Tim Marcoh

Marcoh reads as an aging man, his face deeply lined and set with a heavy jaw. Broad across the shoulders yet fairly short in stature, he keeps mostly dark hair that has whitened along the sides, another sign of his years. A lab coat is his usual garb early on, swapped for an ordinary coat later. Once Scar worked him over, his features were left warped and one eye permanently drooped half shut.

To the villagers he seemed a warm, diligent, honest physician who freely treated ordinary folk. Privately, though, the war never let him go. His deep hand in the atrocities of the Ishvalan conflict left him carrying a trauma much like post-traumatic stress, a churn of guilt, powerlessness, and loathing at having failed to check the men who ran Amestris. His shame ran so deep that he came to view his own death as both fair punishment and release, even a way to strike back at his masters. In time he shifted toward atonement, laboring to aid the Ishvalans however he could, and after his face was ruined he actually grew lighter and braver, ready to confront the powers he had once dreaded. He also proved a capable bluffer, lying convincingly on the rare occasions the situation demanded it.

As a State Alchemist Marcoh led the program racing to manufacture a Philosopher's Stone, and he built his samples by sacrificing captive Ishvalans and Ishvalan soldiers inside Laboratory 5. Sickened, he fled the army with a batch of flawed stones and settled in a quiet town, using them to cure the sick under the Mauro name. The Elric brothers eventually located him, and he pointed them toward research he had stashed in the National Central Library. The homunculi later confined him, first under threat to his village and then in a cell beneath Central, where Envy delighted in reminding him his hometown would burn if he ran. Scar found him there, and rather than grant the death Marcoh begged for, he mangled the doctor's face as a disguise and pressed him into the campaign against the homunculi. When Envy cornered him, Marcoh struck back with the transmutation circle hidden on his palm, crippling the creature's core, a trick rooted in his rare knowledge of how to unmake a Philosopher's Stone with a single touch. He later helped dupe Pride alongside Heinkel and Alphonse, and in the end he pledged to restore Roy Mustang's sight in return for the colonel improving conditions for the Ishvalan people. In the 2003 anime his path is shorter, ending when Lust interrogates and murders him.