Elicia Hughes

Green eyes the shade of a deep forest sit in the round face of this small girl. Her sandy-blond hair is gathered into pigtails, with each side held by a pair of blue beads. Across the run of the story she ages from a toddler into a child of about five or six, though she is most often pictured at the three-year mark that her father so adored.

Elicia is the beaming center of her father's world. Maes can scarcely hold a conversation without steering it toward his little girl, and he keeps her photograph on hand to show to anyone who will look. She is bright, eager, and precociously proud of her counting, the sort of cheerful child who wins people over without trying. That same innocence makes her father's death impossible for her to grasp. At his funeral she pleads for the men to stop burying him so that he can go back to work, and long afterward she still races to the door hoping he has come home. Even in grief she stays tender, welcoming Winry like an older sister and trying to soothe her weeping mother.

Elicia enters the tale at her third birthday party in Central City, where Winry Rockbell is coaxed into attending and comes away charmed enough to think of the toddler as a little sister. The joy curdles when Maes is murdered. Too young to understand what has happened, Elicia begs the mourners at the graveside to stop covering her father, a scene wrenching enough that even Wrath, watching among them, shook only from the urge to silence her. Weeks later she still answers the door crying 'Daddy,' overjoyed until she sees it is only Winry, yet she quickly turns to comforting both her guest and her grieving mother. When the Promised Day arrives, she is kept home from meeting her friend Tabitha and instead watches the eclipse with Gracia; both are among the citizens drained by the nationwide array before Van Hohenheim's safeguard revives them. In the story's closing pages, an older Elicia and her mother receive a visit from Alphonse Elric. The 2009 series follows the same arc, adding her early habit of needling Edward for being 'little.'