Alfons Heiderich

A seventeen-year-old native of Germany, Alfons is a bright young researcher whose face carries an uncanny likeness to Alphonse Elric, the very resemblance that first draws Edward to him.

Warm and relaxed by nature, Alfons delights in Edward's tales of another world even as he doubts that any of it is real, and he is stung by his friend's restless wish to leave and by the suggestion that he and everyone around him are merely figures in a dream. A private urgency drives him, for he is dying of an incurable lung ailment and longs to prove his nation's scientific worth before his time runs out. That same hunger leads him to accept funding from the Thule Society, whose belief in a master race he openly rejects.

Edward encounters Alfons in Munich in 1921, having been cast into that world. The two had studied rocketry together in Romania under Dr. Hermann Oberth, and after Hohenheim vanishes, Alfons takes Edward in as a lodger. He helps hide the Romani fortune-teller Noah from the Thule Society, unaware that the group means to turn his rocketry toward invading and plundering Edward's home, until he witnesses the plan for himself.

Insisting once more that his world and its people are no dream, and begging Edward not to forget him, he launches his friend back through the reopened Gate aboard a two-seat rocket. Moments later he is shot dead by Rudolf Hess. When Edward chooses to return, he is stricken to find Alfons lifeless in Noah's arms, and the counterparts of familiar faces gather for the young scientist's funeral.