Author's Note: First FMA fic I've ever posted. Yes, that is an OC opening the story. No, there is no romantic subplot (YAY!). No, she's not a Mary Sue (note the lack of exceptionally horrific past! No resurrected brothers/sisters/mothers/fathers/etc.). I have strived to make her like the other women in the series and I hope (crosses fingers) that I'll do well with that.

"One day you'll see her and you'll know what I mean

Take her or leave her, she will still be the same

She'll not try to buy you with her time

But nothing's the same as you can see when she's gone"

-"This Side" Nickel Creek

Chapter 1: All Aboard

The train, a mode of transportation to some but to me, a way of life. I love the sound and feel of the train. The jolting movements of their starts and stops, the gentle glide of their travel. The whistles and rattles, they have been my lullaby and anthem for so long now that I've forgotten much else . . . Or so I say. Hard to forget where one comes from really, it's a part of you, ingrained as much as your eye color or speech patterns. No, you can't escape the past that way. Believe me, I know people who've tried. Hell, I've tried. But it all ends in heartache. It is who you are and, to forget who you are . . . That way leads to madness.

My name is Adelle Barso and my story begins about twenty years ago in a little town about sixteen miles outside of Central called Melicar. I was your average child, middling height, middling weight, middling attitude, straight brown hair, brown eyes, rather unremarkable really. The life I lived with my parents was simple, mother was the town midwife and father was a tinker who dabbled in the use of alchemy to fix things. My grandfather was a commanding military officer in the Ishbal rebellion, the sweetest man you ever met. The rebellion did terrible things to his mind though. After his return he was never the same. He would have terrible nightmares and sometimes forget where he was. One day we found him collapsed in the sitting room, dead. Grandmother said he'd given up, she'd found the empty bottle of poison in his bedside drawer.

I was fifteen at the time, young, stupid, and naïve. I recall clinging to my father at the funeral begging for him to bring Grandpa back. Mom was the one to explain. I now know how much I hurt my father with my pleading, it was his father that lay in the ground and I was begging him to do what he wished he could do the most. It was a selfish wish on both our parts. The results would have only brought more suffering.

Two years later, at the age of seventeen, I left town with some distant dream of becoming an automail designer. The dream dissipated at my first sight of the trains. Suddenly, I knew what I wanted to do more than anything. That's how I got my first job. A young man had seen me studying the trains and had approached me. As it turned out he worked for the company that ran the trains and he was looking to hire someone. He needed a person to ride the rails each day on different trains to inspect their efficiency. He wanted it done in secret because he was suspicious that some of his workers weren't operating up to snuff. I was a prime candidate, he said, because of my forgettable face, no offense intended of course. I readily accepted and became a railway inspector or, as most men call it, a spotter. The best part was the constant contact with my beloved trains. Mother and Father were hesitant about my occupation at first but when they saw that I was earning more than enough to keep myself fed and clothed they were happy for me.

It was a year later that I met the Elrics.

That is where my story ends . . . and where theirs begins.