✅ Potty Genius [NaNoWriMo 2022]

Seven

This chapter is dedicated to Dewayne, with my thanks yet again for all your support on Patreon. Thank you!

¿Was the third hypnotist more helpful?

I was somehow more confident by the time I was almost there. This one was a little way outside the town centre, so I hoped they wouldn't be so willing to turn away a customer. But once I was away from the brightly lit shopping streets, I quickly realised that I didn't know the town as well as I thought. I spent nearly half an hour walking in circles. I was about to check my phone again, to see if I'd remembered the name of the street wrong or something, when I felt a vibration from my pocket. I got my phone out to see what it said, and this notification was the last thing I was expecting.

First of all, it had the Potty Genius icon next to the message. A line of tiny italic text commented that this was an app that had been automatically installed to synchronise with my other device. Well, that was useful, wasn't it? I could probably have looked for its icons in the app launcher and then uninstalled it, but I wasn't sure if that was a good idea. If I just removed it from my phone and left it on the tablet, would it be able to install itself again? Or would it remove it from both devices, and then I'd be stuck if it turned out I still needed it when I wanted to use the bathroom? I'd never had two devices before, so I had no idea how this was supposed to work. Better to look it up when I got home, and then decide what to do with it. Assuming that I couldn't get all those suggestions out of my subconscious mind before then, of course.

The notification itself was fairly mundane; no spiral boxes appearing in front of the apps I was using, or anything like that. There was just a simple message, congratulating me for successfully completing the daily challenge, and telling me that the next challenge was ready to attempt.

I put my phone back in my pocket without reading it. I remembered that yesterday's challenge had been to tap the accident button; and that had caused me a whole load of problems. I didn't want to know what the next one was going to say. But then, if I played along with this game, was there a chance that I would be able to convince the app that I was actually potty trained? I remembered that when I had tried entering Honour's name when I was playing with the app, it said that she had already graduated. So if I played along, attempted these challenges whenever they were reasonable, and carried on reporting every time I used the bathroom for a few weeks, would that let me "graduate" too?

I could hope, anyway. So I pulled the phone out of my pocket, and swiped down to find that notification again. There was a little animation before I could see what it had planned for me, but finally the text appeared, and I could find out about '🪢Learning the ropes 2':

==> 𝚁𝚎𝚌𝚘𝚛𝚍 𝚌𝚑𝚊𝚗𝚐𝚒𝚗𝚐 𝙱𝚊𝚋𝚢 𝙰𝚍𝚛𝚒𝚌𝚊 𝚒𝚗𝚝𝚘 𝚊 𝚏𝚛𝚎𝚜𝚑 𝚍𝚒𝚊𝚙𝚎𝚛. 𝚈𝚘𝚞 𝚠𝚒𝚕𝚕 𝚗𝚎𝚎𝚍 𝚝𝚘 𝚌𝚘𝚞𝚗𝚝 𝚞𝚙 𝚑𝚘𝚠 𝚖𝚊𝚗𝚢 𝚢𝚘𝚞 𝚑𝚊𝚟𝚎 𝚒𝚗 𝚜𝚝𝚘𝚌𝚔.

Well that was weird. I certainly didn't have any diapers, so would recording that fact be good enough? It said I had to wear one though, so I guessed that was a challenge I couldn't complete. Still, I gathered that these challenges were some kind of add-on to the main potty training programme, so I expected it would be possible to 'graduate' and disable the thing without following all of them. Maybe it would even be helpful; a way to tell my subconscious that I didn't want to play this game anymore.

I tapped away from that app, and checked the map again. This time I actually managed to find the right address. The reason I'd had so much trouble before was because the street name it showed was in the middle of a construction site. I wondered if the hypnotist had relocated elsewhere while their neighbourhood was getting upgraded with a new pedestrian arcade. That would at least be positive. But when I checked out their website, it showed directions to the big fences that I was staring at, on a site that had clearly been designed with no thought to people browsing on their phones. The listing on the maps had last been updated six years ago, as well, so I guessed that there was little chance I would be able to find them now.