Transformers: Harmony

by megatron_91

Chapter 9

Transformers: Harmony
Chapter 9
By: Megatron_91

The conductor looked at his gold pocket watch as the train’s whistle billowed out into the evening. Making one final call for any late arrivals, the large black stallion with a little blue hat, quickly stepped inside and closed the door of the quickening train car. As the large, iron-clad locomotive released a cloud of steam and began to pull away from the busy Canterlot station, he began walking off towards the first car to begin punching tickets. He stared out the windows as he passed. Starting off at the pace of snail, he noticed as the large steam-powered engine gradually began moving towards the outskirts of the capital city.

The process of moving through the crowded outer areas of the city took several minutes as the train had to take its time building up steam and speed. Finally, as it approached the edge of Canterlot the powerful locomotive was able to shake free the shackles of its urban environment and begin speeding forward as it entered the vast open countryside. The steam engine’s destination was the small farming community of Ponyville and it was expected to arrive there later that night. It let out another shrill whistle as the engineer pulled down on the string attached to the bellows. However, unbeknownst to the conductor, the engineer, and all the oblivious passengers inside, the rail-riding transportation was being followed.

A flash of red-and-silver metal came screaming down from the sky and stopped just above and to the rear of the train. Soaring as low to the ground as he felt comfortable, Laserbeak began scanning the transport, searching for the target his master had sent him after. The Decepticon spy hated being this out in the open. Had it not been for Soundwave’s specific orders to capture this target quickly, the deceitful buzzard would have probably tracked this mare for days before making his silent, stealthy strike. He hissed into the air as he located the pony he sought sitting a few cars up from where he currently was.

Taking flight back into the air Laserbeak spread his wings and swooped down, gliding over the tops of the moving passenger cars. He stopped once he reached the gap where the car his mark sat in met with the one in front of it. Landing on the coupling joint the Decepticon flyer chuckled as he began firing two ruby-powered lasers from his eyes at the bars connecting the two cars.

………….

Meanwhile, within the train’s third passenger car, seated in a small, but comfortable, booth Twilight Sparkle had her forehead presses against the cool glass of the window. She sighed inwardly, watching lazily as the rolling plains and sparse trees zoomed past the frame at top speeds. The soft, satin booth seat seemed to swallow her bottom and back as she listened to the sound of the train rhythmically rattling on the tracks. She wanted to fall asleep, but she knew she had to do something first; moving her eyes from the window, Twilight could see the cream pegasus nervously looking at her. She really didn’t want to do this.

As Twilight peeled her face from the window, she looked at the coy pegasus, sitting on the booth across from her, staring at her with concern-filled eyes. An eternity seemed to pass in the little, square room; neither pony was quite sure of what to say to the other. Finally, Fluttershy opened her mouth to speak.

“Fine, Fluttershy, you want to talk? Let’s talk,” Twilight sighed, cutting off her animal-loving friend before she could speak. “Something’s been bothering you, so what is it?”

The timid pony nervously shuffled her hooves together as she looked down at the floor. Slowly she built up the confidence to do what she promised Rainbow and find out what was wrong with their unicorn friend.

“Why did you lie to everypony?” she asked, barely whispering as she said it. She looked at Twilight with the most innocent eyes the lavender mare had ever seen.

“Listen, Fluttershy,” Twilight answered, closing her eyes and speaking in a smooth, calming voice like a mother trying to reassure her child. “There’s no need for you to worry about that. Trust me, everything is okay,” she explained, putting on a fake smile.

“B-but it’s not okay,” Fluttershy squeaked, getting up from the sofa.

“Fluttershy, I-” but before she could finish her sentence the cream-colored pegasus had crossed the small wooden floor of their booth and was now standing not more than a foot from her snout.

“Twilight, you’re one of the bravest, smartest, ponies I know,” she began, looking the lavender unicorn in the eye. “You and I both know you have a family worth fighting for; there’s Spike, your parents, and Shining Armor and Cadence.” She listed off each one while pointing her hoof at her friend’s chest. “You should be back at the Autobot’s base with the others; not here. Why did you lie?” she asked, restating her earlier question with a surprisingly more confident tone.

Twilight hesitated to answer. Should she tell Fluttershy the truth? No matter how hard she fought it, the lavender mare could feel the crushing weight of her own guilt, not only at having lied to both Fluttershy and Optimus Prime, but for failing to keep her friends safe by letting them stay with the Autobots. She had to tell someone, and now Fluttershy was listening. She slowly closed her eyes and lowered her head as a single tear left her eyelash, rolling down her cheek to the floor.

.“I-It’s my job to protect all of you and now…I’ve failed,” Twilight stuttered, fighting back tears as she spoke each word.

“Excuse me?” Fluttershy asked, raising an eyebrow. She was more than confused about what the depressed unicorn had just said. As far as she was aware, none of their friends were dead or anywhere close to death. “Twilight, what are you talking about?”

Again Twilight hesitated, wanting to word what she was about to say very carefully. Slowly, Twilight responded to the beige pegusus’s query. “Fluttershy, would you consider me the leader of our group?” she asked, looking at the floor and lazily kicking it with her hoof.

“I guess so…” the perplexed flyer responded. She scratched the back of her head with her hoof as she continued mauling over Twilight’s question. “You are the one Princess Celestia seems to talk to whenever we all go see her…”

“EXACTLY!” Twilight suddenly shouted, causing the timid pony to leap back in fright and fall on the bench she had been sitting on.

“Do you two mind!?” a fedora-wearing stallion in the booth opposite of them groaned in irritation. “I’m trying to work on a script here!” he complained. He got up and slammed the booth door shut, hoping to block out the two chatting mares.

Twilight blushed slightly. She hadn’t meant to cause such a commotion. She felt like going over and apologizing to the blue pegasus, whom she vaguely recognized as somepony called Snapperworth who was a frequent visitor to her library back home, but she decided it would be best to just continue her conversation with Fluttershy. She had to get these feelings of anxiety off her chest and the poor, timid flyer was her current target.

“Exactly,” the lavender mare repeated, turning back around to face her friend. “Princess Celestia thinks I’m the leader and therefore it’s my responsibility to keep you all safe,” she explained, waving her arms frantically in the air.

Fluttershy put on a small, soft smile. “Twilight, I think your jumping to conclusions; I don’t think the Princess would want to put that much pressure on you. She cares too much. She’s almost like a second mother to you isn’t she?” she asked, referring to the amount of time Twilight had spent with the Princess when she was younger.

“But that’s the point, Fluttershy!” the upset mare exclaimed, leaning forward on her two front legs. “I have known the Princess that long! That’s why she trusts me enough to not only make me the leader but to keep you all safe as well! I mean, what would happen to the Elements of Harmony if one of us died? It would be a disaster! All of Equestria would fall into chaos!!” she exclaimed, answering her own question in a panicked voice. Her body was now beginning to visibly shake slightly as her natural anxiety and paranoia began to affect her.

“Twilight, please calm down!” the frightened pagasus desperately pleaded.” I think you’re over thinking things; you’re starting to panic!” She reached out and wrapped her hooves around the shaking unicorn in an attempt to relax her.

Twilight shouted in anger, not caring if she interrupted the writer next door anymore as she ripped herself from Fluttershy’s hug. Everything was now starting to explode out of her like a block of dynamite. Nerves, anxiety, worries, everything was coming out of the small, lavender mare, and it was all directed at the timid, but caring, friend sitting in front of her.

“Calm down!? How can I calm down when I know I’ve failed the Princess because I couldn’t keep you all safe; because Rainbow Dash and the others had to go all gung-ho and fight a war that’s just going to get them all killed!? she yelled, throwing up her hooves in anger; tears were beginning to run down her face. “You want to know why I lied to Optimus? I lied because I wanted to get you out of there!” she exclaimed pointing towards the pegasus. “You didn’t have a reason to stay and fight! I just wanted to be sure I could at least keep one of my friends alive! I just wanted to make sure one of you was safe!” she cried, slumping down to the ground as tears began to flow from her puffy violet eyes.

Fluttershy cautiously approached her weeping friend and began rubbing her back with her hoof. “Twilight…this isn’t about failing the Princess…isn’t it? You know she would never want to put you through that much stress. So, why do you think you have to protect us?”

Twilight waited to answer, quietly letting the cream pegasus continue to rub her back as she finally built up the nerve to speak again. “The six of you are the first real friends I’ve ever had that weren’t my big brother,” she whimpered from her place on the floor. She began to dry the tears from her eyes as Fluttershy continued to message her back and shoulders. “I don’t want to lose any of you; you’re the best things that have ever happened to me…”

“But, Twilight,” the cerulean-eyed pegasus sighed as she listened to her friend finally reveal the truth, trying to understand her mindset. “Why are you so worried about this now? We’ve had to stop Nightmare Moon, Discord, Queen Chrysalis, and even Sombra. We were all in danger then, weren’t we?”

“Yes, I guess so, but I wasn’t worried about that because I knew that all of those threats had been beaten before, Nightmare Moon and Discord had been defeated be the Elements; Chrysalis is a constant threat to the kingdom and is beaten back all the time; and Sombra was sealed away long before we had to fight him,” she explained as she slowly lifted her head off the floor and looked up at Fluttershy. “But, we’ve never faced anything like Megatron, he could just shrug off anything we throw at him; you saw how easily one of his soldiers almost killed us if Bumblebee hadn’t been there.

“But Megatron can’t be completely unbeatable, Twilight,” the timid pegasus protested. “Optimus said they’ve been fighting their war for millions of years! If Megatron really was unstoppable, then he would have won the war a long time ago!”

“I-I guess so,” twilight stuttered as she laid her snout back onto the floor.

Fluttershy sighed and smiled. Finally she was getting somewhere and Twilight’s strange behavior was beginning to make sense. Unfortunately, she didn’t really know how to help her depressed friend. In a way, the animal-loving pegasus could understand her friend’s pain. All Twilight wanted to do was keep her friends safe. She knew every time they had gone on one of their world saving adventures in the past few years, she, too, had been afraid of losing everypony she cared about. The distraught flyer looked out the nearby window as she thought of her cyan colored-friend. She wished Rainbow were here, she’d know how to help Twilight. As she continued to stare out the window, Fluttershy noticed something very peculiar.

None of the trees were moving.

“H-Have we stopped?” the cream flyer asked in confusion. She lifted her hoof from Twilight’s back and approached the window. Peering outside she could see that it appeared the train had stopped.

“What?” Twilight sniffed, wiping away the last of the tears from her eyes as she joined her friend in looking through the frame. The moon was just beginning to rise, peaking out over the still landscape. “This is strange; why would the train stop?” she wondered aloud.

“Come on,” Fluttershy said, grabbing the lavender mare’s hoof. “Let’s take a break and go find out what’s going on,” she suggested as she opened the door to their booth and led Twilight into the hall. “We can talk more when we get back if you want.” She smiled.

“O-Okay,” the unicorn stammered, returning the smile.

The two mares quietly began walking up the carpeted hallway outside their booth. The only noise in the cart was the eerie clacking of Snapperworth’s typewriter leaking through his door as he continued his script. As they continued moving through the car they couldn’t help but think something was very wrong. Where was the conductor? Certainly if the train was malfunctioning he’d be around, telling ponies of the delay in arrival. They reached the door leading to the next car and, with a bit of effort, managed to push it open.

They were greeted with a sight they had not been expecting to see: nothing but fresh air and the track stretching on ahead around a large green hill. The entire locomotive and the front end of the train were gone. Surprised and confused the two ponies gently stepped off the car’s railing platform and onto the soft ground below. As they looked for clues as to what could have happened, neither of them noticed the sound of flapping wings and a rocket screaming through the air.

…………

The explosion was deafening. For the second time in the course of two days Fluttershy felt herself flying uncontrollably through the air, being propelled by a force of heat and pressure so great it singed her wings as she spread them. The pink-haired pegasus hit the ground hard, smashing her snout into the gravel bed of the railway track. Looking around, the flyer thankfully noticed that the train of remaining cars seemed to have survived the explosion and she could see other ponies desperately scrambling out of the far end.

As she turned her head away from the fleeing ponies, she caught her first look at their attacker. A large metal bird hovered in the night sky, flapping its massive, bladed wings in order to stay aloft. Without moving, she tried to examine it closer, taking note of what looked like fans built into its wings and a long winding tail that ended in a razor sharp pair of blades. Then she noticed the bird’s focus was entirely directed towards the purple pony who was trying to lift herself off the ground beneath it.

Before the pegasus could yell a warning to her friend, she watched in horror as the monstrous buzzard spun around and slammed its long, heavy tail against Twilight’s head. The lavender unicorn rolled a number of feet before coming to a stop and slumping onto the ground. In the light of the moon, Fluttershy could just make out her friend’s chest rising and falling in rhythm, telling the worried pony that Twilight was just unconscious, rather than dead as she had feared.

“Twilight Sparkle!!” the bird growled in a raspy, hissing voice. Fluttershy viewed in silence as the bird flew over to Twilight and hovered above her briefly before continuing. “I have come to collect you on behalf of the Decepticon Empire!” He suddenly lunged forward trapping the unconscious unicorn between his razor sharp talons.

The pain roared through Fluttershy’s body as she struggled to get up off the tracks and save her friend. Her body ached from the force of the impact and was actively fighting against her as she rose from the gravel bed. But, it was far too late; as she managed to clamber up onto her legs, she turned and saw the large Decepticon bird disappearing into the night sky, carrying the unconscious Twilight with it.

………..

Sparks erupted from the Ground Bridge as Wheeljack sat inside, welding a support beam into the matrix of beams that covered the back wall. He took a step back to admire his handy work. All the beams were evenly aligned in a crisscross pattern stretching the length of the back surface. Branching from them was a series of metal rings that lined the rocky cave walls all the way towards the entrance. As he moved in closer to weld another support in place, he signaled down to the orange earth pony at his feet. Following the engineer’s orders, she used her powerful hind legs to hold the beam in place as he began welding.

Wheeljack had mastered his craft over the course of thousands of years and was the best there was in the Autobot army. Ever since the first battle of Altihex, where Optimus Prime had personally rescued him from his Decepticon sieged laboratory, the engineer had devoted himself and his mastery of mechanical science to the Autobot cause. Welding along the outer, grooved edges of the metal bar the Autobot engineer carefully watched to make sure he didn’t accidentally slice clean through the large piece of iron. He hated working with non-Cybertronian materials they were so easy to break or damage. One wrong move and his entire project could be ruined. Still it was better than what they had on Andegea.

Andegea, as Wheeljack remembered, was the planet the Ark had crash landed on after its fateful trip through the space bridge during its escape from Cybertron and the Nemesis. Luckily, no one had been hurt, as they were all able to make it to the Ark’s escape pods in time, but now the mighty ancient starship was forever a part of the foreign planet’s rocky terrain. Things began to look up for the stranded Autobots, however, when they discovered an ancient Cybertronian space station orbiting the planet; they quickly transformed the station into the new Autobot Orbital Command Hub. Wheeljack had his own crackpot theories, involving the mythical Knights of Cybertron, about where the station came from but he usually kept them to himself

A tired groan from below him drew the Autobot engineer out of his remembrances of the past and back to the orange-coated mare that had agreed to help him.

“So, you say you’re a farmer?” Wheeljack asked as he shielded his eyes from the sparks coming off his blow torch. His other hand hovered over the local he was addressing; making sure none of the hot sparks fell down on top of her as she held the support beam up.

“Born and raised,” she grunted in reply, quickly sliding one of her front legs out of the way as a spark fell off the top of the Autobot’s hand and crackled against the floor nearby. The blue-and-silver robot gave her a thumbs-up to indicate he had finished his welding. She gladly sighed as she lowered her hind legs back to the floor.

Wheeljack walked over to the left curving wall of the bridge and opened an electrical panel to check the wiring. “Must be tough,” he said, tugging on a small green wire as he continued the small talk.

“Yeah, especially this year,” Applejack sighed while she looked at the floor. “What with the draught and all not givin’ us enough rain to grow a good amount of certain crops,” she explained, kicking at the metal floor in despair.

“Well frag, I can make it rain,” Wheeljack absentmindedly replied. He pulled a small round monitor out of his arm so he could check the electrical pulses of wires running throughout the wall.

Applejack stared open mouthed at the large silver Autobot. Her brain came to a standstill as she tried to determine if what she had heard was correct. “What did you say?”

“Frag,” Wheeljack replied, shrugging slightly as he began pulling on the same green wire again. “It’s like a swear word we use, kind of like how you called me a-”

“Not that,” the earth pony snapped at the larger robot. “The other thing!”

“Oh, yeah, I can make it rain. It’s actually really easy,” he explained, dropping the green wire and instead deciding to start running the little white scanner along the whole length of the metal wall. “In fact, I’ve got a Sky Seeder here in the base somewhere. I brought it over form the Orbital Command Hub when Optimus set up shop here about a year ago.” He stopped scanning the wall and began tapping on a small section of it with his knuckle. “Anyways, I never could figure out why I brought the thing, but it’ll be good to give it some use. You know, if you want,” he stated. He turned around to face the shocked earth pony and waited for her to say something.

Before Applejack could reply, a blaring klaxon began to fill the room with is deafening wail. She snapped her ears against the side of her head and gritted her teeth as the cacophonous sound echoed through the hollow metal tube she was in. The sound reminded her of the time Applebloom, Sweetie Belle, and Scootaloo tried to earn their Cutie Marks in musical instruments.

Wheeljack growled. Clenching his fists, he stomped out of the Ground Bridge tunnel and headed towards the main Teletraan control terminal. Applejack followed in suit. “What is it now!?” the engineer demanded as he once more began to type commands into the Autobot supercomputer.

“Teletraan has picked up an intruder within the base’s perimeter,” Ratchet explained, walking up to his long-time friend and comrade. The Autobot medic was followed closely by Bumblebee and the remainder of Applejack’s friends. He had been giving them a tour of the outpost.

The large screen above the computer terminal hummed to life as Wheeljack punched another set of commands into the control pad in front of him. At first, the screen showed nothing but the dense, gnarled jungle outside the Autobot’s base. But then they saw her. A panicked pegasus flew by the security camera at top speed. Her cream coat and feathers were singed with black soot and she had a wild look of fear in her cerulean eyes.

“Fluutershy!?” Rainbow Dash shouted in alarm as she looked at her friend flying madly across the sky towards the main entrance.

Comments

[MC BR0N3]

DOTM Laserbeak?
Aw Slag. That bird is creepy.

[Draco Dei]

Having the Ponies NOT having enough weather control that overall rainfall isn't an issue is causing problems for me... As early as "Look Before You Sleep", that seems very unlikely without a major logistical mess-up by those in charge of the weather.

[Conmac98]

The way i see this story is in live action