'Parp'.

"Lyra, did you just say 'parp' out loud?"

"No, but wouldn't that be funny if I did?"

Twilight sighed. Her horn was still glowing a little, and it ached, which would theoretically be as difficult to perceive to anypony from the outside as any pain relatively might be. Take a paragraph to describe this, the abstract nature of pain. No. Out.

The two ponies (Lyra & Twilight) (No, Twilight & Lyra) (& & & & &) (They're Called Ampersands) had gotten rid of most of the papers. They'd dismantled the machine. The experiment was a total failure.

"We didn't manage to produce even one single coherent piece of text," Twilight said, rubbing a hoof across her horn to ease some of the soreness. It was quite swollen.

Lyra took a deep breath and shrugged. "I still think this one is pretty close." She held up the piece of paper in question, not much bigger than the size of her hoof—it looked as though she'd torn it off the corner of a much larger sheet, but that was simply the way the machine had printed it.

'k e e p g o i n g'

"I mean, it's readable," Twilight conceded. "I'll give you that much. But it doesn't mean anything. For one thing, it's cliche. It's the moral of literally every single story that has ever existed. And for another thing, how do we know what it applies to? If I'm in the middle killing of some pony, and I read this, do I keep going with that too?"

"Has anyone ever told you you're the least fun pony to talk to in existence?"

"Yes! Several! It was the theme of my entire life up until the end of... it's still the theme of my entire life!"

And.... scene!

—the Length of My Sentence.