Okay, here’s the bad news, Tera thought to herself, a tub of grout suspended in her prosthetic horn’s aura. I cannot sleep in my bedroom tonight. She had decided to retile her bedroom—she was a sucker for tile, especially the old-fashioned kind that still required grouting, and there was this nice blue and green one, matched her eyes, and she just had to get it—and after six and a half hours of work, she had managed to put in about a third of the floor. The walls hadn’t even been touched.
And it was half past midnight, and she had work in the morning.
Note to self: do not start major renovation projects at five-thirty in the afternoon.
She put the grout down, slid it under her bed, and turned the light off as she left. Okay, here’s the good news: I wasn’t sleeping in there anyway.
On her way down the hall, she turned up the thermostat to her condo, because she didn’t intend on sleeping under any blankets tonight. Then she hung a right and entered her bathroom. A half-saddlebag was already there.
She unzipped and opened it, and pulled out two pieces of hose. One was dark and opaque, about seven and a half feet long, with a control panel box on one end and a thick metal ring on the other. The pipe ran through the box, which had a waterproofed touchscreen and power button on the front, and to a screw-on attachment on the top.
The other hose was about half the length of the first, clear, and much more flexible, with another ring on one end. The other end was a metal nozzle, tapered in a curve, with a flexible plastic ring around it and a small divot in the front near the hole where the water came out. The two rings looked like they snapped together.
Tera handled it as if she were very familiar with its workings.
Which she was: she’d built the thing.
She took the whole assembly into the shower stall, shut the door behind her, and turned on the shower, setting it to a comfortably hot setting. By the time she was finished showering and getting all the grout and other gunk out from in her coat and in between her hooves, the room was very much steamy. Perfect.
She turned the shower off, then unscrewed the showerhead, set it aside, and threaded the control box on. She then clicked the two rings together, lay down on her back, got comfortable, “grabbed” the front end of the hose with her horn, aligned it, braced herself a little bit, and with one smooth motion and a bit of a grunt, shoved the nozzle up her ass.
Now that the hose was stuck into her rectum like a badly placed umbilical cord and her ponut stretched out tightly around and over the nozzle, she got comfortable again, adjusted the nozzle a bit, and looked up at the control box a few feet away. She had keen eyesight anyhow, but it helped that she knew what it said.
INPUT DESIRED SIZE:
SMALL
MEDIUM
BIG
HUGE!
ADVANCED
She had already calibrated it to herself, and this was going to be a relatively long-term test, so she selected MEDIUM.
PLEASE ENSURE HOSE HEAD IS SECURELY PLACED AND LATCH RINGS ARE CONNECTED.
OK
She could feel the first well enough; the second she double-checked. (It’s good practice for engineers.) Then she gave the machine the (literal) okay to start with another horn “press”.
FILLING...
It was always so titillating, yet so relaxing, and so fun to watch, and feel, the warm fluid rushing into her insides and filling them up and stretching them out, especially that little jolt when the water reached the top end of her intestine and poured into her stomach, forcibly expelling the air within with a cute (though admittedly usually pretty bad-tasting) burp.
DESIRED PRESSURE ACHIEVED.
It was just as good simply having a full belly, especially since water held heat so well and it was like her own big personal heated pillow just under her skin. It was so relaxing, and she’d always wanted to sleep in such a state, but there was always a problem: she couldn’t keep it in.
The second she stopped clenching her rump, the hose would pop out and the water would keep going right behind it. She could stop it by squeezing her sphincter shut again, but she could only hold that position for so long. Even if she plugged up her butt, though, which she had done before, her kidneys would still be working on overdrive and she’d end up peeing away all the water within the next few hours. Not to mention that she still had to turn the water off manually (ungulally? No, that sounded stupid), or at least with her horn, when she got to where she wanted.
ENTERING PRESSURE MAINTENANCE MODE.
So she’d figured out a solution: automate it. That’s what this contraption did: measure the pressure in her belly to keep track of how full she was and, when any water left, replace it as needed.
ENJOY!
She could hear the valve up top open briefly, then close again, already at work. Everything was working according to plan. And she was tired. So she turned the lights down to night mode, set aside her horn, wiggled a bit to get comfortable one more time, and soon dozed off.
She woke up again. Something felt wrong. For a second, she worried that the myriad of safety features she had built into the thing had all failed. But no, she was the same amount of comfortably bloated that she had been when she fell asleep… how long ago was it?
She looked up at the control panel, bright in the half-light of the nightlit bathroom.
PRESSURE MAINTENANCE MODE
03:17
DIAGNOSTICS
Great, she managed to think, two hours and change. She put a foreleg behind her to get up, pushed against the tile—
—and immediately realized the flaw in her design.
She had designed this thing to replace water as it left her. That was all well and good. But water doesn’t just leave ponies. And it especially doesn’t just leave Tera.
Her kidneys apparently hadn’t gotten the memo that the water was supposed to be there, and her bladder had plenty of experience holding it in for longer than most, so as she tried to get up, she could feel a second, smaller, but still large bulge, closer to her nethers than the obvious first, tighten under the weight and try to expel its contents, which she painfully, barely managed to keep in.
She fell back down onto her back, stared at the ceiling, pondered for a second. Then realized something.
This was her shower, in her apartment, with no one watching. She could very easily clean up in the morning and no one would be the wiser. Showers have drains. And urine is sterile anyway.
She lifted her tail—
Right, she was upside-down, her rear firmly planted against the floor.
She tucked her tail under one leg, closed her eyes again, and let go.