"Hello?" Asked Northern Sheild. He was surprised to see Celestia, of all ponies, come up on his computer. And she didn't seem happy. "Oh, Hi there Tia, what's going on...?" Asked the stallion, as concern edged onto his snout. The white princess let out a long sigh, and she said, "I'm not going to lie to you, we have a problem, a big one". A nervous smile crossed Northern's face, but he spoke up to say "Well, I'm listening..." And with that, Celestia set into her explanation.
"Well, as the name implies, the SS Twilight is related to the mare herself, Twilight Sparkle" Celestia started with, and Northern nodded a little in agreement. "I remember her..." He said softly, and Tia nodded in return before she continued. "Well, before she left us, Twilight had a lot of projects, and one of the biggest ones was a device, small enough to fit in a saddlebag, yet holding enough power to power the ship itself for centuries, possibly forever depending on how its capabilities to recharge itself work" She said. There was a bit of a pause, then, "However... we don't know where it is. And we're just now finding out how twilight made her ship so spacious- it was designed to utilize that power device, and we don't know where it is. Sadly, not even I know any more than everypony else- all I know is that Twilight took the core from the ship to use for one of her own projects, and she went missing before it could be completed. Without it, the ship can't do much more than float around in the water, and even if we did somehow get it into space, it would have to rely entirely on solar power which wouldn't be... the safest". And with that, she finally stopped, letting herself give out a sigh.
Northern was quiet for a while, then he said, "So... what do we do, then? everything except Centria and ThreeTown here has collapsed, and the latter we're just barely managing to keep stable as ponies evacuate. I guess we can live on the ship until the core is found, but do you even have any leads on it? I mean, I... is it even going to be safe? I thought we were going to be seeing Tsunamis soon thanks to all the activity underground?" Northern asked, and even though he tried to prevent it, the anxiety slowly came out into his voice.
"I... I don't know, Northern" Celestia said, her eyes full of distant sadness. "Twilight didn't even tell me where she was going when she finally disappeared, and all I know is that it must have been related to what was happening with her friends. She went missing right after Applejack died, and we thought it was to be with Fluttershy, since she was the last of the old elements remaining, but then she was found to be missing" Celestia said. "And not even Discord could find them!"
Northern felt the urge to say something along the lines of "Sweet Celestia...", but well, now wasn't the time. Instead, he simply muttered a curse under his breath, and he looked up again to the camera as he asked, "So, I haven't talked to Polaris in a while, how are him and Saphira doing with the ship's systems? Are we at least making headway there?"
Celestia sighed, which was already pretty much the answer Northern had been expecting. "Well, Saphira has settled in on the ship's server rooms, but she tells us that she is only able to do that because it seems that they were left unused! But everything else on the ship, the control systems, the life support, the navigation, she can't even look into them, she told me that it would be like a pony trying to comprehend how the body of a tree functions. She told me that the servers she had moved onto are what they had assumed held the ship's computers... and the plans don't show any other computer networks on the ship".
"Ugh" Northern said, resting his head in his hooves. "Well, from what I can see, it sounds much better to risk salvation on the Twilight than to wait for the rocks to descend onto our heads down here" Northern said, looking back to the screen with a grim, but slight smile. Celestia offered a gentle smile in return, and she spoke up again to say "I'm not going to take off in the Celestia until I absolutely have to, I want to be here to help if I can. We're going to send out ponies to search through what's left of Twilight's castle, and I'm going accompany them myself". She seemed to hesitate, then she said, "I... it's a slim chance, but I hope that the device is there, because I know she would sometimes carry out projects in the castle itself, so perhaps it's there"
"It's worth a shot" Northern said, smiling a little. He hesitated somewhat, considering the idea of telling the princess that she didn't need to put herself in such unnecessary danger. But he didn't want to suggest it, he could tell that this was important to her. "Well, be safe out there, for all of us" He said, giving her an encouraging smile. The princess nodded in return, saying "You too, North" before the two ponies stopped the call.
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In the main power room of the SS Twilight, a crew of ponies were doing their best to reverse engineer Twilight's power core from the socket it was designed to go into. It looked simple enough! A hole in the heavily reinforced wall, perfectly shaped for a cylinder about the size of a milk jug to fit. But there wasn't much to go off of, really. In the words of Polaris, one of the ponies on the team, "It's like trying to design a generator, and all you have is the power cord that it would plug into!"
Interestingly, there was something to go off of. In the power room, in a capsule on the wall, there was a device that looked just like the power core! However, it clearly wasn't what they were searching for. This one had a panel on the side that extended out from the cylinder, and it had antennas that extended from it. The panel didn't look like it would come off without breaking the device, so it was set on a table by itself.
It wasn't the only one, though. There were also prototype Capsules, which did fit into the ship's power socket! They didn't do anything, though. One of them seemed to hold a slight amount of power, but all it did was light up the machine, and only enough for it to complain that it didn't have enough power. Still, it was a lead, something to work on. Tinker, an old dragonpony who was part of the team, had made the suggestion to try 'charging' the battery that they did have, but that would mean figuring out how they even stored the power they held.
Thankfully, He and Polaris had been around long enough to remember some fragments of what Twilight had done to make the original battery! If only the knowledge was useful...