Prompt #94, Realistic Portrayal, "Easy A"
Title: Easy A
Author: purplekitte
Series: Brotherhood/Manga with a tad of Shamballa
Word Count: 1,672
Rating: PG
Characters: OCs, mention of Al/Mei, Roy/Riza, and most major characters
Summary: A hundred years later, all history is boring.
Warnings: ending spoilers for both versions
Author's note: Long-time lurker finally posting, though unfortunately with the most self-indulgent, self-insert-OC-overload of prompts. If anyone knows it, I imagine ‘modern alchemy’ to be like Stross’ Laundry Files, if less Lovecraftian.
“I have heard the urban legend about the tank, but even if it were true, it wouldn’t immediately lead to ‘So Fuhrer Bradley was a Homunculus.’ Honestly. Stop making up things right before the test. I don’t have time.”
This, Eva reflected, was what she got for going to a study group with someone Sophie had been cooing over meeting in one of her creative writing courses. Sure Ari reminded her pleasantly of Sophie and her stories made history sound like a heroic adventure story rather than, well, school, but even if it helped her remember things vividly, she had to spend half her time on the test sorting through which were the fantastical elements of the narrative and which happened. She had enough trouble from the games she and Sophie had played as children in Risembool of being Edward and Alphonse Elric or Roy and Riza Mustang.
“Sorry, sorry. Fuhrer Bradley destroyed the tank the mutineers were using with his bare hands and sword, the tank of course belonging to the traitorous generals. Some of General Armstrong’s men were killed by the artillery, of course, like Buccaneer. I forget his rank.”
Eva shrugged. Her textbook wasn’t that detailed, she knew even before she flipped a page. “Are we going to get another digression on some low-ranking soldier from the footnotes of history that you may or may not have made up?”
“I make up no one. I just have an interest in some of the minor characters of the past. A book for historians rather than students would tell you more of the gory details.”
“Then there was a great explosion and the Fuhrer fell to his death, the rebels were cut off from each other and separated from the Homunculus Wrath, and the loyalists could regroup around General Armstrong, right?”
“But even injured and dying from Buccaneer and Fuu, there was still a great fight between the Homunculus Wrath and Scar, I mean the Prophet. That was when he revealed the tattoo on his other arm, made from deciphering his brother’s notes.” Ari would get excited about that part. She was a worshipper of Ishvala, even if clearly not ethnically Ishballan.
Eva drifted a bit, the old-school alchemical arrays in question being some of the simpler designs in the diagnostic tattoo on her own arm, only muttering a correction to a mistake of Ari’s about the number of lux atoms released by a particular harmonic conversion. Really.
She’d known of Ari from before Sophie’d met her from her reputation in her intro alchemy labs. Never saw a girl with less common sense or basic understanding of concepts, or more of an ability to blow up absolutely anything. The girl had laughed and said she’d been just as bad at chemstry back home, or some other slang term. No wonder her major was actually history, though why she was minoring in mathematics and alchemy she couldn’t imagine.
Eva sighed. If it weren’t for her stupid gen ed history of alchemy test, she could be working on her med school apps. Her first choice was Mei Elric Medical right here at University of Ishbal, so she could stay near Sophie, who showed no sign of planning on graduating with her philosophy degree before the Promised Day. It was so hard to get in, though. She’d be lucky if she got in in West or North, let alone Ishbal or East like she wanted.
She doodled a crude array for vein-knitting in wound closure. “Sloppy,” Ari told her.
“I’d see you do better.”
Ari smirked, hit a couple buttons on her laptop, and turned it around to show an even more complex version of the array. “Still using straight-edge and compass are you? Or have you moved into the modern age of ruler and protractor?”
“Blasphemy.” Even she had to admit computers and laser arrays were the future, but she was no programmer. Ari was much better with computers than she was with alchemy, while Eva always had to check if she’d remembered to plug in her electronics when they invariably did not work.
Ari laughed, then absently tucked back under her shirt a necklace that had fallen out. Jewelry seemed out of place with Ari, who got mistaken for a boy by their TAs as often as not, and why wear something where no one could see? It had been a six-pointed star. Eva didn’t know of any cultural meaning for that (Which region was she from? She’d never asked), and the only alchemical one she knew was as a sex-symbol, the joining of the triangles representing male and female, in some of the more tantric branches. Didn’t fit with her drab, straight-laced classmate.
“Anyway,” Eva said loudly, “then the Elrics, the Mustangs, the Curtises, and the Armstrongs met back up with the Father Homunculus and Hohenheim.”
“The five-hundred-year-old Xerxian man,” she continued to tease.
“‘Golden’ is just a metaphor.”
“Then where did he come from?”
“Do I look like his wikipedia page?” She tried to remember, in case it was a test question. Come on, it was her home town and she’d even seen his grave, beside the veritable shrine to the graves of the other Elrics beside it. “He was a vagabond, a travelling ne’er-do-well alchemist. He married Trisha Elric in Risembool and they had Edward and Alphonse in 1899 and 1900, then he drops off the radar until 1915.”
“They were never married, but otherwise good enough. Anyway, back where we were before, after the bit with the Prophet and Wrath, the Father Homunculus activates the country-sized transmutation circle.”
“Really, the amount of time, urban planning, and border negotiation that went into deactivating that in the ‘20s.”
“Don’t try to distract me. Who were the sacrifices?”
“Edward Elric, Alphonse Elric, Izumi Curtis, Minster-President Mustang, and… um…”
“Hohenheim. We were just talking about him. Then Father appears in huge monster form and eats the sun and the moon.”
“Allegorically.”
“I have no idea. Father’s body stops looking like Hohenheim’s and starts looking like Ed.”
“The theory Hohenheim and the Homunculus’ original host were brothers is much more plausible. Or that the descriptions of their similarity simply meant they were both from the same distant foreign country and so looked the same to the insular last-century Amestrians.”
“They were blood relatives.” She snorted. “Then Hohenheim activated the philosopher’s stones he’d been planting and the Prophet the national alkahestry circle to restore alchemy.”
“I can’t believe ancient alchemy was so backwards it could be blocked so easily.”
“You doubt me?”
“No, just incredulous at them. You’d think Mei Elric and the Scarred Prophet were the only alchemists not in the stone age.”
“As you said, Amestris was insular, xenophobic, and martial. Amestrian alchemy was completely separate from that of Ishbal and Xing until the ‘20s, maybe the ‘30s. And tons of basic, underlying, taken-for-granted principles hadn’t been discovered yet. And it was extraordinarily difficult to do the necessary math to make arrays before the computer was invented in the ‘40s. And DNA for that matter, as my dad always said.”
“All modern alchemy only started with Turing, as the saying goes.”
“Father lost control, the Briggs army showed up, Al transmuted Ed’s arm back to free him from rubble and got stuck at the Gate, and Ed defeated Father by punching him. It was pretty epic. Greed and Kimbley got to be heroes, of all people. Ed sacrificed his alchemy to bring Al back, in the flesh, and Truth-kun said using his own Gate as the price was the right answer.”
“Got it.” Though talking about the One at the Gate of Truth so casually was not something she fully approved of. “Okay, ‘Chapter Fourteen: The Grumman Reconstruction’.”
Eva’s watch beeped once and she sighed. “Midnight. We still have to get through chapter seventeen, if you’re game.”
Ari was looking past her. “Four years.”
“Huh? The test covers up through 1945.”
“Sorry, I was just remembering it’s been four years to the day since I first came to Ishbal.”
“You started in the spring semester? I didn’t know you were a senior.”
“I’m not. Third year, sophomore, I’m only part-time. I wandered in out of the desert with nothing but the clothes on my back and worked full-time for most of a year before starting college here.”
“Heh. What were you doing there?” Her middle-class parents could support her fully. Not that college itself cost more than a pittance, but not working meant she wasn’t generating any money to cover her own living expenses. Financial independence made her both jealous and not: she put up with her annoying parents in exchange for them paying her credit card bills so she could be a full-time student. Going on a teenaged backpacking tour sounded exotic to her, even if she suspected it involved a lot of discomfort and nature, things she disapproved of.
Ari muttered something too quickly and quietly, the kind of mutter one couldn’t keep inside but the other person wasn’t supposed to actually hear or understand. It sounded like, “Damn volunteering to set up a new exhibit at the Holocaust Museum, activated Thule Society array, ended up in the Xerxian ruins, then a homeless shelter.”
Eva’s phone rang. “Yes dear, I’m going to be out all night. Are you my mother?” she told Sophie sarcastically. “…Don’t touch those post-it-notes; I still need them… No, telling me about the RPS porn you were reading on the internet will not help.”
“Ooh, do tell,” Ari cut in.
She rolled her eyes at both of them, though her roommate couldn’t see it. “You can tell me about the nice Hetalia Amestris/Xing later. I’m studying for once.”
She hung up to Ari’s disappointed sigh. “I don’t ship Ed/Ling, but I don’t mind it, particularly if Sophie recs it.”
“Studying,” insisted Eva.
“Shall we start with Grumman’s social plans, Olivia Armstrong’s reorganization of the military, Mustang and Scar’s rebuilding of Ishbal, Emperor Ling taking the throne of Xing, or the Drachman stock market crash and economic depression?”
“Surprise me, oh history buff.”
Author: purplekitte
Series: Brotherhood/Manga with a tad of Shamballa
Word Count: 1,672
Rating: PG
Characters: OCs, mention of Al/Mei, Roy/Riza, and most major characters
Summary: A hundred years later, all history is boring.
Warnings: ending spoilers for both versions
Author's note: Long-time lurker finally posting, though unfortunately with the most self-indulgent, self-insert-OC-overload of prompts. If anyone knows it, I imagine ‘modern alchemy’ to be like Stross’ Laundry Files, if less Lovecraftian.
“I have heard the urban legend about the tank, but even if it were true, it wouldn’t immediately lead to ‘So Fuhrer Bradley was a Homunculus.’ Honestly. Stop making up things right before the test. I don’t have time.”
This, Eva reflected, was what she got for going to a study group with someone Sophie had been cooing over meeting in one of her creative writing courses. Sure Ari reminded her pleasantly of Sophie and her stories made history sound like a heroic adventure story rather than, well, school, but even if it helped her remember things vividly, she had to spend half her time on the test sorting through which were the fantastical elements of the narrative and which happened. She had enough trouble from the games she and Sophie had played as children in Risembool of being Edward and Alphonse Elric or Roy and Riza Mustang.
“Sorry, sorry. Fuhrer Bradley destroyed the tank the mutineers were using with his bare hands and sword, the tank of course belonging to the traitorous generals. Some of General Armstrong’s men were killed by the artillery, of course, like Buccaneer. I forget his rank.”
Eva shrugged. Her textbook wasn’t that detailed, she knew even before she flipped a page. “Are we going to get another digression on some low-ranking soldier from the footnotes of history that you may or may not have made up?”
“I make up no one. I just have an interest in some of the minor characters of the past. A book for historians rather than students would tell you more of the gory details.”
“Then there was a great explosion and the Fuhrer fell to his death, the rebels were cut off from each other and separated from the Homunculus Wrath, and the loyalists could regroup around General Armstrong, right?”
“But even injured and dying from Buccaneer and Fuu, there was still a great fight between the Homunculus Wrath and Scar, I mean the Prophet. That was when he revealed the tattoo on his other arm, made from deciphering his brother’s notes.” Ari would get excited about that part. She was a worshipper of Ishvala, even if clearly not ethnically Ishballan.
Eva drifted a bit, the old-school alchemical arrays in question being some of the simpler designs in the diagnostic tattoo on her own arm, only muttering a correction to a mistake of Ari’s about the number of lux atoms released by a particular harmonic conversion. Really.
She’d known of Ari from before Sophie’d met her from her reputation in her intro alchemy labs. Never saw a girl with less common sense or basic understanding of concepts, or more of an ability to blow up absolutely anything. The girl had laughed and said she’d been just as bad at chemstry back home, or some other slang term. No wonder her major was actually history, though why she was minoring in mathematics and alchemy she couldn’t imagine.
Eva sighed. If it weren’t for her stupid gen ed history of alchemy test, she could be working on her med school apps. Her first choice was Mei Elric Medical right here at University of Ishbal, so she could stay near Sophie, who showed no sign of planning on graduating with her philosophy degree before the Promised Day. It was so hard to get in, though. She’d be lucky if she got in in West or North, let alone Ishbal or East like she wanted.
She doodled a crude array for vein-knitting in wound closure. “Sloppy,” Ari told her.
“I’d see you do better.”
Ari smirked, hit a couple buttons on her laptop, and turned it around to show an even more complex version of the array. “Still using straight-edge and compass are you? Or have you moved into the modern age of ruler and protractor?”
“Blasphemy.” Even she had to admit computers and laser arrays were the future, but she was no programmer. Ari was much better with computers than she was with alchemy, while Eva always had to check if she’d remembered to plug in her electronics when they invariably did not work.
Ari laughed, then absently tucked back under her shirt a necklace that had fallen out. Jewelry seemed out of place with Ari, who got mistaken for a boy by their TAs as often as not, and why wear something where no one could see? It had been a six-pointed star. Eva didn’t know of any cultural meaning for that (Which region was she from? She’d never asked), and the only alchemical one she knew was as a sex-symbol, the joining of the triangles representing male and female, in some of the more tantric branches. Didn’t fit with her drab, straight-laced classmate.
“Anyway,” Eva said loudly, “then the Elrics, the Mustangs, the Curtises, and the Armstrongs met back up with the Father Homunculus and Hohenheim.”
“The five-hundred-year-old Xerxian man,” she continued to tease.
“‘Golden’ is just a metaphor.”
“Then where did he come from?”
“Do I look like his wikipedia page?” She tried to remember, in case it was a test question. Come on, it was her home town and she’d even seen his grave, beside the veritable shrine to the graves of the other Elrics beside it. “He was a vagabond, a travelling ne’er-do-well alchemist. He married Trisha Elric in Risembool and they had Edward and Alphonse in 1899 and 1900, then he drops off the radar until 1915.”
“They were never married, but otherwise good enough. Anyway, back where we were before, after the bit with the Prophet and Wrath, the Father Homunculus activates the country-sized transmutation circle.”
“Really, the amount of time, urban planning, and border negotiation that went into deactivating that in the ‘20s.”
“Don’t try to distract me. Who were the sacrifices?”
“Edward Elric, Alphonse Elric, Izumi Curtis, Minster-President Mustang, and… um…”
“Hohenheim. We were just talking about him. Then Father appears in huge monster form and eats the sun and the moon.”
“Allegorically.”
“I have no idea. Father’s body stops looking like Hohenheim’s and starts looking like Ed.”
“The theory Hohenheim and the Homunculus’ original host were brothers is much more plausible. Or that the descriptions of their similarity simply meant they were both from the same distant foreign country and so looked the same to the insular last-century Amestrians.”
“They were blood relatives.” She snorted. “Then Hohenheim activated the philosopher’s stones he’d been planting and the Prophet the national alkahestry circle to restore alchemy.”
“I can’t believe ancient alchemy was so backwards it could be blocked so easily.”
“You doubt me?”
“No, just incredulous at them. You’d think Mei Elric and the Scarred Prophet were the only alchemists not in the stone age.”
“As you said, Amestris was insular, xenophobic, and martial. Amestrian alchemy was completely separate from that of Ishbal and Xing until the ‘20s, maybe the ‘30s. And tons of basic, underlying, taken-for-granted principles hadn’t been discovered yet. And it was extraordinarily difficult to do the necessary math to make arrays before the computer was invented in the ‘40s. And DNA for that matter, as my dad always said.”
“All modern alchemy only started with Turing, as the saying goes.”
“Father lost control, the Briggs army showed up, Al transmuted Ed’s arm back to free him from rubble and got stuck at the Gate, and Ed defeated Father by punching him. It was pretty epic. Greed and Kimbley got to be heroes, of all people. Ed sacrificed his alchemy to bring Al back, in the flesh, and Truth-kun said using his own Gate as the price was the right answer.”
“Got it.” Though talking about the One at the Gate of Truth so casually was not something she fully approved of. “Okay, ‘Chapter Fourteen: The Grumman Reconstruction’.”
Eva’s watch beeped once and she sighed. “Midnight. We still have to get through chapter seventeen, if you’re game.”
Ari was looking past her. “Four years.”
“Huh? The test covers up through 1945.”
“Sorry, I was just remembering it’s been four years to the day since I first came to Ishbal.”
“You started in the spring semester? I didn’t know you were a senior.”
“I’m not. Third year, sophomore, I’m only part-time. I wandered in out of the desert with nothing but the clothes on my back and worked full-time for most of a year before starting college here.”
“Heh. What were you doing there?” Her middle-class parents could support her fully. Not that college itself cost more than a pittance, but not working meant she wasn’t generating any money to cover her own living expenses. Financial independence made her both jealous and not: she put up with her annoying parents in exchange for them paying her credit card bills so she could be a full-time student. Going on a teenaged backpacking tour sounded exotic to her, even if she suspected it involved a lot of discomfort and nature, things she disapproved of.
Ari muttered something too quickly and quietly, the kind of mutter one couldn’t keep inside but the other person wasn’t supposed to actually hear or understand. It sounded like, “Damn volunteering to set up a new exhibit at the Holocaust Museum, activated Thule Society array, ended up in the Xerxian ruins, then a homeless shelter.”
Eva’s phone rang. “Yes dear, I’m going to be out all night. Are you my mother?” she told Sophie sarcastically. “…Don’t touch those post-it-notes; I still need them… No, telling me about the RPS porn you were reading on the internet will not help.”
“Ooh, do tell,” Ari cut in.
She rolled her eyes at both of them, though her roommate couldn’t see it. “You can tell me about the nice Hetalia Amestris/Xing later. I’m studying for once.”
She hung up to Ari’s disappointed sigh. “I don’t ship Ed/Ling, but I don’t mind it, particularly if Sophie recs it.”
“Studying,” insisted Eva.
“Shall we start with Grumman’s social plans, Olivia Armstrong’s reorganization of the military, Mustang and Scar’s rebuilding of Ishbal, Emperor Ling taking the throne of Xing, or the Drachman stock market crash and economic depression?”
“Surprise me, oh history buff.”