Day 69: Sun Room (3rd Shift)

[redcladidealist]

Tomatoes in both choices. Lloyd's face fell the moment he heard the announcement, and with a groan he let his forehead thunk against the table in the Sun Room. He couldn't even ask if he could have a sandwich made without tomatoes in it. The lunches were already made, his nurse holding one of each in her hands. Unhappily, he accepted the one that had meat. Maybe something could be salvaged from it.

Ignoring his nurse's cheerful parting words to enjoy his meal, the teen waited until she'd stepped away before he took his lunch out of the bag and started picking it apart - only to freeze, heart pounding unevenly. A deep, rattling breath had just- Lloyd didn't even finish the thought. Something was here! He whipped around, not even sure how he was going to defend himself. The only thing he had was one of those plastic spoon-forks, and if he was up against that same thing they'd run from last night-

There was nothing. Nothing but nurses and patients passing by. Not even any cats. No one else looked like they'd even heard anything. Lloyd's eyes darted around, but still nothing showed up.

Come on, I know I heard it...

[For Ed and Al!]

Comments

[redcladidealist]

Lloyd blinked, trying to take that all in, comparing it to his own experiences. Tried for a moment to picture himself doing things like that. Lloyd Irving, able to make loaves of bread from plants, or destroy things with a touch like Ed did last night. A grin began to spread across his face. "That's pretty cool! You don't suppose I could learn to do that? I mean, we already know I can do things with energy. How different can it be?"

[fullmetalheart]

Ed blinked at him. "Well, it took us years of study to learn how to do this shit. You sure you wanna have to get a ton of science crammed into your head?"

[armoredsoul]

Al shrugged. "And there's no guarantee you'd have the ability, even if you did put in the time to study. Besides, from what I remember of last night your own abilities are pretty cool! Was that pure energy you fired off at it?""

[redcladidealist]

Years? Okay, that was enough to put a slight damper on his enthusiasm. His face fell with a mixture of dismay and disappointment. "I'm... not that great with studying." Especially not science. "There isn't an easier way? I didn't see you doing anything that looked like science back there."

Pausing for a bite of salad, he turned and looked at Al. He swallowed, then nodded. "Something like that. That was my mana, the energy inside me. If I concentrate it, I can use it in my attacks. I guess I thought it was pretty cool when I first learned how to do it, but I've been able to do that for a while now."

In other words, the novelty has worn off.

[fullmetalheart]

Ed was quiet for a moment, looking down at his sandwich. "Most alchemists need to draw arrays to get their transmutations to work. So did I when I first started learning. My being able to do it the way I do... has a very heavy price."

[armoredsoul]

Al pokes at his salad, avoiding Lloyd's eyes. "It's not something most people are even aware is possible, and for good reason."

[redcladidealist]

It should have been good news that there was an easier way. It should have, but it wasn't, not with the edge in their voices and they weren't meeting his eyes as they tried to warn him away. Lloyd looked from one to the other, trying to figure out how bad this "price" was.

"What do you mean?" he asked. "If you did it, how bad can it be?"

[fullmetalheart]

"There's a reason I don't have all my original limbs," Ed said quietly. "Most of my left leg is also made of automail."

[armoredsoul]

"And before Brother and I were brought here, I was a soul attached to a suit of armor," Al added solemnly. "What we did was taboo, a sin. That was our punishment."

[redcladidealist]

Lloyd's eyes widened for a moment, then followed with a wince as the severity of the price really sunk in. Even at the gain of being able to do their techniques without being slowed down by the science, it wasn't worth it. Not to him. You couldn't just get pieces of your body back. Once they were gone, that was it. Only-

With a start, he realized what Al had just said. His eyes whipped back to him. "Wait, if you lost your body, how did you get it back? How are you even alive at all? Wouldn't you have been dead?"

[fullmetalheart]

"If I hadn't moved fast enough to attach his soul to armor, yeah," Ed said as he finally looked up. "The people that brought us here are why he's back in his body."

[armoredsoul]

Al shrugged. "We had been searching for an artifact called the Philosopher's Stone, a catalyst that could increase an alchemist's power and ignore the Law of Equivalent Exchange. That's the only way I can think of that they were able to give me a body again."

[redcladidealist]

"The Law of Equivalent what?" Lloyd echoed the turn of phrase blankly. Inwardly, though, he was tensing. Ed had trapped Al's soul somehow, keeping it from leaving the world, and now they were talking about some kind of stone. He knew, logically, that they weren't from his world, but the pieces felt connected anyway, and stood too similar to things he already understood for him to ignore easily.

His hand clenched, then he held it out, letting them both get a good look at the Exsphere mounted on the back. His gut twisted uneasily. "A Philosopher's Stone... It isn't one of these, is it?"

[fullmetalheart]

Ed blinked and stood to lean over the table to look at Lloyd's hand. Then shook his head 'no' and sat back down. "No. I've never seen one of those before. What is it?"

[armoredsoul]

Al smiled a bit--they had to explain this one a lot back home. "The Law of Equivalent Exchange basically means that you have to sacrifice something of equal value to create something. Substances have to be similar, and you have to keep the mass the same. I couldn't turn this fork into a sword, for example."

Alphonse leaned over as well, frowning at the blue stone before shaking his head.

[redcladidealist]

Once they'd had their look, Lloyd pulled his hand back, rubbing the skin around the Exsphere's crest almost reflexively. He hadn't worried about hiding it in a pretty long time, but that was largely because most of the people he was around already knew about the Exsphere. Here it was different. People saw it, but didn't realize there was any reason to give it a second thought. As far as Lloyd knew, only Kratos knew of its significance, and he was pretty sure he could trust Kratos not to talk.

Ed and Al, though... He'd only just met them. Could he trust them with this?

I trusted them with my life last night. They trusted me with theirs. He took a breath and let it out. That would have to be good enough.

"It's an Exsphere," he began. "It's a stone from my world that can amplify people's power if it's attached directly to their skin. It has to have a Crest, though, or it'll make them sick. The problem is..." He swallowed. This was the part he hated. "The problem is they're made from people's pain and human sacrifice."

Sacrifice... He stared at Al queasily. "So in order to make your body, they had to sacrifice someone else's?"

[fullmetalheart]

Ed's lips thinned and he sat back in his chair, staring into space. "We found out that the Philosopher's Stone requires an array about the size of a city. If they used it to restore Al, it's more like thousands."

He continued staring into space, face going blank. "It's probably best not to think about it too hard."

[armoredsoul]

Al swallowed tightly, staring down at his hands. "Restoring my body meant taking back a toll the Gate--something that regulates alchemy--took. One body for another isn't enough in that case."

It was eerie, that two worlds so different would have something so similar. "How common are Exspheres in your world?"

[redcladidealist]

Even though Lloyd didn't know what exactly an array was, the fact that it had to be the size of a city was both daunting and a little bit relieving. Surely something that big couldn't be that easy to make.

Thousands of lives, though... "That's horrible." He paled, feeling cold at the thought.

"It... depends on which world, I guess. My world was split into two a long time ago. I'm from Sylvarant. That's where the Human Ranches are, where Exspheres are made, but Tethe'alla seemed like it had more of them. One bridge used three thousand of them. There was even a mine to dig new ones from the ground."

[fullmetalheart]

Ed's eyes snapped to Lloyd and he turned tense. "I don't like the sound of these ranches."

[armoredsoul]

Al paled at the thought of that many lives being used for something so...trivial! "That's horrible! Why in the world haven't they been stopped?!"

[redcladidealist]

He couldn't blame them for the way they felt, not when he felt the same way himself. It still sickened him to think about that bridge. Even so, he wasn't sure he could blame the people in Tethe'alla either. "I don't think people in Tethe'alla didn't know what Exspheres really were. I mean, they knew where they came from, but I don't think they knew what it took to make their power wake up. Zelos, one of my friends there, didn't know until we told him. I guess if they never saw the Ranches, since they're on my world, it makes sense they wouldn't know." It made sense - but that didn't mean it was okay. Lloyd's solemn, pained expression turned into one of determination.

"We're trying to stop them now, trust me. No one should ever have to go through what they do to people at those Ranches, and if I have any say, they never will again. In fact, I want to get rid of all the Exspheres someday."

[fullmetalheart]

Ed looked at Lloyd's hand. "They can be removed from whoever they're attached to?"

[armoredsoul]

Al relaxed a bit--that at least made some amount of sense, even if it didn't diminish the horror of what was really going on. He nodded in response to Lloyd's determined look, then followed his brother's gaze.

[redcladidealist]

Lloyd went quiet for a moment, picking up his fork and poking at his salad with it. Somehow, Ed had managed to hone right in on the biggest problem with his plan, the reason why his plan wasn't really even a plan just yet, but a goal that felt just out of reach.

"It... depends. If someone had an Exsphere attached without a Key Crest first, you can't just take it back off. Their mana will go out of control if you do, and they'll... they'll turn into a monster." Like his mom. Like Marble. Dammit, how could fix this? There had to be a way somehow. There had to. He couldn't accept the idea that there wasn't. "They'd need a Key Crest first, and even then I'm not sure if it'd work." They hadn't tried it yet, for good reason.