Nina Tucker

Nina is a small child whose long hair falls into braids that reach past her waist. The manga's rare colored artwork gives her blonde hair and a green pinafore over a creamy shirt, while both anime adaptations, along with the Webtoon, recolor her with brown hair and blue eyes, the 2003 version using a lighter brown than Brotherhood's. Her wardrobe shifts between tellings, from a blue dress and clogs in the earlier anime to pale green and short-sleeved layers modeled on the manga in the later one.

After her father transmutes her together with the family dog Alexander, Nina takes on the shape of a dog-like beast crowned by a mane the color of her former hair. The creature keeps the power of speech, and its fur trades Alexander's white fluff for a peach or grey coat with a strange carpet of hair down its back. In the 2003 anime alone, Tucker later tries to clone her, producing a hollow, doll-like body draped only in long hair, its eyes left vacant.

Nina comes across as a bright, playful girl brimming with energy, most often found romping with or hugging her enormous pet. Loneliness sits beneath that cheer, since her mother's absence and her father's retreat into his work leave her starved for company. She adores her father without reservation and never abandons her faith in him, even as that trust is betrayed. Tellingly, she is one of the very few characters who can call Edward small without setting off his usual fury.

Nina first crosses paths with Edward and Alphonse Elric when they arrive to study bio-alchemy under her father in East City. The lonely girl quickly wins the brothers over, and the days that follow fill with play alongside her and Alexander. She confides that her mother left two years earlier, unaware of the darker truth: the woman had not walked out but died as an unwilling subject in Shou Tucker's chimera experiments. As Tucker's yearly evaluation looms and his license hangs in the balance, he repeats that horror, merging Nina and Alexander into a single speaking creature.

Edward grasps what has happened only when the chimera addresses him in Nina's innocent voice. Unable to undo the transmutation, the brothers report Tucker to Colonel Mustang, but before justice can proceed the killer Scar reaches the house and murders Tucker, then ends Nina's suffering with a swift, prayerful mercy-killing, judging that her altered existence could hold nothing but pain. Her death haunts Edward long afterward, returning in nightmares and in his final reckoning with Truth, and Alphonse names her as a driving reason the two keep searching for ways alchemy might heal rather than harm.

The 2003 anime reshapes the details around the same core loss. There Nina shares extra adventures with the boys before being seized by Basque Grand to fuel chimera-soldier research, escapes with Edward's help, and is torn apart by Scar in an alley, her remains far grislier than the manga's quiet end. That continuity later has a surviving Tucker attempt to revive her, managing only a soulless doll even with a Philosopher's Stone at hand.