Mei Chang

Mei Chang (also spelled "May") is the seventeenth royal princess of Xing, born to the Xingese Emperor and the royal concubine representing the Chang house. Despite being so young, Mei has been tasked with finding a way to raise the social standing of the poor, downtrodden Chang clan in the eyes of the Emperor and has embarked on a journey to discover and present her father with the secret to immortality. Skilled as she is in the art of Alkahestry, Mei sets out across the desert toward Amestris with her beloved pet panda, Xiao-Mei, so that she may learn about the Philosopher's Stone and, arriving there, seeks out the tutelage of the Fullmetal Alchemist. Mei is a short young girl of Xingese ethnicity with fair skin, dark-colored eyes, and dark braided hair, with her hair ending in two buns on opposite sides of her head that let down six strands of her hair that reach to her knees. She also wears light and dark-colored, eastern-style clothing, similar to the Xingese traditional royal attire, and a light-purple bag around her left shoulder and right waist. She is often holding her pet panda Xiao-Mei. In her younger years, Mei wore her hair in two pigtails similar to Nina Tucker as shown when she remembers the day she met Xiao-Mei. Mei is a sweet girl with remarkable inner strength. She is independent, intelligent, and amazingly brave. This is evidenced by when she crossed the desert between Amestris and Xing with no one but her friend Xiao-Mei, something few people have been able to do. She has a short fuse, and has been known to become emotional easily, but Mei knows when to put her personal feelings aside to achieve her goals. This is shown when she selflessly puts herself in danger to find the Elixir of Life in order to save her family. The Xingese girl is very imaginative, sometimes to a fault. She occasionally loses focus in important situations when her imagination gets the better of her. However, her imaginativeness makes her very creative, and allows her to think of possibilities and effective solutions that most people would not have come up with. At times, her imagination makes her turn a deaf ear to what others are trying to tell her, such as why Al and Ed were looking for her in the north. Fear is something Mei rarely shows, often having greater courage than one would expect a girl her age to have; she faced off with the Mannequin Soldiers and Father during the Promised Day, without any signs of turning back.