A New Experience

Alrighty.

So, in a way this is old and new.

When I was thirteen, I discovered Fullmetal Alchemist Three years later, it's still my favorite anime. However, back then I began writing a nice long fan fiction about it that at the time seemed great, called "An Alchemical Experience". I got a lot of positive feedback on it and felt good about it. It ran almost two years, if not that much, before life caught up with me and muse fell behind, and I stopped writing it, leaving everyone hanging at the penultimate chapter.

I started over a couple months ago when I realized that I left such a terrible cliffhanger and how bad my writing was through the thirteenth and fourteenth years of my life. I'm relatively happier with my improvement, and so thought that I would begin posting chapters here for further critique and to see if anyone else would enjoy it. I'll put up a chapter per post as I get them done.

You can ALSO follow along at fanfiction.net; just look up Syldoran or "A New Experience."

So, a few notes before we began, just so nobody can say "YOU NEVER TOLD ME THIS D<" :

-It's a Fullmetal Alchemist fan fiction
-It's an author-insert; this was originally made when I thought that was original and cool, after all. However, I beg that you give the story an actual chance before you throw it away based on this. I do put a lot of effort into putting every ounce of myself, and not some despicable Mary Sue, into the character. I know how painful that is. =.= Damn Mary Sue author people.
-I have run out of notes. I thought I'd have more to say.

So, let the story begin!

Fair warning, first chapters are pretty slow with me.

-----

Jordan bit back a well-deserved groan as she rested her head on her desk. Her arms moved up to cover her head, hiding her in the sleeves of her favorite black coat. As much as she loved chemistry, the teacher, and even the classroom, the final period of the day was dragging on far too slowly for her liking.

“Why won't today go faster?” she complained, her voice muffled by the desk.

Her friend and classmate, Evalyn, looked over at Jordan and couldn't help a small laugh. “Because time doesn't work like that?” she suggested in amusement.

“It should. I don't care if chemistry's taught me laws of the world that can't be bent or broken, it should work like that,” Jordan insisted stubbornly.

Evalyn laughed again and straightened some papers on her own desk, then brushed some of her straight brown hair away from her eyes. “Unfortunately, it doesn't,” she said. “Too bad, though. This class does go by way slower than any of my other ones. Even math.”

“Too bad we don't learn alchemy in here,” Jordan randomly thought, lifting her head from her desk. “I mean, I know alchemy's the original premise for chemistry and everything, but it would be awesome. But it'd have to be alchemy like in Fullmetal Alchemist or it wouldn't be awesome. Then it would just be a mixture of chemistry and religion and stuff that won't work, and then it wouldn't be fun.”

Again, Evalyn giggled at her friend's rambling. “Yeah, that's a shame,” she agreed. “That would make this even more interesting.”

“Oh well. At least I already like chemistry, except for the math parts.”

“Hey!” The snap of the teacher in the front of the classroom made both of the girls jump. “Keep it down back there, will ya?”

Jordan shrunk down in her chair sheepishly. “Sorry,” she apologized, aware of the stares she was receiving from her classmates. She sighed and pulled her sketchbook from to corner of her desk to the middle and retrieved a pencil from her bag. “Damn, of all the times I feel like talking I get busted. The world is a messed-up place sometimes.”

Evalyn dropped the volume of her voice so that they could continue speaking. “Well, at least Mr. Noll's not too mean about it,” she said with a little shrug.

“True, true. Having an awesome teacher does make it a little better.” Jordan tapped her pencil against the edge of her sketchbook, then sighed. “Dang. Talking about FMA made me want to draw it now.” She placed the tip of the pencil lead against the paper, drew a short line, then frowned and erased it immediately afterward. “Dang again, I suck at drawing.”

“Nah, you don't.”

“Yes, I do, now let me beat myself up about it.”

Evalyn smiled and was about to say something else when a melodic tone tolled over the intercom. Immediately students began packing up their belongings, cramming heavy chemistry books into backpacks, stacking chairs on top of desks, and trying to organize entire piles of class notes into binders, folders, or even in too-small backpack pockets. Jordan simply closed her sketchbook, slipped it in her bag, and tucked her textbook in beside it. She slipped the strap to the messenger-style backpack over her shoulder and patted the supplies by her hip.

“Well then, I guess I'll see you-” Jordan was cut short when a rushing student slammed into her. Not expecting the “attack,” Jordan was thrown to the floor, hitting the desk and bruising her ribs before collapsing on the worn carpet.

She scowled and quickly pushed herself up onto her arms and knees, glaring after the offending student. “Thanks a lot, jackass!” she yelled at him. He didn't even glance back, instead catching up to another friend and chuckling about the experience.

“Oh man, are you okay?” Evalyn asked quickly, kneeling down beside her fallen friend.

“Fine . . . Hurt, but fine,” Jordan muttered. She sat up on her knees and looked to the side. The contents of her backpack were now strewn across the floor—most notably, her sketchbook, the cover to which had been torn away from the rest of the pad. “God damn it!”

“Oh, geez . . . I'm sorry,” said Evalyn apologetically. “That really sucks . . .”

Jordan heaved a deep sigh to calm herself, picked up her things, and began setting them neatly back in her bag. “It's fine. Not your fault,” she said, suppressed anger thick in her voice. “Just a sketchbook cover. Not the end of the world.”

Evalyn frowned, but said nothing else as Jordan stood and dusted herself off. “Anyway,” she huffed as she straightened her coat and dark shirt, then shoved her hands in the pockets of her oversized jeans, “I think I'm good, if a little banged up.”

As they headed out of the classroom, facing more jostling by yet more students in more of a rush than was necessary, Jordan rubbed the back of her head. “Egh . . . now I have a headache,” she complained.

“Sorry, again,” Evalyn said with a little shrug, making a gesture down another hall. “But, my mom's waiting for me on the other side of the school. I gotta go.”

“Alright. See ya.” Jordan gave a wave of indifference as they parted ways and headed through the side doors to wait outside.

Outside, the flow of students was drastically reduced. Jordan gave a happy sigh after inhaling a deep breath of the cold winter air. Snowflakes, normally rare even for the season, fell in a heavy blanket, covering the ground and the heads of unfortunate students in a layer of white. Jordan just smiled. Winter was her favorite season, no matter how cold it was. She looked up at the cloudy gray sky as she walked toward her bus, never minding the flakes that fell to rest on her glasses.

As she boarded the bus, though, and looked around at all the other high school students, her smile immediately fell. It was no secret that she despised most people, and most of those people used that to their advantage.

Her good mood stolen, she dropped herself into an empty seat, positioned her bag beside her to ward off anyone who wanted to share the seat, and brushed some snowflakes out of her dark hair. Once settled, she dug a book out of her bag and resigned herself to reading for the trip home.

She was interrupted immediately afterward.

“Hey, what's that?” one boy asked, leaning over the back of Jordan's seat and hovering over her shoulder. “Is that one of those . . . mango . . . things?”

“Manga,” Jordan corrected blankly, turning a page. “Go away.”

“So it's that Japanese stuff, right?”

“Yeah. Go away.”

“Well, what's it called?”

“Fullmetal Alchemist. Go away.”

“Aww, I'm just curious~”

“You're not interested, you're just attempting to piss me off. Do you not understand what 'go away' means?”

He smirked and tried to lean in closer; Jordan snapped the book closed and whipped it back into the boy's face before he could move more than an inch and a half. He swore and fell back, hissing in pain.

“Idiot,” Jordan muttered under her breath as she turned back to her page and continued reading.

The rest of her bus ride, a full half hour, was completed in relative silence. Although the other students on the bus were no quieter than they were at the beginning, the rest refrained from attempting to annoy Jordan further. She, on the other hand, was able to ignore them until she disembarked at the end of the road leading to her home. It was the same as any other day of school. She couldn't begin to fathom why she was such a fun target when she only tried to keep to herself.

She walked down the gravel road to her home (slipping and falling both of the times that she attempted to slide down a patch of ice). Upon walking through the front door, her look of indifference turned into a scowl. The house was empty.

“Which means, of course, that I'm stuck at home to watch the kids while my mom does something stupid and I don't even know what,” she sighed, trudging through the house and expertly sidestepping around the three dogs that insisted on getting in her way—only one of them was actually vying for her attention. “Which also means that I hope she's looking for a job . . .” She paused by the computer to see if her mother had left a note; there was nothing.

Groaning as she thought about the rest of her day, Jordan slogged through the rest of the house and to her room, where she collapsed on her bed.

“Today suuucks,” she whined as she buried her face in her pillow. “Even though I don't have that much to complain about, it still suuucks.” She lifted her head to take off her glasses, then once again dropped face-down into the pillow. “Didn't see Jazzy all day, couldn't get a ride to or from school, sketchbook's ruined, ribs hurt, head hurts, didn't get any sleep, math was confusing, found one of my fish dead this morning, cat scratched me, felt sick almost all day, people are stupid, Anime Club was canceled . . .” She stopped rambling when she ran out of things that hadn't gone quite her way that day, frowning at the wall in thought.

She gave up shortly after. “Nngh. I can't even complain, because everyone in the world will get angry for daring to think a day of my life sucks,” she mumbled, shifting to lay on her side.

She stared across the room at the opposite wall, where a poster of a blond-haired boy and a suit of armor in the background consumed several square feet of space. She couldn't help smiling a little. “Yeah, their lives suck more,” she said to herself. “Being fiction, I guess that's just what happens. Still, it'd be cool to live like that for a day.” She yawned and let her eyes close. “I'm such a nerd for thinking that . . .”

-----

When Jordan opened her eyes again, it was dark. She sat up quickly in alarm, then immediately regretted it as a wave of dizziness assaulted her. She held her head in her hand while her tired brain tried to sort out her surroundings.

“Okay . . . how long was I asleep?” she mumbled, slowly turning her gaze toward the digital clock on her bookshelf. The glowing red numbers announced the time was 2:34. Jordan blinked once; that wasn't possible, because she didn't even get home until three . . .

“Oh, are you kidding? It's the middle of the night? Nobody woke me up for dinner! How the hell did I even-” She quickly cut herself off as her stomach gave a violent and sickening lurch. Bile rose in her throat, and she clasped her hand over her mouth to hold back the urge to be sick. Swearing in her mind, not trusting herself to open her mouth, Jordan quickly pushed herself to her feet and made a move for the bedroom door.

She barely had a hand on the doorknob when she blinked, and found her hand grasping nothing at all.

Her bedroom was gone, replaced by an empty void of white. She blinked again, and then stood an incredibly vivid image of a gigantic, dark archway, sealed shut by immense doors etched with eyes and unfamiliar runes.

The doors swung open, making not the slightest creak of sound. Behind them, hundreds of eyes stared hungrily back at her, unblinking. From the depths of the void crept small, shadowed hands, which quickly made their way toward the human girl.

Something nagged in the back of her mind that this was all painfully familiar, that she should be running and trying to resist. Yet, in a state of delirium, Jordan couldn't fight back as the shadowed hands wrapped around her limbs and ushered her through the opening, and the doors slammed shut behind her.

-----

“Okay . . . why is it that all the dreams I remember are always insanely weird?” Jordan wondered groggily as she sat up in bed.

When she fully opened her eyes, she realized something was wrong.

This wasn't her bed. Or, for that matter, her room.

The room she was in was plainly decorated; white walls, clean wooden floor, and bland furnishings consisting of a small bedside table, a corner desk, and the bed on which she currently sat. It in no way resembled her bedroom, or anywhere that she had visited in her life.

“Ooohh my god,” she breathed, scooting back on her bed and into the wall as if that would somehow help her. “Oh my god. What the hell happened and where am I?” She felt the color drain from her face as the severity of the situation quickly sank in: she didn't know where she was, or why.

Before she could dive into a full panic, knocking at the door interrupted her. A modestly-dressed woman bearing a broom invited herself into the room.

“Excuse me, miss, is there anything . . . I can . . . do . . .” The woman trailed off as she looked over the girl on the bed.

“Um, no,” Jordan said quickly, swallowing to hold down her panic. Instinct told her not to give anyone around her reason to be suspicious. “Is, ah, something wrong?”

The woman's expression changed from one of surprise to one of anger. “You're a state alchemist?” she demanded.

“I'm a state alchemist?” Jordan repeated, dumbfounded. She looked down at herself, and her eyes widened. In her panic, she hadn't noticed that even her clothing had changed, from the school clothing she remembered falling asleep in to the silver-trimmed, navy pants and jacket of a state alchemist.

She didn't have much time to reflect. What she knew next was being tossed out into the dusty street by a gruff man easily twice her size. A small suitcase that presumably contained all of her belongings flew out by her head.

“We don't serve dogs of the military here!” the man yelled before slamming the door.

“Nice way to treat a fifteen-year-old girl,” Jordan muttered as she forced herself to sit upright.

Something silver caught her eye, drawing her gaze back to the ground. A pocket watch, emblazoned with a strange creature resembling a lion on the cover rested on the ground, slightly dirtied from the fall. A chain led back up and hooked on the belt loop of Jordan's pants.

“Okay . . . there's no way, right?” Jordan said, laughing a little bit as she picked up the watch, then clicked open the cover. “There's no freaking way in hell that I'm here, right? It's some stupid joke. I'm still dreaming. I am definitely still dreaming.” She rolled up the sleeve of her new uniform and pinched her arm several times. Her mirth quickly died when she had gained a stinging red welt on her skin, but her surroundings and everything she held remained unchanged.

She stared back down at the watch she had dropped. “There is seriously no way in hell,” she breathed again, her voice cracking with stress as she was forced to accept her reality.

“This is the worst freaking day of my life.”