(Age 16)
"You've got to be kidding me!" Edward shouted, pulling on his pants. Winry gave him a look of disapproval, knowing what was to come, right as Edward began to blame her, "This is your fucking fault, Winry! Someone stole the one thing that proves my certification because of you and those damn nut job mechanics. I swear all of you gear heads are the same!"
Winry's face flushed in embarrassment and a bit of misplaced guilt. There was a deep chortle from a mechanic shop off to the side on the strip of buildings. The party of four turned with curiosity, or rather, three did. Edward was grumbling about locals laughing at him and a 'damn thief' while pulling his shirt on. "Boy," Drawled an older man, tinkering on a metal hand, "You just got played."
Another man, a customer at his shop, nodded in agreement. "Looks like the handiwork of Bunny. She likes to target the oblivious tourists that come around these parts."
Edward's attitude swerved to a more respectful tone as he urged them to give him information, "Do you know where this person is? Please, what they took was very important to me."
The men, not missing his change of tone or the reasoning behind it, agreed, "Well, I see no harm in telling you," His eyes flashed with an idea, "As long as you let us take a look at that automail."
With that, Edward's temper snapped. He'd been stripped once that day and wasn't going to do it again. "You wanna see?" He asked maliciously, "Here." He snarled, clapping his hands and elongating the blade he so often made with a flick of his wrist.
With the sharp point at his nose, the man relented, "The west side main. There's an old shop called Glatz!"
And with that, Edward took off running towards the west side of town, leaving the other three in the dust.
When Elizabeth, Alphonse, and Winry finally caught up, Edward had only just opened the shop door and beginning to yell at Bunny, "Never open even the hood!" He snarled, taking a few steps inside, the other two Elrics trying to make a move to stop him from being too stupid.
The girl with the pocket watch had a darker tan than most city-folk up in central did, with short, dark hair pulled up in a ponytail. She wore a black tank top and camouflage cargo pants tucked into her black combat boots. Her eyes, giving away no nervousness or regret, found an expensive looking vase on the ground next to the counter where she was about to sell Ed's watch. With a swift movement of her foot, she scooped it up and called out to Ed, "Hey bro, catch!" and kicked the vase towards him.
Meanwhile, though no one was paying attention to him, the man behind the counter exclaimed, "No! That vase is over one million cens!"
Yelping, Edward managed to catch the vase and set it down, but the girl had already bolted out of the window, only looking back to remark, "Nice catch!"
"Hey!" Edward snarled, "Get back here!" He, too, took off out the window and jumped up on the roofs. Elizabeth turned and took charge of the situation as soon as she realized that he was going to hurt the girl if he didn't calm down.
"Al, Win. You run after them on the ground. Make Edward calm down, or bad things are going to happen." She ordered, sighing. She lined up with the window, preparing to run after them on the rooftops.
"Wait!" Winry snapped, taking in the sudden authority that Beth held in her voice, "What do you think you're doing?"
Elizabeth cocked her head to the side to look at her childhood friend. "Growing up." With that, she bolted after them, jumping in the window and pushing off the window-seal to get to the rooftops.
They weren't too far away, and she could hear the insults Edward was spewing at her, and the laughs that echoed off the walls. "You're ten years too early," She remarked, pausing to jump over a pipe, "if you think you can outrun my on my home turf!" She laughed as she zoomed be a hissing pipe, which let out a big puff of steam right as she past it, hitting Edward instead of her.
While he was trying fan the steam out of his vision, Bunny leaped down from the low roof they were on and into the street. Al, who had run around on the streets like Elizabeth instructed, reached out of the steam falling from the rooftops down into the streets. His metal arm swiped across where Bunny was running, but her reflexes were faster than any of them could have expected them to be. She slid under his arm the moment it appeared out of the cover of the white and chuckled all the way, remarking, "Too slow!" Still running, she turned into a dead-end alley. With a groan, the speedy girl mumbled, "Dead end."
"No way out!" The younger brother exclaimed. His sister, approaching on the rooftops, caught his eye as she sprinted along, right above the tall brick wall that formed the dead end.
"Al!" the elder screamed happily, "Get her!" His tone had a wicked edge, he was out for a little bit of payback.
The girl just laughed, not giving the brick wall so much as a split second's hesitation. "No biggie!" she cried as she jumped to the right with the power of her left leg. Reaching out to land on the wall, she used her right leg to push off the side of the alley the moment her sole touched it. With an extravagant flip, she landed with a light thud on the other side.
Elizabeth jumped off the the gutter she was running on to try to catch the girl. Alphonse, on the other hand, rammed against the brick wall as soon as the thief leaped over it and called, "Brother!"
Edward then ran, jumped on Al's shoulders, and slid over the wall, snapping, "You're not getting away that easily!"
He froze as soon as he saw the two girls huddled on a sign post. His sister was latched on to the pole, only a foot above a snapping dog and only a foot below a smug looking Bunny perched atop the sign, perfectly balanced. He, however, was only balanced for a split second before tumbling over the edge and to where the dog was snarling.
On the other side of the wall, Alphonse heard the crash and giggles of the girls. He could also hear the struggle of his brother and the growls of the dog while it tore up Ed's pants. The sudden urge to rush caused his transmutation circle, which he was already in the process of drawing, to come out a little bit more elementary than planned, but he still managed the alchemic reaction and got through the wall just fine.
"Good doggie," Al cooed at the pit bull gnawing at Ed's hair, treading all over his back, "Let brother go."
Elizabeth took the opportunity to climb down, but she failed to notice that Bunny took the same chance to escape. The dog, still fixed on Ed and Al, growled in response to Al's kind-hearted request.
Then, taking on a tone that Elizabeth had never heard in her worst nightmare, Alphonse snarled hatefully and frightfully, "Now."
The dog froze before whimpering like a lapdog and slowly retreating off of the short figure. Edward stood angrily and snapped, "I feel like someone just tripped me, stepped on me, called me short, and poured milk all over me! That bitch is gonna die now. This means fucking war." He fumed, Elizabeth had only ever seen him this angry after the whole fiasco with Havoc.
Havoc. The name sent off an odd sensation within Elizabeth. She didn't know how to react to the name at all, much less the man himself. Seven years was a long gap, she supposed, but wasn't her father older than her mother? "Elizabeth" The girl mentally scoffed, reminding herself with a chide that the age gap couldn't have helped her parents' situation and that they probably weren't the best example to follow. "Lizzy!" But still, he was much more experienced. Though she'd never done anything like... that, Elizabeth knew exactly what might have happened at the waitress' house, had Havoc not been worried about the three children. "Elizabeth" Or maybe it did happen, for all she knew. "Elizabeth!" After all, Jean didn't have the best track record with truthfulness.
A sharp slap to the back of the head knocked Elizabeth out of her thoughts of Jean, "Damn it, Liz!" Winry whined, "I've been calling your name! Ed already ran after the girl. He's beyond pissed, even Al couldn't calm him down at all."
"Yeah," Alphonse admitted quietly, as if thinking. "But..." He suggested tentatively, "I think she might swing back around here, after she loses him." Elizabeth opened her mouth to ask his reasoning, but her little brother knew her too well, answering her unasked question by adding, "Just a feeling. Help me draw the trap."
The girl approached the circle unknowingly, twirling the silver watch aimlessly. As Alphonse had predicted, she had come back this way. By then, the three had remembered that she had tried to sell it, and was probably back to sell it. But, as she took one step into the transmutation circle, the girl known to them as 'Bunny' was to be like a wild rabbit in a cage.
"You fell for it." Elizabeth remarked, not playfully, not snidely, just a fact.
As Bunny turned to run, realizing who was there, Al began the transmutation and created a giant cage around the girl. "Whoah..." she trailed off, amazed by the surprise of being encased in an alchemic cage.
Edward scoffed at her, "Not so tough now, eh?" he raked his metal arm across the bars mockingly, to show how he was outside of her imprisonment. "The jail bars do you justice." He added with a smirk.
With a soft 'hmm', the girl ignored his taunting and tapped one of the bars, to test the strength. Her smile grew as she discovered that it was just reformed clay, what the road Al had drawn the circle on was made of. Her eyes lifted up to meet Ed's and she said, taking a slight step back, "You might want to back up."
As Ed began to ask, "Wha-?" Bunny reared her right leg and swung it around, a blade extending from her formerly concealed automail clay bars shattered from the impact of the blade. A few shards hit the only person she warned about his close proximity, causing her to fall into a fit of laughter. "An automail leg?!" Ed exclaimed, angered by her sudden tool.
"Yep." She chirped, bending her left leg, "And my left knee can shoot projectiles." As if on cue, and with her, it probably was, the small firearm inside the kneecap shot out a nonlethal projectile, hitting Edward.
"Damn you-!" Edward screamed, falling backwards.
"Catch me if you can~!" Bunny challenged once more, waving the silver watch for good measure before taking off.
"Not again." Alphonse moaned as he helped Edward up and took off running after her.
Though the boys were hot on her trail, Winry had been standing where she was running past. With a mechanical glint in her eyes, her snatched up Bunny's hand. "Oh," she huffed out, "You're not going anywhere..."
The thief, finally caught, visibly paled. The two boys and Elizabeth looked relieved that Winry had caught her, still running to catch up. "..I want a closer look at that wonderful automail!" Winry squealed, making the boys fumble, landing at the two girls' feet. A few feet behind them, where the boys had begun to trip and where Elizabeth simply stopped upon hearing the rest of Winry's 'threat', Elizabeth's choked laughter echoed loudly back to the others' ears.
Q: How long has it been since I updated?
A: Too longD:
Q:Have any questions?
A:Feel free to P.M. me.
This time, I won't wait 25% of eternity to upload, pinky promise:) Please tell me what you think!