okay by then. He took me to a different restaurant each day and – –"
Envy turned to face Shrike and yelled at him. "Shrike, shut up! Why are you telling me this? Why are you even doing that crap? Your daddy left you alone when you were a kid – heck, even younger than that! And now you're acting like he's the best parent ever or something! What the hell is up with that? You should hate him!"
Shrike was completely taken by surprise and stood paralysed. Eventually he managed to open his mouth. "B-but... he... first he wasn't there but now he is... it's just..."
"Seriously? First he didn't take care of you and now he does when you're old enough to have children of your own? Is THAT what impresses you?"
"U-uh... no..."
"Then what?! You know what, never mind. I don't even want to hear your stupid stuttering."
As Envy stared at him, Shrike felt very uneasy. He had no idea what had happened and could not think of anything to say.
"Just try to get this through your over-excited rediscovery of your stupid dad: I don't want to hear it, so shut up about it already!" Envy was obviously agitated but not uncontrollably furious.
Shrike just stared.
"Got it?!"
"Eh... y-yes," stammered Shrike. "I-I'm sorry."
Envy glared at him for a short moment, but they then resumed their walking.
"Um... Can I ask why you don't...? I mean, that was really sudden... And we've talked about it before during the vacation trips."
Envy had not thought about the reasons for its irritability. Before, the family issue had been neutral because Shrike seemed to have been virtually orphaned and even Linke just complained about his family though they seemed to be on relatively good terms. Now that Shrike had asked about the issue and therefore made Envy think about it, Envy saw that Shrike's new good experiences with his father annoyed it. The realisation crept up from inside Envy and it understood that it was jealous of him, and had been every time he brought the family issues up after the first time he had met his father. Envy did not want to think about the issue.
"Keep your mouth shut, human," it gritted. It calmed itself by thinking about how it would soon enough have a family of its own as well and there was no reason for it to be jealous of anything, but of course it was not like Envy could just stop feeling like it did. In addition, Envy thought that learning all the things it needed to in order to create a homunculus was incredibly wearisome. In fact, it had already given up studying alchemy twice but had this far resumed its studies after a short while.
When the two reached the mess, Shrike got his food first and went to sit at a table, but Envy did not join him. It went to some corner table and looked so uninviting that even some of the more talkative Briggs soldiers who occasionally spent time with it did not join its company.
The next day, Envy was still annoyed enough that it intentionally neglected its ventilation maintenance shift. Shrike phoned Envy's sleeping quarters to inform Linke about the issue, and Linke went to fetch Envy. He knocked on the door of its room.
"What?" came its rather rude reply.
Linke opened the door and saw Envy in a rather odd position. It was upside-down and holding itself up by just one finger. It was not on the floor but on a rack that distributed its weight on a much larger area than just the area of its finger because otherwise it would probably have gone straight through the floor or at the least bent it. It was not wearing its uniform but had the odd-looking outfit Linke had seen on their first vacation trip and on some subsequent trips. He was surprised and a little confused.
Envy glared at Linke somewhat angrily and turned itself upright before getting off the rack and kicking it to the side. "Didn't you think you should have asked what I was doing before you entered? Or asked whether you COULD enter?" it asked, still with a rude tone. It did not bother to lock its door often.
"...Shrike is expecting you at the maintenance office of mandatory machinery."
"Tell him to stop expecting me."
"Huh? Why?"
"That's none of your business. Now leave me alone."
"No. You can't just neglect your work like that."
"Watch me."
"You'll get some disciplinary action."
"Like another shift later? Whatever, I don't care. Now get."
"But... That's not how you should perform you– –"
Envy came to stand right before Linke and glowered at him. "Get out, human."
Linke looked very displeased but was intimidated enough to leave Envy alone. Envy grinned widely to itself over having made the man squirm like that.
Linke went over to the telephone and spoke into the mouthpiece. "It isn't coming."
"What? Er, why?" came Shrike's voice.
"I don't know, it didn't give any reason. It was just really irritable."
"Uh... really."
"Oh? Why, do you know what is up with it?"
"Er... Yesterday it was... I mean, I was telling it about what I'd done with my father but then it suddenly just snapped at me and yelled at me to be quiet. That was really odd. After that it avoided me."
"Huh. That sounds peculiar. Anyway, I can't force Envy to come there so I guess that's that. I'll file a note and schedule extra shifts for it. You should tell Armstrong."
"Um. Yes, sir." Shrike hung up the phone and started worrying whether he had really said something so insensitive that Envy had become truly angry with him. He told Second Lieutenant Roma that Envy was not going to come, but the old man did not even ask why; he just muttered something about everyone getting ill sometimes and gave Shrike his list of jobs.
Shrike did not run into Armstrong while performing the inspection, so he went to find her after his shift ended. Armstrong was in the weapons research and development department overseeing the latest installments.
Shrike walked up to her and could only wonder how much easier it had become to go to her and talk to her. "Excuse me, sir? Do you have a minute?"
Armstrong gave him a look. "What is your issue about?"
"Envy, sir."
"Hrm." She turned around and gestured for Shrike and Rodney to follow. They went through a door and into a corridor that was quieter than the rather noisy assembly hall. "Yes?"
"Um, Envy acted rather strangely yesterday... Actually it wasn't all that strange, but today it wouldn't come with me to a work shift and Linke told me that he couldn't force Envy to come and that I should tell you, sir."
"Hm? What exactly did it do yesterday?"
"I was telling it about my last vacation with my father when it suddenly became really angry at me. It just yelled at me to shut up, and I have no idea why. After that it wouldn't sit with me in the mess and just seemed to avoid me."
Armstrong frowned. "Do you remember exactly what you said to it?"
"Huh? Sir?" Armstrong looked expectantly at Shrike. "Um... Well, first I just said that I had been in North City on vacation. It replied it knew that, and then I said that oh, I must have mentioned that before I left, and then I said that I met my father, and that he had gotten a bullet graze on his arm but it was okay. Then I said that he'd taken me to different restaurants, and then it yelled at me loudly. It told me to shut up and asked why was telling that to it and said that I should hate my father for leaving me alone and... something. That didn't really make sense to me. I tried to ask why it had gotten so angry but it just told me to be quiet."
"I see."
"Er? Does that make any sense to you, sir?"
"It does. If you want to know, I will share the explanation with you. However, if Envy later finds out you know about this, it will probably be many times angrier with you."
"O-oh..." Shrike looked at Armstrong with a confused expression and was not quite sure whether he should stay ignorant or learn of the issue. After a short while, he decided that it was better if he knew of it, since if he knew, he could try to avoid making Envy angry. "Yes, sir, I do want to know."
"Fine. Rodney, you can leave if you wish."
"I'll stay, sir," replied Rodney.
"I am quite certain that Envy reacted the way it did because it didn't want to hear about your good family life. That is because Envy is envious of humans: the way we have loving family, trusting friends and loyal colleagues around us who help us."
"Oh... really? That... would fit with its name, but I thought it was 'Envy' because it's so good at everything and almost immortal and can shapeshift, and that's quite a lot of stuff to be jealous about."
"That is another interpretation. Do you now understand why it became angry with you?"
"I... yes, sir, I think so. It was... envious of my family..." Shrike made a very odd expression and seemed quite confused.
"What?" asked Armstrong.
"Um? I just... it... I can't believe anyone could be envious of MY family, sir."
"I can't say I'd understand how Envy's mind works, but apparently that is still the case."
"I see, sir."
"So, it got angry at you, avoided you and now didn't show up for its shift with you? Tell me if it continues doing that."
"Yes, sir."
"And it didn't get violent toward you?"
"No, sir... I was rather worried that it might but it didn't threaten me or anything and didn't get violent. It just yelled at me."
"Good."
Shrike left and went to eat and read before his physical training.
The next day, Envy did show up for its shift with Shrike. Shrike was nervous and quiet, while Envy still seemed rather irritable and likewise did not talk much.
Envy had been angry enough with Shrike to consider stopping being around him altogether, but it had soon remembered that it needed his help with its alchemy studies and felt quite annoyed because of that. Had it not needed his help, it might have just requested another partner for ventilation maintenance. Nonetheless, Shrike did not bring up his father again, so Envy figured that it would just act like he had never said anything.
As the days passed, Shrike noticed that Envy seemed to forget the tiff. It started being more talkative, complained about other things again and acted in its regular manner around Shrike.
Linke gave Envy two extra work shifts, but it did not even notice that since these days it hardly ever spent any time studying its schedule – it only checked what it should be doing next and did that.
At the end of May, Envy was bored and sitting on a crudely carved stone bench in front of the main building of the abandoned farm. It had just given up on studying alchemy to create a homunculus for the third time and was playing with a rat it had caught in the forested field. Rats were very numerous there, and Envy guessed that the reason was the former field that still had a few of the old crop plants growing on it. Envy had played around with the animal for so long that it had gone into shock from mere stress of being close to Envy. Envy placed the limp and catatonic rat on its thigh and wondered if the thing would ever recover. Envy soon grew too uninterested to continue watching the rat and ate it before anything happened.
Envy walked to the side of the house, shapeshifted so that it looked like a tall tree and spent a while looking around the dull farm environment. It saw some flies on the walls of the stone barn and some birds in the trees on the other side of the forested field. Just on the edge of the field, it could barely see two rats mating. It turned its nose up at them and felt angry.
Even rats could reproduce. Envy could not.
Envy writhed in its hatred over feeling envious of a couple of tiny rodents. Hissing, it suddenly shapeshifted a vine-like arm toward the two far-away rats and managed to take them by surprise, crushing them into a mess. Then it had to shapeshift back into human form to lower the arm because even its physiology could not support such a long appendage. It shapeshifted its arm back to normal and cleaned it while walking toward the flattened rats.
"You bloody stupid filthy maggots!" it shouted at them. It kicked some ground over them and stomped them into an even flatter pile of pulp. "Haha, stupid things, couldn't do anything about that, could you?!" It stared at the half-buried immobile legs and tails of the two rats and did not really feel much better beyond having expended energy on something physical instead of wallowing in its jealousy.
Now the rats would provide nourishment for the insects and other invertebrates as well as the plants, and they could grow and reproduce...
"Aaargh!" Envy flopped down on the ground and rolled around a few times. "Unfair! Unfaaair! So unfair!" It stopped and stayed in an odd frog-like pose while lying on its stomach, simmering and then cooling.
After a moment, Envy got up and dusted its body a little. It glanced at the rats once more and noticed that it could not tell the rats apart. What little was visible and not moulded into a shapeless mass seemed really crudely conjoined. They were kind of like a deplorably failed attempt at making a chimera.
Envy then wondered whether it could create chimeras. It did not see a reason why it could not, though it did not really know what it would even do with chimeras. It spent a while recalling how the transmutation circle to make a chimera had looked like. The circle was definitely not simple, but not all that complex either; the procedure was. The trick to interweaving two very different kinds of creatures into each other was to know both of their physiologies and know how to make the blend work. Envy naturally had rather adequate knowledge of animals since it had previously read books about them to improve its digestive system and many of them were similar enough to humans. Envy had little clue what to do with the souls of the animals, so it decided to not pay attention to them. It designed the transmutation circle on its hand and decided to test it just for fun.
Some minutes passed as Envy hunted for some more rats, most of whom had fled the scene while it had been having a tantrum. After it finally had two rats, it held one in its hand that had the transmutation circle, placed the other one on top of the first one and transmuted. The rats melded into each other and formed a hilariously malformed double rat that died after a few seconds. Envy felt amused and thought that it could try again to see whether it would be able to make the chimeras work properly. Before it started looking for some more animals to experiment on, it ate the dead double rat to get rid of the evidence.
Envy experimented on three more double rats and dissected them after making them and before eating them to find out what had went wrong. Based on its findings, it modified the transmutation circle so that it could get the organs combining better.
After its three experiments, Envy made six chimeras with its improved circle: a more successful double rat, a thoroughly failed snail-mouse because Envy did not know how snails worked, a sparrow-rat, a two-rat-one-mouse, a hare-crow and one final double rat that was successful enough that it survived the operation for at least five minutes and seemed like it would go on living for even longer, even if arduously. Envy dissected and ate them all when it was done.
Succeeding at something relatively complex made it feel better.
Envy decided to do the same the next day and played with creating chimeras. It realised that it was able to make a viable chimera only out of two or more members of the same species, and only with rodents – not invertebrates, snakes or birds. It did not find other kind of animals on which to experiment. It did not know why it could not get the other chimeras to survive longer.
Back in Fort Briggs, Envy studied some more about the physiology of the different animals it had tried to transmute and concluded that it most likely had not fully comprehended the anatomical differences of animals other than the rodents. It studied what it could of the physiology of the snakes and birds common to the kind of terrain around the abandoned farm. It also found in one of Shrike's books a certain important piece of information that helped it insert into the circle a feature that would make the transmutation of living organic material easier and more stable. Envy was sure that the feature had been in the original transmutation circle it had tried to recall, but it guessed that it had only forgotten the feature.
Envy performed chimera experiments on its two next vacation trips as well. It learned to blend the animals so that they were viable even with a cross-species transmutation. However, it could not get invertebrates to work with anything, but it did not care about that too much. From the transmutations of animals that were of a distinctly different species, it induced that when it transmuted a source animal into a target animal, the soul of the target animal remained in the chimera body and the soul of the animal that had been blended into the other was discarded. At least, that was how it looked like to Envy when it observed the chimeras' behaviour.
Regardless of how much the chimera experiments had advanced Envy's knowledge of animal physiology and given a small hint about the modification of organic material, it still did not not know how those tests would help it with creating a new homunculus. Maybe they did not help at all. But what then had been the reason for Envy creating the chimeras? Was there none?
Envy realised that it had not really even thought about why it wanted to create another homunculus. Therefore it spent some time contemplating that. There was some desire in it to just prove itself, to show that it could, but it did not think that was a very large part. Another reason was that if it succeeded, it could be more certain that it would not be the last or only one of its kind. The biggest reason for it to make a new homunculus was to ensure that some puny humans were not superior to homunculi. Humans, and everything else for that matter, could reproduce and therefore homunculi needed to be able to reproduce as well. Heaven forbid that Envy would be envious of the manner in which humans reproduced, but as it had found out right before its first chimera experiments, it did not like that there was something that all other beings in the world could do but it and its kind could not.
Nonetheless, deep down, the ability to reproduce was not what Envy was actually envious of. As Shrike had so inconveniently reminded it weeks ago, Envy was in truth still all too jealous of humans and their friends and family. It could not pretend to itself that it was not. Just being able to reproduce would not be enough. Creating another homunculus was its chance to have a family of its own without having to spend any more time agonising over its troubles in caring enough about humans and befriending them.
Thinking about a family made Envy realise that if it created new homunculi, they would technically be its second family. Its first family was dead. Should it try to recreate them somehow? Envy felt positively giddy about the prospect of bringing Lust back, but it soon considered that a homunculus's soul was in all likelihood similar to that of a human's, which meant that trying to bring back a dead homunculus was true human transmutation, and based on the available evidence, doomed to fail. Envy could pay the toll with its Philosopher's Stone, but that would not change the fact that a dead soul was not going to come back no matter what it paid.
Envy then considered creating a new kind of Lust. A new Lust could look like the original, have a similar personality and probably abilities but would not have the memories of the original Lust. Envy thought that creating a completely new creature only in the image of a dead one was certainly not an attempt to resurrect the dead one. It could just create a new soul and that would work. Envy smiled to itself. It could make a new Lust. It could make a new Greed, one that would not turn out to be such an annoying traitorous dickhead. It could make a new Pride, one that would not be such a chesty prick. It could make a new Gluttony, one with a little more brain and perhaps a bit less stomach – Envy did not have a clue as to how it could recreate his failed Gate of Truth, and it was sure that not creating that intimidating second stomach was indeed the better choice. It could make a new Sloth, one that was more interesting than the old one. And it could make a new Wrath, one that was not just a self-righteous former human with a Philosopher's Stone but a real homunculus.
Envy could even make a completely new kind of homunculus! Its ideas made it very satisfied, and for once its happiness was not just schadenfreude.
After it had floated around in its dreams, Envy got its feet back on the ground. It still needed a way to make its dreams reality. It did not know how to give the created homunculus a certain type of personality or even appearance. It decided that it would try to create a completely new homunculus first since that way it could be certain that it would not be trying to bring an old one back.
Envy needed a way to split its own Philosopher's Stone so that it would have something to serve as the new homunculus's core. It soon found out that it was not able to partition its Stone just by willing it to divide like Father had done. It was quite certain that forcibly breaking the Stone into two would not work, so it spent some time coming up with the means to manipulate and divide its Stone using alchemy. Since it almost remembered how the transmutation circle to create Philosopher's Stone had looked, it could use what it remembered to modify the basic circle that was normally used to modify materials. Designing the circle took some time and Envy was apprehensive about not being able to test the transmutation at all; it would have to get the transmutation right the first time since it only had the one Stone. It decided that the safest choice would be to divide the Stone so that it was left with two-thirds. The one-third would become the core for the new homunculus.
Finally Envy realised that perhaps the chimera experiments and the subsequent studying of animals had been useful in its journey toward making a new homunculus after all. For one, Envy thought that it should make the new homunculus's body better than a regular human's in a similar way as it had improved its own body by shapeshifting. It also realised that it could practise binding the soul to a body with the chimeras by transferring an animal's soul into another animal. Of course the homunculus would be a different case since it would have a Philosopher's Stone, but at least Envy could practise something even vaguely similar.
Author's note: Schadenfreude (from German): feeling of joy caused by the misery of others; Schaden: damage, misfortune; Freude: joy. The Finnish equivalent term is "vahingonilo", and the words ("vahinko" and "ilo") are the same as the German ones. (A Dilbert strip from 2006-08-07 illustrates schadenfreude nicely.)