Ace: WAH, I MEANT TO UPDATE YESTURDAY, BUT I GOT DISTRACTED BY WRITING UP SONYA'S FLASHBACK AND FORGOT!

Sonya: It's okay Ace.

Lela: We still love you.

Kayla: Sorta. Hey look, EternalHypernova reviewed! AND SHE RE-ENCOURAGED ME TO RAPE ED!

Ed: GAH!

Sonya: Sure, why not let you fake rabies, you can come with us to trash the next Wal-mart.

Ace: AND THE RABID WEASEL MINIONS WILL HELP ME HELP YOU DO ALL THAT STUFF, BECAUSE I HATE IT WHEN PEOPLE CALL MANGA CRAPPY FOURTH-GRADE COMIC BOOKS!

Greed: Once again, Ace's brain has left the building.

Ace: Nah, I just probably suffer from a serious mental disorder like EternalHypernova!

Greed: Okay then...

Lela: You don't need to sit in a corner, Furorensu-Chan just stop the dumb arguement.

Envy: But I like annoying people. *pout*

Lela: Which is why you're sitting with me in the corner of shame.

Kayla: RIGHT, THAT'S IT, NO ONE CALLS MY MATE SHORT!

Envy: YEAH, NO ONE'S ALLOWED TO DO THAT TO CHIBI-SAN BUT ME!

Ed: What the-? That idiot has a Mini-skirt Army?

Kayla: Yeah. They solicited me once.

Ed: *spasms at thought of Kayla in a mini-skirt*

Envy: Oh, and Ace is thinking about re-writing Winds of Change to better reflect the plot, since she wrote the first two chapters, and then had a sudden idea change to redo the entire plot. She tried to fix it, but even she doesn't think she did all too well...

Ace: Yeah, I'll fix it after I put up another chapter, then I'll go on hiatus for a while, not for another week though, and rewrite Winds and update Chimeras like a mad woman.

Lela: We ARE all monsters, Bloody Bonez Alchemist XD. If you go through the flashbacks, it's kinda hard not to reach that conclusion. Especially after Sonya's...

Kayla: And besides, the closest thing we've ever had to friends is Greed and Dorochet for Sonya, Envy for Lela, and Ed and Al for me.

Sonya: I know, DarkVampirePrincess8, I was back for one entire chapter! But now, you get to find out more about the projects from Lela as I wait another chapter for my own magical flashback of wonder.

Greed: WITH MORE SIDE-MENTIONS!

Ace: And even more mystery and dangling plot lines to be filled in at a later date!

Envy: You're evil, you know that?

Ace: Yeah, pretty much.

Ed: SAVE ME FROM THE CRAZY WOLF-GIRL!

Ace: Only if you do the disclaimer.

Ed: FINE! Ace5980 does not own FullMetal Alchemist.

Ace: *picks up Ed and places him into Envy's lap* ENJOY!

14: Flashbacks of a Traitor

(7 years prior)

Lela had taken care of both childish Kayla and blind Sonya for two years, ever since their dad had committed suicide and slit his throat. Sonya was always subdued, clinging to Kayla in a desperate attempt to compensate for her lack of vision. Kayla was normally whining about the fact she had no friends because they were on the run from their parent's superiors, after the notes Lela had taken from her father's office before she'd picked up Sony6a, grabbed Kayla's hand with her own, left the house she'd only reluctantly called home, and never looked back since. She regretted that Kayla and Sonya weren't having a proper childhood, the childhood they deserved, but since Lela had given up her own childhood at the tender age of six, she couldn't really relate. The year after that, her mother had been shot by an intruder who was never found or caught. Then her father had done what he'd done and ended Lela's nightmarish childhood, leaving her to raise her younger siblings and protect his work.

The nine-year-old looked at her charges sleeping nestled against each other in the tent and smiled sadly. They'd need to move soon if they were to avoid the alchemists hunting them, even though Lela knew part of what those bastards were looking for. Lela had flipped through the alchemy notes she'd taken and, surprising, had understood them throughly well for someone who could not perform alchemy and hadn't even seen a full decade of life yet. In fact, she'd even taken a pencil to the formulas, doing all her math in the dirt with a stick in an innumerable amount of different locations around the country. Making sure the girls were sound asleep, she crept outside, shuttering the small lantern they had with her hand. Setting it down on a nice large patch of dirt and fetching a nice twig, Lela pushed up the sleeve of her coat, revealing a long complicated formula stenciled on her forearm in charcoal. Nodding to herself, she copied the series of numbers and letters at the farthest spot from the lantern where she could still read her scratch marks in the flickering light it offered. This was the very last of her father's work she had to check, and she carefully fixed a few minor miscalculations she'd already spotted in her previous forays.

Lela Animalia was an alchemical genius, a prodigy. She could not perform the elusive art, but she had a talent for working its formulas half on instinct alone and half on the sketchy info she knew of math and science from what little schooling she'd had and the notes she'd decoded. She had just as much potential as a certain blond boy, an Edward Elric. However, just like Ed, Lela's subject matter was, although she didn't know it, human transmutation and thus taboo. But she thought alchemy was alchemy, not formulas, and formulas were always the same on both sides of the equals sign at the end of the day. How could she have known that formulas and alchemy could be the same thing and the opinion she had of formulas was basically the Law of Equivalent Exchange?

Straightening, ignoring the dirt on her pale knees and legs, Lela looked up at the sky, deciding she had enough time to begin her own work from what she'd learned from her father's. Absently correcting a few figures on her arm to make her original formula right, she then raked up the bottom of her shirt, revealing minuscule lines of text snaking from just above her bellybutton to about halfway up her ribcage. She swept away her remaining work with her sleeve, once again ignoring the mud and dirt attaching itself to her clothes. She lines up three columns, separating each formula into one on either of the far sides, leaving the middle bare for her work. Slowly but surely, she compiled the formulas in the left column into fewer and fewer sets, absently noticing the figures got more and more unstable with each combination. Then, she did the same for the right, noticing there were two ending formulas instead of one, all of which she copied down around her wrist before scratching out all of her work. She had upheld her part of the bargain she had made with Kimbley. Now it was time for him to heal her sister, after she'd got them all captured and begun experimentation, of course.

(2 years later, still 5 years from present)

"The formula isn't safe! Dammit, Arthur, you can't give it to Kayla!" Lela yelled, grabbing at a man by his arm and barely keeping her temper in check.

He smirked at her. "It didn't hurt you, now did it, Lela-cat?" he said bluntly, pushing past her. Lela growled at the closed office door, her new cat ears lying flat against her head as her tail flicked angrily by her side. Arthur was a fairly decent alchemist, good at what he did, but he simply didn't possess the same prowess Lela did. Picking up a marker in her paw and finding the task rather more difficult than she'd originally though, she sat down at the absent alchemist's desk to do what she did best. She quickly ran through the formulas they'd given her on Sonya and compared the finished product to that which she'd gathered from information they'd let slip or she'd stolen. What she found was enough to anger the chimera girl beyond reason.

The alchemists had lied to her about what they were doing to Sonya. They weren't fixing her sight like they'd promised. They weren't changing her into the dangerously advanced chimeras like Kayla and herself, but Sonya sure as hell wasn't a normal human anymore. She was the product their father had been striving for before his untimely death. Sonya had been turned into a being that could only be classified as an avenging angel, and it had been done by the very formulas Lela herself had perfected.

Lela felt sick, sick to her core. Her old hobby had turned her and her sisters from humans to mere experiments. I have to get rid of this. I have to get rid of it all, she thought, her body changing into the supple one of a sleek black panther. Her claws shot out as she prepared to do the unthinkable. I have to free Kayla and Sonya, and we'll run away, far away, where no alchemist bastard could ever find us no matter how hard they look. We'll blend in with society, make sure we never end up in this place again, and we'll never look back. Her green eyes roved the office one more time before settling on the papers placed underneath a photo of Arthur. But, before we go, I need to make sure my work isn't going to be abuse, by these alchemists or anyone else. She lit the room on fire and stalked off, ears twitching as the smoke hid her from view so that no one could see her coming.

Ace: REVIEWS EQUAL RABID WOLVERINE PITS!

Lela: Um, why aren't you guys all crazy and stuff?

Sonya: 'Cuz Wal-mart didn't have any cheez-whiz or whipped cream.

Greed: Some guy who loves boobs stole them all first.

Envy: CURSE YOU, BOOB GUY!

Ace: Now we're off to the Wal-mart down the street. *all run off*

Lela: *trailing behind* Sometimes I wonder exactly what goes on inside thier heads...

*Ed and Kayla come in after everyone leaves*

Ed: What'd we miss?

Kayla: *tackles Ed* Don't know, don't care.

Ed: SAVE ME!

Kayla: DON'T LISTEN TO HIM!