Maria Ross

A small beauty mark rests just beneath Ross' left eye, the very detail Hughes leans on to tell the real Maria apart from Envy's imitation. She keeps her dark hair cropped short in a practical style and stands at an ordinary height and build. Her look holds steady across the series with little variation.

Ross is close to the model soldier: brave, mature, and professional, able to be firm or gentle as the moment demands. Her spotless record and long history of dependability lead those who know her personally to vouch for her without reservation. She holds trust as a virtue, asking her comrades to believe in her fully because she has no trouble believing in them.

By her own account she is an outsider swept into forces far larger than herself with no say in the matter, yet she adapts fast and accepts her forced exile with barely a flinch. Leaving her homeland pains her deeply, but she shows real courage and a willingness to fight a corrupt government for what she believes in. She also proves a capable public speaker, able to stir a crowd behind a cause.

Ross is paired with Sergeant Denny Brosh and handed the job of escorting Edward and Alphonse around Central in Major Armstrong's stead. The pair are stunned to learn that the young alchemists' code-breaking has exposed the Philosopher's Stone as a thing made from living people. Investigating the fifth laboratory, Ross and Brosh reach the site just as Alphonse is cornered by Barry the Chopper, each firing a round to disarm the killer before the building collapses. To keep politics out of it, Ross takes the wounded Edward to a friend's clinic rather than a military hospital, and later slaps and scolds him for sneaking off, only to be told he had it coming.

Trouble follows her after the Elrics move on. Hughes is murdered by Envy wearing Ross' face, and because the fatal bullet matches her service handgun, she is publicly arrested and interrogated as the prime suspect. Family testimony cannot serve as an alibi, so she has no defense. Barry breaks into her cell to warn her that newspapers already report her conviction and scheduled execution, and she chooses to flee. Colonel Mustang stages her death by burning a skeletal dummy in a showy blast, then slips the living Ross into a tunnel where Havoc spirits her away. Smuggled out of Amestris with help from Fu, Han, and Prince Ling's people, she takes refuge among the Yao clan in Xing.

She resurfaces driving an armored truck of weapons and Xingese tear gas to support Mustang's coup in Central. From the Radio Capital station she gets on the microphone and becomes the earliest voice to brand their fight as justice, rallying public opinion, and she reunites with the tearful Brosh. Both drop when the Nationwide Transmutation Circle fires, only to be restored by Hohenheim's hidden failsafe. In the 2003 anime her role differs: she calms a berserk, Red Water charged Edward by embracing him until he mistakes her for his mother, halting his transmutations, and continues serving in the military afterward.