Fullmetal Alchemist and the Crimson Stone Chapter 10: Flamel's Castle, a fullmetal alchemist fanfic

Disclaimer: I do not own the copyrights to Fullmetal Alchemist and Harry Potter, as well as any other songs or other character references made in this story.

Fullmetal Alchemist

And the

Crimson Stone

A Fan Fiction Fusion

Tattoo Alchemist

Chapter 10: Flamel's Castle

During the next day, Edward Elric went through his regular classes with Al at his side. Of course, the others did wonder why Alphonse was wearing a suit of armor, but that was quickly set aside when they commented on how much taller Alphonse was to Ed, even if he was his younger brother. Still, the comments about his height were set aside when Ed told his friends after classes in the library that he found Nicholas Flamel's journal.

"What are you going to do now?" Harry asked

"First, I need to send a report to Colonel Mustang," Ed explained but then grimaced, "If he doesn't know about it already."

"Sounds like he and Hermione would get along like a house on fire," Ron commented.

"Watch it," Hermione sneered.

"But if you tell that you have the book," Sandra added, "Doesn't that mean you'll have to go back home?"

Ed had hoped that this part wouldn't come up in his good news to his friends. He already went through this kind of anguish in his head about the fact that he'd be leaving behind his new friends. He started to wonder if he should have told them about finding it in the first place, but then he thought that it would be worse because they were his friends and he had to tell them what he thought.

"Yeah," Ed answered, "I'll have to go back home, once I sent the report to Mustang, but the other part of this investigation is that we have to verify if Flamel is still alive, and if he is, is creating a new stone, we'll have to bring him to the authorities."

Sandra h ad suddenly stood up from her chair, knocking it backwards to the stone floor. Everyone around the table and in the library looked towards her. Her fists were clenched so tightly that they were turning slightly pink, just like her face was streaming with tears. She must have stood there for at least half a minute before she dashed from the table to the library door like a rabbit dashing down into its hole leaving her friends feeling very confused by her actions, at least Ed and Alphonse were.

"What was that all about?" Ed asked

"You really don't get it, do you?" Hermione answered back.

"What do you mean?" Ron asked

Hermione took a deep breath to let out her frustration before she explained, "Sandra has feelings for Ed, so with the idea of Ed leaving, she'll miss him terribly."

"Maybe I should go talk to her," Ed suggested as he got up.

"No, brother," Al added, "the best thing to do now is to let her cool down, besides what do you think you can say that would make her feel better?"

Ed sat back down knowing that Al was right in what he said, still given light to how and why Sandra acted like she did Ed suddenly knew that he would miss the place called Hogwarts. It really was like what Mustang told him, have fun being a kid for once, but it seemed so grim that he would have to go back to that.

Writing a report to Colonel Mustang hadn't been that hard in all the few years that Ed was a state alchemist. Even though there wasn't a great amount to put into the report, just that shortly after the arrival of Alphonse Elric, the journal was discovered. As well as the notice that he would need to stay in order to find Nicholas Flamel and turn him into the proper authorities.

Ed gave the report to his owl, Tweety and the small owl set off into the distance to where the Land of Armestris was located. As Ed watched the owl fly off he stated to wonder how he and Al were supposed to go about finding Nicholas Flamel. It was ironic that after the enormous task of finding the journal was finished, an even greater task was still ahead of them.

Ed had gone back to Gryffindor Tower with Al at his side, the two of them not saying anything as they trekked up the stairs to the Fat Lady's portrait, but before Ed gave the password, Al had spoken up.

"You're thinking about Sandra, Ed," Al pointed out as he looked at Ed' slumping neck during their walk back.

Ed didn't answer, he only stared down at the stone floor.

"Don't worry, brother," Al consoled, "I think that somehow this will work out."

Most optimists say that when they can't think of something really insightful to say. Ed didn't answer back, he only looked up at the portrait of the Fat Lady who didn't say a word to add to the discussion between Al and Ed, only waited for the password.

"Treguna Macoitis…" Ed spoke the password, the Fat Lady's portrait swung open, and Ed with Al went through the portrait hole to the Gryffindor common room.

Inside the common room near the roaring fire were Harry, Ron, and Hermione studying together. Ron was studying over the table, while Harry and Hermione were sitting intimately close together as they read quietly. They were about to ask Ed how he was, but seeing his face made them each think twice about asking Ed anything, so they simply allowed Ed and Al to continue to the boys dorm.

The Elric's came to the dorm room, but when they opened the door, they found something that shocked them instantly. All over the room were things that were violently out of place, the sheets on the bed looked as if they were yanked off and left to pile on the floor. Ed's trunk was wide open with all its contents scattered on the floor, his books, cauldron, clothes, and other school supplies. His desk at the window had all its drawers pulled out and its contents scattered around the messy floor.

"What happened, brother?" Al asked in shock.

"Looks like someone was looking for something," Ed snarled as he looked around for the clues about who could have done this. That was when a horrifying thought snapped at him. Flamel's Journal. He dove at his trunk scrambling through its contents and scattered remains on the floor.

"What is it, Ed?" Al asked

"Flamel's journal!" Ed gasped as he frantically searched the room, "Flamel's Journal is gone!"

Just as Ed stood up and was about to dash down to the common room, he saw something odd. He looked to the desk and atop it's cleared off surface was a piece of paper that was neatly folded. Ed stepped over the wreckage of what used to be his room to the desk; he reached for the paper, and unfolded it. He gasped as his eyes read the elegantly written words upon it.

"Brother?" Al asked, "What is it?"

Al reached over to get the paper, but Ed's shock was so much that he had let go of the paper without much of a struggle. Upon getting it, Al looked down at the paper and read the words that had transformed his brother into that state.

I'm sorry, Ed.

- Sandra

Ed and Al dashed down to the common room where the roar of their stampeding footsteps caused Harry, Ron, and Hermione to stand up and stop them.

"What's going on?" Ron asked

"Flamel's Journal," Ed snarled angrily as he clenched the note in his auto-mail hand, "Sandra's stolen it!"

"What makes you think that she stole it?" Hermione asked hoping that her questions would calm Edward down a little.

Ed had shoved out his auto-mail arm to Hermione with the crumpled note in front of her nose. Hermione carefully took the note, opened it up, and read it with Harry and Ron reading over her shoulder. The three of them experienced the same shock and disbelief as they read the words that were elegantly written. Yet, instead of standing there, Harry Potter dashed up the stairs to the boys dorm and in only a short moment, he came back down the stairs with a piece of parchment in one hand and his wand in the other. Coming to the small circle of friends, he held the parchment, tapped his wand to it, and said:

"I solemnly swear that I am up to no good."

Ed and Al felt confused by what was going on, but they looked at the blank parchment as ink began to spread into lines, like the blueprints of a building. While atop of it was the title of: The Marauders Map.

"What's this?" Ed demanded

"A very handy map of Hogwarts," Harry explained, "It shows where everyone is within Hogwarts at every minute of every day. Here we are."

Harry's finger pointed to five dots in a room on the map with banners that read their names: Harry Potter, Ron Weasley, Hermione Granger, Edward Elric, and Alphonse Elric.

"And there's Sandra," Harry's finger pointed to a hallway a good distance from Gryffindor Tower.

"And none of you saw her leave?" Ed demanded.

"We did see her leave," Ron explained, "but she seemed pretty bloody upset."

"She's heading for the One-Eyed Witch passageway," Harry interjected, "She's going to Hogsmeade."

"Let's go!" Edward shouted as he dashed out of the portrait hole and followed the maps directions to the One-Eyed Witch portrait with Alphonse, Harry, Ron, and Hermione following closely behind.

"Ed!" Al called, "Wait for us!"

"Is he always like that?" Ron asked Al as he panted from his mad dash after Ed.

"Yes, he is," Al had answered sounding as if he was telling them this in a very disappointed tone.

They came to the One-Eyed Witch passageway and after seeing Ed duck passed the portrait, the others pushed a little harder to follow after him. Yet with each turn, move, and dash they felt that they were only a step behind him. At least until, within the tunnel that led from the One-Eyed Witch portrait, there was a small flicker of light that they knew to be the basement storage of Honeydukes. They came up and found Ed standing looking around trying to find some trace of Sandra. As Harry, Ron, Hermione, and Al came out of the basement trapdoor, the frustration had reached its peak.

"Damnit!" Ed moaned as he clenched his fists.

Just then there was a rusted creek and a loud click, which brought their attention to look up the stairs where in just a flash of the eye they saw the door close. It didn't take too long and Ed bounded up the stairs, threw open the door, looked out over the confused looks of those in Honeydukes sweet shop and he saw the bobbing head of Sandra, exiting the shop. Ed ducked and shoved his way through while behind him Al was the one apologizing in the wake of his brothers shoving.

They came to the main road of Hogsmeade looking all around amongst the pasing and curious crowd to find another clue to the direction of where Sandra went to. The others stood around Ed, each looking in different direction hoping to find Sandra. To Harry Potter, it was like trying to find the Golden Snitch in Quidditch, and with his eagle Quidditch eyes, he found it, the bobbing and shortly cut red hair of Sandra Locke heading down the one road street of Hogsmeade.

"There she is!" Harry called out to the others as he dashed after Sandra like the snitch that would win him the game. The others followed closely behind, even Ed who caught up with Harry and they were keeping a good eye on the escaping Sandra. As Ed dashed alongside Harry, the direction that they were going already seemed familiar; in fact after only ten seconds of running after Sandra, he knew that they were heading toward the Shrieking Shack.

At the instant that Ed made that connection, his dream came back into his head. It was that dream where he was in a room with a singular door standing in the middle of it like some kind of monument or monolith. In that dream where he was reaching for the doorknob at the end, Ed started to wonder why that singular dream was coming up at him like that of all times. Yet he couldn't dwell on it any further as the Shrieking Shack was within sight and Sandra was walking through its front door.

"Why is she going in there?" Ron asked as he panted behind Ed and Harry.

Everything suddenly connected in Ed's mind, he saw it all so clearly. That's where the door was located, the singular door in the basement.

"I know why," Ed said as he stood at the threshold to the Shrieking Shack property while the tohers were still panting.

"Why Ed?" Al asked

Ed didn't answer, he simply started a new mad dash towards the front door of the shack. The others groaned as they followed behind him, entering the Shrieking Shack tasting the stale smell of dust, cobwebs, mildew, and rotting wood. Ed looked around from the crooked doorways, the loose boards that were letting in the light from the outside, and the stairs that looked like they were about to collapse. Ed's eyes then came upon a door that looked somewhat brand new, especially with the multiple locks that were on it.

"This is it," Ed said as he stepped up to the door.

Hermione drew out her wand and was about to perform her spell on the locks, when Edward Elric had beaten her to it as he clasped his hands and set them on the door. In a flash of blue light the door and the locks had vanished but reformed into a finely carved archway with metal fittings that stuck out of the carved wood in the shape of flowers.

"Now you're just showing off brother," Al sighed.

"How did you do that without a transmutation circle?" Hermione asked

"That's just how Ed is," Al answered.

Ed didn't listen to either his brothers' sarcasm or Hermione's question; he headed down the set of stairs that lay beyond the alchemy created doorway. Each step he took, the boards underneath his weight creaked and the sound became worse with Al and their friends following behind, but what they all saw at the bottom of the stairs had shocked and confused them all.

IN the dank, dusty, and cobwebbed filled basement, there was a door. It wasn't a door that was set into a nearby wall, this door stood on it's own in the middle of the room inside its very own frame as if the door was visible and the wall wasn't.

"What the bloody hell is that?" Ron asked out of his own exhausted frustration.

"The path that Sandra took," Ed answered as he took his steps towards the door, reached for the handle, turned the knob, and opened the door. From within the crack in the door came a bright yellow light that streaked its way through the dim basement as if it were a god bringing the joyous light to the darkness of the underworld.

Everyone threw their hands or the forearms over their eyes as they tried to adjust themselves to whatever lay through the doorway. Taking their shields away, they looked through the door to see a vast green and gravel stone path courtyard. They each looked in awe at the bizarre sight as Hermione and Edward walked around to the other side of the "Stand alone" door. In the place where they thought they might see the same courtyard viasage, they only saw right through an empty space to their friends who still looked dumbfounded. Ed and Hermione came back and looked in through the doorway to see the courtyard visage.

"Let's go," Ed announced as he was the first to step through the doorway, while Al, Harry, Ron, and Hermione only looked at one another before stepping through the doorway and caught up with Ed on the other side.

On the other side of the doorway, Edward Elric, Alphosne Elric, Harry Potter, Ron Weasley, and Hermione Granger found themselves in a great castle courtyard. The place was so expansive that it could have been the exact (if not larger) size of the Quidditch field. Looking around at the patches of green grass, the lanes of walkways, and the flowerbeds there was already something that didn't seem right about it. The way the grass was cut was too angular, the pathways seemed to go in more directions than necessary, and the flowerbeds was what truly caught the eyes of Ed and Al. There were white flowers with different colored flowers planted along with them in patterns of transmutation circles. That was when Ed looked around and saw that there were circles everywhere in that courtyard, cut into the grassed, and even the walkways were lines of a circle.

Before Ed could relay his discovery to his friends there was great rumble that they all felt. For a moment there was silence, but then came another great rumble like thunder starting to roll in but there was not a single storm cloud in the sky. Once again, there was silence but then came another rumble that was even louder than before. By that time the rumbling was so much that it shook the ground beneath their feet.

"What's going on!" Ron demanded.

They looked and found the answer coming toward them. From the archways of the castle courtyard came not one, not a few, but several dozen enormous chimeras. Ed looked at them and had the unpleasant memory of Heisgart brought back to his mind for the Chimeras were all lumbering, bulbous, slimy, sweating, repulsive, and six legged frogs and toads. Every single one of them had blemishes on their backs that were like barnacles on a whale, but each one of them were spewing smoke and putrid gas like volcanoes. If that wasn't enough, from the sky came unearthly cries that made the young waizards and alchemists turn skyward to see flying Chimeras. There were some that looked like the mixings of bats and sparrows, others were of dragons and birds, but the leader of this flight of winged chimeras was one that had an Eagles head, wings, a lions tail, and feet like some great clawed lizard.

Upon seeing the new chimeras the young Gryffindors each drew their wands, while Edward Elric clasped his hands and from his hidden metal arm came his arm-blade.

"Now that's handy," Harry commented as the chimeras drew closer to them like a mindless lumbering army.

"Yeah," Ed agreed half-heartedly, "but I think that we may be in a little over our heads."

"But we can't give up now that we've come this far," Harry said defiantly.

"You're right, Harry," Ed smiled grinning with a little optimism in an otherwise hopeless situation.

As the chimeras drew closer, there came a new voice that spoke with such thick arrogance.

"Perhaps you could use a hand Fullmetal," the voice said as there was a slight spark at the front line of chimeras and then a great explosion that sent out bloodied and dismembered parts of chimeras in different direction. At the center of the clearing smoke from the explosion was the very man that was called The Flame Alchemist.

"Colonel Mustang!" Al called out.

The colonel was holding his right hand ready to snap his flame alchemy at whatever approached him, while his other hand was casually in his uniform pocket. He looked to Ed and his friends with that arrogant know-it-all smile that he always had.

"I told you once before, Fullmetal," Colonel Mustang said arrogantly, "fighting requires rationality, fighting countless foes will only wear you down before you're beaten senseless!"

He snapped his fingers again, there was the spark, and another explosion that sent out the bloodied parts of the chimeras. As the parts landed near Ed, Al, and their friends another voice called out to bring its support.

"And fighting also requires a sense of aesthetic beauty!"

With that the ground shook with a great explosion that sent the chimeras in multiple directions, and the one responsible for it was the shirtless and muscular Strong-arm Alchemist.

"Major Armstrong!" Al called out with joy.

The major began to flex to show off each muscle he had, "A beautiful physique begets beautiful skills and beautiful skills beget beautiful power! BEHOLD! The artistic alchemy that is the Armstrong Family Tradition! Come hither chimeras! You'll regret your decision in due time, I assure you!"

"What a show off…" Hermione commented

"You said it," Ron agreed, "And I thought Lockhart was bad."

"Come on!" A woman's voice called out, "Stop showing off major! We've got work to do!"

Ed looked to his left and standing out from the bushes and flower beds was Lieutenant Riza Hawkeye with the guns drawn and ready to fire.

"Lieutenant Hawkeye!" Al called.

"How did you guys find us?" Ed demanded, "And how the hell did you get here so quickly?"

"That would be thanks to a portkey," Colonel Mustang answered as he snapped his fingers and blew up another set of dumbfounded chimeras, "Courtesy of Albus Dumbledore!"

Harry smiled when he heard that Dumbledore had his hand involved in the situation.

"And we found you thanks to…" Major Armstrong stopped as he slammed his iron gloved fist against a chimera that shattered the creature to pieces.

"Lieutenant Colonel Edmund Blackadder," Blackadder finished as he stepped in front of Ed, Al, Harry, Hermione, and Ron, "I had put a tracing spell on you, Ed, and we followed you like hunters following the hounds,"

"And we needed it with such a small hound," Colonel Mustang added.

"WHO YOU CALLIN' A PIPSQUEAK SO SMALL YOU WANNA CRUSH LIKE AN ANT!" Ed bellowed.

"Now's not the time, Fullmetal," Blackadder snapped calmly at Ed as he began to unbutton his uniform shirt, he then took off his shirt and coat to show his upper body covered in tattoos of transmutation circles that stood by themselves and yet at the same time blended into one another as they stretched from his chest, abs, and arms to his back. "We'll fight the chimeras, you kids head into the castle and find Flamel and Sandra Locke."

"So that's why they call you the Tattoo Alchemist," Ed observed.

"They'll be time for that later!" Blackadder said as he slapped his hand to the ground that ruptured the earth itself as if it were thin ice that toppled the chimeras, "Get going!"

"Got it," Ed smiled as he took off for the great castle in the center of the vast courtyard leaving the state alchemists to fight the chimeras as Harry, Ron, Hermione, and Al followed closely behind.

To Be Continued…