There was a knock at the door, and Divine opened her eyes. She had been lethargic for quite a while, laying there with her eyes closed. Behind her was Flashfire, snoring quietly, even drooling a little, with Divine's canteen in her hooves. She stretched, trotted over to the door and opened it. It was Orgullo, and he looked more than just a little beat up.
Tied to his torso was an unconscious changeling, and Orgullo himself looked like he was going to pass out. He flew past Divine without so much as a hello, and deposited the changeling on the floor before shaking Flashfire and calling her name desperately. She woke up and looked at him, and they talked lowly for a bit before she injected him with a small clear syringe. After a few minutes he relaxed, and she began to tend to his blood-loss. It had been two whole days since she had sent him off, and one day since they took shelter in this house, the occupants of which either displaced or dead. Nothing was left in the house, save things bolted into the walls.
"M-maybe..Flash, if you're going to be...vivisecting it..give it some?" Orgullo asked, turning his head slightly to the passed-out changeling.
"Hm..I still have a good amount in this syringe, and no, you won't get it. You could become addicted, or overdose. Oh, that's the fate of many soldiers who are injured, both recently and for a long time. Opiates are highly addictive, I hear."
Morphine, Divine deduced, carefully holding down the changeling as she untied it. Flashfire took the syringe and looked for a break in the exoskeleton, eventually settling on a foreleg joint. Divine held it there for her as she drew the syringe up a little, then injected the rest of the morphine, which had become a greenish color due to the blood. Holding a hoof on its chest, Divine felt its heartbeat gradually slow as the opiate anesthetic took hold of its body. Only a few more steps before they could start.
Looking over, Divine saw Flashfire remove her lockbox of supplies from her pack and open it. She didn't have much: A cauterizer powered by batteries, scalpel, a few rolls of bandages, sterile syringes wrapped in plastic. A partly empty bottle of morphine. The seal was broken on it. The scalpel, surrounded by a blue aura, floated out of the box and made a controlled arc that stopped at the changeling's chest.
"Let's begin, shall we?"
The first incision was shallow, not deep enough to actually cut through the exoskeleton. Changelings had this thick skin because they didn't have any bones, so without it they were kind of like slugs. A few more cuts in the same spot and Flashfire was in, right between the lungs from what Divine could see. Instead of just two there were multiple segments.
"They're nothing like us," Divine noted.
"They're not equine, bovine, or anything. They're bugs, if anything, completely unrelated to us. I place them in..Animalia, the closest shared classification." Flashfire explained, cutting lower and revealing its stomach and more organs Divine couldn't place.
"It's nasty too..nearly their entire insides are green..what are we doing with this one when we're done?"
"You mean if it doesn't die? We'll kill it and toss it in the snow."
"Seems a little unorthodox."
"This whole war's unorthodox. I don't really care. What I'd like to do is be able to get lots of changelings. We could get some good marksponies to shoot them in places, you know, learn their weak spots. It'd be a lot easier to kill them, wouldn't it?"
Nodding, Divine watched intently, pulling open the exoskeleton and throwing it to the side. Without it it looked almost normal. The exposed flesh was made to exactly fill the exoskeleton.
Damn, this was nasty.