(A/N: Neid is pronounced like 'Hide'. Also, as per usual, this is not well edited, so feel free and welcome to point out any typos/errors. It was amazing how many errors I found when I read it aloud with my friends all doing different voices. Imagine Wrath with Nixon's voice. I nearly died XD. Kyle and Kaze, I dedicate this chapter to you :3)
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Although Kimblee had been notified in advance, the assignment was a surprise when it arrived. He was, the document informed him, to be working under a certain Dr. Timothy Marcoh.
Doctor? As in, a medical Doctor? He frowned. Yes, the report specified that they would be doing 'research of a medicinal-alchemical nature'. As far as application of his abilities went, that was only a small step up from interior design in terms of interest. It was required that all State Alchemists learn the basics of human anatomy, which he had found interesting enough, but he assumed that working in the medical field would be dreadfully dull if one had no regard for whether their patients lived or died.
He reminded himself that the order had come from Father. Whatever he would be called to do, it wasn't what the official report would lead one to believe. He only hoped that it was more interesting than the official report led him to believe.
And it was progress of sorts, if not the specific kind he had envisioned. It was an unspoken rule that alchemists were overseen by other alchemists, so being officially placed under Dr. Marcoh was an advancement of sorts, if not in rank per se.
Reading on, his eyes widened in surprise. His new assignment placed him in Laboratory Five, which was about as secret as secret could be and still have people know where it was located. To that purpose, he had been given full security clearance, whereas before he had been just above that of a civilian's.
Whatever he would be doing, it was at least moving him up in the world.
.
Lab Five was innocuous enough from the outside, not displaying the often ornate architecture characteristic of important military buildings, particularly those in Central. Indeed, it took him a moment to even locate the door, and he was half-expecting no one to answer.
He certainly wasn't expecting it to be answered by Envy, wearing the uniform of a soldier.
"Invidia?"
"That's Major Neid, to you." Envy said with a wink, beckoning him inside.
"I…had no idea you were in the army."
"Only now and again when the need arises. They follow orders better when they think I'm a figure of legitimate authority."
"'They'?"
"Your soon-to-be co-workers. You'll meet them soon, but first I'll give you the grand tour. It's easy to get lost in this place."
It was indeed deceptively intricate on the inside. He realized, as they traveled down a number off oddly angled corridors, that the building itself was structured to facilitate the performance of alchemy within its walls.
As for the rooms, most of them were shut and locked, but Envy pointed out a few accessible places of interest, usually lab rooms based around a specific alchemical purpose. Many of them were a certain shape: one room was entirely triangular, down to the light bulbs in the ceiling, another, hexagonal; built as some sort of extended transmutation circles, meant to amplify whatever was performed therein.
There were many supply rooms, containing every ingredient one could possibly call for, and many more that had no conceivable purpose at all (why would he ever need quinoa flour for alchemy? And blood-of-virgin, really? What was this, the Dark Ages?) as well as a few archive rooms that he couldn't wait to explore very thoroughly, assuming he could find his way back to them.
The final door Envy led him through opened to a strange menagerie. In cages that lined the wall, there were numerous and varied species of animals – dogs, cats, two hyenas, a bear, a lion, a glass tank filled with snakes, a komodo dragon, a bobcat, several goats, and an aquarium with an enormous octopus.
The thing that set this place apart from any zoo, however, were the cages which contained humans. That seemed to be where most of the noise was coming from, for as soon as the door opened, many of them began to talk, or shout, or beg or just plain cuss them out. It was difficult to distinguish one voice from another.
"Shut up!" Envy shouted, seizing a chair and hurling it against the bars with an earsplitting clatter. They fell quiet to a one. From they way they looked at Envy, they had clearly learned to fear the homunculus in however long they had been there.
"Lust made the mistake of quieting them down with morphine." Envy explained, once the noise had died down. "It worked wonders for a while, but then they just got louder because they thought it would get them more." It grinned. "You really can't show them any sort of mercy at all."
"Who are they?" Kimblee asked, eying the prisoners with interest.
"Death row convicts for the most part."
"Am I to be an executioner?"
"No – well, incidentally yes, but that's not the point." Envy handed Kimblee the file it had been carrying. "This is the full description of your duties and objectives concerning your work in Lab Five. You won't be working here all the time, but when you are, it will consist mainly of two things, the first of which being the creation of human-based chimeras."
There came a despairing wail from one of the prisoners.
"I said shut it!" Envy snapped. "You'd only be killed anyway, why are you always whining?"
"And the second thing?" Kimblee prompted.
"Uh, right. Your other task, the more important one, is the creation of philosopher's stones."
Kimblee merely stared at Envy for a moment, who regarded his shock with a smug look.
"…You're serious." He managed at length.
"It's all in there," Envy said, pointing at the file. "Right from Father."
"How?"
"Eh, you're the alchemist, that's where you come in. I only know the underlying principle: the harvesting of human lives for power."
Kimblee began to laugh, quietly, and then not so quietly. Before long, he was in stitches. The prisoners huddled further back in their cages, wondering what new demon they were now at the mercy of.
"What's up with you?" Envy asked, amused.
"Oh," he brought up one hand to wipe at his eyes, "just to think, at first I was afraid this work would be boring."
.
To bring two disparate forms together into a chimera, one must condition them to and for one another.
Cut off a human's leg, cut off the opposite leg of the animal with which you intended to combine it. Put out a human's right eye, put out the animal's left eye. The more characteristics you wished to transfer, the more of each you had to take, prior to their combination. You have to make room in them, for each other.
For the best results, one must take as much of both of their bodies as you could, just short of killing them. Ironically, the closer they were brought to death, the more that was taken, the more subtle and robust their bodies would be when the process was complete. The human and animal sides would be more attuned, better-fitted to one another.
It was not a matter of literal cut-and-paste, of course. You would not end up with some Frankenstein monster with a mish-mash of human and animal body parts – a goat's eye here, a bear's claw there, oh no. That was where the alchemy came in: combining seamlessly the two forms which had been made to mirror one another, yet creating a sum total more than any of the parts which comprised it.
Kimblee, being the perfectionist that he was, had a tendency to push things too far, to take too much, and have both human and animal die prematurely. (That, combined with his tendency to hum Beethoven's Für Elise as he sliced living things down to their barest minimum, did not help his popularity with the other researchers.)
Interestingly and perhaps predictably, the animals usually held out longer than the humans. Not surprising, once he considered it. The humans had been behind bars a long time, and were none too fit at this point. Perhaps he would request stronger humans for test subjects.
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The only disappointing part of his new job, as per usual, were his human compatriots. There just didn't seem to be any escaping that pitfall for him.
There were six people assigned to the job, Doctor Marcoh and five assistants: Shou Tucker, Alden Thayer, Rex Leander, Conrad Morgenstern, and, of course, Zolf Kimblee.
They were all, except one, mortified by the work they were ordered to do. Few of them were openly showing it, yet, but the signs were there. Kimblee knew it was only a matter of time before they became mired in ethical crises. How troublesome.
To make the whole thing less arduous, he decided to bet with himself who would be the first to snap.
Thayer was the youngest there next to Kimblee himself, so that was a point in his favor. However, he also seemed, to Kimblee at least, rather simple-minded. Intelligent yes, but not smart. It might take a while for the deeper ramifications of the situation to penetrate his skull.
Tucker was the most openly demonstrative of his horror, often the one to pale and quake at the sight of blood, the first one to lose his composure when a subject died on them. Maybe he was already on his way to snapping, or maybe venting his feelings of horror would allow him to cope longer.
Unlike Leander, who was a rock in the face of everything asked of him. He might, almost, have been unaffected by their orders, but Kimblee didn't buy it. He knew another good actor when he saw him. The man was just putting up a strong front – a good one, but an act nonetheless. How long before he snapped, before the pent-up horror shattered him from the inside?
Morgenstern was the one Kimblee really wanted to see break. He was the one to justify what they were doing. He was nowhere near as resolute as Leander, but he would always square his shoulders, put on a stiff upper lip, and say that it was for the good of the country, or that it was their duty. Or, and this was the thing that irritated Kimblee most of all, that the people they were experimenting on were condemned criminals anyway.
.
"I don't understand them." He said to Envy, during once lunch break when everyone else was too nauseated to eat. It was a common occurrence, leading him to break bread with the homunculus far more often than any of his fellow researchers. They were on the roof, with Amestris sprawling out below them.
Envy didn't get or need lunch breaks, but it often found excuses to share Kimblee's – his break, and his lunch. It had started small, just a grape, a chip, a small scrap of meat, and then somehow he found himself packing extra helpings when he left for work in the morning.
"Why should it matter, what kind of people they are?" He continued. "Does that make their pain any less? Does that make them less alive, less human?"
"I should think it makes them especially human, being especially sinful." Envy reached out and swiped a morsel of chicken, then hopped onto the railing, uncaring of the several-story drop below. "But that's not how your kind likes to look at itself." It tilted its head to one side. "You're not gaining empathy for them, now are you?"
"I've empathized with them all along. They're more like me than most, having done whatever they did to get put on death row. But just because I can see myself in them doesn't mean I can't kill them."
"Freak." Envy teased.
"The real 'freaks' are people like Morgenstern. Doesn't he see the hypocrisy, in using what they've done as justification for what we're doing to them? How does the government's approval change what it means to take a life? Why is everyone an idiot?"
"Morality isn't based in logic. It exists to let people believe they're superior – to animals, to other humans who disagree with them, to me and my kind, when they meet us. So if Morgenstern's morals are allowing him to go about his life with a clear conscience – er, clearer than it would be otherwise – then they're doing their job."
"Even if I believed in some objective system of ethics, what would qualify someone to carry it out as they see fit? Who could be that arrogant, to believe they know what's 'right', that they know what justice should be dealt out to strangers?"
"What about you, then? Do you think this is wrong?"
"I don't see it on those terms."
"What do you think is wrong, then? Nothing at all?"
"Hypocrisy, irrationality, baseless arrogance." He shrugged. "Those things bother me more than what most people would call 'evil'."
"Do you think I'm evil?"
"The rabbit would certainly think the wolf is evil. By human standards, you're the very definition of the term."
"What about your standards?"
"I'm human, aren't I? But like I said, evil doesn't bother me."
"So you see me as technically evil, but you don't care."
"That sounds about right, yes."
"How do you see yourself, then?"
"Oh much worse." He said lightly. "You're siding with your own kind, I'm stabbing mine in the back. From a human perspective, that evil is the worst of all. And a bit stupid on top of evil, perhaps. Being a rabbit throwing himself to the wolves."
"I don't see you as the rabbit type."
"That's good to know."
Envy took another bite of chicken, then, "If it makes you feel better, we will kill them eventually. Morgenstern and the others, I mean. We'll see how good it does them, to die while feeling superior."
He smiled. "That a promise?"
"It is." Envy gave him a look that was almost…sympathetic. "I spend a good deal of my time impersonating various humans, and I don't hate anyone as much as the ones I have to put up with, when I'm under cover."
"Do you get to kill them after?"
"Not all of them. I will someday, though. I keep a list." For a moment, there was a very grim look on Envy's face, but it passed in a moment, replaced by a look of malicious glee. "So, who here do you think will be the first to snap?"
Kimblee laughed. "Would you believe I've spent these last weeks contemplating that very question?"
"Yes. Who's your money on?"
"I can't tell yet."
"Leander will snap first, but Tucker will snap worst."
"He does seem the most deeply disturbed by it all, at least most openly."
Envy shook its head, holding up one finger. "There's more to it than that. I've looked at Tucker's records, and he is what you might call…'ill-adjusted'. The reason he's having so much trouble is that he's conflicted. On some level, he's fascinated by what he's doing here, at the power it gives him. But he doesn't have the guts to admit it to himself. The denial is what he's struggling with."
"Interesting."
"Oh yes. When it happens, it will be very interesting. Not sure how it will play out with Morgenstern and Theyer, though."
"And Doctor Marcoh?"
"He already did, as a matter of fact. Told us he wouldn't do it, that he would resign. Then we told him we would kill him. Soon enough he'll tell us to kill him anyway, and that's when we'll start threatening the lives of others."
"I see. But there's one left."
"No there's not."
"Why, I'm hurt."
"You?" Envy snorted. "Either you cracked the worst a long time ago, or you'll never break, ever."
"You don't think my fragile mind is at risk of collapsing under the strain?"
"Of dealing with morons all day, maybe." Envy suddenly frowned. "Now I think about it, you'll probably be the one they turn on. If that starts to happen, don't feel like you have to be a hero. Father will re-assign you if the other humans aren't playing nice."
"I'm the one who doesn't play nice. I can take care of myself."
Envy shrugged. "Suit yourself. I'm just saying, you're worth more to us alive."
.
When Envy wasn't around, his second favorite choice of conversation was the subjects themselves. The other researches were loathe to interact with the prisoners, as though not acknowledging their subject's humanity would make the whole thing more bearable.
Needless to say, Kimblee felt no guilt or unease at interacting with someone who was at his complete and total mercy, and knew it. The dynamic was more interesting that way. It cut through all the bullshit.
"Why not let me out? Wouldn't it be nice, to save a life?"
It was a plea he had heard before.
"Not especially. Besides, if I let you out I expect I'd be your replacement."
"Feh. You're the one who oughtta be in here." The man had little real spirit in his argument. He'd lost that a long time ago.
"'Ought to'? I would think one in your position would have dispensed with the notion that certain things 'ought' to happen to people as a result of their actions."
"What if I told you I was innocent of the crimes they condemned me for?"
"I would deeply pity you. But I would still kill you."
"I killed. I admit it. But that was different. I was angry. Not like you."
"I'll be angry, if you continue with this nonsense. Are you claiming your death would be less objectionable, if I had a 'reason'?"
One of the others was laughing. "No, no, they've got it all wrong. You don't have to have a reason to kill. Having reasons detracts from the fun!"
Kimblee turned, looking more closely at the prisoner who had spoken. Underneath the unkempt beard and the grime…
"You look familiar."
The man laughed. "My handsome face was plastered all across the news a few years back. You should remember, you're not that young."
He snapped his fingers. "You're that…that butcher fellow."
"Barry the Chopper! Get the name right!"
"I apologize, mister Chopper. As I recall, weren't there twenty-three bodies to your name?"
"Twenty-four, actually. I held out on the location of the last one."
"My my." He grinned. "I had no idea I would be working with celebrities."
Barry the Chopper laughed heartily. "Kid, you really are one sick puppy."