Dealing with Slavers [CLOSED]

Lucky started digging through one of his bags as he continued talking to Techno.

"Well, I'm not sure how much it'll help, but I've still got a healing potion on me that I traded with the zebra for that you can have. Speaking of which, where IS Athanix?"

Having found the potion, Lucky held it out on his hoof towards the medic.

Techno took the potion in his levitation and put it in his saddlebags while still patching up Sky's wing. He had already applied Med-X, which he still had a fair amount of, and was now working on wrapping the wing where it was injured. "Thanks Lucky." he said, stopping and stepping back to examine the now fully bandaged and mended wing. "Shouldn't be able to fly for a bit, bit that should heal up nice." he said, this time looking around. He did another internal roll call: He saw Starry, Lucky, Shutter and Sky, but not Arthanix. "Well, this is brahmin shit." he said. "We're down a zebra."

Shutter would have grabbed a few of the cleaner looking bottle and cans from the first crate, figuring it would be good to have a few supplies to divy up down the road.

However, after finding the first box of T-Rexes, Shutter would have stopped to pick one up. Aw man, this thing was cool! He'd never seen one of these before! Just look at that pointy teeth and green scales! Is this supposed to be a dragon? It didn't have any wings though...

Slipping one of the T-Rexes into his saddlebag (Just because), Shutter went on to opening the rest of the crates, eventually getting to the medical supplies.

"Hey! Techno! There's a bunch of doctor stuff in here! Come check it out!"

Shutter said, shoving that crate a but further away from the others, before heading over to search the loot the raiders had, giving the corpse he had created a wide berth.

Techno looked up the hill at Shutter. "Hey, Shutter, can you see Arthanix from up there?" he called up, starting towards the slaughtered caravan. He looked around, still concerned for Arthanix's health, looking for him. He figured if he went to the top, there'd be a better view, but since Shutter was already up there and probably had greater perception, he enlisted him to help look.

Starry lifted herself slowly to her hooves. The painkiller was in full bloom now, and the healing potion had taken it's full effect. She was able to lift herself, pushing past a dull pain in her chest.

She trotted very slowly toward a nearby set of rocks. She did not want to aggravate her wound, but the ponies needed help finding Athanix, who could be dying. It took her some time, but she finally reached the rocks. Peering around the side of them, she spotted Anthanix's unconcious body.

"Over-" she took a deep breath. Her voice had come out raspy and weak, but she would need to shout to get her comrades' attention. "Over here!" she shouted.

Techno stopped and turned as Starry shouted. He ran over to where she was peering over the rocks and saw Arthanix a bloody mess on the ground. He turned to Shutter up on the hill. "Change of plans, Shutter! Bring that medical equipment down here!". He then ran to Arthanix's side. "Whoa, looks like you were hit by something big..." he said, examining what he was up against this time. There was a large gash along his side, with blood still pouring out, creating a puddle, along with many bumps and bruises covering a fair portion of the rest of his body. He also seemed to have a few broken ribs- at this he mumbled to himself "What's with the Celestia-damned ribs today...". And that concluded his diagnosis. He was about to go to work, but there was one small problem.

He was out of gauze, the thing that he needed to patch up pretty much any wound he came across.

"Well..." Starry was taking deep breathes, shouting in her current condition winded her quite easily. "I never pass up an opportunity to learn, even if he's reminding me of my own condition."

Starry fell on her flank. Her mouth was wide open, she wasn't bothering to close it between breathes. She levitated her canteen to her lips and took a sip, but even her magic looked weak. "Let me know if you need help during this operation. I may not be quite as experienced as you medically, but if you need me to wrap something or hold something down, I'm your mare."

Techno gave a sigh, as per usual when he was in a situation such as this. "Hey, don't push yourself too hard, Starry. You need rest. Oh, by the way, you wouldn't happen to have gauze on y- err, on hoof, would you?" he asked, catching himself before he let slip a joke. "I used the last of mine on Sky, and I'm down to one potion... And this isn't the best place for an operation. Sorry to disappoint." he said, now wrapping Arthanix in a field of levitation to bring him back over to the group.

Starry groaned, as she forced herself back onto all four hooves. "C'mon, doc, I may not be in the best shape right now, but I'm not some foal like Trails or Sir Pounds a Lot who doesn't know their limits. I promise not to hurt myself, or get in the way."

Starry took a deep breath. 'That sure was a mouthful,' she thought to herself, 'Maybe you should focus on breathing while you're exerting yourself, Starry.' Indeed, keeping up with Techno was, in Starry's present state, quite exerting physically.

With a nod, Shutter would head back down the hill to the Caravan wreckage, groaning as he very carefully shoved the crate off the caravan and began pushing it towards the group, grunting and groaning the whole way thanks to his frail physique.

"Ugh...you know...I don't know...alot about...Unicorns...but...couldn't you...have just...picked this thing up...with your magic? Urgh..."

Shutter grunted, the metal crate proving a heck of a struggle for him...but eventually, he got it over to Techno.

"There...you should have everything you need in there..."
Shutter mumbled, not sure if that was the complete truth, but there should be more then enough.

Techno laid down Arthanix near where Sky was. He then walked over to the crate with the supplies to examine the contents. He found medical tools which could help him in a more delicate or required operation, but best of all, there were two rolls of gauze at the bottom of the crate. With a small 'phew', he levitated out the gauze and laid it near Arthanix and put the tools in an empty pocket of his saddlebag.

He then went to work on Arthanix. He did the same thing he did to Starry, turning him to face upwards and pouring the healing potion into his mouth. After that, he gave him a shot of Med-X near the wound and started cleaning it, pouring some water from his canteen over the large gash. He levitated out a surgical needle which he got from the box, and slowly and carefully started to sew the wound shut.

Starry observed the whole procedure. She had plopped down on her flank next to Techno before he began. She was, perhaps, a little in the way, but she wanted a close look at at what was going on.

"Anything I can do to help?" she asked him, as he was trying to concentrate on stitching Athanix's wound.

Athanix's mind came back to him after he felt something poking at his sides. He had just taken a little something to slow down his body's systems so that he would not bleed to death. Slowly opening his eys, he saw that the two blue inicorns had gathered around him and one of them seemed to be threading something with a needle.

There was only a couple reasons why the Doc might be threading something through him. He just closed his eyes as he tried to get some rest before they forced him to move on or anything.

"Thanks Doc." Athanix said queitly. "I couldn''t quite get my hands on the potions in my own satchel. Glad to see somepony actually found me though. I though I was going to have to fix my self." With a quite laugh he lay back again and enjoyed the bit of reprive he was getting, albeit the the extreme amount of trouble he was in.

Techno nodded as he focused on getting the needle to sew the gash shut. "It's no problem at all, and I did sign up for this to keep y'all alive. Gonna have to do my job every now and then. For now, just rest... got it. Starry, could you give him another shot of meds, please?" he said, finishing his work sewing it up and enlisting Starry to help. "Put it near the stomach, a bit above the gash, there." he said, now directing her to ensure she didn't accidentally give it in a place that could do harm.

Shutter watched the two Unicorns at work for a short time, before speaking.
"I'll go search the Raider wagon, no point leaving it alone and risking anything happening to it."

He said, starting to walk back towards the wagon, when he stopped, quickly turning back around.
"Oh! Hey! When you're done, you might want to search the first crate on the caravan, it had a bunch of food and water in it. I already grabbed some of the cleaner stuff to share around, but I might have missed some things...so if you could just pick through it later for anything we could use?"

He asked, hopefully.
"It won't be hard to find, it's the crate with a magazine on the top. A very...er...'interesting' magazine..."

With that slight mumble, Shutter's face turned a little redder as he remembered the rather interesting literature, before he quickly headed off towards the Raider wagon to keep anypony from noticing this.

"Oh! Wait up! I'll come with you!" Starry called to Shutter. The operation seemed to be over, and Starry had been eager to see what the spoils of their victory would be.

She followed him up the hill, moving at a slow and controlled pace. She was still hurting from the injury to her chest. When she got up to the top of the hill, she immediately climbed into the wagon and peered into the first crate. The top was off, so she didn't have to search all the different crates.

The magazine was the first thing she noticed. Not because of the nature of the magazine, but just because of her natural love for reading. "Ooo! New reading material!" Starry exclaimed, as she pulled out the magazine with her magic and opened to a random page. "Huh... this armor doesn't seem all too practical, I'm not sure the authors did their research... and that battle stance seems like it would be more effective at attracting mates than it would intimidating opponents."

"Hey, Shutter!" Starry called to him, turning the magazine to face him so he could see the picture of the mare on the page. The armor she wore could barely protect her modesty much less keep her safe, and the pose was fairly provocative. "What do you think? Would I look good in this armor, think it would be practical for combat? The battle stance looks a little... flirtatious, but if that's how swordfighting's done, I guess I could try to emulate it."

Shutter would have been heading towards the Raider wagon when he heard Starry call back to him from the Caravan.

Turning to head to see what she was talking about, his eyes immediatly fixed on the image, and his ears on what she was saying.
Needless to say, his face almost turned bright red from not only the picture, but the mental image, and he VERY quickly turned his look back to the wagon, stammering away.

"A-a-ah...I d-don't think that magazine i-is meant for r-r-realism..."

He stumbled, his walking pace speeding up as he tried to get to the wagon as fast as possible, so he could just put all his focus on searching it.
"I-I mean...the armour is...well...nice...b-but I don't t-think it's meant t-to defend?"

Soon, he reached the Raider wagon, as he almost jumped inside to search.
"Ohheywe'reatthewagonhowaboutwecontinuethisconversationlaterokaygood!"

He said without taking a breath, before quickly starting to search through the wagon.

"Hmm... Aha!" Starry had just made sense out of what Shutter had told her. "It's not meant for defense, so it must be an offensive fighting style! The armor must be small to allow for dexterity, while the pose is an offensive stance, like a tiger about to pounce!" The mare in the picture did look like she was about to pounce, but not in the way Starry had imagined.

"I should go and show this to the rest of the group! I'm sure everypony will love it, I'll have to start studying this right away!" Starry hopped down from the wagon, and starting trotting as quickly as she safely could down the hill toward Techno and the bunch.

//The wagon is the caravan. There's only one large wagon which the caravaneer pulled. Sorry about the confusion, I'll try to be clearer in the future.//

//Ahh, gotcha, i'll just have had Shutter picking through the food too then. Should I edit my last post for consistancy?//

"Shutter would have been picking through the food supplies, trying to not focus, when he heard what Starry said, especially about showing it to the rest of the group.

"...Wait, what?!"
He gasped, before quickly jumping down off the caravan.
"Nonononononono! I mean, the armour probably isn't for defending or attacking! It's...er...well...um...ah..."

Shutter wanted to try and explain it...but darn it, the words were just not coming to his mind! It wasn't like he was an expert in explaining such...well...'things' anyway...

Starry couldn't hear a word Shutter was saying. Her mind was racing, flipping through the pages and taking note of every minute detail in the mares' stances and motions, throughout the various panels. There were an awful lot of pictures, and the models weilded a wide variety of melee weapons, not just swords. Surprisingly enough, the authors had done their research. Most of the real content was authentic fighting styles, albeit spiced up for sex appeal.

By the time she reached the bottom of the hill, she had looked through every panel of the magazine, and had a crude image of much of it in her mind. She would practice through several of the motions in her spare time, but right now she was eager to show the magazine to her friends.

"Hey! Check out what I found!" she told them as she approached, waving the magazine in front of her. "I've looked through all the pictures. The text was pretty corny, but I bet you guys will enjoy looking through the pictures in much the same way as I did!"

She levitated the magazine outward, for one of them to grab it.

Lucky looked at the magazine being lofted in the air by the unicorn.

"Gee, and I thought I was the lucky one..." he said loud enough for everyone to hear. Lucky started walking towards the wagon, pausing only to get a better look at what appeared to be a sword being used in an entirely unsafe way, then continued forward. He crawled up into the wagon and started going through a random box.

Lucky looked at the contents of the box and immediately became confused.

"What in the hell? Who would carry all these useless toys around with them?" he said as he held one up with his hoof. He dug around in the box some more and then let out a yelp of surprise.

Techno snatched the magazine from the air. "Whoa, some form of book that isn't burned!" he said with a big grin on his face as he levitated it towards himself, taking it over to a rock and laying down to read it. As he started to read it, though, his grin faded into a baffled look, then he looked up at Starry, and back at the book, and back to Starry, then the book. "What exactly do you mean by 'enjoy', Starry...?" he asked, his eye twitching slightly.

Shutter just groaned as everyone apparantly took an interest in the magazine, turning back to the food supplies as he rooted through the crate.

"I think we've nearly picked this thing clean of anything we can use..."

He mumbled, before quickly shooting his head up at Lucky's yelp of surprise, looking over to see the Earth Pony had been rooting through one of the toy chests.

"What happened?! Did one of the T-Rex thingys bite you? Was there a scorpion inside?!"

"Oh, I think you know what I mean," Starry said suggestively. She added a conspicuous wink. Starry had figured Techno to be an educated sort of unicorn, and she was referring to what she perceived to be their mutual affinity for written material. She was, of course, failing to convey this in the most humorous manner imaginable. "Go ahead and skim through it, you might learn some new tricks. I certainly did, and I can't wait to try them out on somepony big and strong."

Techno glanced back down at the magazine, his eye twitching madly as he skimmed through the pages. She- I- w-what...? He was actually surprised to see legit fighting stances and techniques in the book, and looked back up to Starry, the light bulb going on. "Ohhhh, you were talking about the actual combat stances... That makes a ton more sense." he said, now turning back to the magazine to study what he assumed Starry had just been doing, herself.