//------------------------------//
// We depend on you 
// Story: Hello? 
// by Prince Polaris 
//------------------------------//

The trek across Centria was thankfully, uneventful.   The group of ponies climbed onto the fancy carriage that was hitched up to the engine, which was already starting to hiss with steam.   "My, this is fancy" Fluttershy said quietly, once she had carefully laid Silver down on one of the soft cushions.   One of the guards smiled, saying, "Well, why not take the fancy cars?  We're abandoning it all, anyway"

"Right, that makes sense" she said, smiling back.   "All right, we're goin!" barked the pony at the controls.   This time, he poked his head back into the car, counting out his four partners, Silver, and Flutters.   That was everypony.   With a hiss, the steam engine began to move, and the stallion driving pulled the whistle.   The sound of the whistle echoed up the tunnel to Threetown, where Celestia and Northern had moved inside to rest.   The princess teleported to the roof of the house right away, and Northern followed once he realized where she'd gone.   Once the whistle stopped, their ears went up, waiting for another.    And Northern put on a big smirk as two short toots came down the tunnel.   Celestia turned to look at him, her expression alone asking "What's it mean!?"

"Two toots, I told them, if they managed to recover both Silver and the Power cell" Said the stallion, and Celestia could've fainted with relief right there.   She didn't, of course.  But she almost felt like it.   "Oh, that's wonderful!   I hope he's okay...  I can't stop hearing what he said before the phone gave out" She grumbled.   "Ah, so it was bothering you" Northern said, ignoring the mocking expression she made towards him.   

"All right guys, hold on!" Yelled one of the ponies in the car, and Fluttershy scrambled to secure both herself and Silver, despite his protests.   The train was coming up on the temporary bridge that had been built overtop of a cave collapse, and it wasn't the safest thing.   The engine made it across fine, the front half of the car did, but half the ponies in the car made rather foal-like spooked noises as the second half suddenly sank down on its way across.   The bridge had buckled, but it had lasted long enough- the rear of the car made it across just fine, and the train continued on.   Didn't help the nerves of the ponies on the train, though.   Still, it was a short trip from Centria to ThreeTown, so that was the only spot that held any real danger.  

The train hissed as it came to a stop in the first town, and Celestia and North simply teleported onto the car.   The princess and the robotic mare seemed equally surprised to see each other, and Northern began to quietly talk to one of the guards as the train began to move again.    Celestia was the first one to speak, and in a quiet voice, she asked, "So, is this what Twilight worked so hard on?"   She was smiling a little, and she sat down next to the once-pegasus.   Fluttershy smiled, saying, "I suppose so...  I'm glad to see you again, Princess" In her usual softer tone of voice.   The white mare shook her head, and she gave the robot a little snout-boop as she said, "Just call me Tia, really".   The boop was followed by a soft hug, and Celestia took that time to whisper "Is Silver asleep?" To Fluttershy.   Silver himself answered, saying, "Nnnuh, tired though" As he slowly opened his eyes.   Celestia released Fluttershy from her hug, and she sat down in front of him, smiling at the stallion.   "Well, I'm glad you made it out" She said softly, giving him a gentle little nuzzle.

Taking a look over his body, Celestia noticed his leg.   She frowned a bit, asking, "How bad is it?" To Fluttershy, as if she knew SIlver wouldn't admit how bad it was.  "Pretty broken..." Fluttershy said, giving Celestia a worried look.  The mare nodded, saying, "Well, he can be the first one to the clinic onboard the twilight then".   As they talked, the train connected to another car, containing the remaining crew of ponies in ThreeTown.   In fact, the last ponies in the entire UnderWorld.   A triple-checked roll call was taken, and with a toot of the whistle, the train set off for the surface.   


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Onboard the SS Twilight, things were ramping up.   There was a nasty thunderstorm going on outside, and crews of Pegasi were doing their best to keep the storm from getting bad enough that the massive ship was put in danger.   It was somewhat of a losing battle, though.  The storm continued to build, and it was starting to get to the point where even something like a sonic rainboom wouldn't clear the sky for long.  On the bridge, Saphira and a few ponies were trying to fogure out how to interact with some of the displays, but they weren't making much progress.

The power room was actually left Empty, since everypony inside had left to work on other things.   Well, all except for Tinker, who had fallen asleep at one of the tables, the not-a-power-cell sitting on the table in front of him.  The ship was ready to leave, despite its incapability to actually do it.   The SS Twilight and SS Celestia were the only two ships left on Earth, because the atmosphere itself was beginning to get rough enough to make takeoff dangerous.   The ponies riding on the train got quite a startling notification that they had left the underground, in the form of harsh rain that began to batter the windows.    Now that it was aboveground, the train sped up, hissing with power as it began to race towards the docks where the SS Twilight sat.   

A few of the ponies onboard started to joke about how drenched the driver was, but Northern put a stop with it by suggesting that they switch places with him.    Nopony was willing to do it, of course, and the one at the engine was the best driver they had anyway.   The trip to the docks was rather quiet.   Everypony stayed glued to the windows, watching the battered landscapes pass on by.

Equestria wasn't holding together too well.  The railway had a good vantage point of the country, and the ponies inside could see what had happened to everything.   Highway bridges were laying along the ground, the smashed remains of various cars and trucks scattered along them.   Pegasi air-chariots were scattered all over the ground, since the cloud roads that once stretched all over Equestria had been thoroughly destroyed.  In fact, the only pegasi construct to remain was Cloudsdale itself, but the city was barely holding on.   The ponies in the train could just barely see it in the distance, floating low to the ground.  Its towers were collapsed, and the rainbows pouring from it were just a muddled mess of pale colors.

As the train pushed through the storm, the ground began to shake once more.   Nopony on the train said anything, but a few of them certainly began to look worried.   This earthquake wasn't nearby thankfully, so the train wasn't in much danger.     The same could not be said for Canterlot.   The next time lightning stabbed across the sky, everypony on the right side of the train got a glimpse at the ancient city, and it wasn't level anymore.   Everything went dark once more, until another network of lightning webbed across the sky, revealing Canterlot once more.   This time, it was lower.  The city's massive supports had finally given way, and the entire thing was falling to the farmlands below.

Darkness, once more.   Then light, as lightning arced through the sky, striking the ground somewhere in the distance.   This time, it stayed lit long enough for the ponies to watch as the city impacted the ground, and they could hear it.  The sound was like nothing they'd heard before, a harsh rumble that could be heard overtop of the noise form the earthquake, and the rain.    The darkness returned, but only for a brief time.   Next time Lightning striked, all they could see of the once-standing city was a pile of stone and broken buildings at the base of a mountain.  

There was a 'tock' from one of the windows.   It was just Celestia's horn, touching the glass as she let the pane hold her head for her.   She hadn't said anything, but she didn't really need to, the tears running down her face alongside the tightness of her jaw did enough of a job.   One of the guards in the car muttered "Damn" in a soft voice, and for the briefest of moments, a smile tugged at her lips.   Why was it always the dumbest things that amused her?

Fluttershy was the next one to speak.   "So, everypony in Equestria is leaving?" She asked quietly.  Northern decided to answer, and he looked over as he said, "Everypony above and below...   well, I suppose not every single pony alive.   There are ponies living in faraway countries, and there are even plenty of stubborn ponies living here in Equestria who are determined to stay.   But without the heart and the tree of harmony...  well, it seemed clear that heading to space seemed like the best idea" He said.   He then sighed, and kept going.  "We also don't have much of a choice, there isn't a single place on the planet that can handle the entire population of Equestria showing up at their doorstep.   We'd have to learn new sets of laws, we'd have to rebuild cities, and it might even come to war if the people housing us decide that we've overstayed our welcome.   And not only that, certain parts of the world are convinced that the country was cursed, and letting all of us in would bring the curse with us"

Celestia finally spoke up, saying, "Equestria's magic has two parts.  There is the magic flowing through the world, the magic of the tree and the heart, and then there is the magic inside of every pony, be them earth, pegasus, or unicorn.   I've got the elements of harmony on my ship, and our best plan is to try to plant a new tree of harmony wherever we go, to establish our new home".   "What happened to the heart and the tree of harmony?" Fluttershy softly asked.   "We don't know" came the reply, as the white princess wiped her own tears away.   "We thought it might be discord, but he-" she said, before she stopped suddenly.   She looked to Fluttershy, having the same realization that she did.   Where was discord?

And so, Fluttershy asked.   "Where is he?" She said, her ears lowering with two quiet clicks.   "Nopony knows" Celestia said soflty.   "After you went missing, Discord moved to canterlot with us, and he came close to me and Luna like it used to be before his original banishment..." She said, pausing to organize memories.  "I refuse to believe that he is the cause of this.   This isn't his brand of chaos, this is much worse.   I...   I should have listened" She said softly, frowning.  

"Listened?" The pegasus quietly asked.   Celestia took in a breath, then she said, "Not long before this all started, Discord had started to complain to me and Luna that something felt wrong to him, but we had no idea what.   It's not like we ignored him, but we had no idea what it could've been.  We tried to help him figure it out, but we came up with nothing.   I guess that's the closest we got to a warning" she said, looking more troubled the more she thought of it.  "I can't help but fear the worst.  Was he simply kidnapped to prevent him from stopping this?  Was he forced to do this?  Surely, someone or something couldn't have just killed him" She said.

Fluttershy was quiet for a while, then she said, "I hope he's okay" In a soft voice.   "I think you're right, Discord would never do these awful things, and if he's still the discord I know, then nothing could keep him contained forever"   This got Celestia to smile, and in contrast to the nightmarish landscape outside of the train, she said "I'm sure he'll make it out of whatever mess he's gotten into, and all he'd have to do is follow our beacons to find us again"

"Beacons?" Fluttershy asked, glad to divert the subject from the fate of her close friend to something more simple.   Celestia was happy for the change in discussion, too.  The train continued to push on through the storm, and the ponies inside began to talk about the fancy system of beacon sattelites that they would leave behind as they pushed out into space.  


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Firebox was soaked.   Still, he wasn't going to give up the chance to be the pony at the helm of Equestria's last ever train journey.  The rain had soaked every part of him long ago, but he was still hyper-focused on the task at hoof.  He kept watch on the tracks ahead to make sure they were clear and intact, he kept coal in the Firebox to keep the engine going, and he made sure the train was going at the proper speed for the grades and bends it had to raverse.   In the distance, he could spot the SS Twilight.   The massive ship had been a landmark since it was finished, shortly after the disappearence of Princess Twilight herself. 

It's not like Equestria forgot about it, of course.   The problem came with the ship's controls.   From the ground up, Twilight had designed the ship herself, and every system and computer was designed by herself.  Twilight made it clear that when the ship was finished, she would finally explain its functions to everypony.   It wouldn't make sense until it was finished, she had said.   When she had died, crews of ponies did their best to reverse-engineer the way it functioned, but Celestia forbid disassembling any of the ship.   

For the two entire centuries it had sat there, the princesses disallowed any projects to try disassembling the ship, whether to scrap it or find out how it worked.   Neither of them ever confirmed it, but the main theory that passed from snout to snout was that they were keeping it safe, in hopes that Twilight would return.   When Equestria had began to fall apart, the SS Twilight wasn't even on the list of ships that would be modified to hold ponies.  Originally, the twin sisters had managed to plot out the entire population of Equestria onto heir fleet of ships without needing the Twilight, and then even had room left over.  That is, until they remembered the UnderWorld.   

Finally, the orders were given to clear out what little was inside of the Twilight and get it ready for the ponies of the UnderWorld.  Soon after the orders were given, it was discovered that the networks of Servers on the ship weren't even holding anything to run the ship.   Equestria's other superfreighters had simplistic AI programs on board to run the entire thing, and following that logic, there should have been one on the Twilight.  but there wasn't.

That was fine though- the Earthquakes had managed to start caving in the PolariSoft bunker next to Ponyville, and the servers held within the bunker contained Saphira, Equestria's first and only fully sentient AI.  The solution to that problem was obvious!   Saphira managed to successfully transfer herself to the servers on the Twilight before her original servers were destroyed, and the problem was figured to be solved.   That is, until Saphira came to realize that the ship's systems were totally alien to her.   

Still, she had all the time in the world to figure it out.   They just needed to get the ship into space.  Firebox flinched as a blinding bolt of lightning slammed into one of the buildings at the dock, where a substantial Lightning rod had been mounted.   It had been seeing quite a lot of action during the storm!  Firebox began to slow the train as they came into the docks, passing empty docks, and warehouses, some of which had already been destroyed by either the Earthquakes, the heavy rain, or even a lightning strike, in the case of one unfortunate warehouse. 

The train began to squeal as it came close to the dock that led to the SS Twilight, where a drenched group of Royal Guards stood, in front of one of Celestia's chariots.   "Oh dear..." The mare said, looking at the little group of her poor guards.   They were there to get her back to the SS Celestia, but she felt bad that they'd been waiting there for her in that awful storm.  At least they were standing under the relative dryness of the train station!  Finally, the train came to a stop at the station, and Northern pushed open the doors to the cairrage.   "You guys ready?" He asked, smiling as he looked back at the others.   Fluttershy pulled Silver onto her back again, ignoring his protests.   "Flutters, I'm fine, I think I can walk..." He grumbled, though he wasn't even going to try to prove it once he noticed the looks that both Fluttershy and Celestia gave him.  

"Tia, I want you going to your ship right now, we'll take it from here" North said, and she hesitated, before sighing a little bit.   "You're right, it's getting bad" She muttered.  "Be safe, okay?  Don't hit anything on your way up" She said, giving North a smile.   He nodded in return, saying, "Now go".   The mare left the train car, and she ignored the rain that blasted in underneath the station roof as she stepped onto her chariot, grabbing onto it tightly.   "All right guys, let's go!" She barked, needing to yell to be heard over the rain.   Four sets of wings opened, and the group took off into the skies, making a beeline for the Celestia.