"She seems nice."

"Sept's a really good kid. And we've tried to make things easier for her, at least while we've been able..."

"That's very good of you."

Uncomfortable shrug. "Akira-sensei helped a lot, especially at first."

"She was pretty young, when we met."

She leans against El. "Yeah - Sept's adopted, we met her... When she was like six I think?"

"Around that," she agrees.

"Man, that whole period feels - kinda fake to me, memory-wise..."

"A lot happened."

She squeezes her sister, snuggling in. "Probably it'd be useful to ever actually summarize everyone's life stories for each other... At least make comparisons among alts' personal trajectories..."

"That sort of context can be helpful."

She glances at El. "Are you up to talking now? - If we are, I'd maybe prefer Leya go help Sept and Luka..."

"Yeah, let's do it."

Snuggle.

And, once Leya leaves:

"...Hm, probably makes sense to start with like some world context... So alchemy's a science. It works on predictable principles, and you can do experiments at it, and you can derive new principles logically. The fundamental basis of it is equivalent exchange - in order to gain anything, you must first sacrifice something of equal or greater value. It took a really long time to be properly discovered, though. An ancient civilization called Xerxes was the first to get even crude alchemy, and one of their experimenters - pulled something into reality. A homunculus, which was initially a small creature of shadow and blood... It was made with the blood of our father, who was a slave, and it was fond of him and gave him the name Hohenheim. It promised to make the king of Xerxes immortal - but first he had to create a massive array around his nation, and prime it with blood at five points."

"The array went off, killing everyone in Xerxes - including the king, but not including the homunculus or our dad. The homunculus had used the energy from all those deaths to make itself a body, identical to Hohenheim's, and to create two philosopher's stones - one for each of them. A philosopher's stone is a way to convert the energy from souls to other things, to give an appearance of cheating equivalent exchange. The philosopher's stones made them immortal, but Hohenheim objected to all the mass murder, and the two parted ways. Both wandered the world, and tried to keep tabs on each other. Like a few hundred years ago, Hohenheim took a student, Dante, around the same time the homunculus was consolidating our home nation - Amestris - into one whole. Hohenheim and Dante ended up marrying and having a kid, who died, and who Hohenheim was only able to partially resurrect - her personality changed. Dante and Hohenheim fought over that, and over Dante wanting the secret to the philosopher's stones so she could be immortal, too - she figured out her own method, but it wasn't efficient enough to make her body immortal, so instead she ended up jumping between bodies a lot."

"Hohenheim wandered off, and the homunculus started puppeting Amestris, expanding it so its borders could host another national array, and arranging carefully timed mass slaughters at key points. Hohenheim eventually wandered back, because he'd finally realized the homunculus might be up to something - and he met our mom and had the two of us. Then he wandered off again when we were really small."

"Mom fell sick. Really sick. We met Akira-sensei about a year before she died - Akira-sensei was able to make her more comfortable, but not cure her - and once she died we left to apprentice under Akira-sensei. That was when I was... Seven, El was eight..."

"Dante was Akira-sensei's teacher. We didn't know all the history, then, and Akira-sensei didn't either, so she thought Dante was safe for us to be around. We studied with Akira-sensei for two years, and then Dante tried to convince El to make philosopher's stones for her. We decided to talk to Akira-sensei first, but - when we got back to her house, there'd been a fight, and she was dead."

Bellona shifts a bit uncomfortably.

"So I ran back to Dante's and begged a small philosopher's stone off her, and ran back, and me and El tried to resurrect Akira-sensei - and it worked, Akira-sensei's fine and she doesn't have any weird personality changes, but - "

"It turned out that-"

"Human transmutation is not like other alchemy."

"Yeah."

"The exchanges for a soul - and for the attachment of a soul to a body - are fairly consistent, but not - predictable based on other alchemic principles. We didn't have enough, so there was - backlash, and we ended up before the Gate of Truth. Which is - this weird non-place, and behind the Gate is all the knowledge possible, and it's guarded or... Something... By a being that claimed to be the truth, and god, and the universe, and us, and a bunch of other stuff. We both - ended up through the Gate, briefly, and when we exited - "

"Akira-sensei was alive, but El'd lost her leg, and I'd lost my body. El reacted fast enough to attach my soul to some armor, so I didn't really die, but - that cost her an arm. And I stopped being able to actually feel things."

(Ashes winces a bit, sympathetically.)

"I am so sorry."

"It was... Usually tolerable. We had each other, and we were able to get prosthetics for El..."

"We had to leave the area, though, because we were pretty sure Dante was our enemy, so we went to hide in our hometown for a bit - it helped that one of our neighbors, who'd liked our mom, was an extremely skilled automail maker. But while El was still recovering, someone from the military showed up, looking for Hohenheim - and he saw me, and realized we'd done human transmutation. Which is really illegal, but he offered to cover it up for us, and tried to recruit us to the military - we turned him down, but he left his contact information... And Akira-sensei decided that our best bet might actually be getting the military's protection. She was a medical alchemist, and the military didn't have any of those at the time, so - she was in high demand, and if she recorded us as her kids then the military would protect us, too. Even though she really hated the military, because they'd shot her brother for cowardice after he refused to fire on civilians... She was willing to swallow that."

"So we moved so Akira-sensei could prepare for her alchemy entry exam, and we ended up staying with a chimera alchemist - chimeras are alchemically created combinations of multiple animals, with modified abilities. That guy was September's dad. Akira-sensei passed pretty easily, and we stayed with September and her dad when Akira-sensei left on her first tour of duty, and then..."

"So the alchemist had gotten famous for making a talking chimera, though it didn't survive very long. Everyone figured he'd used a parrot, but - "

"He hadn't. He'd used his wife. And he hadn't produced any really big successes since, so he - decided to use September for another experiment."

"We killed him when we found out. September was - in a lot of pain, though, and we didn't know what to do, so we called Akira-sensei and one of her friends in the military, and... Prepared for a trial for killing a state alchemist, while Akira-sensei rushed back to try and help September."

"The Fuhrer - the military dictator of Amestris - ended up showing up and personally pardoning us, though, which was - very weird and also made us nervous, because of some of the things he said hinted that - he suspected us of human transmutation, and saw a use for us."

"That - all got interrupted, though. A bit after Akira-sensei got back, we ran into Dante and Hohenheim's daughter - the one he'd failed to resurrect properly. She kinda worked for Dante but not really, and wanted to mess with Dante's plans, so she used an interdimensional array on us, and flung us into - this world, actually."

"I see."

She shifts, somehow snuggling into El even more.

"So Arda mostly wasn't - that bad. We got settled here, and started carefully introducing technologies from our world, and got really rich doing that. The dwarves had the economic base to jump to industrialization with fairly little prompting. But then - word reached us. A war was brewing, between the lesser god Sauron and... Basically all the mortal races, though Sauron had the orcs and goblins and some others enslaved and fighting for him. The dwarves were reluctant to help the free peoples. They didn't see it as their war. King Thorin decided that they would, though, especially as engineers - and me and El thought really carefully about introducing war technologies, mostly decided to be very slow about that..."

"But then - "

"So Sauron'd fought the free peoples before, and they'd won and killed him. But it turned out he'd made an artifact anchoring his soul, so he was able to reform, though he was a lot weaker without the artifact in his possession. It was - designed, though, to prevent people from destroying it, and to drive its bearers mad, and to try to get back to Sauron, and complete his goals if it couldn't. It had a way of - skipping bearers, whenever it didn't like its last one, because it could move itself, a little."

"It - ended up in our apartment. Someone who came through must've been carrying it, and it must've ditched them, and - El found it. It just... Looked like a normal ring, at first."

"It got into my head. At first it was just- pretty, something that would be nice to keep. It helped with alchemy, I could see more details, make more connections."

She nuzzles her sister, stroking her hair a bit. "...We can just skip this part," she says, softly, "If you want." (They ever talk about it now - Ruby was insistent that helps - but, well.)

"...It was evil. Made me think- my sister-"

She kisses El's cheek. "It wasn't El's fault, at all. But it made El mad at me, and then - kind of hot and cold. I got - hurt. But I eventually figured out it was the ring - it couldn't grab my mind in the armor, we don't think, but I couldn't destroy it with alchemy, so I - took it away, and found out how to destroy it the hard way, and left."