Airship Mauled

by Darkonshadows


Chapter twenty two, While You Were Out: Warm Kitty.

-Jacky-

I think Fizzle needed some time to herself, so now I was holding a sad looking turtle. Snickers pointed in Jade’s direction and then at Fizzle, was she upset about Fizzle being angry with Jade?

“Look Snickers, I think Fizzle and Jade’s relationship won’t be affected by this. They’re both really stubborn about how much they care for one another and need a little time.” The reaction I got was something approaching a hopeful look, I patted her on the head. “Don’t you have something else to worry about? I mean you dragged that nice reindeer into our lives for a reason after all, she was a real big help with protecting the balloon while it was being inflated.”

“Coo!” Snickers started to rub her flippers together in an evil manner and she looked excited about the prospect of something. I began to worry that Snickers might be evil, given that turtles shouldn’t come across as adorably demented like that. Then again, I couldn’t actually think a mystical turtle that might work for love gods would do something too horrible.

“We’re coming in for a landing everyone, it looks like you’re local goddess is waiting for you.” It seemed like Daring was a little worn out by her adventure, she didn’t sound as excited after she helped Jade down from the top of the balloon.

Her hoof to hoof fight with Screaming got Daring’s blood pumping until she saw Jade and helped finish off the remaining thestrals that were harassing us.

Looking over the side I could see Sekhet waiting for our landing. While she wasn’t smiling too much, she at least looked happy to see us return home. There was a strange stallion sitting next to her, looked like a doctor. So Velvet and Blade did actually see Rata on the ship, he probably told Sekhet to acquire some medical help for the La Perms.

I decided to go help the landing preparations, even started whistling the infamous gangplank galleon tune as I grabbed the gangplank.

Ah, classic pirate music, the best kind. Still can’t see what Jade see’s in ninjas, we beat the crap out of a lot of them. The inverse ninja law was pretty bad for them, pirates only had the back stabbing for more money if your captain is a complete asshole law and I wasn’t about to do that to my friends.

-Sekhet-

“You know, I’ve never helped a goddess with anything before.” Oh yay, one of those kind of ponies. Why did Ratatoskr have to get the talkative kind of doctor? Bedside manners, what are those, let’s talk about it!?

As annoying as he sounded to me, we needed him and I couldn’t just riddle him into the ground because he was annoying. That would be clearly against sphinx rules, I can’t riddle without a just cause for it. He’s not actually trespassing and is offering his services to us wholesale for long as we needed him around, we are paying him for his skills and not his personality.

“Look we require your assistance with this because the local doctor is good at skin and fur care only.” I liked Potassium well enough, his fur and skin care advice were top notch. Never has a goddess like me felt so fluffy, his special talent was a worthy one. “We’ve been meaning to get around to building at least a clinic out here, only we don’t really have people that can really staff it.”

“Well if you need some ponies that are looking for a job, I can refer them to this place. Airship Mauled was it?” The ship came in for a landing and the doctor looked curious as to whom his patients were. “So what are the conditions of the patients, I don’t exactly like bad surprises here.”

“Broken bones, maybe some internal bleeding and some other horrible injuries I’m sure.” I lowered myself to look him in the eyes. “Let’s just say they are very important to me. So do your best mortal, because I am paying you to help my friends.”

“Don’t worry about it, I’m good for fast medical procedures.” The pink eyed unicorn gave me a friendly smile, before it dropped slightly. “Though the environment I will have to work in might a bit of a problematic factor if I can’t move my patients from the ship.”

“Do you what you can for them.” I kept my tone clipped and even, because I wasn’t about to rip into someone who was already willing to help us with this.

The ship came in for a landing in the only zone in Airship Mauled where airships absolutely refused to crash. Right next to wherever the Ardent Survivor was currently parked. The aptly named ship did kind of create a safety zone for other ships to land in this incidental airship destroying town.

I shrunk down to a more manageable size as Jacky lowered the gangplank while whistling a jaunty tune and I made my way up to meet her.

“I brought a doctor, who needs to be checked out? Ratatoskr said it was pretty bad, but his descriptions leave much to be desired.” It was not hard to procure a doctor with a delivery squirrel as fast as Ratatoskr was.

“Everyone really, just to be sure we don’t have slow acting poison in our systems. We did fight some ninja style thestrals. I don’t honestly know where they were keeping all those crossbow bolts or throwing stars, but they pulled them out of multiple different places on their bodies. Kind of like how I pull out my party cannon come to think of it.” Glaring at Jacky, she decided to get to the point and motioned for us to follow her slightly limping form. “Captain Jade, Mother To All Chief Cook Kuril and Sugar The Killer Bunny are all really the worst off.”

“Yeah, you might want to check Jade out first.” Turning to Fizzle, I saw that she look distracted and slightly down on herself. The unicorn with us balked as he saw Fizzle’s broken horn and bandage wrapped head.

“What about you? Your horn is…” The doctor started off.

“It’s been broken for a long time now and I’m still capable of doing magic, I’m not in danger of dying and I’m certainly not using my magic anytime soon. I happen to be on medication for the pain from using my magic with a recently acquired head injury so I’m perfectly fine!” Fizzlepop started off slowly and got angrier as she went, she was really worried about her bed cat and pointed her hoof at the broken nosed Abyssinian. “Now get to Jade!”

“Right, I’ll get right on that! I’m Quick Patch by the way and… I know this cat, we’ve met before! She was my first Abyssinian patient after an unfortunate meeting with a chimera, did she get mauled by another one?” Hearing this Quick Patch talk about a chimera, I had several guesses as to who had harmed Jade previously and when that had happened. I was gently shoved aside by Maries who growled at the good doctor.

“If another chimera did maul her, they won’t be alive for very long.” All three heads stated in complete unison. After that they all stated one word apiece. “Help… Jade… now!”

“No it was a really strong thestral, beat the crap out of her.” Thank you for the information Jacky, because that was painting a target on whoever did this. If Maries ever met them, then that’d be quite a violent fight.

“Well I can see that the chimera she met really did become her friend as advertised.” The doctor just shivered a bit and started his diagnostics on Jade.

“Yes, well, the status between Jade and us has evolved a bit from the whole need food to survive thing straight to dating.” Maries three heads smiled at him showing their fangs and teeth. “Also we’re lawyers, defense attorneys mostly. Not that we can’t work a case for malpractice if you fail to help her. Quick question, how fast can you run?”

“Yikes, wouldn’t want to be on your bad side then. Not only could you eat me alive figuratively, you could also do it literally. Whoa, are you sure it wasn’t full sized adult male chimera that did this?! These injuries are really quite severe, she’s not critical at least. Close enough to it to be worrisome though.” Everyone was now waiting for Dr. Patch to tell us his findings as he scanned Jade. “I can help her, but I’m going to need some assistance. The not very squeamish kind.”

“I’ll go get Fresh Start and Cheerilee, they’ve both have some medical training. I can also assist in keeping either one of them focused on the task at paw.” I know they were not a lot, but it could help.

With that I was flying to get the two mares I spoke of, Priest Jade looked pretty bad off and Celestia would definitely flip out when she next visited if she saw her in that state.

-One hour later, Fizzle-

Let’s see Jade had a blade wound in her side from where a shuriken pierced her, most of the bones throughout her upper torso were cracked. Her nose and two ribs were broken and her body was mostly a giant bruise with some internal bleeding. Her left arm was worse off than her right arm, the bandaged crossbow bolt wounds in her shoulder and rear were slightly opened up and were easily fixed again.

This was all better than Jade’s spine being knocked out of alignment at the very least, according to Dr. Patch she’d make a full recovery. Patch then moved onto mom after telling us that Jade wouldn’t be waking up for a while, mostly due to the extensive nature of her injures were. She needs the rest anyway.

Mom’s right arm almost entirely shattered, it was broken in three places and there were various fractures throughout the bone there. The muscles throughout her right arm were messed up, she had magical backlash damage across her body starting from a point centering on her right arm where the damage was at its worst.

The doctor said mom would be fine, but she shouldn’t do whatever she did to incur that much magical backlash damage in the first place ever again or anytime soon if it was unavoidable. The only reason why the mom’s barrier held up for long as it did was because the ‘Mega Flare’ was pure raw magical energy that slowly turned into pure unrelenting physical force.

The magical sustain of the shield was good at taking energy based attacks with little physical components to them and Bahamut broke through that with a frightening amount of raw power. Mom would wake up within a day or so, she wasn’t nearly as bad off as Jade was.

Quick Patch couldn’t fully help Sugar. He was not a veterinarian, but he did his best to help our favorite death rabbit out anyway. Sugar wouldn’t be deflecting magic for a while if she wanted to recover from this. Her horn had only taken minimal amount of damage, but the doctor was using unicorn estimates so it was unknown if he was on the right track there as Sugar’s magic deflecting horn was not the same as a normal unicorns.

Jacky got a clean bill of health, she just needed to rest and get off her injured leg for a few hours and to let her various swelling bruises go down. Fat chance of that happening with her luck.

I was checked out. I would recover, but under no circumstances am I to use magic unless it was life or death until my head injury cleared up. Otherwise any magical use now could be fatal, I was more so at risk than an average unicorn with a normal horn. Also I was informed that I should keep taking my pain medication and was prescribed something a little stronger if the pain became too much. I had a small, admittedly rough, discussion about my broken horn.

Blade’s wings would be fine, thanks to them being splinted correctly. Like Jacky she needed to rest, he fixed a few minor problems with her wings.

Velvet was the surprising one, her internal body temperature was a bit off and lower than it should be. It was chalked up as a side effect from her constant use of ice magic. Her surface body temperature was relatively warm by comparison. Other than that she was a little underweight for her size and needed to eat a little more than she currently was. Sekhet said she’d set up a training regimen for the deer while she was here and it was quickly, if begrudgingly by Velvet, accepted.

Daring Do was physically fine, her projectile attracting helmet required a little maintenance. Though Dr. Patch did tell her to lay off eating too many snack cakes.

We started unloading the stuff that mom and Jacky got a hold of, after we brought both Jade and Mom inside carefully. This was a paid for house call and as such Quick Patch, who apparently knew Jade from around the time she first met Maries, would stick around to see them returned to full health.

I sought out some company. Mom was still out and Jade wasn’t going to be waking up any time soon due to her miniature coma. Jacky gave me sisterly affection, but I didn’t need that at the moment.

So I chose to go to the one being that might give me what I needed right now, warm cat snuggles. Well she was one third cat at least.

“Maries… I need a hug.” I was quickly obliged without question, they didn’t even say anything and just held me close. I was nuzzled on both sides by Mara and Maria, while Marie snaked around to pat me on the back with her chin.

A nice, warm, fluffy hug from a chimera. Most ponies would run away from them yelling and screaming about a monster, yet here I am embracing them lovingly. I was open to the idea of dating them in public, even if it might have been a problem. The history of most chimera in general was that of a large negative connotation, one that kind of fits unless you knew a chimera personally like we did.

Seeking comfort from Maries just felt right at this moment in time, they held me close to them in their safe and muscular embrace.

-Velvet-

I was led to a scruffy looking cow roasting a large marshmallow over the central fire by Snickers, the cow gives Snickers a curious glance before looking to me.

“Okay, I can see Snickers is back, but who the hay are you?” The cow sounded rather uncouth, but Snickers seemed quite insistent that I introduce myself here. So I did.

“I’m Velvet Iceberg Deer of the Ice Shapers clan, pleased to meet you… er…” I watched as the cow gnashed at the marshmallow as she answered me.

“Names Arizona, you look really prissy.” Yep, talking with her mouth full and getting marshmallow chunks all over my… over my… she got marshmallow on my floof!

“Why you brainless brutish bovine, how dare you desecrate my floof!” It didn’t take a second for my reprisal.

After my first hit, I ignored the fact that the remaining marshmallow on the stick went to a smiling Snickers.

I had a cow to pound upon!