.:Three:.

A Warm Welcome (Why Is No One Surprised?)

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Edward Elric was extremely happy.

He had one arm handcuffed to a chair in a claustrophobic interrogation room in Aquaroya, and he had been left alone in the room for approximately an hour. He was still shirtless and what little clothes he did have were soaking wet; as a consequence, he was freezing cold except where the warm pain throbbed up and down his bruised shoulder (for which he had been given no medical treatment). The whole situation reminded him of the last time he'd been here in the city, arrested by that local detective instead of the military, of course, but still generally mistrusted and rudely detained. He had no idea what he was going to tell his interrogators when they entered the room, but for the moment, his stomach was rumbling in protest, and he was extremely groggy.

During his time in the Gate, he'd had no need for food or rest, and he was wearily pleased by the return of these unfamiliar needs, however annoying. Additionally, he'd just helped to capture a huge sea monster without being killed, and it was going to take a lot to bring him down from that particular high.

He hummed a little, looking around the drab, dimly-lit room. There was a table before him with two chairs facing his way, and although he knew that the chairs would likely be filled soon enough, it did little to diminish his contentment. Ed looked up to see a face staring at him through the small and grimy window in the concrete door behind the table. When he realized who it was, he smirked and stuck out his tongue—immature, yes, but he couldn't really help himself—and watched as the face in the window reddened in anger.

The door flew open and the ashen-haired Major stormed in, trailed by a young orange-haired man, a First Lieutenant, who fidgeted uncomfortably. The Major leaned with both hands on the table, breathing heavily as though slamming the door had been a strenuous activity.

"Can I help you?" Ed asked coolly.

The Major was silent for a moment, looking at Ed in anger, before he straightened and took a deep breath. "You captured that—that thing. And you seemed to have a great deal of knowledge about it—"

"I just happened to be lucky," Ed said, feigning modesty.

"—like how hard it's outer shell was, where to shoot the harpoon at the tail—"

"Really? You arrested me because I have eyes and common sense?" He asked sarcastically.

"Also, it chased you, though it had been so busy attacking the walls that it ignored most of the people who fell in the water. It was familiar with you—"

"Like that's my fault! I can't help being the most attractive person in Aquaroya—"

"—and your plan was utterly ridiculous! Endangering the life of a young boy by forcing him to man a boat almost into a solid wall—"

"Are you sure this whole interrogation thing isn't just because my 'ridiculous' plan got the Beast and you couldn't?"

The Major thumped his fist against the table. "Now, listen, you—!"

"—Sir?" the Lieutenant broke into the conversation uneasily. "Maybe it would be for the best if we did this as quickly as possible? It's just…"

With a visible effort, the Major calmed himself down. Ed knew that this was the part where the questions started coming, and he knew that he couldn't answer them. If anyone found out about the absurdity of his situation, there would be no telling what could happen; being the only person to see and return from the other side of the gate would make him a bug under a magnifying glass for just about every alchemist in Amestris. Ed exhaled slowly as the Major spat out his first question.

"What's your name?" Well, that was easy enough.

"Edward Elric."

"Elric?"

"As in 'Edward Elric, Fullmetal Alchemist.'"

The man snorted.

"Seriously. Look, it sounds weird, but just…get Colonel Mustang on the phone. He'll know it's me."

"You'll have to do better than that. The Fullmetal Alchemist is dead—"

"Obviously not."

"—and I'm sure he didn't look like a sniveling little brat."

"WHO ARE YOU CALLING SO LITTLE THAT AN ANT COULD—"

"How old are you?"

Edward deflated in mid-rant, stumped by the question. "Uh, fifteen?" He felt like he was fifteen, but there was no telling how long it had been since he had entered the Gate. "How long has it been since—"

"I'll ask the questions," the Major said as Ed glared at him sullenly. "Are you familiar with that monster?"

"Maybe."

"Is that a 'yes'?"

"No, it was a 'maybe.' I can see where it would be hard for you to understand."

"Are you—?"

"Yes, I'm insulting you."

A growl. The Major's face was alarmingly red. "Why did the monster follow you?"

"Maybe it just likes me a lot."

"Could you give a definitive answer?"

"No."

The Major rolled his shoulders back as though restraining himself from strangling Ed. "Are you familiar with these monsters?"

"Maybe."

"Should I assume that 'maybe' means 'yes'?"

"Don't I have the right to remain silent?"

"Well, yes, but—"

"I hereby invoke my right to remain silent."

"Answer the question."

Ed raised his eyebrows and mimed zipping his mouth closed.

"Kid, answer the—"

"—Sir?" The Lieutenant interrupted again, wincing nervously as the Major whirled around. "Maybe you ought to just…call in the brass. That…creature is probably something they need to be informed of anyway, and I'm sure they could find a way to get him to talk."

The door opened suddenly to reveal a worried-looking private. "Sir? There are over a hundred civilians outside protesting—" his eyes flickered to Ed and back. "Well. Any more show up, it'll be a security risk. What should we do?"

The Major's hand flew to his forehead, and trailed down his face to rub at his chin. The room was silent for a moment as the man glared at Ed, who only offered a smirk. Protesters, huh? I guess people usually don't like it when you arrest the guy who saved the day.

The Major sighed suddenly and addressed the redheaded lieutenant. "Brennans. Call this in. Tell them about the creature, and that we have a kid here that knows about the situation but is resisting interrogation anyway. Randall, there isn't much we can do. Let them protest; we should have the kid out of here in a few hours anyway." The men hurried off, and the door banged shut. The Major turned to Ed, fixing him with a piercing stare. "Don't suppose you'd change your mind?" the man asked, almost tiredly.

The alchemist pressed his lips firmly together.

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Roy Mustang was extremely irritated.

For nearly three hours this morning, his office had been running perfectly. It had been silent, and everyone was finishing paperwork (well, Havoc and Breda had been goofing off, but they were doing it silently, and that was what counted). He had been looking forward to finishing what little he had left to do and taking the rest of the day off when the calls started coming in.

And it wasn't even calls that he was particularly used to. At one point, he had nearly started making up answers just so he'd have something helpful to say.

Apparently, there were monsters. All over Amestris. And as far as he could tell, there were even reports of the things in other countries as well.

The majority of the creatures seemed harmless, from what he could make out over the phone. Some of them just stood there looking around bewilderedly, others chased animals and small children but were doing no real harm, and others ran around stealing things from people's houses. It was like a strange dream that wouldn't end.

Mustang was suddenly pulled from his thoughts when he heard a shout come from the other room. He thrust his hands into his gloves out of habit and raced inside to find that everyone in the small office had raised their guns to a black thing on Breda's desk. The window had been broken, and the dark creature—Mustang assumed that it was the reason the window was shattered—was staring back at them with wide eyes and the creepiest grin Mustang had ever seen.

"What the hell…" the words seemed to have escaped from Havoc's mouth before the man realized it.

"What should we do, sir?" Hawkeye asked sensibly.

"Don't shoot it unless it's threatening someone's safety," Mustang said. "It seems the little black ones are relatively harmless. Just try to get it back out through the window without touching it. Fuery, run downstairs again and see if Al's called in and we missed him with all of the other calls. I have the feeling we'll need his help with all of this sooner than we thought."

Fuery rushed out and Havoc disappeared into the next room as the little monster picked up some of Breda's paperwork. "Fun," it said, startling everyone in the office. "Leaves?" it asked, throwing the papers into the air. They kept their weapons trained on the black blob behind the falling white pages. The little grinning creature let out a laugh that sounded like a short bark before grabbing another stack of papers and beginning to shred them. "Pieces," the thing said as Breda gave a dismayed cry.

"Do it fast," the redhead said gruffly as Havoc came back with a broom. Without losing his grip on his cigarette, the First Lieutenant quickly swept the little monster onto the broom and thrust it out the window. There was a startled cry as the thing fell to the ground, but when Havoc and Mustang poked their heads outside, it had already picked itself up off of the ground and begun slinking away.

"Great. It's nice to know they can survive five-story falls," Havoc said sarcastically.

The phone rang again, startling all four of them. "Get something to put over the window, and then get back to work," Mustang said tiredly as Falman picked up the phone.

The Brigadier-General went back to his office as his own phone began to ring again, and he thought privately that they had been lucky it was just a small creature.

It was the destructive ones that threw Mustang off guard. What was he supposed to do about the creatures that attacked buildings or homes? And what about the sudden earthquakes, hurricanes, and tornadoes? The firestorms that had ravaged half the countryside? At first, they had begun evacuations, but there was nowhere truly safe for people to run. Then he had offered backup from Central, sending out men to different locations, but there were so many reports coming in that there were no additional men left. Their forces were spreading thinner, and the calls were still coming.

And the fact that, apparently, no one in the world could use alchemy at the moment made things even worse.

All Mustang could really do about that problem was send help or have the call wired to one of his superiors for further instructions. Though he was an expert in fire alchemy, he could freely admit that he was fairly useless when it came to something like this.

He picked up the phone and began to answer the same questions everyone had been asking. Where were the monsters from? Why couldn't anyone do alchemy? What could they do about the attacks and thievery? Did shooting them work?

What he really needed was to record his own voice saying "I don't know" to be played back whenever people phoned. He eventually wired the call through to his superiors—Let them deal with this one, he thought maliciously—when Falman poked his head in.

"Brigadier-General? Al is here."

"Finally," Mustang said exasperatedly, rushing through the door to find Al standing before him, silent and grim. He smiled at Mustang in his usual serene way and Mustang leaned against the wall, letting out a smirk. For the first time, he felt like things might start going their way. There were few people in the world whose competence Mustang was assured and rather proud of, and Alphonse Elric was one of them. Mustang noted absently that Alphonse held in his hand a library book, and though he nodded to the other members of the office, his thoughts were elsewhere.

"Do you have any idea what's going on?" Mustang asked hopefully.

Al sighed, seemingly aware that all eyes in the office were on him, despite the ringing phones and distant sounds of chaos that could be heard from the hall behind him. "I might. Nothing like this has ever happened before, so I'm really just making an educated guess."

"We've just been making most of this up as we go, Al," Breda said, "so I'm sure it's better than anything we've got so far."

"Okay. I think there's something wrong with the Gate," Al said bluntly.

There was a tense pause.

"Wrong? Wrong how?" Hawkeye said. None of them had more than a basic understanding of the Gate as something that controlled alchemy and had once stolen the bodies of their young friends, but even they could tell that having something wrong with it probably wouldn't be good for the rest of the world either.

"Well…I'm not exactly sure. But it's the only reason I can think of why this would be happening. Those little black monsters running around everywhere? I've seen them inside the Gate before. The only thing I can think of is that the Gate must have somehow let some of them out."

"But what does that have to do with the fact that alchemy won't work for everyone else?" asked Mustang impatiently.

"That's the part I don't understand. In theory, there should still be enough alchemy in the Gate for us to borrow it in this world, like we always do."

"How do we get them back into the Gate?"

Al scratched his head, frustrated. "I don't really know. The Gate is—theoretically—on a separate plane from this one. I guess you could even call it a different world. The monsters shouldn't be here at all, and there's no way to push the monsters into the Gate because it doesn't actually exist here."

Havoc and Breda simultaneously tilted their heads to the side. "A different world?" asked Havoc.

Al nodded. "I know how it sounds, but that's one of the few accepted theories about the Gate. That it exists on a different plane. Every time someone in this world uses alchemy, it's borrowed from the world in the Gate. Only now, a lot of the alchemy has found its way over here, and that's probably making it hard for the Gate to regulate alchemy."

The office was silent for a few moments.

"So," Havoc said slowly. "What exactly are we supposed to do about this?"

Al gave a stretched grin. "I have no idea."

Havoc grinned back, his cigarette tilting precariously. "Isn't that our line?"

The office door opened suddenly to reveal a rather harassed looking redheaded woman who was breathing as though she had run a mile. "Brigadier-General…Mustang," she panted, "there's someone…on the phone for you."

"Tell them I'll call back."

"He says…it's urgent, sir. There's someone over in…Major Pierce's jurisdiction." She took a deep breath. "Pierce says he knows about the situation with all of the…monsters and everything."

"What? Get him on the phone."

The woman shook her head. "He won't talk. Pierce arrested him this morning after he captured one of the creatures somehow…but the guy won't answer any questions. That's why he called. He wants you to interrogate him, since Aquaroya is in your jurisdiction anyway. He said you're better at interrogations. He's probably right, sir," she added. It was rather well-known that Major Pierce had something of a temper.

Mustang glanced at Hawkeye, who smiled and said something about getting a car.

"Fine," Mustang growled. "I'll make him talk."

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The trip there was fairly uneventful, considering that everyone in Amestris was on alert for the alchemic monsters. The few creatures that Mustang and Hawkeye saw on the journey were the small black blobs like the one from earlier, and most of them were doing relatively harmless things like laughing maniacally, chasing birds, lifting women's skirts, or throwing rocks at people.

They stopped the car on the outskirts of Aquaroya, as the streets became to narrow to drive farther into the city. Mustang saw no signs of any structural damage on any of the bridges they passed, though he had no idea which part of the city the monster from this morning would have been in. The pair of them hurried down the busy streets and through crowds of people who were much calmer than those in Central, likely because the worst of the creatures they had seen had already been captured.

Toward the center of the city was the small military station, and Mustang reached the door and threw it open. Angry and frustrated that someone had answers about this confusing and hopeless situation but refused to reveal them, he glanced around the room until his eyes fell on the grey-haired Major Pierce, who was sitting at a desk in the corner and rubbing the bridge of his nose in the way of one who has a severe headache. He pointed to a door on the far wall.

Mustang stormed forward, throwing the door open, already beginning to speak. "Alright, you little—"

"WHO ARE YOU CALLING LITTLE?"

The man froze, and from the silence behind him, he assumed that Hawkeye had done the same.

"Fullmetal?"

The blonde in question recovered from his surprise enough to grin. "You know, Mustang, I have to say…it's almost good to see you."

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A/N: Can I just say that it's really annoying that Mustang has been promoted in this story? I keep writing "Colonel Mustang" and I have to go back and change it. Oh well. Kudos to him for the promotion, anyway.

As always, thanks to everyone who reviewed, especially my anonymous reviewers that I can't PM back. You are all wonderful people!

Thanks again for sticking with me. Please review!

~ket

Next Chapter: Genii and Alchemical Theory 101