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Mustang surveyed our group nonchalantly, "What exactly have you been up to while I was away Fullmetal?"
"He's helped us out a lot." I piped up from behind the bulk of Kisame and Al. "Sir." My throat only caught minutely. It had recovered almost completely over the long, boring, train journey, which I appreciated greatly. Mustang raised his eyebrows at Ed, obviously still waiting for an answer and some introductions, Ed obliged.
"In height order, that would be Kisame, Itachi and Cathy."
"We're having a little trouble getting home and-"
"How exactly is this your problem Fullmetal?" Mustang said, completely ignoring me. "It seems rather, beneath you." Ed bristled.
"Well, we came looking for you originally, but you weren't here, and then I found Al and Ed." I said.
"It's even less my problem."
"Perhaps, but I'm pretty sure this involves some serious Alchemy, and when in Amestris, go to the government for weird powerful Alchemy."
"Exactly what kind of problem are you having?" Not sure my voice would hold out, I didn't start the story. Itachi sighed and stepped forward.
"You really expect me to believe this?" Mustang snorted, Ed shrugged.
I frowned; I though Itachi's straightforward 'We don't really know how we got here, we're from another world.' Story was very succinct and convincing. However, Mustang disagreed; he only buckled under the combined pressure of Kisame and Itachi's evidence. Considering Kisame changed back to his monstrous blue self and Itachi walked up a freaking wall and hung from the ceiling, it makes sense.
Once again no one thought very highly of my textbook.
"I'll grant you, I haven't seen a lot of this before but math is hardly my area." Mustang said, I sighed and put the book back in my bag.
"I am officially giving up on this book as a resource. A geography textbook would be so much more useful! Or a mobile phone or something!" I thought of my own phone, which had been sitting on the little table next to the front door. I blame you for this, Life, why couldn't you have thrown me through here with something more convincing? Without the much more believable ninja backing me up, I just looked like a crazy person.
"Look, regardless of the evidence, there was at least definitely some weird Alchemy going on with that cult up North, and they mentioned the Philosopher's Stone." Ed said, "They had loads of stories about non-Alchemic sources of huge amounts of energy you could harness in your transmutations, and they hinted at Alchemy I've never thought of before, for transporting things instantaneously." Mustang nodded,
"Alchemy like that would no doubt need a lot of material to accommodate for the energy used." They talked about it for a little while. I swayed a little where I was standing, the events of the last few days and sleepless nights spent on the train catching up with me. Happily, no one was really paying attention to me at this point, as I had hardly done anything interesting, so I leant against a wall and closed my eyes.
"Come on, girly!" Kisame said while tugging me away from my rest a few minutes later. Ed and Al lead the way out the door and down the halls to some rooms we could apparently sleep in, something undoubtedly organised while I wasn't paying attention.
"Well, see you tomorrow. Someone will come and get you in the morning." Ed said before walking briskly away.
"Good night everyone, I'll see you tomorrow." Al said.
"Night Al. See ya Edward!" I called after the blonde Alchemist. "So, what exactly is happening tomorrow? I sort of zoned out there." I turned to the ninja.
"We're beginning the in-depth research." Itachi said
"Oh, good. Great. Well, at least we're not on a train or running from crazy people."
"I'm not even sure if this one is in English; it's going on your pile." I shut the thick brown tome of 'Alchemic field work' and set it on Ed and Al's book pile just across the table, and then reached for another from the unsorted pile. I glanced at the cover, saw at least twelve words I didn't remotely understand and placed it on top of the previous one.
"Try this one instead." Al said helpfully, I took the book he offered and looked at the cover; it didn't have anything on it, which was a good start.
"Thanks Al." It was only a few hours into the research session but I was more than ready to give up, Alchemy at this level was like trying to understand complicated particle physics; I had grounding in the basics but this level was so high it was mystifying.
"Those friends of yours are heading out to gather information from the city and try to track down and scientists working on this, didn't you do something like that with them before?"
"I'm not allowed to come; I was 'enough of an annoying hindrance last time'. Oh well, when you want information gathered covertly send in spies not teenage girls."
"I guess that's right." Al said, "One more time brother, from the beginning, what do we know so far?"
"Slowly please."
"Well, so far I've found basically nothing about Alchemy that can move things the way you describe, and almost no reference to alternate universes. Theoretically it's a little easier to approach a theory, so far I've gathered a lot of evidence that indicates it would require a huge amount of energy, but it just looks like there's never been any serious experimentation."
"So we have nothing concrete." Al concluded, "There've been one or two references to the Philosopher's Stone, but nothing too productive there either." Only a few seconds after he finished speaking the window slid open and Itachi dropped through it, Kisame came next carrying a limp figure.
"Oh my gosh, who is that?" I said, Kisame dumped the unconscious figure, a woman, on a chair and pulled a small book from his pocket.
"She knows something, we followed up at least a dozen leads and all of them lead back to her." Itachi said, Kisame handed the book to Ed, who began to leaf through it.
"Hmmm, these actually look like her research notes, but all the good ones are in code; it'll take some time to translate them."
"Let us see if we can't speed that up for you." Kisame said, grinning in an altogether chilling way.
"Now let's not be hasty." Al said, spreading his arms out in front of himself and planting himself firmly between Kisame and the woman, who chose that moment to stir.
"Who are you? Oh God, where am I?" Al spun around immediately on hearing her voice.
"Don't be frightened, please. We just need to ask you a few questions." He said, trying to calm her down.
"Who are you!? Kidnapping is a punishable offence!"
"We just want to ask you a few questions, really! Could you tell us about your research?"
"Why should I? When you've told me nothing about yourselves!" Kisame growled and stepped threateningly towards the women, Al put out his arm.
"My brother and I are Alchemists, and our friends are in some trouble and we heard you might be working on something that could help them."
"Tell us." Kisame growled, managing to shove past Ed and tower over the Alchemist, who visibly quailed.
"I'm a State Alchemist too; I have a right to this information as well." Ed said, flashing his pocket watch from the shadows of his desk.
"I'm the Hammer and Nail Alchemist." The woman began, "I'm part of a special project ordered by High Command doing a whole bunch of different experiments, all pushing the boundaries of Alchemy."
"Did you ever try anything concerning Human Transmutation, or the Philosopher's Stone?" Ed butted in.
"We had one or two experiments, but we never had anyone dedicated, or crazy, enough to go very far with anything." She shrugged, "Wait, you're not-?"
"Were you some kind of project head?" Affirmative answer, the questioning continued, the Hammer and Nails Alchemist seemed willing to provide plenty of information, possibly because of the presence of Al and Kisame as much as Ed's authority as a fellow Alchemist.
"What do you know about transporting people or things with Alchemy?" Al asked.
"How did you find out about that? We've been in testing for the last couple of months, no one is supposed to breath a word about projects that are still under way!"
"No one told us anyt-"
"Guys! Come here!" Ed said, still seated at his desk, paper from his decoding efforts spread all around him. Kisame made sure that the female Alchemist was secure before following.
"It's this page." He said, pointing to the open book with one hand and continuing to translate with the other. When he finished the page he handed it up to Al and went on to the next one, gesturing for Al to begin reading it out to us.
"Experiment records, transportation 'portals' begin: May 5th. Began the first round of testing today, almost no results except a large chunk of the floor is missing. Could be the radical in the fifth circle needs shifting, Collins was against it there." Ed handed him the next sheet as he read,
"May 25th. Transportation 'portals' Preliminary stage. We've been tweaking and activating the Transmutation for weeks. Something does almost always come out, and the appropriate amount of material is taken. The building looks like such a mess because of this. So far no living organisms have made it through, none have survived the journey, even plants are charred and distorted, however the number of organisms coming has increased. Chimera breeding on hold. Hydro-testing in the paperwork stage." Al put the pages down, "Well that seems pretty definite."
"I'll say. Who authorised these tests?" Ed said, the woman shook her head.
"I don't know, really, I got a letter with no signature delivered by a soldier, it had the correct seal, and everything was in order. I was issued a staff and specialised research funds and equipment. But we've never seen anyone."
"Wait a minute." I said, "If you've been conducting all these tests here in Central, why did we appear in the middle of the freaking mountains half a week's walk away?" The woman's brow furrowed, she shot e a confused look.
"Pardon? Did you just say that we brought you here?"
"Unless someone else has been ripping portals through space, I'd assume so."
"That's amazing! How many of you are there? When and where exactly did you arrive?"
"We, me, Sharkbait and Weasel-boy, have been here..." I started trying to tally up the days, "Since about a week ago, right guys? We arrived in the late morning, I think, somewhere in the forest to the East, near Resembool."
"Wow! Can I have my research notes for a minute? This has tremendous impacts on the latest experiments!"
"Sure, I've finished decoding it anyway." Ed tossed the woman the book.She began flipping through it frantically, muttering about equations and quantities and scribbling here and there.
"So, you can get us home right?" I asked.
"We can directionally transport up to 600 kilometres now, where are you from?"
"Way further than that, lady." I said, pulling a chair opposite her and sitting down. "I am here to congratulate you. You have successfully plucked three living beings from two different worlds and plonked them in the middle of the forest."
"Two different worlds? That's amazing…" She continued writing in her notes at a frenzied pace.
"The fact that this seems like new information to you doesn't exactly fill me with confidence."
"Can you get us back or not?" Kisame added bluntly.
"Get you back? We're still lucky if we can maintain a steady opening, we have no idea how to keep things intact when they go or come through, or even how to control what goes through. Controlling destinations is something we've barely dreamed of. The fact you survived the journey here is a miracle!"
"Well surely you can figure out what you did that day and work from there?" Ed interjected. "Surely you have some idea."
"We've been trying to do the same thing every time, but since we always get different results progress has been really slow."
"There's gotta be some kind of concrete rule though." Ed said, scratching his head and looking over her shoulder, she turned the pages in her notes helpfully, apparently now over the whole kidnapping incident. They started talking about how they could test the various aspects of the theory.
"None of your notes so far have detailed exactly how you've been creating the portals."
"The diagrams are all in my other notebook, which I keep in the safe in the lab, I'd be happy to show you. All of you, in fact. I'd be really interested to see what we can figure out; this could be the breakthrough we've been looking for!" She looked up and smiled at Itachi, Kisame and me, "My name is Sara Pierce, The Hammer and Nail Alchemist."
"Nice to meet you, I guess." I said, Itachi and Kisame both nodded and said nothing.
"I'd love to have you come and stay at our laboratory, it's set up to house some of the staff, but they don't sleep there."
"We'll just follow you there for now, let's get started right away." Sara wrote her address on a piece of paper and handed it to Ed.
The laboratory was in a one-story brick building around twenty minutes away on foot. Sara led us on a short tour of the facilities, finishing with the basement laboratory.
"These look huge" Ed said leafing through a sketchbook filled with drawings of circular mechanical-looking structures.
"I suppose you're wondering where we keep them."
"My guess is behind the ginormous covered walls around the garden." Ed said, Sara nodded and pointed at a small door in the corner of the basement room.
"There's some stairs over by that desk, they go up to the test yard." It looked like a set straight out of a sci-fi film. Scattered between flowering peach trees were piles of scrap metal and one huge round structure that looked like your average interstellar portal. It was a smooth ring of silver metal inscribed with a transmutation circle.
"So, you try shoving whatever you can through this thing, when you can get it to open that is, and see what happens?"
"Basically. We can try and aim it at certain places, by adjusting the circle, but we can only do that before we open it of course."
"What happens if you hit somewhere?" Al asked, Sara motioned for us to follow her and lead us back to the basement, and into another small room.
"Did all this come through?" Ed said, "You three recognise anything?" Kisame, Itachi and I began to pick through the piles of detritus.
"The thing is," Sara said to Ed as we walked, "is that sometimes even when we place the same material in the doorway we can get hugely different results, even when we haven't changed the circle."
"What kind of things usually come through?" Al asked, his voice sounding mildly concerned as he examined a pile of what looked to be furs.
"There isn't a usual kind of thing. Sometimes it's clothes, like that pile, or bits of metal, we've gotten our fair share of dead animals too, but obviously we can't just leave them down here in a pile. They're usually dissected. We keep massively detailed records on everything we put in and everything that comes out." None of us had seen anything in the debris that looked familiar enough to fuss over, so the group trooped on upstairs to the records room; which was stuffy and dim and crowded with desks, reams of paper and masses of filing cabinets.
"Sara." I whispered as we were about to walk into the room, "Could I have a word?" She nodded and we stood a few steps away from Ed and Al as they rooted through the records. "I know our arrival is probably important for your experiment," I said, nodding towards Itachi and Kisame, also standing in a corner discussing something quietly. "But we were hoping to maintain a fairly low profile. We'd just like to get home without getting involved in any great big military kerfuffle."
"Of course, I'll instruct all the staff accordingly." Sara said. I thanked her and we moved off into the room. The amount of material that had passed through the portals was astonishing. They had tried feeding in combinations and variations of natural and synthetic materials both Alchemically enhanced and not, and even live plants, though they had drawn the line at living animals.
The materials that had returned were equally varied. For example, in response to a recycled tyre they received approximately one square metre of mud, and in the second trial received half of an animal similar to a cat.
"We think the variations in mass and elements might have something to do with a combination of the location, the object you put in, if you do, the nearest thing to the portal and the amount of energy taken to transport everything." Sara said.
"Well, it still has to operate under the principle of Equivalent Exchange." Ed agreed, "There must be a rule, or an equation, we just have to find it."
They had only ever seen one other living thing result from the experiments.
"A bird flew through once. A nightingale. It flew away and hid in the garden for days before we could catch it, and it died only a month or so later. I think it might have been the climate here."
Ed and Al spent some more time in the records room, declining Sara's suggestion that they begin experiments straight away.
"We can start those tomorrow, or the next day." Al said, "For now, we should read up all we can and try to build our knowledge of what's been going on."
"Yeah, we'll try and make it quick though. I'd love to get my hands on the stuff you've been building." Ed said.
"We can try and help catalogue some of the stuff they've been pulling through." I suggested, Ed nodded absently without pausing in his perusal. "Come on Weasel, Sharkbait; we've got a job to do!"
"Why would we want to help sort out there junk, exactly?" Kisame asked.
"Well, aside from the fact that it might help get you home faster, it could be mildly interesting to see what you unearth, and it's way better than setting you loose on the streets of Central and having you picked up by the military anyway for being out of place and blue; not much." I replied, "I'm going at least."
I was immensely grateful they had removed all of the dead animals as I began picking through a pile of vaguely sorted objects from early on in the experiments. There was a lot of dirt, pieces of broken, twisted metal, plastic and glass that it was basically impossible to identify, but every now and then someone would find something fairly intact and interesting.
"Hey I found some shuriken, do these look familiar Weasel?" I tossed the grimy metal objects over to Itachi, who turned them over thoughtfully in his hands before shaking his head.
"I haven't seen the like of these before, Kisame?" He tossed the objects to his blue partner, who also knew nothing.
"Great, I'll keep them then shall I?"
"No." Kisame snatched the star-shaped weapon from my hands and threw it onto a pile nearby.
"That's not where those go, Sharkbait." Kisame bristled, but we were both distracted by a booming knocking sound from the front door directly above us upstairs, and the booming voice that followed it.
"Hammer and Nail Alchemist, open up!"
Screw you, Life.