Izumi Curtis

Tall and toned with a curved, athletic figure, Izumi keeps her fair skin and sharp dark eyes looking far younger than her middle years would suggest, a fact she guards fiercely against anyone who dares call her old. Her black hair falls to her upper back, worn in box braids gathered into a ponytail, and a Flamel emblem is inked above her left breast. Day to day she favors a white collared blouse left open at the neck, snug grey trousers cut to the ankle, and open-toed sandals stamped with the letters W.C.

Izumi loves to present herself as nothing more than a gentle, ordinary housewife, an image that sits at odds with the terror she inspires in her students. The Elric brothers dread setting her off, and a careless word, especially about her age, can earn a swift and painful reminder, often preceded by the crack of her knuckles. For all her power, she insists that alchemy is no substitute for honest labor and reserves it for tasks that hands alone cannot manage, reminding others that alchemists are only human.

Curious and broad-minded, she reads meaning into difference rather than dismissing it, a habit that gave rise to her creed that one is all and all is one. Beneath the aggression she is deeply warm, drawn especially to children and always ready to lift up those who have the will to help themselves but not yet the means.

Born in western Amestris, Izumi left home at eighteen to seek out a renowned alchemist in the far north and was told she would only be accepted if she lasted a month alone on the brutal Briggs mountains armed with nothing but a machete. She barely survived the cold, the wildlife, and the Briggs patrols who took her for a Drachman spy as she raided their supplies, and it was there she worked out her guiding idea that one is all and all is one. Returning to claim her place, she learned the man before her was Gold Steiner, brother of the late alchemist she had sought and a fighter rather than a scholar; enraged, she flattened him and set out to teach herself. Around the same time she crossed paths with Sig Curtis while hauling a freshly killed bear, a meeting both called love at first sight. The two married and settled in Dublith.

Her longing for a child ended in tragedy when her baby died at birth, and grief drove her to attempt human transmutation to bring it back. The Truth claimed several of her internal organs as the toll, leaving her chronically anemic, prone to coughing up blood, and unable to conceive again. Years later, passing through Resembool during a flood, she raised an earthen dam to spare the village, and there two orphaned boys, Edward and Alphonse Elric, begged to become her students. She set them the same kind of ordeal she had endured, a month surviving on Yock Island while puzzling out her creed, then trained them in alchemy and martial arts for six months.

That failed transmutation also made her one of the rare few able to work alchemy with no circle at all, simply by bringing her palms together and letting her will stand in for the runes, which makes her transmutations instant and endlessly adaptable in a fight. She is likewise among the physically strongest people in the series, hurling opponents, overpowering bears, and knocking back the homunculus Sloth, and she favors conjuring metal spears and spikes in combat. When the brothers later visit Dublith and reveal their own human transmutation, she expels them from her tutelage yet keeps guiding them as fellow alchemists. King Bradley personally offers her a State Alchemist post, which she flatly declines. Later Van Hohenheim rearranges her ruined organs into a healthier configuration, easing her condition. On the Promised Day she storms Central with the Briggs forces, helps bring down Sloth alongside the Armstrong siblings, and is then dragged underground to be forced, with the other human sacrifices, into opening the Gate for Father. She survives the ensuing blast thanks to Hohenheim shielding her, adds her strength to the final assault, and is there to welcome Alphonse home once he reclaims his body.