✅ Potty Genius [NaNoWriMo 2022]

Fifteen (First Appointment)

This chapter is dedicated to D.C., with thanks again for your support on Patreon. I'm sorry it's taking me so long to get your rewards posted, but I really do appreciate all your support.

¿How did the appointment go?

Well, things took a turn for the worse before I even got there. I set off early that morning, because I wanted to make sure I was in time for the appointment. I even had an automatic reminder show up on the calendar on my phone, like an appointment with my regular doctor, and I would have been more impressed with the high-tech system if I hadn't been aware that it was that Britney girl pulling the strings behind the scenes, until she had all the automation properly set up.

I could look around town as well, maybe do some window shopping so long as I didn't go into Mazzar's. Then the bus was late, stuck behind some idiot learning in the middle of Shellos Road that backing up a caravan is harder than it looks. While the traffic slowly managed to escape the resulting jam, I spent ten minutes staring out of the window at a billboard that promised it would make everyone at college remember you. It took me a little while to realise that it was advertising a brand of hair dye, and that the rainbow mohawk was supposed to be the most striking feature of the gorgeous punk girl in the centre of the ad.

When I got into Ellisberg, I found myself wondering how I would look with coloured hair. I always described my hair as red, but I knew that some people might call it blond, and it was probably light enough to take a temporary dye pretty easily. Like the billboard said, anybody who saw me on the first week of university would remember me, which might make the first step towards making friends just a little easier.

I went to a couple of salons and looked at the styles in the windows; I knew they would require more maintenance than I had time for, even if I wasn't spending just about all of my available savings on the hypnotist. Then I went to DRŨGSTØR to check out if I could afford one of the wash-in temporary colours, and was confronted by a whole aisle of different shades that I couldn't choose between.

"What am I doing?" I muttered to myself, after ten minutes of trying to imagine myself in each of them. Was I trying to prove how grown-up I was, trying to do all of the things that a kid would never be allowed? It almost felt like a subconscious act of rebellion, trying to convince myself that I could look after myself. Trying to deny that I'd woken up with a teddy in my arms again that morning, and found myself organising them all so they were comfortable to my bed when I got up in the morning.

Okay, I'd done that as a kid. And I'd only stopped because I thought it was childish and my friends might laugh at me if they found out. So it was natural for old habits to come back now that all the toys were in reach again. And it was a little creative act, imagining them as real people. I knew that they weren't really pets, but that wasn't a reason to stifle my creativity so much. I was just letting myself be imaginative, and that wasn't something I needed to make up for.

I did like the idea of changing my look a little, though. And after telling myself again that I didn't need to do it, and that I had nothing to prove, I decided that I still wanted to. I picked out a colour that wasn't so outlandish, but looked more the richer ginger shade I'd had when I was younger. I'd never been sure if the baby photos that Mum loved to embarrass me with had faded, or if older cameras didn't reproduce certain colours perfectly, or if my hair had just changed colour over the years; but I thought that look kind of suited me, and I didn't see any reason not to try going back to being a proper redhead.

I bought it. Two bottles; one to see how it looked on me, and another so that I could make sure the colour was fresh when I arrived at Moistville University.

¿So did you go to the hypnosis appointment?

Yeah. After getting the dye I stopped to get a sandwich for lunch, and then I was confident I could make my appointment without having any trouble before then. I was feeling like myself again, with my usual laid-back confidence that everything would sort itself out. And then just before I left the sandwich place, my phone chimed.

¿Another interruption from Potty Genius?

Yeah. The congratulations alert for my daily challenge. It seemed that sometimes they were more or less than a day, coming a bit sooner if I actually completed the challenge the previous day, or sometimes allowing me an hour or so between finishing one challenge and starting the next.

This time, it gave me a medal and said that I'd done all of the 'Learning the Ropes' challenges. And that I could choose when to start the next day's challenge, so long as I started it some time before midnight. I thought that was nice, giving me a little slack. But then I saw what the challenge was, and I realised that it had the potential to be a real problem. This challenge was called 'Forward Planning I', and told me that I would only be able to open the Potty Timer interface twice in a whole day; requiring me to set timers in advance for all the times I might want to use the bathroom. Sure, I could probably plan around that, but I really wasn't looking forward to it. I decided not to start the timer yet, so I could have more time to plan.

And so when I walked down the stairs to the hypnotist's weird basement, I was really, really hoping that she could cure me today.