Fullmetal Alchemist Fan Fiction ❯ Veritas Hominum ❯ The Philosopher's Stone ( Chapter 12 )

The Philosopher's Stone

 

1935, Santa Fe

 

It is a blood red crystal that has the power to make a human immortal and rend all the laws of physics completely useless. It has haunted the dreams of thousands of men for centuries. Many have quested for it, and it is said that anyone who gets close to the stone must perish. The legend promises wealth, longevity, spiritual renewal, health; the things that every human desires. As gold is a means to all wealth, the Philosopher's Stone is a means to all ends. It is an end in and of itself.

 

That is why so many alchemists have spent their whole lives searching for it - even in this world there was a secret society that sought the stone: the Vril Society dreamed of immortality and ultimate power and they wished to create a master race of Aryans by harnessing the power that the stone embodied. But they were only the latest in a long line of seekers, Edward himself not excluded.

 

Ed remembered sitting in the library searching through Dr. Marco's notes - whose research was the most complete ever conducted - and staring dumbly trying to convince himself that he was reading it wrong.

 

The main ingredient for a Philosopher's Stone was human life.

 

To obtain, something of equal value must be lost.

 

Of course there had been a catch. There was always a catch.

 

He sighed and turned back to his papers. He was almost glad that alchemy was impossible in this world. It had been the Vril Society that had forced him in this tiny excuse for a lab. His father had gotten involved with the wrong people - this group had members in the highest echelons of the German government, including the Fuhrer, and they would stop at nothing to get what they wanted - and through Hohenheim, they had found him.

 

The last thing he had wanted was to be drawn in by the Stone again. It had been his whole life during his adolescence - it had caused him to grow up much too fast - and he had no desire to search for it again. He certainly didn't want to help those people find it.

 

That was how he ended up in Santa Fe, hidden away from the governments and bureaucracies that sought to control him. He wasn't particularly fond of the Americans either, but at least they believed in the tangible, and they mostly let him alone. As long as he came up with something they could use in the battlefield, they would keep him safe and well fed.

 

His current project involved experiments in cold fusion, but he was failing to see where the energy to complete the reaction would come from. A Philosopher's Stone would actually be pretty useful right about now, he thought.

 

Still, if energy can neither be created nor destroyed - it can only be converted into a different form - then there was no ultimate power in the stone; it was simply the energy that fueled alchemic transmutations solidified.

 

And if the stone was just a coalescence of energy for alchemists to draw on, then the Gate between the worlds was also a kind of Philosopher's Stone. So, if the energy on this side of the Gate was what all alchemists drew on to perform transmutations in Amestris, and energy can't be created or destroyed…

 

His eyes widened. The energy has to flow in both directions.