Hey guys! Thank you so much for you reviews-they've lifted my spirits like crazy. It makes me super happy to know that you're enjoying this story and that it feels authentic. I'm not gonna talk too long this time since my author's note got real real long last time, but I am REALLY excited for this chapter. It's a long one, so buckle up.
Song title is "Big Shot" by The Pack a.d., a song about an egotistical jerk who thinks he's right all the time. Spoiler: he is not.
I think I said, "The end is coming,"
You said, "That's great, I'll be king."
Well, you're a jerk, quite a piece of work
I think it's fun that you're so dumb.
Screw your indignity
You're no Chips Rafferty
More like that ape on the tower
Crushing planes by the hour
Ooh-big shot.
The crowd cheered and clapped as the title card for the feature appeared. The Beasts of Devil's Alley, starring "the enchanting Antonia C. Wilde" as Lady Marie, and "the enigmatic Marshall Q. Armstrong" as the leader of the Beasts.
Winry turned to Ed and grinned excitedly, practically bouncing up and down in her seat.
The title card faded out to reveal the opening shot of the movie—a long pan over a city neighbourhood in dim light.
Ed and Winry turned to each other immediately, eyes wide.
"Holy…!"
"I know!" Winry hissed, trying to keep quiet. "I told you! It's getting better all the time!"
"It looks so real," Ed whispered, shaking his head in amazement. He'd been so used to the jerky, grainy movies from five years ago, all shot from the same camera angle and with plenty of weird little light blips and aberrations.
Then the camera closed in on Lady Marie walking into her apartment building and climbing the stairs, passing through a gaggle of suspicious-looking criminal types with low-drawn hats and cigars on the way to her door.
One of them opened his mouth to speak, a creepy, leering expression on his stubble-covered face, and then the dialogue appeared.
"Hey, hey, this is no place for a little lady like you to be walkin' home alone. What do you say me and the boys escort you home?"
The card faded and the screen showed the man silently finishing his sentence.
Lady Marie shook her head and kept walking, and the gang followed her.
"Aw, come on, lady—we'll do it for free, so long as we're compensated for our time."
Lady Marie took off running up the next flight of stairs, and the gang continued to tail her, leering all the way. The camera followed them as they moved.
At the top of the stairs another shabbily-dressed man with a low-brimmed hat and a curling mustache was leaning against the wall smoking a pipe. Just as Lady Marie reached the top step, the man with the stubble reached out to try to grab the end of her scarf.
In one motion, the man with the mustache swung an arm out and punched him, sending him flying backwards down the stairs and knocking his gang members down with him like a row of dominoes.
Back in real life the audience whooped and clapped as they hit the floor.
Onscreen, Lady Marie looked at her rescuer in shock, then hurried into her apartment. Just as the door was closing, she spoke.
"Thank you!"
The man with the mustache tipped his cap at her, then turned and headed back down the stairs, stepping over unconscious gangsters as he went.
Then, as he stepped back out onto the sidewalk, he started off down the street and turned off into an alley, where he met up with a gaggle of men in long trenchcoats and low-brimmed hats, all shabby and suspicious-looking. One of them looked up, revealing a face full of odd piercings, and greeted him.
"Hey boss, good to have ya back. We just got word about a big shipment of nice new radios that, ah, recently fell of the back of a truck and are lookin' for a good home."
The man with the mustache grinned shrewdly.
"Looks like I'm just in time. Let's get back to base so you can give me the details—hopefully we can move 'em all before anybody notices they're gone. We could sure use the dough, but we can't afford too much heat on us right now neither."
The camera held still as the men headed further down the alley, and then moved further back, revealing one of the men who had been knocked out on the staircase peering around the corner of the building. He was sporting a fresh shiner on one eye and looked a little worse for wear, but it was clear from his expression that he'd heard everything.
He met up with his unsavoury friends again at the entrance to the building and told them the big news.
"So listen—turns out that guy who caught us off-guard just now wasn't no small-time thug—he's the leader of the Beasts!"
The gang reacted in a flurry of silent gasps.
"Exactly, but that's not all! Turns out they've got a lead on a bunch of stolen radios—real high-end stuff. They're making plans to move 'em right now at their headquarters, so I say our payback is gonna have a much better rate of return than we thought."
The men looked back at him in confusion, and he clapped a hand over his forehead in exasperation before explaining.
"I mean, the best way to hit back at them is to either intercept the stolen gear and move it ourselves, or wait until they've moved it and rob them afterward. So we're getting revenge AND a lot of cash."
The others squinted and nodded extremely slowly, comprehension dawning on them at a snail's pace, and the audience laughed.
Winry was getting into the story, watching eagerly as the setup unfolded: the two rival gangs' longstanding feud that was rapidly approaching its boiling point, Lady Marie's dire financial situation as she cared for her sick mother alone in her tiny apartment, and the growing turmoil between the leader of the Beasts' unforgiving street instincts and his resurgent conscience. Everything from the costumes and makeup to the sets and the dialogue created a very believable world, and she found herself getting wrapped up in the characters' lives as the action heated up.
During a lull in the story, she found herself thinking about Edward next to her. This was the first movie he'd seen in years, and she wondered for a moment whether he was enjoying it too, or whether it was all a little tame to him by now. He's been in all these intense fights and stuff for years, Winry thought. It's probably only exciting for people like me who don't see a whole lot of real action.
She glanced quickly over at him, and to her surprise he was staring at the screen in rapt attention, enthusiasm written clear as day across his face. He even clasped his fist together triumphantly in a tiny little victory motion as Marshall Q. Armstrong's character landed a particularly well-placed punch.
Winry smiled and turned back to the screen. Okay, she thought, scratch that: this is one hundred percent up his alley.
It really was. Ed hadn't expected to like the movie so much, but he found himself getting very into the way the rival gangs bantered with each other, the way they fought, the way they got to deliver cool one-liners…he was tense with excitement, and he had to admit that a real piano instead of a decidedly worse-for-wear accordion made a real difference.
There was something else, too. Every so often, to set the scene, the camera panned over the run-down neighbourhood where the story took place—and it looked oddly familiar.
It wasn't until the camera panned over the exterior of Harold's Pawn and Thrift that Ed figured it out, and then he felt ridiculous for not clueing in sooner. He grabbed Winry's hand to get her attention.
"Winry, that's Dublith!" He practically hissed the words, trying to whisper and shout at the same time.
"What?"
"The city! That's where Al and I did our training! I've lived there! That must be where they filmed the movie!"
"Really? Are you sure?"
"Positive. I can't believe I didn't realize it sooner."
"That's so cool!"
"I know!"
Just then, onscreen, the rival gang began moving in on the Beasts' headquarters, which so far had only been seen from inside. But now, gangsters armed with brass knuckles and bats were heading down an alleyway towards it, and the audience finally got a glimpse of the outside: the hole-in-the-wall entrance to a small, seedy bar with a sign that said—
"The Devil's Nest!" Ed hissed, squeezing Winry's hand. "No frickin' way!"
"What?!"
"That's a real place! I've been there too!"
"No way!"
"Yeah, I'll tell you at intermission."
Ed's hand was still curled around Winry's. He wasn't thinking about it, but it was there. Both of their eyes were glued intently to the screen now.
…
When the first roll of film ended, the theatre's lights came on with a string of distant popping sounds. There was a general chorus of murmurs as people stood up and stretched.
"Come on," Ed said, offering Winry a hand and practically yanking her out of her seat. "Let's go get some snacks—Fuery says they're an essential part of the cinema experience."
"Oh, well, if they're essential," Winry shrugged, grinning as they headed out to the concession stand in the lobby.
The line was already long, so they had several minutes to kill.
"Okay, so spill," Winry said, turning eagerly to look at Ed. "You've really been to the real Devil's Nest?"
"Yeah, and it was pretty insane," he replied. "Okay, so—you remember how—" he lowered his voice a little. "You remember how Ling was Greed?"
"Kind of. The homunculus was…sharing his body?"
"Exactly. Well, before he was sharing Ling's body, he was this completely other guy, in his original, totally artificial body…"
"Okay…"
"…And he had sort of rebelled against the other homunculi, so instead of being part of the whole big plot with the nationwide transmutation circle and all that, he was the ringleader of this big gang of small-time criminals and military deserters in Dublith, just livin' it up with a bunch of ladies and all these chimera friends of his."
"And so the Devil's Nest was…?"
"That was his bar, yeah! That's even what it was really called!"
"No way! So how did you guys get mixed up with him, if he wasn't working with the others?"
"Well, they kind of kidnapped Al."
"What?!"
"But obviously I got him back, so don't flip out!"
"Are you serious? What happened?!"
"Uh…" Ed paused, adjusting his collar sheepishly. "Well, they wanted information from me about how to transmute a soul—as in, how to put a soul into a suit of armour—so I pretty much marched in there and told them to go to hell."
"Oh, so—"
"Except—wait, no, at the time I wanted information from them too, about how to create human bodies with alchemy, because we still didn't know, y'know, all the stuff we found out later."
"So you…"
"Yeah, so I figured I could definitely take this Greed guy no problem, and then I could get what I wanted and take Al with me without giving anything up."
"Of course you did," Winry said witheringly.
"Hey, it almost worked!" Ed protested. "It took me awhile to figure out how to weaken his shield, and he might've gotten in a few hits here and there, but I practically had him before Bradley showed up with an entire army and secured the whole place. Then he took off."
Winry squinted at him for a moment.
"Wait—if this happened in Dublith, then does that mean—"
"I mean, it was so long ago, who even remembers—"
"Are you talking about that time you came crawling back to Rush Valley with all your plating missing?!"
"Yeah, okay, but it all worked out, didn't it?"
"Did it work out, or did you get the absolute snot kicked out of you because you rushed into something insanely dangerous without thinking?"
"I don't see why it can't be both!"
"Ugh," she sighed and shook her head. "You're something else. Anyway it's almost our turn, so you'd better buy me some serious candy."
"Okay, okay," Ed replied, rolling his eyes as he pulled out his wallet.
They walked back to their seats in silence, arms laden with chocolates, gummies, milk duds, sour candies and a bottle of soda each.
It wasn't long before the lights went down again, a hush fell over the crowd, and the little be-sequined woman at the piano started playing again. The image of Marshall Q. Armstrong surrounded by enemies in a tense gang standoff appeared on the screen, and the audience cheered.
He punched one guy in the nose, flipped another one over his shoulder, and ducked a third guy's blow, letting him collide with a fourth guy charging from the opposite direction. Then, suddenly, he froze in place.
All the characters froze in place. The image on the screen flickered a little, jerked up and down slightly, and then held totally still.
Then it was hastily replaced with a card that said, "EXCUSE OUR TECHNICAL DIFFICULTIES".
A disgruntled murmur rose up from the audience.
"Aw, man," Edward said through a mouthful of sour candy. "I hope this doesn't take long."
"I wonder what's wrong?" Winry replied, daintily popping a single milk dud into her mouth. Then she took a long sip of her lime soda. "Must be something serious if it's slowing down a big cinema like this on a Friday night."
"Try to contain your excitement, machine geek," Ed smirked.
"I'm not taking criticism from a man with eight gummy worms in his mouth."
"Listen—" Ed grabbed another gummy worm from the bag and shoved it in with the rest (it was actually only five). "—don't knock it 'til you've tried it."
"Ew. Anyway, I really want to find out how this ends! Whatever's wrong, I'm sure they can fix it—a place this size has got to have a dedicated repair person, right?"
"Probably," Ed replied, taking a sip of his cherry soda. "Oh wow, this does not pair well with the green gummy worms."
"Here, try mine."
Ed leaned over and took a sip of her lime soda. "Hey, not bad!"
"Wow, there's really an art to this, huh?"
"I'm an alchemist; I know what I'm doing," Ed said, holding up a single green gummy worm with a gravely serious expression.
Winry giggled. "Wow, it's great to have an expert on hand."
Just then, there was a series of pops as the lights started coming on. A tall, well-dressed man was coming purposefully down the theatre steps towards the middle of the crowd.
"Ladies and gentlemen," the cinema manager bellowed, his voice equal parts showy and slimy. "Unfortunately, our projector has malfunctioned and is in need of servicing, but the repairman is presently unavailable and we are unable to continue our feature presentation as a result."
The crowd groaned en masse; a few people booed.
The manager was tall, broad-shouldered and middle-aged, with stiffly-waxed silver hair and a pale, smarmy-looking face, cleanshaven with the exception of his incredibly sharp sideburns. He wore a white suit and a black bowtie, and he wasn't sure what did it, but Ed immediately disliked him.
"Due to the fact that more than 51% of the show has already elapsed," the manager continued, "we are unable to offer a full refund, but we will welcome you back at a reduced rate on Monday through Thursday at matinee showings only. Please see our ushers on your way out to receive a voucher as our thanks to you."
A wave of indignant muttering swept across the crowd.
"I'm a mechanic," Winry said eagerly, standing up and striding out into the aisle. "I'd be happy to take a look at it if you'd like."
"Oh, no, young lady," the manager chuckled. "I appreciate the offer, but I think you'll find this sort of thing is best left to the professionals."
The smile dropped off her face, replaced with an icy-calm anger Ed recognized all too well. He got up and stood next to her while she addressed the manager. "Well, if the professionals aren't available, I think you'll find that the next best thing to a projector repair guy is a third-generation automail mechanic with ten years of experience."
The manager's eyebrows shot upwards, and he turned his head towards Edward. "Really? You have ten years of—"
"What?! Me? No," Ed snapped, looking back at him incredulously. "She just said—"
The end of his sentence was lost in the sound of Winry's exasperated groan.
"Wait here," Winry spat, and before Ed could respond she darted up the stairs and climbed the metal ladder to the projection booth. The projectionist had left the door ajar, and with a quick glance at the theatre manager on the floor below her, she slipped inside.
"Miss!" the manager cried, indignant, starting up the stairs after her. "It's not safe for a young lady to be up-"
"Relax, Pops," Ed said, grabbing him by the shoulder. "That 'young lady' is a weapons engineer; pretty sure she can handle a six-foot ladder."
Okay, Ed thought, so it's been a long time since Winry's actually installed a weaponized prosthetic.
He was embellishing for dramatic effect a little. But she could make some kind of terrifying automail missile-launcher-arm if she wanted to, so it was still true. Just like it was technically true that she had ten years of experience, since she'd started helping her family in the shop when she was six or seven.
"What?! That little girl is an engineer?" the manager said, disbelieving. "She certainly doesn't belong up there poking around at my state-of-the-art motion picture equipment!"
For a split second Ed surprised himself—he wished he could roll up his sleeve and show off his automail right arm to this dumbass, who was clearly the bankroll and not the brains of the theatre operation.
"State-of-the-art equipment is practically her middle name, so I wouldn't worry," Ed replied, trying to keep indignant rage out of his voice.
We're here to have a normal night out, he reminded himself. You are not allowed to punch this asshole.
Behind them, the rest of the moviegoers were getting antsy, their collective murmurs reaching a dull roar.
"What's going on?" a young man in a tweed suit asked. "Is it getting fixed after all?"
"Yeah," an older lady added, "or are we gonna get our money back?"
Several others chimed in to say the same, and a few couples near the front started getting up to leave. The manager began to sweat visibly.
Ed turned away from him and back toward the crowd.
"Give her fifteen minutes," he called.
There were some enthusiastic noises from the audience.
This wasn't what Ed had been imagining when he planned out a nice evening. But come to think of it, he thought, for Winry, getting her hands on some new piece of machinery for free is probably more fun than just a movie anyway.
Up in the projection booth, Winry had taken the silk ribbon from around her waist and used it to tie her bangs out of her face. She'd been absolutely furious on the way up here, but now that the projector equipment was in front of her everything had clicked into focus again. She carefully removed the film rolls from the machine (taking great care to remember which frame they'd been at) and set them aside. Then she checked the power source (always the first step).
It had been running smoothly, and the picture had been clear before the film had gone off-track completely. That was lucky, because it meant she wouldn't have to mess around with any of the focal modifiers at all. The side panel of the machine was covered with knobs and levers that adjusted lenses, and she decided firmly to leave them to the trained projectionist. She didn't want to get ahead of herself—it may not have been an electric limb interfacing with living human nerves, but it was still a precise machine well outside her own specialty.
Don't get cocky, Winry reminded herself. Just focus on what's in front of you.
She'd seen movie projectors up close before, but really only Mr. Greenboro's, which was much smaller, plainer and less sophisticated than this one. And she'd never really been allowed to dig into it properly or fix it when it broke down or anything like that, either, although she had gotten to see it in action and help take apart the major pieces and put them away a few times. That meant that without enough specific knowledge, she was relying on engineering principles, mechanical logic and her gut instinct.
Next she checked the machinery for any basic sprocket obstructions, loose bolts or broken bands. No dice from above, but it was clearly some kind of pure mechanical issue; the film itself seemed in perfect shape—not tangled or crunched up at all—so it had clearly been wound correctly. She bit her lip in thought for a moment, then lowered herself to the floor to see the projector's guts from underneath.
While she did all this, the scrawny, freckly projectionist—a boy not much older than her—stood in the corner of the booth and watched timidly.
As soon as she'd entered the little room she had eagerly fired off a dozen different technical questions to diagnose the situation, most of which had been met with confusion and terror.
"I don't know—I just work here," he'd said, stepping aside and granting her access to the machine.
No kidding, she thought, and she got to work.
After a few minutes he was handing her tools from the maintenance kit on the back shelf and searching for the manufacturer's schematics under piles of empty chip packages and magazines. She would tighten a bolt here and readjust a belt there, then try the manual crank and try to isolate the source of the jam.
"Has this ever happened before?" she asked the projectionist, her face and hands hidden under the machine.
"Uh," the young man faltered, "sort of? But last time it was because the film melted."
"It melted?"
"Yeah, and we had to order a whole new print—and the regular repair guy had to take the whole projector apart to get rid of all the melted bits of twisty film."
"Yikes." Winry paused for a moment, thinking. "Did you ever find out why it melted?"
"I dunno, I guess it just got too hot."
Very insightful, Winry thought, resisting the urge to scoff out loud. Hmm.
There was no foreign matter like grit or oil buildup throwing anything off as far as she could see, and all the parts lined up with the manufacturer's schematic, so the overall looseness wasn't caused by a loose screw or a missing part anywhere. Working from the outside in, she realigned each of the gears and pulleys until she got to the central one closest to the light source—and bingo, there was the issue.
The belt that connected the primary reel to the speed control mechanism was overstretched, and she knew why—it was still warm to the touch, even. She unhooked it carefully and examined it. It was leather, and had clear, fresh-looking stretch marks all the way around.
Replacing the belt was an easy fix, provided they kept spares on hand—and she couldn't imagine why they wouldn't—but that wasn't really the source of the issue. Leather machine belts naturally stretched over time, but not this fast. Between this and the melted film story, clearly something was heating up that had no business heating up.
"Hey," Winry said, turning to the projectionist. "What can you tell me about the light source on this thing?"
The young man brightened a little, eager for a question he could answer. "It's an arc lamp!"
"Right. Okay."
She stepped toward the lamphouse and gingerly touched its metal casing. Ow. Hot. Using the edge of her long skirt to insulate her hand, Winry opened it and looked at the lamp inside.
"Could you read me something from the manufacturer's specifications, please?" she said, squinting at the extinguished glass bulb.
"Sure thing."
"The, ah, size and resistance of the carbons they recommend for the lamp?"
There was a small pause.
"If it's not in the schematics," Winry continued, "it's probably in the section on fire prevention?"
There was a slightly longer pause.
Winry let out a withering sigh. "Let me see that," she said, grabbing the manual from him.
Comparing the chart in the instruction booklet to the carbons in front of her—the two dark, waxy columns inside the lightbulb whose resistance created a bright electrical arc, which was then caught by a parabolic mirror and focused by a set of condenser lenses onto the strips of film—it was immediately clear that they were the wrong size and weight. She removed both with a pair of pliers and dropped them on the counter.
"How long have you been using these carbons?" she asked sternly.
"S—since last week," the projectionist stammered. He had slowly put together that he had a reason to be nervous. "The manager said they'd be more efficient so he had us start using them for every show."
"They're efficient alright," Winry scoffed. "Efficient at burning down an entire city block. These are obviously not rated for the voltage of this projector—that's why the machine keeps overheating! You're lucky all you've had so far is a stretched belt and some crispy film."
The projectionist blanched. "I—I didn't know!" he stuttered. "He didn't say—"
"Yeah, I'll bet he didn't," Winry said. "But it's okay; we just need to swap them out with the correct ones."
She read him out the specifications for the properly-rated, manufacturer-approved carbons, and, sure enough, he opened a cupboard door overhead to reveal a few remaining boxes of them, hidden behind stacks and stacks of the wrong ones.
Together they changed the lightbulb carbons and the belt, oiled and realigned all the moving parts, and carefully loaded the film. The projectionist explained each step as he spooled the film (starting right at the beginning again) and refocused the lenses.
When everything was set, he plugged in the power source and gave her a shaky grin. "Now for the moment of truth. Ready?"
She grinned back, a little shaky herself. "Ready."
The bulb came on with a pop and the projector whirred to life, making what Winry recognized as the healthy sound of a consistent machine. Outside the booth the screen lit up again, dim at first but getting steadily brighter as the lamp warmed up, and a cheer rose from the crowd below as they recognized the first half of the scene they'd had cut off.
Both teens in the booth shouted triumphantly, and they high-fived.
"You did it!" the projectionist said.
"Yup," she said, untying the ribbon from her hair and shaking it loose. "See ya!"
He stared after her, dumbfounded, as she darted back out of the projection booth.
The freckly projectionist signalled the pianist, who had stood up to stretch, and she bolted back to her place at the upright piano in the front left corner, sequins rattling all the way. Within seconds, she started back into the score. As the cinema lights dimmed and the screen came into clearer focus, Winry scrambled back down the ladder and beamed at a waiting Edward.
Wordlessly, she gestured to the screen with both hands in a triumphant flourish.
"Nicely done, machine geek," Ed conceded, grinning. The two of them fell into step and breezed past the stunned manager as they strode back to their seats.
Instead of looking pleased, though, the manager looked furious.
"Jeez, this guy really didn't like being proven wrong, huh?" Ed whispered as they sat down, shooting a glance over his shoulder. "He looks like he's trying to incinerate you with his mind or something."
"You're not far off," Winry whispered back. "I'll explain after the movie's over."
OOOH, INTRIGUE.
Okay, so a couple of notes:
Firstly, I did a metric BUTTLOAD of research for this chapter, including what kinds of movies were around IRL in 1915. "The Beasts of Devil's Alley" is based in part on a real movie called "The Musketeers of Pig Alley", which you can actually watch for free on Wikipedia because it's public domain. I also downloaded this public-domain honest-to-goodness 1910s operating manual for movie projectors and theatre management, and dang, you guys, it was a complicated business. FYI, "carbons" were basically the equivalent of lightbulb filaments, which are the lil squiggly boys inside of incandescent lightbulbs. Instead of changing the whole lightbulb, for an "arc lamp" you would just change the carbons. If picturing this accurately is important to you I suggest you google it because it's hard to explain.
The main thing you need to know for this chapter, though, is that yeah, early movie equipment posed a LOT of really serious fire risks, and after a few very nasty movie theatre fires, most cities got very very strict about fire prevention. The film used used to be super flammable, the lamps (ie big ol' light bulbs) threw a ton of heat, there were a lot of electrical parts and not a lot of people who really knew how they worked, everybody smoked inside-it was fire hazard city, man. So it got pretty tightly regulated pretty quick.
I couldn't decide if Amestris should have popcorn or not, since it's based on a fictional pseudo-Europe, and the presence of corn implies a fictional pseudo-North America, and that just sent me down a whole mental spiral that I didn't have the patience for, so instead it's gummy worms. I definitely mentioned potatoes and tomatoes already, though, so, uh...never mind. Maybe next time they'll have popcorn. Why am I obsessed with fictional countries conforming to produce patterns that match the Columbian Exchange?! I don't know!
Anyway, there's a lot of other stuff going on in this chapter as well, so please let me know what you think! Thanks for reading; back soon with more! :)
