Ugh. It's so late at night, but I wanted to get this chapter out tonight and do everything that goes with that anyway. Anyway, it's summer vacation now, so now that I have time I actually am getting some writing done. Most of my effort's focused on my original fiction right now, but this should get another update or two as well. I hope you enjoy. I would love to hear from you!

Recap:

Fu tells Ed that there's an appointment to get him turned back into a human and wants to ask him some questions after dinner. Meanwhile, Mustang returns the backpack Jake left at the factory, only for Jake to attack him and Al, who vanish on him without a trace.

Chapter V

Jake went to his grandfather's after the two foreign alchemists gave him the slip again. He walked in on his grandfather replacing a light bulb from a squat blue lamp in the front room. "G, those two foreigners just came by my house, looking for Ed!"

Lao Shi kept most of his attention on the spiraling light bulb he was screwing on. "How did they find your house, young one?"

Jake was rubbing the spikes at the back of his head. "I don't know. They had my backpack, but I know I didn't have any ID in it. Maybe someone recognized us back at the factory."

"Most troublesome." Lao Shi put down the lamp and put the lampshade back on top, a thin, white canvas of blue and red Chinese dragons flying through a storm above some sea. "We will have to increase our security. Here, and at your house."

The old dragon walked over to an old land-line sitting on the counter. "I'm calling your mother about this. You go upstairs and tell Fu."

Jake walked through the dark back room and followed the kitchen light up the staircase. He found Fu right away, sitting at the low kitchen table and typing away on his laptop, a notepad lying beside him.

"Hey, kid. Take a look at this." Fu slid the notepad across the table like he was playing air hockey.

Jake picked it up and saw pencil drawings laid out like a manga page or something. "What's this?"

Across the notepad were various sketches of a stick figure with an antenna and braid on its head. At the very start, the figure was labeled Ed, but Jake only realized that the pile of rectangles he followed a palm tree labeled as Envy into was a factory because he'd been there himself.

The next few panels showed Ed acting sneaky, hiding behind crates, and peering around corners. Nothing beneath his eyes was ever shown until Jake reached a much more detailed panel showing part of the transmutation circle chalked on the main factory floor.

Comic Ed's mouth and eyes were wide, nothing but large circles that extended off his face. A thought bubbled upward, showing some stick figure with braids, a plus sign, a dog, and an equals sign with a new dog after it.

After that, he was shown spinning around to face someone with glasses, some sort of rod coming down toward his head. What surprised Jake was that the person with glasses had a label next to them, granted it was followed by a question mark. It was possibly someone named Shou Tucker.

The last two panels were of a little kitten and of Tucker setting a box down with the kitten in it on the side of some street.

Jake set the notepad down. "This is what happened to Ed, isn't it?"

Fu took his paws off the keyboard and moved his eyes from the screen to Jake's face. "As much as I could get out of him tonight anyway. He had a hard time finishing this much once he got to the point where he put two and two together. I think that other chimera he drew is someone he knows."

Jake's stomach churned a bit. How many people had noticed something wrong before this ever reached the dragons?

He pushed those thoughts aside. "Speaking of people Ed knows, those foreigners are still looking for him. They managed to track me down at my house tonight, so Gramps wants to amp up security."

Fu raised his droopy brows. "Anything else?"

Jake looked down at the notepad on the otherwise clear spot of table in front of him. "Any chance we can ask Ed who they are tonight?"

"If you want to wake him up, be my guest. When I went in to get him to verify the face I found from his comic there, he was sleeping more heavily than any real cat ever would. Snoring too. I suggest waiting 'til morning."

Jake brisked to the laptop. "You found a face? One you're sure isn't Envy?"

"Not unless Envy doubled back to knock Ed out." Fu adjusted the laptop's angle to give Jake a better picture of a scrawny man with thick dark hair, a pair of glasses and a somewhat lumpy nose. "His name's Joe Tucker. He's in his early twenties. He runs a craft store that his parents left him. And get this – he is an alchemist, one who says he specializes in working with organic materials like furs and artificial ivory. We just have to check him with Ed in the morning."

Jake couldn't place it, but the alchemist looked familiar from somewhere. "Any foreign connections?"

Fu shook his head. "Nope. We still don't know how those two fit in."

When the morning came, Fu was able to check Joe Tucker with Ed. He took the way the kid widened his eyes and hissed at the laptop before running off as a confirmation.

"Great," Fu said, navigating to a map, "we can check out his place."

But when the map came up, the shop was in the mundane district of town, where it would be suspicious of them to be snooping around too much during the day. It would have to wait until after dark.

That still left them with plenty to do though, especially after the call came in and Fu and Jake found themselves heading to another part of the city altogether to check out the Urban Alchemist's latest crime.

Last time, it was a murder. This time it was an explosion. Pieces of an automobile littered Nigel Thrall's whole neighborhood – twisted chunks of metal that were formerly part of his neighbor's Mitsubishi.

This time, the golden graffiti appeared in the street itself, the curls and slopes of the high-class font perhaps just a little tighter than the last note the Urban Alchemist had signed. Jake groaned when Fu pointed out that it could point to a different culprit, providing evidence that they were indeed dealing with an entire group.

"Fu, no one saw them again. Nothing's here. Why did we have to come? Shouldn't we be following up on Joe Tucker?" Jake held his hands shoved in the pockets of his red jacket, and a blue helmet rested, unstrapped, on his head. He was frowning at the shar-pei and pointedly not looking at the burn-covered, fully grown sorcerer with long blond hair and one arm in a white sling.

"That's not until tonight, kid. I don't want to have to be the one dealing with this any more than you do, but someone has to do it, and as a dragon, it's your responsibility."

Jake huffed and stared up the steer of small neat lawns and cozy houses, toward where Spud and Trixie were practicing without him. "Well, we came, we talked to the one guy who might have seen what happened and he didn't know anything. Can we go now?"

"Yeah, we can."

Fu left a promise with the freaked-out sorcerer that they would get the ones who blew up his car and would have gotten him worse too if he hadn't turned back for wallet, and then he and Jake walked away, past the graffitied note that read this time:

No need to investigate who's the best, dragons – it's alchemists that have the most beautiful magic. Who will see my crimson flower next?

- The Urban Alchemist.

Fu's phone rang as he was entering the data from that morning's crime into the computer. "Hello?"

The speaker was a man with a weak, low voice – the old sorcerer they'd hired to turn Ed back to normal. "That cat boy is one of the Urban Alchemist's victims, right?"

Fu pecked a few more keys with his free paw: r-a-d-i-u-s…. "If he wasn't, we wouldn't need your services."

"I thought so." The old man on the other end gave a weak laugh. "It's always trouble with customers like you."

Fu pressed the return key and the blinking black cursor jumped to the next line in his word processing program. "What's it to you? Are you going to up your prices again?" The shar-pei stopped typing and tensed, mentally listing a thousand reasons why they should get a discount instead.

"I'm afraid money isn't enough."

That claim Fu wasn't expecting. "What?"

"I heard what happened to that leprechaun, and Timothy told me what happened to him this morning. I'm not interested in becoming a target."

Fu shouted into his little black smart phone. "Hey, wait just a minute, you cowardly sticky fingers…."

There was a click and the line went dead.

Fu groaned. "Just as we were getting that kid to eat."

It was a problem, but he wouldn't tell Ed. He could fix it before the morning, right? And if he couldn't, the dragons definitely could.

Al squatted down and picked up a shard of metal. It was too small to tell what it had once been, but whatever it was, it had been thrown with enough force to embed itself in the asphalt.

He'd been told that there had been larger pieces of a car there, but they had been cleared away. However, the street still had hundreds and little bits on it, and part of the sidewalk had been blackened by something, with scratches and white chips missing near where its own shrapnel waited to destroy an unwary shoe.

"An explosion?" he asked, glancing at the grown man with him.

Mustang nodded silently, looking at a gold flamel lying a bit ahead of them. "Reminds me of Kimblee when he was less extreme."

Al stood up. "Do you think he could be? I mean, we ran into Lieutenant Hawkeye's double the other day."

"Perhaps. Especially if he keeps that same love of alchemy across dimensions as she does her love of guns."

Both males shuddered at the memory – this world's Lizzy Hawkeye was a police officer who'd been fighting gang violence in an area the two had attempted to spend the night in, and her squad had mistaken them for shady characters. They were glad Hawkeye was just as cool-headed and reasonable here as she was back home.

Mustang kept his eyes on the flamel. "What do you make of this?"

Al frowned. "That's almost the same one that was near the skate park that Jake Long followed me away from."

"He was here this morning, you know. Either he's investigating whoever hurt your brother or he's a mole."

Al started rummaging through his deep jacket pockets for something. "He won't listen to us, but if he's a real investigator, we should tip him off about Kimblee. Do you think he might be? You're the one who's been keeping tabs on him all day." When Al's gloved hands came out of his pockets, they were holding a weathered black notepad and a nearly ink-less pen.

"It's too soon to tell. But perhaps you should check out this world's Kimblee."

That night, Ed stowed away with the dragons again. They discovered him when they reached the shop's street and went for Fu's bag with some Sandman's brand sleeping powder they'd brought to keep Tucker from noticing their investigations inside his shop.

Fu's gray paw came out of the bag, holding not the vial of golden sand that Jake had been expecting, but a fur ball of golden chimera. "What are you doing here?" the shar-pei asked.

"Mew!"

Lao Shi flicked Ed on his wet nose. "This is too dangerous for you, young alchemist."

The only one at all pleased about the situation was Jake. "I told you him ending up at the factory wasn't my fault."

The young dragon found the chimera being held in his face by his grandfather's wrinkled hands a moment later. "Wha-?"

"No choice," said Lao Shi. "It will take too much time to turn back, so you'll have to keep an eye on him as you're outside standing guard."

"Say what?" Jake's volume rose, broadcasting itself to all the street in the quiet neighborhood they were in. "I thought I…."

Lao Shi bonked him on the head. "Keep it down, young one. We don't want to wake Tucker before we've put him to sleep."

Jake glanced around at the relatively short buildings and empty street illuminated only by streetlamps. "I thought I was supposed to help search the shop."

"Change of plans. Ed needs to be watched. Besides, who knows what other security Tucker has if there really is something here? We'll need someone to keep an eye on things outside."

Jake groaned, but with a little more arguing, he stuck around outside the front window of Fantasy Crafts. When his grandfather and Fu had gone inside, he set the chimera on the dirty pavement. "Great going, Ed. You know you can't come investigate with us while stuck in that form."

Ed ran over to the closed glass door keeping him outside and tried to bat it open, but it was shut properly. He started mewing and put his hand and front paw up against the glass, far underneath the gold lettering of the shop's name.

"I'm not letting you in."

Ed paused for a moment to glare at the dark-haired teenager who had the misfortune of watching him. He changed tactics a moment later to go tug on the bottom of Jake's blue shorts instead. "Mew?"

Jake flicked Ed's nose in retaliation. "I can't let you in there. Gramps would catch us for sure. If you'd been fused with a louder animal, you'd get us all caught with the fuss you're making. Ouch!"

An annoying, stinging sensation started behind Jake's knee when Ed ran his front right limb – one of his true paws – across it and dug in. Jake snatched up the little chimera and held him in front of his face.

Ed grabbed onto Jake's hand and pressed down against it. He glared at the dragon, ears back, and growled. He showed his tiny, white teeth to the much larger teen.

Jake squeezed Ed a bit but otherwise ignored him.

The dragon examined Fantasy Crafts' display window. It was covered in geometric symbols that he didn't recognize, as well as some stylized depictions of several creatures and beings.

On the left side of the window, a golden lion danced in front of a fire that almost glowed with its bright red lit up by a streetlamp. A phoenix sprung from the ashes underneath some triangle. But what intrigued Jake the most was a carefully-detailed dragon hanging out with a snake.

He took a single step over to admire the dragon design. Like the rest of the figures on the window, it was detailed line art, but that dragon in particular seemed familiar – similar to one the young dragon had seen several times before.

Then it clicked. The dragon was the same style as the one on the gold-and-ruby necklace he'd bought for Rose at the Autumn Festival. "I knew I'd seen that guy somewhere before!"

Ed had finally gone quiet in Jake's hands. Glancing down, the teen saw the chimera's ear twitching. Ed's yellow eyes were gazing up the street.

Only a moment later, Ed turned his wide eyes up toward Jake. "Mew?"

"You want to check it out?" Jake went quiet, a grin on his face and a hand on his chin. He hummed, pretending to think hard about what he'd tell Ed. "Well, Gramps did say to keep an eye on things out here."

The young dragon's blood wasn't yearning for more action than standing around outside an alchemist's shop. Not at all. He would just have to find something to do with the delicate chimera he was supposed to be watching if it turned out to be a threat.

He activated his dragon ears and caught two sets of footsteps coming their way – one soft, and one clear and even. He went closer, keeping Ed securely in arms.

After a few moments, a conversation started up between a young male's voice and a more mature man's voice in that strangely melodic German-like language only recently known to Jake. Those two foreigners!

Ed had noticed the noises too. "Mew!"

"We'll hide you. We've just gotta tell Gramps and Fu that it's time to go." Jake loosened his grip a bit so Ed wouldn't get the worst of his grip when he dragoned up.

Ed took the opportunity to bite him.

"Ow! What do you think you're doing?"

The chimera was bolting down and across the street. Jake went through with his transformation and followed through the air, but Ed had enough of a head start that he was already leaping into the bronze-haired boy's arms by the time Jake caught up with him. What a speedy, insane little guy!

Crying out, the bronze-haired boy embraced the now-purring blond chimera.

Really, what was Ed thinking? And why did the two other alchemists look so genuinely happy to see him? Even the dark-haired man smiled, although he stopped when he sneezed a moment later, eyes red and puffy as though he were allergic to cats or something.

Jake touched down on the asphalt only a matter of feet away from the lot of alchemists. Of the three, only one bothered to look his way as Ed and the bronze-haired boy were still swept up in their smiling tears and their purring.

But the man was free to stand there and eye the dragon.

"Who are you?" Jake asked him.

"Who are you?" the man answered, his accent still as thick as ever. He raised a gloved hand with his usual red fire array. "Answer."

The dragon held up his hands. "Ed's friend. Ed's friend."

Jake watched the man carefully for any signs of movement at all. He knew he could fight these guys off if he needed to, but he did have to see if he could retrieve Ed first, or at least find out what these people wanted with him. Ed seemed happy enough to see them, so could he at least learn whether they were truly the villains?

He held his breath as the man glanced at the chimera in the younger alchemist's arms and said something, asking Ed a question when he got his attention.

Ed nodded.

The man lowered his glove and set a smile on his face instead. He pointed at his own chest. "Roy Mustang. Ed's friend." Then, pointing to the bronze-haired boy, he said, "Alphonse Elric, Ed's brother."

The bronze-haired boy, Alphonse, secured his brother in his arms and gave Jake a light bow. "Hello."