Lox’s travels would’ve been a pleasant one if not for the sight before her.
It was a giant net that spanned further than she could see on both sides. It was a giant rotating net which caught anything bigger than her hoof. It was a giant net a few hundred meters deep into the ocean which caught everything Klugetown needed, aka damp, barnacle-laden trash. It was the great filter of the Celestial Sea.
Lox’s travels would probably have stayed pleasant after seeing it, but not after her brain made the connection between it and another, very specific knowledge about Equestria’s sewage system. Equestria didn’t have one.
Well, no. Equestria did have sewage systems in all of its major cities. It all consisted of a series of tunnels and pipings that sent every lavatory-related wastes into the sea. The Celestial Sea. What it didn’t have were any water treatment plants. It had one, but it was used exclusively by the Oxygen Factory. All their wastes were thrown into and dragged by the ocean current down south.
It was Lox’s realization that this ocean current ran right past the net that ruined her day.
Everything ever pooped by everypony and everyone from every major city in Equestria sans Vanhoover and Los Pegasus was flowing right past the very waters in which she was swimming and breathing in. And she had just gotten a treatment for her coat last week too, to give its orange color a beautiful golden shine. She hadn’t had her white mane and tail treated, but she still woe at the knowledge that it was dunked on poop water.
Lumber Fox hesitantly asked the seapony beside her about it.
“Yep!” he replied. “That’s why we gave you those pills.”
“I thought they’re to help me recover from transforming for the first time.”
“It’s penicillin.”
“Do you have anything to help me with the headache?”
“We have paracetamol back at shore.”
“Do you do this everyday?”
“We’re normally forbidden from swimming down here.”
“Why did we?”
“You insisted on inspecting our stuff.”
“You could’ve told me.”
He put his fin on his chin. “I guess I could.”
Howlitinatingerjord Riverdavercadaver, or Harry, could’ve. He really could. He should’ve. It was his job to keep creatures away from the isolated facility. He didn’t stop Lox from swimming in because he was way too overwhelmed with the knowledge that he was talking to an Oxygen Factory supervisor. It was the first time he met an overseas colleague, and one revered by his predecessors.
Harry was a white hippogriff with white-and-black mane and tail. He was a supervisor for Aris Wastewater Treatment Facility. He had only taken the position for a few months after one of the previous ones slipped on the bathroom floor and broke her neck and died. He knew everything about the facility, but he wasn’t the best at being a supervisor. He was still learning, and today he learnt that he really shouldn’t let any creature swim into the poop stream. Including but not limited to himself.
Lox and Harry got a thorough bath back at shore and bags full of medicines. Lox got an extra strip of paracetamol pills. Harry got an extra death stare from Lox.
Lox was originally there to supervise the installation of a new scrubber for Mount Aris and to reopen maintenance access to the southern vents after three centuries. Then Lox called from the factory and told her to help them with ‘a problem with the secondary treatment plants’. She told Harry that she was there to survey for a study exchange program.
After the bath, Harry took Lox for a stroll on the basalt beach, showing her the flow of the poop stream down to the settling chambers.
The ‘chambers’ were entire portions of the sea segmented by walls of basalt. The closest to them had one of its walls lowered somehow and was filling halfway, while the others were all filled to sea level and sealed off. Lox could count a couple dozen segments, but she could see that there were more beyond the horizon. Groups of hippogriffs flew about, carrying with them long wooden boards to scrape off anything on the surface of the water. A distance away she could see the silhouette of a dragon.
Turning away from the sea, she could see a zeppelin station not far from them. There was a warehouse next to it with hippogriffs carrying wooden crates inside.
“That’s where we send away the sediments,” Harry explained. “We sent ten whole shipments last month. It’s been very busy since we stopped production for, uh, a while. The sea has been pretty grimy.”
“You can just… stop production?”
“Yes! Well, it would eventually turn the sea inhabitable, but that would take a very long time. We can always increase production to catch up with the backlog.” He looked at a clipboard he put under his wing. “At this rate, we expect to catch up in about forty years.”
“That’s worryingly slow.”
Harry chuckled. “It’s really not. There aren't that many things that can hinder production aside from environmentally-ignorant megalomaniacs. And statistics show that only 20% of megalomaniacs are environmentally-ignorant! There’s very little danger in this regard.”
“Where did you get that number?”
“Uh, statisticians.”
“My statistics show 70%.”
They looked at each other. Harry looked at his clipboard, where there weren’t any statistics about megalomaniacs and their consideration for the environment, but he needed somewhere to look other than Lox. “We should talk more later.”
Harry brought Lox further into the secondary treatment plants. It was just like the settling chambers but with a lot of bubbles rising. “These are the secondary treatment plants. It’s the main bottleneck of our production rate.”
“What’s wrong with them?”
“Nothing. They’re working perfectly.”
Lox raised an eyebrow. “I was told you have a problem with your secondary treatment plants? It’s the whole reason I’m here.”
“You said—”
“I just wanted a free tour.”
Harry stared at her for a bit, then laughed. “Well, you succeeded. But really, there’s nothing wrong with them. I mean I guess I want them to be faster, but this is as fast as we get.”
“How do you make them faster?”
He pointed at the bubbly water. “If we could pump more oxygen in, we could make the bacteria eat faster. But we tried increasing the pump power and we ended up overflowing the chambers because there’s too much air in it. We need to increase the proportion of oxygen in the air. But, yeah, that’s not happening anytime soon.”
Lox nudged him and pointed at herself.
“What?”
She pointed at herself again.
“What? Seriously, what?”
Lox slapped her face. “I can help!”
“How? You want to blow air five hundred meters below the ocean?”
“I can give you oxygen!”
“How? Are you from the Oxygen Factory or—” Harry slapped his face with his clipboard. “Right. Right. I’m stupid, sorry.”
Lox took a deep breath and playfully nudged him again. “You should talk to Lox about it, though. Back at the factory.”
“Alright, I’ll talk to Harry about it.” And then he saw a hippogriff flying at them from a distance. “Speaking of.”
Harrowfingasliteninger Progentallynosticator, or Harry, was the oldest of the facility’s supervisors. He had been around since before the Storm King attacked, and currently the only supervisor to know anything about supervising. He was also the only supervisor who decided to stay at Seaquestria after knowing that they had been swimming in their own poop and piss, as well as every other creature’s wastes. (Not as horribly as the poop stream, but that’s just how the ocean works.) He had an endearing collection of poops in mason jars from almost every known creature in the southern hemisphere. Thankfully they stayed back on land.
Everyone trusted Harry the most. Harry, on the other hand, had been losing the trust of his fellow employees ever since he randomly threw himself and a guest into the poop stream. Harry was afraid of Harry, but he needed to tell him about the offer somehow, and he had the feeling that he was going to be the one sent to Equestria to talk about it.
Harry landed gently in front of them and ruffled his gray feathers. His graying brown mane danced chaotically in the wind. He spoke in a booming voice, and he spoke confidently. “Aye. I’m Harry.” He turned to look at Harry. “And I heard my son let you swim in the poop.”
“I did. It was an accident.”
“It was a lapse in judgment. Forgive him, he didn’t have breakfast.”
Lox nodded. “Breakfast is important. Generally speaking.”
Harry coughed. “Anyway. Lox told me the Oxygen Factory can help us increase the oxygen proportion for the aeration chamber. We need to talk to Lox back at their factory about it though.”
“Then you’re going.”
“Me? Why not Harry?”
“She likes traveling. You hate traveling. You’ll get the job done quicker.”
And then Harry took off and left, and Lox was left with the old hippogriff who looked like he was always half drunk.
Harry’s eye twitched. Not in an annoyed kind of way and more in like he had too much coffee or ale. “Anything I can help you with?”
“Well, Harry was giving me a tour of your facility.”
“You want to continue touring?”
Lox nodded. Before she could step forward, Harry pointed at the sea. “That’s the aeration tank. That’s the aeration tank’s settling tank. That’s the magical thingamabob from who-knows-how-long that filters out bacteria from the settling tank. That’s the sea.”
Lox nodded dumbly.
“Anything else?”
“Is Seaquestria in the middle of the poop stream?”
“A little to its side. Safe to live in, at least. Maybe.”
Lox caught sight of a building standing on basalt. A pipe came from the sea to it, and another pipe came out of it and up north, disappearing behind the sea of clouds. “What’s that?”
“A desalinator. An Abyssinian kept it running. Or really anyone who wants to from Klugetown, but right now there’s a cat there.”
“Where does that pipe go? Klugetown?”
“If it does, they never got it. We don’t know where it goes; we only know that the pump never stops.”
“You’re sending water to a mysterious place that you don’t even know about?”
“Don’t you have vents like that too?”
“Fair.”
“Our ancestors weren’t very keen on writing diaries.”
“We’re fixing it.”
Writing down everything that they did was a relatively new concept for both facilities. Or for any of the associated facilities like the weather factory. Many of the things around them were a mystery, and many of the other things were lost to the annals of history. The things their ancestors wrote down seemed to only be incredibly random things and hilarious events.
For example, there was no surviving text about the technology used for segmenting the sea with adjustable basalt pillars, but the Aris facility has a perfectly preserved hemp parchment about a game of tasting poop and guessing what creature it was from and the resulting dysentery outbreak.
Even Smart Cookie had a journal of her and Chancellor Puddinghead finding a cult village of oxygen-worshiping ponies, but there wasn't anything from the Factory’s side of things about how and why they ended up being part of Equestria. Instead the Factory had a vellum with a drawing of a kitten that dated back to two thousand years ago.
Terravistaquercetum Ubeiticalitycity, or Harry, was the first supervisor to start digging into the Aris facility’s archives and mandated that they start writing down events. She was so busy with the archives that her mind was always full of it and she would oftentimes not pay attention to her surroundings, which led to her death when she slipped on the bathroom floor and broke her neck. At the very least she was the first supervisor to have dug into the archives and not died before mandating that they start writing down events.
It was Harry who found out that they were supposed to be in direct cooperation with the Oxygen Factory and the weather factory and invited their supervisors for a meeting. The meeting ended up being a friendly game of billiards where the weather factory’s supervisor was nearly killed by a stray cue ball, but nevertheless they were now well acquainted.
However, it was Harry Queen, or Harry, who found out about an unfinished contract between them and the Oxygen Factory about raising the oxygen proportion of the injected air of the secondary treatment plants. She was proud about it, and it was the first step into her obsession with the Aris facility’s archives. She held the record for longest surviving supervisor after opening the archives’ doors.
“Don’t you have a job to do?”
“Right.”
Lox and Harry went back to Mount Aris, where Lox regrouped with the Factory’s engineers and started scouting a place to put the scrubbers in, while Harry went to the archives to check if Harry was still alive.
Harry, meanwhile, started packing his belongings for a short business trip to Equestria. He could’ve taken the zeppelin and transit through Klugetown to Canterlot. He really could’ve. He instead decided to take the ship to Baltimare and spent an entire week staring at the poop stream.
The official term for the poop stream was the Celestial Sewage Stream. It was clear and beautiful, but everyone knew its diluted contents. No one knew how the stream was formed and how it came to be, but it was there, and it was unnatural. Someone somewhen made the stream to circle around the Celestial Sea, but again, there was no text about how, why, or when. It became a greater mystery than the Factory’s vents because they didn’t require maintenance. It was simply there, and something in the great depths of the sea kept it running and separated from the rest of the sea.
The closer they came to Baltimare, the less clear the sea became. As they entered Horseshoe bay, Harry started smelling poop. The sea itself stank. The ponies probably couldn’t smell it, but hippogriffs have a greater sense of smell than them. And for Harry, a greater tolerance.
Not from the poop stream itself, but from handling settled sludge. He was glad to rise to the position of a supervisor.
The bay was tinted brown. The estuary was green with severe algae overgrowth. Somehow the ponies managed to keep them away from the sea; or maybe it was whatever kept the poop stream alive. Harry had always wondered how the entire Celestial Sea didn’t get any eutrophication from the countless millennia it was used as a sewage dump. And how he had been able to live inside it for the better part of his life.
Baltimare had fresher air than Mount Aris. If he moved away from the river. It may have to do with the scrubbers. It made him excited to go back and see if the new scrubbers made any difference to the air back home.
The trip to Canterlot was his first experience riding a train. It was also his first experience with a train’s toilet. It was the worst thing in the world. It always had water in it, and it never truly flushed. It disappeared somewhere below, but the water was always there, and it was never replaced with clean new water. It got worse when the train shook and the water splashed about, and even worse when it inexplicably clogged with nothing but water and started overflowing.
He was only supposed to talk to Lox about the oxygen thing. He could’ve only done that and not talk extensively with the princess about train toilets. He really could’ve.
And so he only talked to Lox. He didn’t meet the princess and talk about toilets. Instead, he talked to Lox about toilets. About wastewater management. About Aris Wastewater Management Facility. He talked about comparing their statistics and establishing long term cooperation with the Oxygen Factory. He talked about everything except about the oxygen thing he was supposed to talk about.
When Harry was about to take the train to leave the Factory, he remembered about the oxygen thing and returned to Lox’s office. And then he talked about the oxygen thing with Lox, and Lox told him to talk to Lox about it when she woke up. So Harry ended up sleeping in a hotel in Canterlot.
Hotels in Canterlot were extremely expensive. Harry ended up choosing the cheapest one downtown where the sewage system didn’t reach. The entire neighborhood relied on a waterless gutter system to push down their wastes down the waterfall. It was an open gutter system, and everytime anyone walked the streets they could see, smell, and hear the slowly advancing poop.
The next day Harry talked to Lox about the oxygen thing. And then he requested an attendance with the new princess and extensively complained about the waterless gutter system and the health risk it imposed. At Princess Twilight’s insistence, he stayed at the Canterlot Castle for the next two weeks talking about sewage management with a bunch of engineers and the princess herself. He also talked a lot about poop and train toilets, and about the oxygen thing he was supposed to be talking about with Lox. He also talked about how it was technically safe to throw all their waste into the ocean, but they should refrain from throwing away dangerous stuff like swords and knives, and questionable stuff like dead bodies and fetuses.
And then he mentioned the archives, and he regretted everything. He needed to resort to telling her that the archive was cursed, and anyone entering it would die. Twilight then offered to break the curse, and Harry ran out of excuses to keep her out of the archives. And then a telegraph from Mount Aris arrived saying that Harry died in her sleep for absolutely no reason, and Harry managed to stop the princess from going to the archive by telling her that it was infested with ladybugs. Right before she took the zeppelin to transit through Klugetown to Mount Aris.
And then Harry told Princess Twilight that Canterlot’s waterfall was actually a sewage dump for the entire city of fifty-thousand ponies, and he boarded the zeppelin before he could hear her reaction. Thankfully, too, because Harry had no idea that young Twilight had loved to swim in the lake beneath Canterlot.
And even more thankfully because Harry was on his way to Klugetown when Twilight realized that every body of water in Equestria was probably part of the sewage system, and the entire population of Equestria had somehow survived their entire history drinking their own poop and piss.
It was around this time too that Lox returned from Mount Aris and realized with horror about the very same revelation. He had suffered enough from being conscious about his own breathing, and now he's forced to be conscious about the water cycle and the poop stream.
Author's Note
I have forsaken editing and decided to write anything I want in any format I want in any way I want. Life is great.
