Pinako Rockbell

In her later years Pinako is a tiny, wizened figure, her gray hair pulled into a stiff upright ponytail with a pipe rarely far from her lips. Her diminutive height is a running joke she shares with Edward, the two forever trading jabs about which of them is the shorter. Old photographs tell a different story. As a young woman she stood tall and striking, full-figured, with cascading brown locks and warm dark eyes that turned heads around the village.

Blunt, tough, and quick with a sarcastic remark, Pinako hides a deep well of warmth beneath her gruff exterior. She never scolded Edward and Alphonse after their forbidden experiment went wrong, choosing instead to shield them from the disapproval of adults like Hohenheim and Roy Mustang, and she gently talked Edward out of the guilt he carried over his brother's condition. Her humor runs dry. Rather than nag Ed about the automail he keeps wrecking, she simply calls him her best-paying customer and pads his bill for rush work. She enjoyed a lively youth of drinking and revelry, and even in old age refuses to admit to loneliness. The 2003 anime gives her a bitter edge, a lingering distrust of the military that she keeps hidden from Winry, whereas her manga counterpart has long since made peace with the war that claimed her son.

A lifelong resident of Resembool, Pinako turns up in town photographs stretching back to 1866, already a cheerful drinking companion of the strangely ageless Hohenheim. She married into the Rockbell family, gave birth to her son Yuriy in 1873, and earned a reputation across Amestris as a formidable engineer nicknamed the Leopardess of Resembool. It was Pinako who introduced Hohenheim to a young local woman named Trisha, a match that produced Edward and Alphonse, both of whom she helped bring into the world. Her family circle then narrowed through repeated grief. Yuriy and his wife Sarah died practicing battlefield medicine during the Ishvalan war, leaving Pinako to raise their daughter Winry, and Trisha's illness soon claimed her as well, orphaning the Elric boys.

When the brothers' attempt to revive their mother ended in horror, Alphonse carried his mutilated sibling to Pinako's door, and she performed emergency surgery to keep Edward alive before quietly burying the failed creation behind the Elric home. She warned the boy that fitting automail and recovering would be brutal and slow, yet he insisted on a single year, a promise that won her respect. She built his mechanical arm and leg, and later, once Edward had become a State Alchemist, she reopened old wounds by helping him exhume that buried body. Measuring the bones herself, she confirmed the corpse was male and could never have been Trisha, freeing Edward toward the truth about restoring his brother.

In her final chapters Pinako shelters Edward's ragtag allies before the decisive confrontation, welcomes Winry home, and falls unconscious when the nationwide circle drains the country's souls, vowing even then to give Hohenheim a thrashing on his return. She is the one who finds his body resting before Trisha's grave, and she lives long enough to greet the children Edward and Winry eventually raise.