Philip Gargantos Armstrong

Philip is a tall man, though he falls well short of the towering, heavily muscled build of his son Alex Louis. His blond hair is slicked back above a full beard and mustache, with a single curl resting over his forehead and long eyelashes framing his blue eyes. True to the family line, faint sparkles tend to drift through the air around him wherever he goes.

Something of a windbag, Philip delights in regaling any trapped listener with tales of the Armstrong legacy and his own storied military days, and it is plainly from him that Alex inherited the habit of trumpeting the deeds of past generations. Yet under the bluster sits a genuinely shrewd mind. When Olivier moves to claim the family estate, he reads the danger at once, understanding that Amestris has become unsafe and spiriting his wife and daughter away to Xing under the cover of a long holiday.

Once a general in the Amestrian military, Philip long stood as head of a family that had shaped the nation's finances for generations. His part in the story is brief but pointed: pressed by his eldest daughter to surrender the Armstrong mansion, he retires and departs, leaving Olivier to seize the estate after besting Alex in a brawl for it. By clearing the household off to Xing, he keeps his family beyond reach as potential hostages, a quiet act of foresight ahead of the conflict bearing down on the country.