"Just [i]look[/i] at yourself." Each word popped like a balloon filled with rotten milk. "It's disgusting!"

"Hey, hey, hey!" The second voice gave off the aroma of freshly cut grass: sweet, clean, and refreshing—unless one happened to be allergic. "Maybe instead of grousing, you could try coming up with a way to fix this?"

"Excuse me?" The first voice conveyed an impression of raised eyebrows. "Have you ever [i]met[/i] me?"

"Forget it." The third voice sounded like one of those dogs whose face seems to be made entirely of melting ice cream. Not that dogs can talk, of course. No, no. That would be silly.

[i](Note to self: when next out at Sweet Apple Acres, give that dog of theirs the power of speech. And a top hat. All talking dogs should have top hats.)[/i]

"Nothing can be done," the third voice continued in doleful tones. "Too far gone. Too far gone!" The words crumbled like cinnamon coffee cake and became a howl echoing through the spring evening all around, the twilight—

[i]Don't use that word; don't use that word; don't use that word![/i]

—softly wrapping around the houses and shops of Ponyville as if each step wasn't carrying him another decimeter closer to dissolution.

Or rather the howl [i]would[/i] have echoed if it had actually been audible.

"Audible?" The first voice, not having eyeballs, rolled its larynx. "Do you honestly think I have a larynx? Or was that just today's entry on that word-a-day calendar your precious princess gave you?"

[i](Note to self: change every word on the rest of the calendar's pages to 'eleemosynary' and give it a different definition each time.)[/i]

The second voice sighed a flowery sigh. "She gives the most thoughtful gifts, don't you think?"

"I [i]don't[/i] think," a fourth voice piped in. "At least, I don't [i]think[/i] I think. At least, I don't [i]think[/i] I think I think. At least—"

"My point is—" The second voice spoke over the cracking sound of a cricket bat shattering across something roughly the size and shape of the average skull. "—she's always taking time out of her busy schedule—"

"To destroy everything good and proper in the world!" The first voice bubbled now, those bubbles being all that was left of the soap that had formerly filled the soapbox the speaker would have been standing upon if the only legs it had access to hadn't been currently dragging along the road through the center of town, ponies stopping and staring with jaws slack and eyes bulging. "And by 'good and proper,' I of course mean 'oblong and obsequious.'" A scritch-scritch-scritch as of claws scratching a scalp rustled forth. "Don't I?"

"Hmmph!" The second voice's snort gusted out both ears simultaneously. "I'll tell you what you mean! You mean that hope springs internal!" Another spate of claw scratching. "Or is that external?"

"I hope not," Discord muttered, raising his gaze to the gold and purple arched doorway at the top of the steps. "And I'll have you know that none of you is being at all helpful!"

A moment of silence, then: "Run," the first voice whispered somewhere beneath his antelope antler.

"Agreed," the second voice murmured from his beard. "She'll only think this is a trick, you know. Or a joke."

Discord sighed. "No help at [i]all[/i]." Shaking the flowers he was holding to partially straighten their wilting stems, he changed his tuxedo from purple to orange, drifted as light as dandelion fluff up the stairs, and knocked on Twilight's front door.