✅ Potty Genius [NaNoWriMo 2022]

One

¿How did you find the easter egg?

At first, I thought it might be another game. I'd played around with a couple of the other apps on the tablet, like Family Friendly Video Library, which had a little 'snake' game hidden on the menu screen, but not found anything particularly interesting. I was starting to think that apps for little kids might not have easter eggs, because the existence of hidden content might be scary to the more paranoid parents. But I don't like missing things, so I looked around anyhow.

Okay, it might not be so much dedication to finding secrets, as the fact that I had about a month left before I was due to head off to college, I had everything planned and packed up, the guy I'd always been slightly too nervous to refer to as my boyfriend was out of town with his family, and some men in hi-vis jackets had been digging up Marill Street in a way which apparently resulted in the loss of internet access at home. Sure, I could have gone out, but I was slobbing around the house in sweatpants while the rest of the family were out, and I didn't really have that much motivation to go out. And yeah, I could have tapped the mobile hotspot button on my phone and carried on playing _Shadow Covenant V_, but I wasn't particularly good at that game and the lag would have meant losing over and over. It was so depressing, not that I even tried.

So, with nothing else to do until Mam got home, I stopped procrastinating over getting my new tablet set up for university work. By which I mean I went looking for easter eggs. And after a while, I opened up Potty Genius. The main screen had a couple of buttons on it with cheerful icons, and a couple of kids' names at the top. I could swipe across between Joy and Honour, both of whom had medals next to their names. When I tapped on them, it gave a little show of fireworks. Their status was "graduated from Potty Genius", which I guess meant that Uncle Stefan had disconnected their accounts from this tablet or something like that. I might have deleted it then, but like I said, I had nothing better to do.

I turned on my keyboard, and waited for the little blue light on the corner to stop blinking. I typed in 'secret', and saw a wait pointer flash up for the tiniest fraction of a second. So it was listening to the keyboard, but not giving any indication of what it was doing. There would be a secret in there somewhere. I tried typing 'xyzzy' instead. That was a common one, though I didn't really understand why. Same response. I tried it again, not quite sure if I'd seen what I thought I saw in the momentary blink of the screen. There was always a chance that pressing some specific key was turning a setting on or off in the background, which would be a lot less interesting.

Then I tried all the keys that don't show up on the tablet's onscreen keyboard. Ctrl and Alt, tapping F3 or F5, and then running my fingers all the way along the top row. Some of the media keys started music playing in the background, but that was no surprise. That was the same as pressing the buttons on earbuds; the response came from whatever app was set up to play music, not the one that happened to be open. It was when I hit 'scroll lock' that something actually appeared. Text flashed up for just a second, with what looked like a text entry box in the middle. Was I expected to type something there? It didn't appear for long enough for me to read the instructions.

I tried typing 'xyzzy' again, and hit 'enter'. This time there was the briefest flicker of an error message. I tried again, staring at the screen to make sure I could read it before it vanished again.

==> 𝙸 𝚍𝚘𝚗'𝚝 𝚔𝚗𝚘𝚠 𝚇𝚢𝚣𝚣𝚢

Well, that was something. I was doing the right thing, but didn't have the right password. I tried again with "let me in", "password", "secret", and a dozen others. All gave the same response. And that was more frustrating than ever, because I knew there was some kind of easter egg there, but not how to get to it. After twenty minutes of trying everything I could think of, I gave up and went to fix dinner. Instant ramen today; nobody else was home, and I needed to get in practice for university. I hated to think that something as dumb as a potty training app could have beaten me. I just needed some kind of epiphany. But as it turned out, the answer had been right in front of my eyes without me noticing.

¿What was the clue?

It was right there in the line "I don't know Xyzzy". Or "I don't know Password", or "I don't know Let".

Capital letters. I mean, if you ever read some of the fanfic my classmates had written, capital letters are to emphasise the important words. But when I thought about all the other messages on the Potty Genius app, the titles on the option screens, it was all impeccable grammar. The kind of stuff they teach you in school. The thing that made me properly realise was a dumb joke; I made it answer "I don't know Jack". And then I realised that I was supposed to be typing in a name. But what name? Honour would be a good one; one of the kids registered with the app. And I knew that it wouldn't somehow affect the app on the kids' new tablet, because the kids all had their own Family Monitor accounts, connecting their activity on every app they used so that they could sync across devices, and Uncle Stefan had already logged them out before giving me the tablet.

I typed Honour, and the message appeared:

==> 𝙷𝚘𝚗𝚘𝚞𝚛 𝚑𝚊𝚜 𝚊𝚕𝚛𝚎𝚊𝚍𝚢 𝚐𝚛𝚊𝚍𝚞𝚊𝚝𝚎𝚍 𝙿𝚘𝚝𝚝𝚢 𝙶𝚎𝚗𝚒𝚞𝚜.

I congratulated myself as the message didn't instantly disappear, before a second line appeared at the bottom of the little box:

----> 𝚁𝚎𝚜𝚝𝚊𝚛𝚝 𝙷𝚘𝚗𝚘𝚞𝚛 𝚒𝚗 _𝙲𝚑𝚊𝚕𝚕𝚎𝚗𝚐𝚎 𝙼𝚘𝚍𝚎_?

There were buttons as well; 'yes' and 'no', as well as a drop-down list to choose a difficulty setting. I picked 'hard', and clicked 'Yes!'.

==> 𝙷𝚘𝚗𝚘𝚞𝚛 𝚒𝚜 𝚗𝚘𝚝 𝚕𝚘𝚐𝚐𝚎𝚍 𝚒𝚗 𝚘𝚗 𝚝𝚑𝚒𝚜 𝚍𝚎𝚟𝚒𝚌𝚎.
----> 𝚄𝚗𝚊𝚋𝚕𝚎 𝚝𝚘 𝚘𝚋𝚝𝚊𝚒𝚗 𝚙𝚎𝚛𝚖𝚒𝚜𝚜𝚒𝚘𝚗𝚜.

The message vanished again, giving me only a second to read it. I tried a second time, now using Joy's name, so that I could finish reading it. Right, I couldn't do that because they weren't logged in. I shouldn't have been surprised; since the latest legislation came in, almost everything designed for kids was part of this confusing ecosystem designed to make sure that their parents knew every app they used.

Well, I was logged in on the tablet. I'd had to sign in with my cloudpoint before I could even use it. Would my name work, or did I need to figure out how to create a Potty Genius user profile first?

I could try it and see. 'Scroll lock' -A-D-R-I-C-A- and scroll lock again. The box appeared in the middle of the screen, my name entered in a text field. But this time, there was no error message. Just a prompt to enter my name. And beneath that, there were boxes already filled out with my age and gender; and a choice of cartoony images I could pick as my avatar. The buttons at the bottom gave me the option to create a Potty Genius training plan; start in Challenge Mode; or cancel.

Well, I certainly didn't need a potty training app. What was challenge mode? I could only guess it would give my avatar a life of its own, like a virtual pet that I would have to keep clicking on to remind her to use the potty or something. When I tapped the little question mark next to the option, it said that the challenge would give me all the fun of potty training without the pain of pregnancy; which I guessed was some kind of confirmation. So I selected challenge mode, wondering how long my virtual baby would hold my attention before I uninstalled the thing.

I agreed to the terms and conditions, poked around the app a little to figure out what it was doing, and tried out the different options. I thought I had a good guess how the app would work, and I expected it would be a little boring. But only twenty minutes later I was on the verge of panic as I rushed to clean up a puddle of pee on the carpet.

¿You really wet yourself?

Yeah. I mean, I didn't mean to. But there's a lot more to this app than meets the eye.