✅ Potty Genius [NaNoWriMo 2022]

Eleven

¿Was the next challenge any better?

It would be a while before I found out about that. I remembered choosing that I wanted to enable a penalty for missing a challenge, but I didn't think too much about it. It wasn't going to be anything really serious, was it?

When I'd just finished eating and was rinsing the cheesy residue off my plate, my phone chimed. I almost reached for it immediately, wondering if the hypnotist had found time to look at the hypnosis script in the app again. Of course she hadn't, but I'm always optimistic. But I saw from the preview that it was Potty Genius telling me that I had failed a daily challenge. I knew that; it was a stupid challenge, and I didn't see the point in doing something like that. So I finished what I was doing and dried my hands before I picked up the phone again, and I clicked through to the message. And then I realised that I should have taken the app more seriously. It was like the third time I'd had the same realisation; you'd think I would have learned by now, and I promised myself that I wouldn't take it so lightly again.

==> 𝙲𝚑𝚊𝚕𝚕𝚎𝚗𝚐𝚎 𝚏𝚊𝚒𝚕𝚎𝚍 𝚙𝚎𝚗𝚊𝚕𝚝𝚢: 𝙿𝚘𝚝𝚝𝚢 𝚝𝚒𝚖𝚎𝚛 💧 𝚜𝚎𝚝 𝚏𝚘𝚛 𝟼𝟺𝟻-𝟼𝟼0 𝚖𝚒𝚗𝚞𝚝𝚎𝚜

I groaned in disbelief. There was no way that was fair. I tried to calculate what time that would be, and figured it had to mean sometime after midnight. It gave a fifteen minute interval, which would have been a frustratingly long time to sit on the toilet. But now it would be even worse, because I didn't know what time this timer had started. It had been while I was washing the dishes, so probably about five minutes ago. So I went into the timers screen on the app, and selected a 'reminder' timer, like a real little kid would need. Thankfully a real timer, that wasn't tied to the hypnotic suggestions, could just be set for a specific time. I entered 10 hours and 40 minutes, then hesitated. I thought it had been about five minutes, but it wasn't like I'd had a stopwatch. If it was a couple of seconds less, or if I got distracted so that I was more than a few minutes from the bathroom when the timer reminded me, I risked wetting myself again. And it might not be so easy to hide.

I set the timer for ten and a half hours instead. That way, I was sure to get to the bathroom before this surprise timer went off. It meant I might be sitting on the toilet waiting for nearly half an hour, but that had to be better than the alternative.

I thought I was done with Potty Genius for now. But when I went back to the app's main screen, there were two messages in the banner at the top. It was still warning me that I was out of diapers; but there was a notification that I should check today's daily challenge as well. That one wasn't red and highlighted; it would have been easy to overlook. But I was determined that I wouldn't end up with a timer set for a random inconvenient time again. After searching through the settings to see if I could disable the penalty – not unless I 'graduated' and started over, apparently – I sighed and tapped on the notification to see what today's challenge was.

To my surprise, it gave me a choice. I'd missed a challenge, and I could decide if I wanted to discard that challenge, try again the next day, or add it to the challenge rotation at a random point. I thought about that for a while. I could choose whether to buy myself diapers, or face some challenge that I didn't know anything about. It was an embarrassing thought, but I had to admit that wearing a diaper for five minutes in my own room was probably less embarrassing than a lot of the things that it could ask me to do. I hated the idea that I was actually choosing to do something like that, but it was kind of like the lesser of two evils. I had at least one day where I knew that the challenge wouldn't be something someone else could see; buying myself one more day to get these hypnotic suggestions removed without major humiliation.

I went back and forth a few times over the next half hour, before eventually deciding that I could cope with wearing a diaper. Just once.

¿Where did you get diapers?