This is a joint fic, written by Dare Deville and Smart One, AKA Ink.Incorporated, AKA Rachel and Elaine. This story...may or may not be about us. Certain things are true, while others are not. The first chapter was written by Smart One, but the concept of the story was almost completely Dare Deville's idea. Some of the later chapters will be written by her also.
E: The story you are about to read is true. The names have been [sometimes changed to protect the innocent [oh yeah, like we're soooo innocent. Note to any stalkers: The town, school and street names are 100 fake, and all the locations have nothing to do with where we actually are. If you have any IDEA how much research we had to do to get these facts right about Ontario... Anyway, I hope you people like the chapter, and I also hope this isn't TOO much of an overdone plotline. We just thought it would be funny.
R:We'll try to make this story as good as possible. So if you have any comments/questions, please tell us. And remember, this story is based off the manga. NOT the anime. So if you only watched the anime, then you probably won't really know what's going on. Well, we hope that you enjoy and please, please, please leave a review.
Disclaimer: Ink.Incorporated does not own Fullmetal Alchemist, or any of the copyrighted property mentioned in this story, including songs, brand names, books, franchises and movies. These are all owned by their respective...owners. This fanfiction is a work of fiction (no, REALLY?) and any resemblance to actual persons or places is entirely coincidental, or if intentional are used fictitiously. None of the events portrayed actually happened. That is...you can't prove that they did. We don't own anything except our own original characters.
Underneath the Cselkcess Ruins
The Great Eastern Desert
January 4, Year 15 5:22 PM
"Kimbley was lying. He must have been." Edward couldn't possibly believe something so unlikely from someone so untrustworthy, no matter how much he wanted it to be true. "If these really were another set of Gates…"
"But what if he's not lying? Ed, if these really are toll-free gates, we can get our bodies back right here and right now!" Alphonse knew just as much as his brother that the idea was almost impossible, but he seemed to have let himself forget that. More than anything, he wanted Kimbley to be telling the truth.
Ed understood that, so he decided to humour his brother for a little while. He supposed there was some fact behind Kimbley's claim. "Okay…even if we trusted Kimbley, we'd still have to figure out how to open these gates. They're definitely different from the normal ones…"
And they were. While the gates the Elric brothers had seen almost five years before were solid, dark and square, these were arched in cracked white marble, and the strange designs etched upon them glistened bright, eerie red. Instead of suns, there was a single enormous pentagram in the center, surrounded by pairs of glowing crimson eyes.
"I already figured out all that! What do you think I was doing all night? Since, let's not forget, I couldn't fall asleep even if I wanted to. See all the red on the doors? The only thing that would make sense here is if all of it is part of some different kind of Philosopher's Stone."
"Why a different kind?"
"Because there aren't any souls in it! I don't know how I know that, but this stone definitely wasn't made of human lives. I can feel it. It's the only thing I've been able to feel for five years."
"So you know how to do the transmutation?"
"Yeah. We have to use this circle." Alphonse pulled a scrap of paper from somewhere inside his armour. On it was a roughly yet intricately drawn transmutation circle, with a pentagram in the center like on the doors.
Edward still looked sceptical. "But where did you find out all of this? How can you be sure it's right?"
"Brother, I just know it's right! You have to trust me on this. Please. These gates are going to close soon. This armour is going to reject me again soon. Besides, isn't this why we came all the way here in the first place?" Alphonse really had no idea how he knew all of this. But something was telling him that he was exactly right. The gates wouldn't be open for more than a year, and they couldn't afford to wait that long.
"I… I guess you're right." Ed was convinced now. He looked from his brother to the paper in his hands, to the Gates, and back at his brother. "Let's draw the circle right now. Do you have chalk?"
"I always do. This is really going to work. I'm sure of it. Soon I'm going to be able to eat apple pie…"
They set to work drawing the circle. Al's plan called for it to be 50 metres in diameter. The cold, flagstone floor was almost three times that size, and the squeaking of chalk bounced and echoed across the cathedral ceiling for an hour or so. All scepticism was forgotten in the simple act of drawing.
"Is that all?" Edward looked up at the mass of steel that was his brother, who checked his scrap of paper and examined the circle.
"That's everything. Are you ready?"
"If you are."
"One…two…THREE!"
Clack, clack, clack.
Winry, who had come from upstairs where the expedition was camping to yell at Ed for denting her toolbox, stepped inside the cold stone room in time to see the transmutation circle light up, and everything became a whirl of eerie blue and red light as the marble doors creaked open. Unearthly black hands reached through the huge arched void that now lay ahead, and pulled the Elric brothers into it with them. Neither of them seemed to have time to say anything at all. They were just instantly taken away. The doors slammed shut abruptly. Winry stood frozen on the spot for a moment, staring at the place where Ed and Al had disappeared. She realized that what had just happened must have been the same thing that had happened to Alphonse years ago, when his body was taken away. She knew, of course, how Edward had saved him- by sacrificing his arm. But she couldn't do that… She wasn't an alchemist, she didn't know how to bind people into suits of armour, or how to cut off your second arm after one was already gone. She considered, for a moment, screaming at the gate until something happened. But screaming wouldn't bring them back. She needed help to get them back. Winry dashed out, and her footsteps echoed for quite some time in the silence. The transmutation circle had now returned itself to plain white chalk on the floor of an empty room.
Callaway Street Public School Gymnasium
Morrison Falls, Ontario, Canada
November 6, 2007 3:46 PM
"Tell me again, Lainey. Why am I helping you clean upyour mess? I'm not even in your class!" Rachel dropped the stack of pinnies and the soccer ball she was holding and sat down on a stack of chairs, which wobbled ominously underneath her.
"Because," Lainey replied, "You're my best friend, and that's what best friends do. Besides, this isn't even my mess." She gestured around the stage they were sitting on, with its thick blue curtains down and all manner of sports equipment scattered across it. "It's not my fault that the idiots in my class practically started a freakin'riot up here. Since they got caught, we were all supposed to help clean it up. But, since they're losers, they all left, and made me do all thework."
Rachel shrugged. "Yeah… but why did it have to be me? Why couldn't you just get Candy to help you or something?"
"Well, Candice took the bus home because she had Tae Kwon Do…or Guides… or something. But since I missed the bus, Dan has to come over to walk me home at five, because apparently twelve-year-old girls get kidnapped more often than fourteen-year-old boys or something. I'm not trusted to walk across town alone. But you live close to school, and I remembered that you have to walk. So now you have to help me, got it?"
"Ugh… FINE." Rachel groaned. Then she smiled in her evil little way. "But you so owe me for this. Next time-… wait, Elaine, did you just hear a really weird noise?"
"Yeah…"
Both girls suddenly turned serious. The sound they heard was much louder and much, much scarier than another box of tennis rackets falling from the top shelf in the storage room. (That happened twice already). They ducked under the thick curtain and leapt down from the stage. It was higher up than more modern stages, so they hit the ground hard, but nothing could have hit them harder than what they saw next.
The ceiling had collapsed.
They stood horror-struck staring at the destruction before them. Elaine was looking at the chunks of metal and plaster on the floor, as well as the wreckage of the expensive motor that made the divider curtain in the center of the large gymnasium rise and fall. Rachel was staring up at the gaping hole where the ceiling used to be, and what had caused it to fall.
"Oh man, we are so screwed…"
"Uh, Lainey, you might wanna look up." Rachel advised her best friend without taking her eyes off the huge, swirling, reddish-black vortex over their heads.
Elaine looked up, and then screamed. "Holy $#!!"
Rachel stared at her. "I thought you didn't swear!"
"And I thought giant interdimensional vortexes didn't appear in the Callaway gym."
"Good point."
The girls were so distracted that they almost didn't notice when a pentagram glowed on the surface of the vortex and two figures- one huge and one small- pieced together in front of them. (a/n: For lack of a better word. What's the opposite of disintegrated?)
The first words that sprang to Rachel's mind were "What the hell?!" which was very common in her vocabulary. Too common. It didn't seem to fit this situation. So she didn't say anything. The first words that sprang to Elaine's mind, however, were "Whoever the hell you are, you're paying for this!" Which she said. Loudly. She usually did.
Ed and Al looked down at themselves. "It didn't work, Ed! I'm sorry… I… I really thought it would work…"
"Forget that, Al, where the hell are we?!"
"PAY ATTENTION TO ME!" Elaine waved her hand in front of Edward's face. "In case you can't tell, you just completely totalled the Callaway Street School gym. And now you're going to fork over the money to fix it."
Ed, who was pretty stunned by this time, automatically said, "Forget money, I'll fix it for you right now." Elaine raised her eyebrows as she watched him walk over to the walls, clap his hands and slam them onto the old, painted cement blocks dramatically.
Nothing happened.
"What the… why can't I transmute?" Ed tried again. And again. Still nothing.
Rachel finally spoke up. "What the hell are you doing?"
"I'm trying to use alchemy to fix your ceiling for you, but it's not working and I don't know why." Ed explained.
Rachel just looked confused, but Elaine's initial panic and anger subsided a little at an opportunity to use her vast knowledge of obscure and random things. "Alchemy? Isn't that some medieval science where people were trying to turn rocks into gold and make the Philosopher's Stone?"
"Isn't the Philosopher's Stone that thing from Harry Potter?" Rachel asked.
Elaine was about to groan at her friend's ignorance, but Al cut in. "You know about the Philosopher's Stone? Do you have one?"
"Have one? They're not real. They're just from legends. People supposedly had them a long time ago, but now they're only really known about through Harry Potter and stuff like that."
"Can we meet this Harry Potter guy? I'd like to ask him about the stone…" Edward looked extremely intent.
Rachel and Elaine exchanged glances. Elaine sighed, then said, "…You're not from around here, are you?"
"I don't know! Where ARE we?"
"We're in what's left of the gym at Callaway Street Public School, Callaway Street, Morrison Falls, Ontario, Canada, North America, Northern Hemisphere, Earth, The Milky Way-"
"We get the picture." Ed cut in. "Is any of that near the Cselkcess ruins? Or Amestris?"
"Where??" Elaine asked, "I have a world map on my bedroom wall, and I know for an absolute fact that Tetris or whatever is not a country. You guys are either a special effects team for Prank Patrol… or you're from another dimension. Holy crap, this is exactly like my brother's screenplay. Only they're not from any cartoon that I know of."
"Another DIMENSION?" Alphonse and Rachel said in unison. "How is that possible?"
Elaine and Ed replied in unison, "How should I know?" Elaine continued alone with "As far as I do know, it's not possible. Now who ARE you, and what's with the big robot guy?"
"Who are you calling a robot?!?!" Al said, sounding offended.
"True, we haven't introduced ourselves… We're the Elric brothers. If we weren't from another dimension, you probably would have heard of us. I'm Edward, and that's my little…okay, YOUNGER brother Alphonse. And he's not a robot, he's a soul alchemically bonded to a suit of armour."
"Are the laws of physics different in Tetris? Because here in Reality, that's not possible, "Edward". But I guess this isn't reality after all, because this whole thing is physically impossible, and way too horrible to be happening to me. That really sucks…This means I'm schizophrenic or something…Great. I'm clinically insane." Elaine sank to the ground and continued mumbling hysterically to herself with her head in her hands.
"Sorry about my friend Lainey…She's really scientific and stuff. I'm Rachel. Normally I'd be freaking out like she is, but… I've been wishing for like my entire life that something cool like this would happen to me, so… I don't want to wreck it by not believing it. Plus I don't think the laws of physics were really doing me much good anyway. But I still think Alphonse is a robot."
"I'M NOT A ROBOT!" Alphonse knocked his own head off and bent over so that Rachel, in all her five-foot-three-ness, could see into his empty armour. "SEE?!"
"Whoa. You're… you're empty. How come you can move and stuff?" Rachel sounded curious, but not disbelieving; Elaine stared into the armour with an expression that suggested that the struggle to comprehend the situation was causing her physical pain. That's just the way she was. She let her brown hair fall into her eyes as she kept repeating, over and over, "That's not possible…It'snot possible… It can't be real…How can that… Why can he…"
Alphonse began tediously explaining to Rachel about the blood rune that kept him in the armour; Edward took a moment to absorb what the hell was going on. The gates must have been more like a passage to this other world. Somehow, instead of retrieving what they had lost, he and Al had ended up in this enormous rubber-floored room. There was a large stage at one end, and doors along the sides (five on the left and two on the right). There were six basketball nets… and the ceiling was all over the floor thanks to them. The only other people in the room were these two weird girls who didn't know anything about Amestris but knew something about the Philosopher's Stone.
The one girl, "Lainey", even without the fact that she was kneeling on the floor mumbling hysterically, was downright strange looking. She was wearing a baggy, faded denim jacket with beige sleeves, a dark denim skirt that didn't quite reach her knees, and black-and white striped tights. Her hair was both light and dark brown, hung in a loose ponytail that was falling out and drooping into her face, which was covered in zits. Her earrings didn't match; one was a large, dangling bronze feminist/women's symbol, and the other was a tiny fake diamond stud. Her eyes were hidden at the moment.
The other girl, Rachel, who was now dropping tennis balls into Al's armour while he tried to reach inside to get them out, had dyed-red shoulder-length hair and a lot of freckles. Her eyes were blue. She was wearing black cargo pants and a red, black and white fall jacket. The only jewellery she had was a large metal pentagram on a plain black string. Ed wondered whether there was any connection between it and the pentagram on the gates… but no, this kid didn't seem to know anything about the gates.
"Oops…" Rachel had just dropped a basketball on Al from on top of the stage, where it got stuck where his head should have been.
"HEY! Get this thing out! I can't move it!" Al said, trying to grip the basketball.
Ed decided that he would try to ask the sceptic girl more about this world. He walked over and knelt next to her. "Um…hello?" She looked up.
"What? Haven't you already destroyed enough?"
"I didn't destroy anything! Okay, you said you knew a bit about alchemy, right?"
Elaine perked up a bit on the subject of something she knew about. Sort of. "I don't really know much more about it that "turning rocks into gold and making Philosopher's Stones"…"
"The Philosopher's Stone! I'm pretty convinced now that this is definitely some kind of other world, or… or…"
"Parallel dimension?"
"Um…Yeah. So what I want to know is, what can the Stone do in this –whatever you want to call it- place."
"Well, in the Harry Potter books… Here, this is basically everything I know about it. The Harry Potter books are by Joanne Kathleen Rowling, who lives in England. The first book, out of seven, is called, "Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone." It's all about magic and wizards and stuff. Nicholas Flamel, who I think is actually in real legends, was supposedly the only known person left to have a Stone, and it can create the Elixir of Life, which makes you immortal if you keep on drinking it, and it can also turn any metal into gold. At the end of the book they destroy it, and Nicholas Flamel, who's like 476 years old or something, finally lets himself die. I know that in like real medieval times, alchemy was pretty much in the same league as witchcraft at one point, and I think they burned alchemists at the stake. But this one guy supposedly succeeded in making a Philosopher's Stone. He had two names… One was Paracelsus, and the other one was really long…Something-something-something-something-Von Hohenheim."
"Did…did you say Van Hohenheim?"
"No, I said Von Hohenheim. Why, someone you know? In a lot of books where people go to other dimensions, everybody has alter egos…but he's from, like, a thousand years ago. Ooh… that reminds me…" She seemed to have accepted the whole other dimension thing as scientific fact, thus returning her to sanity. "What year was it in your old dimension?"
"Year 15." Edward responded automatically. They couldn't have changed timeframes, too, could they?
"Yeah, and…? Fifteen-what? 1915? 1415? 4015?"
"1915."
Elaine gasped, then sighed. "Ohhhh man… Oh man, oh man…"
"What? What is it?!"
"Now we have a big problem. It's 2007."
"WHAT?! You mean this is the future?"
"No, not just the future. It's still a parallel dimension, remember? This isn't your freaky alchemy world. Hmm… what kind of technology do you have? Do you have electricity?"
"Yes."
"Computers?"
"What-now?"
"Okay… Radio?"
"Yes."
"Airplanes?"
"Huh?"
"Phones?"
"Yep."
"Alright then…looks like I've got a LOT of explaining to do…" Her eyes fell on the collapsed ceiling again. "AHH! A LOT of explaining to do! RACHEL! Leave the armour freak alone and get over here!" She turned worried and upset, and hissed, "What are we gonna do about the ceiling?!
"Oh, crap, I forgot about that," Rachel replied. "Well, I don't think anybody can really blame us for it… how were we supposed to have knocked all those metal beams down?"
"That's true… If only there was snow, then they might think it was all from snow damage… Maybe if we go to the office all upset and crying, they'll feel sorry for us and won't ask how it happened? They'll probably attribute it to something in the structural design… or hopefully something that the insurance will cover… Look really scared, okay, Rae?"
"Wait, wait, wait… it was these guys who did it!" Rachel indicated the Elric brothers, who were now standing opposite them. (Alphonse had the basketball inside him)
"Yeah, but how are we supposed to explain that to the principal? Uh oh… Why couldn't this have happened when the whole class was here? Then it would be everyone's problem, and then they'd bring in the Feds or the Men in Black or whoever it is that deals with these things… But no, we can't do that, can we? Now that we've met you guys, you're gonna blackmail us into keeping you secret or something, aren't you? This whole thing is gonna end up with me in jail… or a mental institution… I can just tell."
E: Was that entertaining in any way? Please review and tell us what you liked and didn't like! Although, the next chapter and a half are already written, but we're gonna wait for some reviews. At least 5, okay? Please?