Sheska

Sheska is a mousy, bespectacled young woman whose glasses and unruly hair frame a shy demeanor. Her home is famously swallowed by towering stacks of books, so many that she can be found buried beneath a collapsed pile of them. Though the manga never colored her in its main pages, Arakawa's cover art for a collected volume reveals her with bright orange hair, making her the only true redhead in the manga's cast.

She struggles with a low opinion of herself, dismissing her own worth and treating her love of reading as more burden than blessing, and she wounds easily, as when Elicia Hughes teases her with the nickname Bookworm. That preoccupation with books has cost her one job after another, a serious problem given the hospital bills for her ailing mother. After Edward pays her generously and Alphonse offers gentle encouragement, she manages to move her mother to better care and begins, cautiously, to believe in herself.

The Elrics seek her out to learn whether Tim Marcoh's research journal had been stored in the library's First Branch, which burned down. Dug out from beneath her avalanche of books, she confirms their fear that the book was indeed lost in the fire, but reveals as they leave that her perfect recall lets her reproduce it exactly as she read it. Within five days she recreates Marcoh's notes so faithfully that Edward can crack their coded meaning. When court-martial records also turn out to have been housed in the First Branch, the brothers recommend her for that work as well, and she is taken on at a desk in the military's records department. She is last seen covering for Colonel Mustang as he digs into Hughes' murder, inadvertently letting the detail slip to Envy, who is disguised as Captain Focker.

The 2003 anime greatly expands her part. There she first meets Edward while still at the library, later gets rehired by Frank Archer, and uses the access to probe Hughes' death, uncovering the suspicious truth about the Fuhrer's secretary Juliet Douglas. Trusting only Winry Rockbell, she flees the military alongside her after a brush with Sloth, retreats to Resembool, and gradually reassesses Mustang's motives. She also breaks the news of Hughes' death to the Elrics and appears again in Conqueror of Shamballa, by which point she and Winry have become close friends.