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Ed took a step back, nearly stumbling as he stared at the lobby of the hotel he suddenly found himself in. He'd been hurrying full-tilt into the lab -- and well, this certainly wasn't the lab he'd been in before. There was no familiar pattern of alchemy on the walls either. Which meant this wasn't the lab.

It was only belatedly that he realized he was also by himself. Everyone he had been traveling with was gone. He spun around quickly, braid twisting momentarily into the air. Nope, he was by himself. He grabbed the door he had just run through, twisting it back open, but the familiar streets of Central didn't wait outside of it. The realization of what had happened sat coldly in his gut. But, it should have been impossible.

Hastily, he pressed both his gloved hands against up the wall next to the door. His alchemy crackled along the wall before a new door was called into being. Even as the energy poured through both his real and automail arm, he could feel that there was something off about it, as if his connection had been altered in some way. He hastily grabbed the knob of the new door, pulling that open as well. What was behind wasn't the same as the first door he had opened -- but still wasn't Central. He slammed it shut, moving automatically to create a second door, and then a third. Each one opened up to a new place, but none of them were the world Ed had just left behind.

"What the hell," he growled under his breath, unable to hide his rank irritation. He spun back around from the wall, facing the expanse of the hotel in front of him again. There was only one weapon he had left to him now.

"Alphonse!" he bellowed. And then, even though he didn't want to: "Hohenheim!"

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Belle was startled by the sound of a shout, clutching her books tighter to her chest as she stopped in her path, not entirely sure who was shouting, but she didn't think it was a shout that could be ignored. She set the books down on the table and hurried towards the sound of the voice, staring at the young man warily when she found him.

"Who's Alphonse?" she asked.

Ed stared just as warily back at the girl who had arrived in front of him. At least he had gotten someone's attention. She wasn't wearing a uniform, so it didn't seem likely that she worked for the lab or the government. Maybe they had gotten smart enough to wear plainclothes, but Ed didn't think so. Their arrogance wouldn't allow for such a thing.

"My brother," Ed said, crossing his arms in front of him. He didn't bother to explain that his brother also appeared to be a suit of armor. "Who're you?" he asked.

"Belle," she introduced herself, not sure if there was anyone named Alphonse around that she had met. She worried that she was going to disappoint him with such news, but she had to be honest. "I'm sorry, I don't think I've ever met someone named Alphonse," she said gently. "Maybe it's only that I haven't met him yet?"

"If you'd met him, you'd know," Ed reassured her, unable to help a wry grin despite the oddity of the situation.

"Are we in Central?" he asked a moment later, because that probably should have been the first thing he asked. Of course, it was important to discern where his traveling companions were -- or, at least, where they were not -- but he needed to know where he was above all. And how to get to Central if that wasn't where he was.

She paused before shaking her head, the pause only because she was beginning to realize that this was someone who didn't know his general surroundings. Paired with the fact that he was looking for someone who didn't seem to exist here, she felt like an explanation was incoming. "No, I think it's called the Nexus Hotel," she said. "I'm not sure if anyone calls it Central, casually."

"Is Central where you meant to be? It could be through one of the doors," she suggested.

It didn't seem as if she even knew what Central was -- which indicated just how far from home he was. He felt caged, a sensation that he hated more than anything. He had been ready. He hadn't know exactly what was waiting for him in Central, but he knew that he was going to fight to save the country. He knew he had a role. So, why the hell had he been pulled all the way out to this weird hotel at the last moment?

"Those doors all go to different places," Ed said dismissively, but what he had seen suddenly keyed in with the implication of what she had just said. "The doors all go to different places," he repeated, almost under his breath. Which meant that there might be a door that could take him back.

He spun around toward the wall again -- forget protecting his back -- and pressed his hands against it. His alchemy surged through it, transforming another door. He swung it open impatiently, but this one was just like the previous ones -- not to Central. This time, the ocean stretched in front of him, bright sunshine beating down on his face.

"How do you find the door you need here?" he asked her.

"Well," Belle said, a considerate moment as she thought about what'd she had just said. "Sometimes they go elsewhere," she said. "And sometimes they don't." Said like that, it made complete sense to her, but probably wasn't quite so easy to understand for someone else. "I think there might be some kind of luck to it, but I honestly couldn't tell you what luck or skill you use. All I know is that I can open a door and find myself back home," she said, smiling with the kind of warmth and peace that came from knowing she could see her Papa.

Though, she hadn't been home in some time recently, because she was trying to avoid the Beast and Gaston and what she feared was coming if she allowed time to march on freely. "I mostly just ... well, hope," she breathed out the word with a happy smile. "Sometimes it even works."

"That makes no sense at all," Ed said, his frustrated bleeding clearly into his world. If this was arrange by alchemy, there had to be a reason to it. It couldn't just be luck of the draw. Random. The very word ate at Ed, because while he appreciated the spontaneity and creativity that came from being an alchemist, uncertainty held little appeal.

He made another door, the familiar glow appearing beneath his gloved palms. He pulled this one open too -- and this one was just a door to the outside in front of the hotel.

He cursed and slammed it shut.

She watched with sympathy in her eyes, holding a breath on her lips that she didn't want to let loose. She felt bad for him, but she also didn't know how to solve his problem. That was the trouble. Belle desperately wanted to be able to help, but couldn't imagine being very good at it. "Maybe you can try another one?" she asked, but hated that she'd said the words. "Or maybe you can try later. I don't think time really moves at home, while we're here. Maybe, I haven't exactly tried it out."

"I don't have later," Ed began to say, nearly shouting the words, although he knew they would make no difference in what was happening. However, he paused openly when he finally heard the second part of what was she was saying.

"Time freezes?" Ed echoed, spinning about to look at her with open confusion once more. It was another element to whatever this was that didn't make any sense and certainly couldn't be explained by alchemy. He'd never, in all of his studies, heard of anyone who could manipulate time. If this was done by alchemy, it was unparalleled. But he didn't know what else it could be done by if it wasn't alchemy.

She nodded, beginning to feel slightly wary about his mood. She took a gentle step back, making sure that she kept herself vaguely out of harm's way in case his anger was more than just shouted words. "I think so," she said. "Or else everyone has been kind enough to not allow their lives to move forward even a minute, where I'm from, because it's always the same if I go back there."

To James, it sounded like some sort of curse and he stepped back a little, waiting to dodge whatever jet of colored light was surely about to come his way. While he had become something of an expert at casting curses without speaking out loud there were some that needed an audible spell to be pulled off correctly and while he'd never heard hohenheim before, it didn't sound good.

"Whoa, mate, watch where you're throwing curses," he said, frowning a little. Still, nothing had hit him and all the usual signs of curse-receiving weren't present: no singed eyebrows, no rips in his trousers, no extra appendages or infected pustules. It seemed to have missed him entirely.

"Er, it was a curse, wasn't it? Hohenheim?"

"Curse?" Ed asked, his irritation obvious as he twisted around to see who was talking to him. The man didn't look familiar though Ed knew that didn't much if he had actually landed in Central. The place was crawling with cowards who had sold themselves to the government for a chance at immortality. Most of them wore uniforms though.

"What? No," Ed responded. "My -- Somebody I was traveling with." He eyed the other stranger more closely, although he still didn't unleash his armblade just yet. He was ready if he was attacked, but he figured it was better to try and get some information for the time being.

"Who're you?" he asked. Shame Al actually wasn't here. He tended to be a bit better at the whole making friends thing.

James thought for a moment about giving his actual name but, then, if this was someone who was throwing hexes without much notice, maybe he wanted to give someone else's.

"Severus Snape." Even the sound of it was slimy and James instantly regretted his choice in pseudonym. "Are you sure it wasn't a curse?"

"Severus Snape," Ed repeated, blinking openly. It was a weird sounding name to be sure. Though, to be fair, he figured that he'd met plenty of people with weird names lately -- though, to be even more fair, they had all been attached to weird people, too.

"Yeah, I'm sure it wasn't a curse," Ed answered impatiently, starting to pace back and forth in front of the three doors he had made, the sides of them still stripped with the signs of his alchemy on the side. He sorely wanted to twist one of them open again, but he knew it wasn't going to bring any new results and, despite his brash behavior and stubbornness, he did know better than to turn his back to a stranger.

"We're not in Central, are we?" Ed asked, his gaze flitting back over to Severus.

"Er, no, not Central. It's some hotel," James said, trying to decide how best to explain it. This was one of those situations where Remus and his head full of facts would be useful or even Sirius, with his charm. James had both when the occasion called for it but words seemed to be failing him.

"You can open doors and go into different worlds. I bet you just stepped out of your own into this one."

Ed was about to get indignant about the vagueness of where exactly the hotel was located, but then he got rather caught up on the description of the hotel. He wouldn't have believed it at all if it hadn't been for the fact that he had just been pulling open door after door that didn't lead to the same place.

He still wanted to snap back that that was impossible -- but, it would just be really bloody difficult, probably. The scale of that level of alchemy -- He couldn't even begin to fathom it. He didn't think that the worlds passed through Gates of Truth, because he hadn't felt it when he had stumbled in, but still, connecting all of these places to one central location -- and then to bring subjects here without their knowledge or awareness. He didn't even know if one alchemist could do that. And if there was an alchemist behind it, possibly even a Philoshoper's Stone, why the hell had they brought him here now? They obviously didn't want him in Central for the Promised Day, but why?

"Are you an alchemist?" Ed asked, walking toward Severus, the familiar drive to need to know sparking hard. "Did you make this place?" If an alchemist had made it, he could find out why, how, and how to get the hell back.

Edited 2014-03-10 03:28 (UTC)

"No, I'm a wizard. What's an alchemist?"

James had never heard of that before except in some vague, foggy place where he thought he might have been asleep in History of Magic and something Binns said had drifted in by accident. He certainly had never learned anything about alchemists on purpose. If it wasn't important to being an auror, James didn't care.

Ed stared at the stranger openly, taking no care to hide an expression that clearly displayed just how crazy he thought he was. Ed wasn't sure which sentence he was having more difficulty digesting.

He'd met a lot of strange people lately. Beings who were the embodiments of human sin. People who had been alchemically blended with animals. Hell, he was related to a lot of strange people. His brother's soul was bonded to a suit of armor, and his father was apparently a couple of millennium old. But he'd never met anyone who claimed to be a wizard.

"Like, a State Alchemist?" Ed asked, holding up his watch and letting it swing in front of James' face. He spoke the words slowly, as if it would help James understand. Because, well, who the hell hadn't heard of an alchemist.

"No, never heard of any alchemists, state or otherwise. Is that a Muggle thing?" As much as James liked some Muggle inventions (motorcycles, Sirius was onto something with that) he knew very little about how their world worked.

"Must be, since I've never heard of it."

"Muggle?" Ed echoed, face contorting in confusion. He didn't know who this guy was that he had never heard of a state alchemist -- even people from outside their country knew what they were, particularly because of how pivotal they had been in the last war.

But he felt like they weren't even speaking the same language, really. He'd thrown around wizard and Muggle as if they were common things, but Ed had no idea what he was going on about. He wished, once again, that Al was here. Ed was a little narrow in his studies -- if it wasn't alchemy, he didn't care, but there was a better chance that Alphonse would have been able to handle this situation well. Or at least with more patience.

"Someone who can't do magic? Well, not a squib...but someone who can't do magic and doesn't know anything about it," James clarified. Really, someone who didn't know who Muggles were but clearly did not seem to be a Muggle himself? Was alchemist just another name for wizard that he hadn't learned in history?

"Ever heard of people like that?"

"I have no idea what you're talking about," Ed responded, his exasperation abundantly obvious. Really, he considered himself quite restrained for not just giving up and starting to shout.

He had no idea what was happening, what this idiot was blathering about, but he did know that he didn't have time for it. He needed to go back to Central.

"Listen," he said, trying to get the other man to focus again. "Is there anybody else I can talk to around here?" This guy obviously wasn't going to be helpful.

James hooked his thumb back toward the general vicinity of the front desk. "They can tell you where your room is but other than that, you're just going to have to pull doors open and see where you end up. Nothing too helpful around here, I'm afraid."

Seriously, someone who hadn't heard of Muggles but clearly wasn't a Muggle himself? Weird.

Erik heard the shouts, distant but getting closer, but couldn't make out what the person was yelling. He sounded distressed, whoever he was. Normally Erik would stand firmly by the perspective that what wasn't directly affecting him wasn't his business, but it was almost impossible to concentrate on reading with someone stomping around hollering at the top of his lungs nearby.

He left his room and went toward the sound of the voice, rounding a corner and coming face to face with a teenaged boy vaguely reminiscent of Summers— that is, blond and surly looking— drawing breath for another shout. "Would you mind keeping it down?" Erik snapped, folding his arms. It was only as the kid turned on him that Erik's metal sense tracked the movement, alerting him to something unexpected. Testing with a thread of his power showed him— amazing— two of the newcomer's limbs, an arm and a leg, were made entirely of metal.

Taking a step closer, Erik's brows furrowed together and his head canted to the side, his hands dropping to his sides as his power scanned the artificial limbs and learned their makeup, their inner workings. "Metal limbs that actually work," he said, now sounding curious and impressed, his eyes meeting the boy's. "You certainly don't come from any world I've ever heard of."

Ed turned at the sound of the reprimand. He wasn't unaccustomed to adults telling him to calm down or giving him orders -- but he was also incredibly accustomed to ignoring them.

However, any snappy response he might have had to the misplaced request was silenced when the stranger commented on his limbs, which were fully hidden. He might have chalked it up to the guy being some kind of bizarre expert on automail, except for the fact that he sounded surprised to even hear about the existence of automail.

Ed knew that he was being overly paranoid at the moment, but he couldn't help the way his skin started to crawl, senses blaring warnings at him. There wasn't anyway this guy could have known about his arm and leg, and there wasn't any place he knew of that hadn't at least heard of automail.

He clapped slid his hand over the metal, letting his alchemy transform it. A thick blade slid from his wrist and he held it in front of him, eying the stranger distrustfully. He didn't attack it -- knew that was overzealous at the least, but he hoped to show that he could certainly take care of himself if he needed to.

"Yeah, and who are you?" he asked, voice sharp.

Erik's eyebrows shot up as the blade extended, even more impressed and intrigued than he'd been a moment before.

"Not a threat," he said dryly. "At least, not to you." He took another step closer, in part to illustrate how unperturbed he was by having a sword brandished at him, and in part to get a better look at how it worked. But the kid responded by stepping further back, looking wary and angry in equal measure.

"I'm not going to attack you," he said, a little impatient. "I've a sense, an affinity for metal. I couldn't help noticing. My apologies for intruding." He stepped back as if to leave, then added, "You might want to avoid waving that sword around to everyone you meet. You'll find some sparring partners, I'm sure, but you'll scare the hell out of the cleaning ladies."

Not a threat. Ed had almost the compulsive need to laugh at that, because he lived in a world where priests, and presidents, and goddamn kids masqueraded under masks of righteousness but, hey, turned out to be threats.

"Right," Ed echoed. "You've got an affinity for metal, but you've never seen automail before? That's kind of hard to believe, buddy." Besides, there was something off about the way the guy had said it. He'd been around nutjobs who loved automail -- that town that Winry worked in had been full of them. They'd love her clean, effective word, had gone crazy when they'd seen his arm and leg. Not that he'd really liked having people that close -- but he was used to people being impressed by his limbs. This felt different, although he couldn't say exactly why.

"I've certainly found some sparring partners, many who have been ladies," Ed answered with a wry and ready grin. Though, he didn't think he'd sparred any cleaning ladies yet, to be fair. He glanced around, although his eyes barely flitted off the stranger for more than a second. "Where the hell are we?"

"Automail?" Erik repeated. "Never heard of it." But if the kid didn't realize he wasn't in his world anymore, that would explain the skepticism. It was hard to derail himself from quizzing the newcomer more about a world where working metal prosthetics were (apparently) commonplace, but somehow he managed.

"We're in a hotel called the Nexus." He'd given this speech so many times by now, he could recite it practically without thinking. It was enough to make him wish he'd printed out Welcome to the Nexus pamphlets. "Whatever world you were in before, you're not there anymore. You might be able to get back, but trying can have mixed results. The doors here don't always go where you expect them to."

Edited 2014-04-13 02:15 (UTC)

Ed's shoulders dropped a little, his stance less standoffish when Erik didn't make any attempt to actually attack him or close the distance between them. He still let the blade jut out of his arm, because, well, if something did go awry, he'd at least gained a few valuable seconds.

Ed didn't want to believe what he was being told though. A hotel that pulled people from different worlds and didn't let them go home. He supposed he'd heard stranger things lately, but not by much. And certainly not so out of his realm of understanding. The things he'd learned lately had been based out of alchemical myth. This -- well, this was impossible, simply put.

"I had noticed that," Ed said bluntly and perhaps just a little sourly. He jerked one hand up to gesture with his thumb at the row of doors he'd made. None of which had led him back to the door he so needed to reach.

"Who are you?" Ed repeated again, not certain what the next good question was to ask, but reluctant to let go of a potential source of information.

Erik recognized the sullen resentment— quickly, and uncomfortably, as it was quite similar to the emotions his arrival to the Proserpina had once upon a time provoked in him. He, too, had treated every new acquaintance as a dubious source of information to be mined, and been convinced that what everyone told him had happened to him, couldn't really be true.

How quickly he'd been disillusioned. He wasn't sure whether to hope it happened to this boy faster, or slower. It wouldn't be enjoyable either way.

"My name is Erik Lehnsherr," he said, patient as he could be in the face of a hostile teenager. "I'm from Earth, the year 1962. I'm a mutant with control over metal and magnetic fields." His head canted slightly to one side as he added coolly, "I could give you my whole history, but that might take some time."

"Edward Elric," Ed answered. "Earth. 1905."

The fact that they had to stipulate that they were from Earth sat a little easily with Ed. Because it meant that there were people here, presumably, who weren't from Earth.

However, the second part of what Erik said caught Ed's attention much more quickly. A mutant with control over metal and magnetic fields. He had no idea what the word mutant entailed -- it brought to mind the odd experiments he'd seen come out of the laboratories. But the notion that this mind could manipulate metal worried him, made him feel vulnerable in a way he hadn't been in a long time. He'd lost his arm and leg young. He'd had the automail almost as long as he hadn't. But he didn't like the idea that this man could use them against him. Now, it was obvious how Erik had known what he had.

Worse, he didn't exactly know how to handle the situation. He shifted uncomfortably, weighing his options. A fight would be stupid then. Running -- well, he'd have to make a door. And they were strange right now. He didn't understand how they worked, and he also needed both arms to make a door.

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