Martel

Fused with a snake, Martel gains a body that bends and elongates at will, letting her arms, legs, and even her neck twist and reach well past human limits. Two visual signatures mark her: outlined lips and a tattoo. The adaptations disagree on the specifics, coloring that tattoo magenta in the earlier series and green in Brotherhood, while her eyes turn from green in one to blue in the other.

What defines Martel is devotion. She fights at Greed's side beside her chimera comrades Roa and Dolcetto, and in the first anime the loss of them turns her toward vengeance against everyone who betrayed and slaughtered her group. Yet she bears Edward no ill will for delivering the final blow to Greed, grasping that he would sooner have perished by the boy's hand than be sealed away all over again.

Martel once wore a soldier's uniform. By the manga's account, a landmine maimed her during the southern border clash with Aerugo, and she was hauled to a military laboratory where doctors merged her with a snake before she broke out alongside Roa and Dolcetto. The first anime tells it differently, casting her as a member of a covert squad that unwittingly lit the fuse of the Ishval Civil War; captured and remade into a chimera to keep her quiet, she languished in the fifth laboratory for fourteen years and never aged a day.

In the manga she helps take Alphonse by climbing inside his empty suit of armor and stretching herself to jam his movements, then rides out the Devil's Nest slaughter from within. Fleeing through the sewers afterward, the group meets King Bradley, who quickly cuts down Roa and Dolcetto and beats Greed; when Martel strikes at the Führer to avenge her friends, he drives his blade through the armor and kills her on the spot. Her blood seeps into Alphonse's seal, an accident that later gives him back his memory of the Gate and, in time, the power to transmute without a circle. The military spirits her body out of the armor before he regains consciousness, sparing him the trauma.

The first anime expands her role. With Bradley absent from the Devil's Nest raid, she lives through it and follows the Elrics eastward, chasing payback against Kimblee and the rest who doomed her comrades. During that journey she tells the brothers that Amestris lied about a slain Ishvalan child sparking the war. In the end she learns Bradley is a homunculus and dies at his hands just as she does elsewhere, but only after warning Alphonse what Bradley really is.