#tumblr don't eat readmores on asks challenge 2020

[presumenothing]

Fic title- Ingredients: Two teaspoons of Cyanide

(make up a fic title?)

ok so the obvious(?) answer to this would be a political assassination plot, bonus points if it isn’t even in amestris for once

but in yet another inappropriate application of wikipedia, did you know that cyanide (or rather aqueous solutions thereof) is apparently fairly commonly used for extracting gold from low-grade ore? it’s called gold cyanidation aka the macarthur-forrest process, and obviously it’s pretty damn controversial on account of cyanide being, y’know, Actual Poison and all that.

on the other hand, amestris has (a) not historically given a shit about the well-being of its citizens, (b) an economy that sufficiently prizes gold to make up 1/3 of the Official State Alchemist Rulebook™️, and (c) xenotime towns thirsty for gold. so unless they invented a different industrial process that’s just as cheap and effective, it’s very plausible that they use cyanide too. especially since i don’t think we really see a lot of research going on in canon that isn’t state-funded slash alchemy-related, and for obvious reasons no alchemists (much less state alchemists) are gonna want to even be seen messing around with gold production.

enter the elrics, who – after learning about this issue from the metal suppliers at rush valley – overhaul the whole gold extraction process to be cyanide-free over one far-too-long train ride, half a small notebook’s worth of paper alchemised into one large sheet (al’s doing), and like twelve sandwiches (mostly ed’s doing). somewhere between sandwiches eight and ten they have a galaxy brain moment about how to channel some of the waste energy back into the array via a feedback loop, so it’ll only need to be reactivated by an alchemist maybe once every few months depending on the volume of production. 

winry’s gonna like this, al says. 

finish your damn sandwich, ed says.

and then they reach resembool and winry whacks them both not-very-gently upside the head for making the array output gold in the form of Solid Gold Bars. which are great for being rich!! and taking over mining towns!!! but less great for automail mechanics wanting to use it for corrosion-resistant circuitry. or electromagnetic shielding.

this is what happens when i’m not around to stop you two from thinking like alchemists, winry grumbles at them both, serving apple pie topped with an hour-long lecture on the most useful forms of gold as an engineering material. ed pretends to fall asleep sometime around when she embarks on the potential merits of titanium-gold alloy. they pretend not to see him doodling modifications to the array as she speaks. none of them actually notice den stealing the last crumbs of pie crust off the plate.

they name it the rockbell-elric process and refuse to patent it. 

al goes around helping to set things up especially at the smaller mines, and leaves his forwarding address in those cases where there aren’t any local alchemists available. (his offer to bring the process to xing was met with a very politely-worded request from crown price ling yao to Not destabilise the nation’s economy until i’m actually the emperor, thankyouverymuch. al frames the letter up after he recovers from the stitch in his side from laughing.)

ed hangs around atelier garfiel when he’s in town and glares at anyone who asks after the array until he’s convinced they’re not wanting it for nefarious purposes. (or, in one particular case, until that guy basically leered that they had to be using some kind of philosopher’s stone in the array. ed punched him with his no-longer-metal arm and made sure it hurt anyway.) 

winry fields the technical questions and gleefully watches rush valley lose their collective shit at how much better the quality of the gold has gotten, and the fact that they can skip a lot of the really tedious metalworking steps because it already comes in a usable form. most of the locals also drop the elric from the name, as in it’s the rockbell process, of course it’s good. (winry goes completely red when she first hears this, and paninya never ever lets her live it down.)

everyone is happy. including mustang, who is ecstatic that ed is 500% retired from state alchemistdom and therefore no one has to figure out if this breaks the rule against making gold. the end. 

#well this came out longer and more wholesome than i anticipated #tumblr don't eat readmores on asks challenge 2020 #fma #fmab #fanfiction #mine #asks #i swear i don't intentionally keep coming back to gold #this shit just makes itself up #i opened the wikipedia page and it was Right There #me stringing together random bits of engineering into fic: what else did i go to undergrad for