1 Chapter 1: Altering the Game

If you had seen me six years ago when I first started my new journey in life, you would have thought I was insane. I wouldn't have blamed you -- so did I. I even checked myself into a mental hospital. Eight times. It wasn't until I finally landed here that it all clicked for me. I was some kind of Planeswalker or traveller or something. I could with an act of will step between realities. Learning to come back to a place I'd been before was more challenging. Learning to seek places, barely more so.

The most precious thing I figured out, though, was how to not slip between the cracks. No language I'd ever learned actually had words to describe all of these things. Some metaphors worked better for some tasks, but metaphors are by definition inaccurate.

Where would "here" be, and why would I have spent a little over four years in one place when I could go just about anywhere? The world of Fullmetal Alchemist. Quite frankly the "softest" world, physics-wise, I'd yet found. And the one with the most hope for any long-term travels I might have. With all of the wars and refugees and just 1930's equivalent bureaucracy, slipping into the society here was child's play. Learning automail engineering and maintenance was, ironically, quite easy to pull off. It helped that I knew some things about it that the people teaching me didn't -- like the function of the human nervous system and the role of human souls in automail motivation and for alchemy itself. Learning alchemy, however, was somewhat more difficult.

It would have been damned near impossible if I hadn't made a trip or two to a random zombie apocalypse world or two and shamelessly stolen ingots of gold from Fort Knox to cover my expenses. Even if I did have to make a trip for every ingot. Hiring investigators to find the best available material and medical alchemists who might be willing to actually teach me for a fee was the easiest part.

Actually learning all this stuff? To the level I knew I would need to accomplish to do what I was planning? That was far more tedious. I'd blown off steam more than once just exploring the multiverse. But at some point, I'd known that I was simply delaying the inevitable. Confronting the agonizing would do that to a man. Finding an automail engineer who would be willing to simply not ask questions when offered my notes on sensory prosthetics and enough gold to let his entire family retire for three generations -- and was trustworthy -- did take up an appreciable amount of time, admittedly.

But at some point procrastination just had to have it's limits, and I was at the limits of what this world could offer me. Sure, I could simply settle down and let the whole Father (or maybe Mother? I didn't know which version I was in, and had actively been avoiding finding out) thing play out -- but the longer I stayed here the more likely I would become a statistical oversight in the events of canon. I had to get it over with.

Staring down at the painstakingly laid out alchemy circle, with it's semiotic imagery laid out to provide imaginary links between various concepts in an equally imaginary four dimensional space as represented in a two dimensional medium (with color of chalk for the extra dimension), I cut my thumb with a penknife and began the transmutation event.

What happened next was an event that I'd anticipated and feared none the less, even as I knew just how important it was for my future plans. I didn't fully manage to grasp everything I saw, felt, or heard -- and honestly I felt that was for the best -- but what happened next was. Well. The singularly most surprising part was that it went exactly as I'd expected.

Blank white space. Check. Ornate stone double doors of a material type I was quite sure wasn't actually stone. Check. Hollow black space where a young boy ought to be. Holy fuckballs what was I thinking, check.

The… Truth… thing walked in an assessing circle around me, emoting for effect his/its assessment of me as he went. "You… my, you are a curious one. I could just gobble you up!"

I tried my damnedest to avoid quivering. Maximum Effort time. "Hello. Never actually met a deity-class entity before. Don't know the proper etiquette. Sorry if I offend, or bore. I know I'm not offering enough to get much, but I'm not really asking for anything that anyone who winds up here in the first place doesn't get merely from the experience. And I'm not expecting to walk away without a price. You'll accept Odin's Price?"

Truth laughed. It sounded like the weeping of quasars, and the scent of my grandmother's rosebush. "Well. Yes. You are an interesting one. Half the vision of the world for all the wisdom of the world. If you weren't what you are, I'd just take all of you. But… well. I'm interested to get to see all those nifty places you'll go! You have a deal!"

I didn't even notice the doorway opening, nor did I notice the slender shadow arms reaching out, even though I knew to look for them. It all happened out of my line of sight. I did, however, notice when they suddenly grabbed my head and with a sudden fell swoop ripped my right eye from it's socket.

I barely managed not to black out from the pain. Not immediately. The screaming helped, I would have imagined, much more than it really did. I didn't manage to make it to the door of the room my circle was in before I collapsed. My last thought before the black took me was to wonder when I got back.

I woke up.

All things considered, this was far less of a surprise than it otherwise might have been. I'd gambled big -- albeit while hedging my bets as best I could -- and I probably won. Helped that my little incident of "human transmutation" didn't actually involve any humans other than myself, and I didn't actually try to do anything other than get pulled through to Truth's realm.

The fact that I was not currently lying in a pool of my own blood? That would be due to the frankly questionable ethics of my soon to be least favorite surgeon ever. Because he was going to have to operate on my eye socket while I was awake. But hey. Automail eye. Worse things, I supposed.

Two weeks later. Skipping the details even in your own head, is a bit like repressing a childhood memory. It's just like getting beaten up by your school friends because they don't like how you ride your bike.

It's interesting, really, how automail prosthetics here work. They are powered directly by the user's soul, but don't have to follow the natural bodyplan. The sensory feedback is normally not all that great -- but that's more a limitation of the structure of the prosthetics than anything else. My new Steampunk cybernetic eye wasn't all that great. The resolution was… well. Blurry and chunky. And greyscale. Worked better for outlines than anything else. I also needed to wear an eyepatch at night because the photoelectric cells were able to detect far lower levels than natural light. Took a while to get used to.

I'd insisted on a concealed socket for the eye with Johann, and with the money I'd paid him, he didn't really object, even if it did limit what he could do and didn't make much sense in the context of the prosthetic being obvious when attached anyhow. He'd done shadier things for less palatable people, after all. Someone wanting to be able to wear a glass eye instead of an automail eye at his discretion -- well, that was just odd but hardly likely to hurt anyone.

Needless to say, if he had the slightest hint about the "glass eye" I now held in my hand, sourced from materials scavenged from a slightly more advanced than usual deadworld, he might have found it less puzzling. Getting used to the prosthetic I was actually going to bear? That was more difficult. A proper if analogue camera, with mechanical zoom and both infrared and "backscatter" receptor, all connected to voluntary muscle control… it would have been impossibly overwhelming to go directly to my proper prosthetic. I'd need time to train in its use, but I certainly wasn't going to do so on this world. Too much risk of being noticed by groups like the State Alchemists now that I've done my little bit of taboo-breaking. No, I was done with this world.

The time had come to finally and truly step out of my cradle and carve out my own place in the cosmos. After all -- if I could do the things I could do, and then so could someone else. And the odds that they would be friendly? Absolute power corrupts absolutely. I couldn't take chances. Hell, I'd already taken to robbing dead worlds, and that was me trying to be ethical. Someone without that compulsion? Yeah. Better to have my own carved out niche where I could hang my hat in safety.

Plus there was that little voice in the back of my head that kept whispering: "If someone asks if you are a god, you say yes!" At least the voice listened when I complained about things like having to eat energy fields bigger than my head. Mostly.

I decoupled my less advanced prosthetic, and hooked in my self-made eye. As expected, the inputs were confusing. I'd need to relearn control just like walking again. "Maximum Effort."

I took a deep breath; it would be my last of the air of this world. On the one hand, it was too bad I never got to meet any of the Hoenheims. On the other, they'd be just fine without me. Wish I could've something about Nina without putting my neck in a noose, though. Really wish that.

I stepped sideways and reality crumpled around me.