I'm going to sound soo ridiculous but it really did take me this long to get into Fullmetal Alchemist. Sort of. I've always liked it from the vague memories I have of watching it on Adult Swim as a child, but as it always is with TV shows you watch at 3am on whats usually called the Cartoon Network, seeing it as a series in order is actually really difficult. I definitely remember being obsessed with all the openings - now there is an anime that never disappoints with its music. Also, the soundtrack?? Bless??
As it turns out though, apparently I was in love with Fullmetal Alchemist 2003, and the one everyone in my office loves is Fullmetal Alchemist Brotherhood. I hadn't realized how different they really were until I finally got around to watching Brotherhood. People swear by Brotherhood (especially in my office, where it is a cult) but I have to say I'm not that into the ending. In all fairness, I haven't re-watched the ending of the 2003 version, I just remember totally digging the movie.
Anyway, as always with a new fandom obsession, an Exosphere character has one again appeared like the wild, rare shiny zubat that you absolutely were not looking for, thanks, and there wasn't much I could do about it.
Idk what it is with me and siblings with huge age gaps, but it is a known thing for me and I've just given up and accepted it at this point. Anyway Exosphere is nothing but my own judiciously gratuitous and unrepentantly indulgent AU to begin with, so what does it even matter. Kianna is Ed and Al's older half sister by somewhere around 15 years? On their dad's side, of course. I hate to say it, but Hohenheim just really does seem like the kind of fuckboy who would definitely leave a gaggle of entirely accidental love children behind him. Not because he's an asshole, just because he's an idiot. Also, I know in Brotherhood Al's supposed to look just like Ed, but I love his design in 2003, and plus Trisha deserves some love too.
Ed’s got distant memories of the day a lady that looked just like him showed up at their front door. Al doesn’t remember it at all, but Ed recalls bits and pieces of it. The shock of opening the door, and thinking it was his father, only to take a closer look and realize it definitely wasn’t. He can’t really remember much about her features; just her long goldenrod hair, gold eyes, gold skin. She looked like father. She looked like Ed. Mom had shooed him and Al off to the fields to play after catching sight of the other woman, frantic and snappish in a way she never was. Ed doesn’t know what they talked about, but he does recall glancing up at the sound of the front door slamming shut. Twilight burns across the sky, paints the rolling hills of Resembool in strokes of peach. He looks up at the noise. The wind whips her hair around her like golden fire; he thinks she looks in their direction. Looks at him. Meets his gaze, pausing there at the top of the hill.
Then she turns around and walks away.
The premise of Dayglow, her Exo spinoff, is that a nineteen year-old Kianna drags one of her teammates back to her homeworld of Xerxia II ostensibly so he can study Alchemy, but really just for moral support, to confront her biological father. Unsurprisingly things do not go as planned - and not because her father had a different family, oh no, that was to be expected. But what really got her incensed was the fact that he not only had another family, but he'd apparently up and left them too. Anyway, Kianna is livid, and maybe her trademark temper gets the better of her and she yells at the wrong person, because it's not Trisha Elric's fault she's in love with a shithead, or that she'd want to stick up for her MIA husband when some brat claiming to be his daughter starts badmouthing him in front of her.
So the whole 'meeting dad' thing goes really fucking poorly; Sonic and Kianna go to East City, the nearest thing even marginally approaching civilization for miles, so Kianna can drown her daddy issues in advisable amounts of alcohol and Sonic can check out the local libraries for Alchemy books. She, of course, meets a certain hollow-eyed war veteran at a bar, has an ill-advised tryst, and then keeps having trysts. Sonic was supposed to be her emotional support, but he's buried himself in books to hibernate for the winter so instead she gets Roy Mustang, who does a lot of supporting, but not of the emotional kind. But there's still a lot of supporting going on, namely in the shower, against the hallway wall, one memorable time over the kitchen counter. Literally none of her problems - or his, for that matter - are going to get solved in this manner, but a good time is had by all anyway.
They part amicably once Kianna can no longer stomach the guilt of ignoring all her friends and family (who don't really know what she was doing on this whole 'finding herself' vacation, aside from wasting side-eye inducing amounts of PTO).
Is this all a convoluted backstory to get some dad!Roy in the middle of Season 2 of Brotherhood? It's more likely than you think. There is literally no other reason that it takes Kianna ten or so years to return to Amestris.
It starts as a strange tingling feeling, which evolves into an itch, which eventually becomes terribly unbearable.
Kianna is not used to running from her problems. Or her thoughts.
It’s not Rio that does her in. Of course not. Rio looks just like his father, and she feels nothing but fondness when she thinks of Roy, has no regrets about what happened. Nina is an entirely different story. She’s the spitting image of her mother; golden hair, golden eyes, golden skin. The spitting image of Kianna’s father, a hallmark to the Xerxian dynasties. The spitting image of Kianna— the spitting image of her brother. Her brother, whom she only got a brief look at, but that one glance has since been seared into her memory. A little boy with golden hair, gold eyes, gold skin, another child behind him peering over his shoulder. The image is overlaid with Nina, hands on her hips as she scowls down at some of their playmates, Rio peeking from behind her shoulder.
Kianna hates having regrets. She’s the sort of person who tries to live life to the fullest, who accepts when things cannot be changed and moves on. But this. This eats away at her. Maybe this is just a symptom of motherhood, who knows.
It’s a brilliant day in Gjallarhorn when she decides she’s got to do something about it. The sun is shining, she’s just been conferred a Lordship title (Ha! Her, of all people! What is this universe coming to, honestly.) and Nina and Rio are both away at school, and she’s bored. No time like the present, and all that, so she gets up out of her lazy sprawl across the chaise she’s commandeered for the day, saunters out of the garden, tells one of the maids to let her parents know she’s leaving the estate and doesn’t know when she’ll be back, and nabs one of the new prototype ships.
I had a lot of fun writing Kianna, actually. Her first name comes from Honkai Impact-3, which I have never played, but love to watch AMVs of, and her family (Elion) is a shoutout to all the Gundam Iron-Blooded Orphans that got sucked into Taurus. I modeled her after some of my favorite coworkers, who all seem to have their shit together on the surface, but internally are pitiful excuses of adults with fabulous internal monologues. The fact that she's a mom to two ten year-olds definitely changes her dynamic with her two younger half-brothers, who are so close in age to her kids they should really be siblings with them and not her.
Some life highlights: she was adopted into the Elion family, one of the Seven Stars of Gjallarhorn (a massive military conglomerate based out of Taurus, that basically constitutes the backbone of the entire Star Alliance military economy. Think like Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Boeing and Northrop Grumman all rolled into one) and currently the Head of Gjallarhorn as well. They're not as casually cruel as their IBO counterparts, but they definitely still have all the same prestige and military dominance. Her family in particular though is very casual despite their exorbitant wealth and infamy, and cares little for high society; her father Rustal Elion is the Leader of Gjallarhorn, likes fixing cars, whiskey, and bonsai gardening. Her mother is a former Admiral in the Navy, now mostly retired, breeds horses and loves wine.
It's pretty obvious from the start that she's Xerxian, one of the three ancient empires of the Star Alliance, and the only one considered extinct. There's no question that she attends Hanasaki, what with House Elion being one of the Seven Stars. She signs her name to Leo at 18, which is hardly the youngest a Champion has ever signed, but still probably inadvisably young. She has one year in University before the rookie Yggdrasil Sector Senator Hera Le'Grenge is unanimously voted Queen of the Senate, and promptly declares war on the Slave Empires. She's eighteen and terrified of a war of such scale, and Rh'llor, the God of Leo, chooses her as Leo's delegate in the Sacred Senatorial Queensguard, mainly a political position than a military one. But Queen Hera ain't your average Queen, and spends the entire war on the frontlines. Once the war is over she has her existential finding yourself crisis, comes back knocked up, starts her career as a Champion for real. Also, finishes school. It ends up not being that big of a deal to take a year or two off, what with the war in the middle of it and all.
By the time the story proper starts all of that is years ago though.
They catch up to her again, at yet another cafe, after spending the day at Shou Tucker’s mansion. She seems genuinely curious about Alchemy and their research, even though it’s clear she doesn’t know much about the subject. Al is happy to catch her up on the bio-alchemy research they’ve been doing, and she seems to keep up with it very well. But of course she’s smart, if she’s he and Al’s sister. The two of them are geniuses. He imagines some of that had to, unfortunately, come from their alchemist genius of a father.
But when she asks innocently why they’re so interested in bio-alchemy, the conversation comes to a tense pause.
Neither he nor Al know how to respond. They’ve come to a crossroad. Do they tell her their secret?
At this point, does it even really matter? He’d told Rose, back in Liore. Mustang knows. And his team at least knows something about it, even if they don’t know the specifics. But the thought of trusting an adult with anything makes his skin crawl.
She notices their hesitation, of course. She assures them they don’t have to talk about if they’re not comfortable on the subject.
“... Sorry.” Al says, deflating. “We aren’t really trying to keep secrets from you or anything, but it’s just, well…”
“This is something you’d like to keep secret?” She finishes, brow raised. She has a knowing smile on her face. “It’s alright. Maybe it’s time I tell you some of mine, anyway. It doesn’t seem very fair that I already know so much about you two when you don’t know very much about me.”
The tale she tells them is… surreal, to say the least.
It starts out simple enough. Her mother was Ishvalan. Years ago now, she’d met their father and fallen in love. Whether it was returned as fervently or not is anyone’s guess at this point, but not long after she had met him their father said he had to go on a journey. He promised to return, but never specified when. At first, her mother had waited with steadfast loyalty. But as the months passed, and she grew heavily and obviously pregnant, her faith wavered. Her family and people shunned her. Not only had she lain with an outsider, but an alchemist as well. A devil of their people. And now she was left abandoned at the altar of birth. In her despair, she killed herself shortly after Kianna was born.
A sad story to be sure, but nothing outlandish.
But this was where it got weird.
Apparently Ishvalans will not murder unwanted infants; what they do instead is send them down the Great River— which cuts between Xing and Amestris through the desert— in a basket, as a way of offering either their life or death to Ishvala. So they sent baby Kianna down the river, where she was found by an archeologist exploring the ruins of Xerxia. An alien archeologist. A geomancer, Kianna had called him. As there was no civilization for miles, the man assumed Kianna was abandoned and took her with him when he… err… left the planet. Because that was a thing that could happen.
One thing led to another, and Kianna was eventually adopted by the people she considers her mother and father, and the grandparents to her children.
Kianna assures them she’s well aware how crazy it must sound, but it really does explain how someone so obviously well-educated would be so ignorant to the most basic workings of Amestris, the world, alchemy and automail. They're just supposed to believe, what, that she was raised by aliens?
This is also the Exo spinoff where I flesh out Taurus and Gemini more, finally. In some ways I'm glad I waited until the stars aligned, because this story actually ends up having some real Exo plot to it. Truth is the God of Gemini, a mysterious and untrusted character who holds domain over Souls and Alchemy. Most Champions in the Star Alliance only trust him about as far as they can throw him, and the other Gods are noticeably noncommittal on the subject. People never see him, and they know so little about him and the worlds under Gemini's domain. All Kianna knows herself is that everything about Gemini has always given her the creeps, and she'd never have stepped foot in any of its territories if it wasn't for the unfortunate reality that she was born there. That, and he's got an eternal hatred for Aries and her Champions, because he's a vain and egotistical megalomaniac who fashions himself above the other Gods by virtue of his command over souls.
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