"Hold on. You're going to send a bunch of teenagers to fight a primordial god of chaos without the Elements of Harmony that are the only reason you'd even consider doing that in the first place? Shouldn't we at least check to see if the Elements are actually gone first?"

"No," she says, "if we check now, they'll definitely be gone, and then we'll have a real problem. If we wait, they might turn out to have been there all along." It's obvious if you've spent enough time around Aspexia Rugatonn.

"Beggin' your pardon, but that don't make any sense."

"She's right, of course," says Discord, reappearing in the window. "If you let me have my fun without going straight for the Elements, I'll retroactively never have taken them out of the vault, and you won't have to go looking for them later. If you do try to turn me back to stone before the game is through—good luck!"

She understands decision theory, of course, but Discord doesn't normally act like this.

"Of course not," he says aloud. "I'm not normally playing to an audience that knows anything about omniscient agents with sealed boxes! This is so much fun."

"You should—"

"Nuh-uh, Celestia," says Discord scoldingly. "No hints. You either, Abrogail. The Mane Six need to figure this out themselves."

"Oh, and Valiant Victory, don't even think about trying to fight me. You're much too boring to be a worthy opponent. Ask the Princess about Hell instead. That'll be interesting."

"Later."

One, two, three, four, five—"We're the 'mane six', right? Jus' checkin'."

Discord rolls his eyes, an impressive feat for a piece of stained glass. "Yes."

"This is stupid. Either the Elements are there or they're not. We can just go check."

"Wait, Rainbow Dash. It might be more complicated than that. I don't think Discord would have made it into a puzzle if it were that simple."

She drops to the ground. "Or he's just lying."

"I think in the puzzle we're supposed to assume he's not. Discord, you said 'no hints'—can we ask Celestia questions?"

He rolls his eyes again. "You get three. And none of them can be 'what should we do?'"

"Can Discord see the future?"

"Only when it's already happened."

"No, I don't know what that means any more than you do. Discord can—well, really there's no such—"

"Cheating. That wasn't the question she asked."

Sigh. "Discord knows a lot of stuff that he has no logical reason to know, including stuff that hasn't happened yet."

"Okay. What did you mean by 'there's no such thing as the future'?"

"Still cheating."

Celestia ignores him. "It doesn't exist yet—or, rather, there's no one future that does. I can see some things myself, but I have no way of knowing which future I'll find myself in—that's up to you. And everyone else, of course."