"Alchemy, it's a working science in my world," he corrected quietly. "But we'd been studying alchemy all our lives before that, we just. Well, we needed a bit more instruction before we were capable of handling human transmutation. The bitch of it is, for all the crap we lost for it, it had worked for the most part. But someone came along and stole the homunculus we created and poisoned her against us."