Enjoying a Pleasant Wee in the Enchantress' Tree

Come on… just gotta hold out a little longer…

Your destination grows closer with each step, but still feels like it is miles away from you. It’s all you can do to keep yourself going and not lose it right on the spot.

Your whole body grows tenser with each passing second as you rush along the dirt trail. The pressure you are exerting to maintain control is almost unbearable, but you couldn’t stop now, not when your goal was only a few yards away. But oh dear goddesses, how in the world have you been holding it in this long?

After what feels like forever, you finally reach the door. You bang loudly on the door with your forehoof while you bounce around on your other limbs. Please hurry, you think, please, please, please hurry.

It couldn’t have been more than a few seconds after you’d started knocking that the door knob finally turns , though once more it felt like hours. The door opens a crack, and the blue eyes of the house’s inhabitant look at you.

Due to the pressure you’re exerting to maintain control, you find yourself unable to speak. You can only hope the desperate look on your face will be enough convince her of your plight.

She doesn’t speak either, instead letting out a gasp. She knows.

Not wasting another second, she stands to the side and quickly opens the door. You rocket past her, pausing only to stand in the center of the room and quickly look about for…

There!

Everything goes into slow motion for these next few seconds. You half-run, half-leap towards the blessed bowl, doing everything you can to keep yourself from failing so close to your goal. You reach out with a hoof and flip up the lid just before the last ounce of strength in you fails…

And promptly spit out the contents of your mouth into the bowl.

Your puffed cheeks feel odd as they return to their normal contour. The green liquid being sprayed from your mouth mixes with the blue in the bowl, turning it into an off-lavender color. With your mouth mostly emptied, you proceed to cough and spit into the bowl to get the remaining liquid out. It’s probably one of the most disgusting spit-takes in the history of spit-takes, but at least you can say you came through in the end.

The offending concoction finally removed, you gasp for breath. Your body aches from the running you did, but there’s only one thing on your mind now, and you feel the other pony in the house deserves to know what it is:

“That… is the worst thing… I’ve ever tasted… in my life!”

While you gasp to both breathe and air out your taste buds, you can hear a giggle resonating from the throat of the mare approaching you. Somehow, that giggle always makes you feel calmer and content with the world, but not nearly as much as her actual voice.

“I do not know many ponies who would make haste to enjoy dragon juice and black shroom’s taste.”

You would have argued that it tasted more like dirty dragon feet mixed with parasprite barf, but what she said would have been a close second.

You chuckle slightly as you turn to face her. You are soon met with a pair of bright blue eyes, windows to a mind that is wise well beyond her years, and a striped face that only adds to her mysterious allure. She is certainly a one-in-a-million phenomenon, and her name only made her more exotic.

Zecora. You could say that name all day and it would never get old. Context, however, has a nasty way of keeping you from doing that, so you instead opt for a more appropriate response.

“Yeah, thanks for leaving the door open,” you reply once you finally catch your breath. “You have no idea how many times I almost spat out that mix on the way here.” You cringe as you finish, but you aren’t sure if it was deliberate or just an uncontrollable reaction from your body.

“It was a good thing for us you did not spit.” Zecora looked over to the bowl and the lavender liquid inside. “Now the mixture and our brew are a perfect fit.”

“That’s great.” You look towards the new concoction as well. “I’ll never understand exactly why jogging around with Celestia-knows-what in my mouth helps make an antidote, but at least I sacrificed my taste buds for a good cause.”

You chuckle a couple times to make sure Zecora knows you’re joking like always, but it doesn’t stop her from dropping her smile and giving you a serious look. She never was one to mess around when it came to brewing important potions, and this one was more important than most. No matter what, that look always makes you feel like a mischievous toddler in the presence of a stern grownup.

“What? Our brew is coming along great, isn’t it? Now nopony in town will have to worry about looking silly for the rest of their life, right?” Your smile subtly turns from a jovial one to a strained one as you keep talking.

“The Polka-Dot Pox should not be treated so silly. It poses a danger for every colt and filly,” says Zecora in a stern tone.

Both your ears and gaze drop to the ground. “I-I know. Maybe now’s not the best time for wise-cracking.”

Out of the corner of your eyes, you can just see Zecora’s face relaxing. You risk a look up and find her smiling again. It’s as if she pulled an invisible weight off you just by curling her lips upwards.

“You need not feel you have committed a crime,” she says, “for we have made this mixture in great time.” Before you can respond, she turns around and walks towards another cabinet. She rummages through them and grabs a jar filled with yet another liquid and two cups, perfectly balancing them on her back as she walks back to you.

“More to add to the bowl?” You ask.

Zecora is practical with her rhymes. Instead of coming up with a lengthy way of saying “no,” she shakes her head, sets the jar and cups down and says, “I believe you like your mouth’s insides to not stink, so would you like to wash that taste down with a drink?”

“Do I ever!” Your face lights up in an instant. You could scarcely wait until Zecora had finished pouring the clear liquid into a cup before you wrapped your hoof around it and held it up to your face. You give the brew a couple quick sniffs just to be safe; you only make the mistake of drinking the wrong thing at Zecora’s hut once. With no detectable odor coming from the drink, you take the plunge and take a drink.

Much like its smell, the drink has little discernible taste. There might be a hint of lemon to it, but you can’t tell for sure. Nonetheless, the drink is doing its job of getting that awful taste out of your mouth quite well. Traces of the mixture still linger like a skunk’s spray in a room several days after the fact, but it’s nothing a little potion-making can’t help you forget about.

As you finish off your drink and set it back down, you notice that Zecora had helped herself to a cup, proving beyond the shadow of a doubt that what you just had probably won’t come back to bite you. In fact, it probably wouldn’t hurt if you had another drink.

Unfortunately, just as you’re about to grab the jar and pour yourself some more, Zecora grabs your hoof with a tad more force than you expected. “Having another drink would be ill-advised,” she states while giving you a serious look. “It is best to keep your consumption pint-sized.”

“Pint-sized? But I’ve only had a cups-worth,” you say innocently. Zecora’s expression and pressure on your hoof do not change a bit, so you quickly relent and lower your hoof to the ground. “Then again, I’m not that thirsty,” you add.

Looking satisfied, Zecora places the jar and drinks on her back, and returns it to the cabinet. Instead of walking back to you, she goes to the large cauldron in the middle of the room. You had not noticed it in your initial desperation, but the cauldron was already filled halfway with a concoction of its own.

“If your mouth no longer tastes like a dirty shoe, then maybe we can get back to making our brew,” says Zecora. She lifts a hoof and points at the bowl next to you.

Looking at the bowl, you quickly figure out what she’s asking of you. You place the bowl on your back and walk up to her with a grin. “Sure thing. One pox-curing potion coming right up!”

***

You have to admit, the last couple days have been working out quite well for you. Of course, you would never say that to anyone who fell ill, but you can’t shake the feeling that this whole chain of events has been a nice opportunity for you. After all, who else in Equestria can say that the pony who helped them treat a pox is the same pony they happen to be dating?

It was only yesterday morning when the first pony in Ponyville began showing symptoms of the Polka-Dot Pox: Fever, nausea, lack of energy, and yes, polka-dots. A quick read of the disease in one of the library’s books revealed that it had spread to epidemic-like proportions at one time in old Equestrian history. It also showed that the disease itself is thankfully not fatal, but it could leave ponies bedridden for weeks, and the spots could even become permanent if left untreated.

Unfortunately for Ponyville, this strain of the pox was proving to be just as nasty. By the next morning, more than half the town was sick, and most of the other half were refusing to leave their homes. Knowing that nopony wants to live the rest of their life looking like a clown, the town mayor was quick to spring into action in getting a cure whipped up.

However, the pony who would normally be in charge of fixing one up was too busy with her new job as one of the Princesses of Equestria. Thus the job fell on two other ponies: Zecora, whose old texts contained a surefire home remedy for the pox, and you, a simple earth pony whose special talent just so happened to be alchemy.

That special talent also happens to be the reason why you know Zecora so well to begin with. It was by pure chance that you had bumped into her on your first trip into the Ponyville market. You were both trying to grab the last batch of tree sap at a stand for the same reason: using it as an ingredient for a potion or transfiguring. This led to a debate as to who needed the sap more, a debate that could have lasted for hours if the pony running the stand hadn’t quietly sold the sap to someone else. It turned out both of you could appreciate the irony of the situation, and your relationship had kicked off from there.

Before you knew it, chats at the market turned into assisting each other with potions and alchemy, which turned into hanging out around her place and Ponyville, which turned into confessions of liking each other more than the usual friend, which finally led to kissing and officially declaring yourselves a couple. Looking back, it seemed only natural that two ponies with common interests would eventually hook up together.

Of course, there’s still one part of a relationship that you would like to explore. A very intimate, physical part that quite a few ponies save for their honeymoon. You wouldn’t dare push Zecora into it before she was ready to, but it still doesn’t stop a certain pressure from building up between your flanks on occasional visits with her.

And speaking of pressure…

“Okay, that’s the last bowl of fine beach sand added,” you say as you step away from the cauldron.

“Then our potion is moving along in a flash, though I had gathered as much when I heard the splash,” says Zecora from the other side of the hut.

Don’t remind me of the splash, you think to yourself while one of your hindlegs bounces uncontrollably. It didn’t help that Zecora also happens to pouring a liquid, a previously-added ingredient, back into another jar. There may as well have also been a heavy downpour outside, with fat rain drops splattering against the windows.

It had been creeping up on you while you were working on the potion. At first, you could easily ignore it just by focusing on making the antidote. As time went on, you had found your hindleg bouncing on its own when you were standing still. Later, you would squeeze your legs together at irregular intervals. Later still, and you started whimpering occasionally and maybe not so quietly.

You had hoped that the antidote would have been finished before you needed to excuse yourself to the little colt’s room. That hope, however, is rapidly diminishing while the pressure in your bladder is rapidly growing.

Enough is enough. Asking your marefriend to let you use her bathroom like a schoolcolt asking his teacher is only awkward. Leaving a puddle of piddle on her floor like a new pet is worse.

“Hey, Zecora?” You ask.

“What is it?” In a rare non-rhyme moment, Zecora looks away from her bowl and towards you.

Putting on the best poker face you can, you respond. “Uh, since the potion is coming along so well, maybe we’ve, uh, earned a little break?”

Zecora gives you a frown, her eyes lowered and piercing through you. “Why would you bring our brew to a still while so many ponies in town are ill?”

“It’s not like that!” You blurt out. “It’s just… I’d just need a couple minutes to recuperate, and…”

Even if you could come up with an excuse underneath Zecora’s piercing gaze, you don’t think you could find it in you to lie to her. Besides, ducking behind a bush sounds a lot better to you than beating around it.

You can’t help but feel your face turn pink as you ask, “Do you have a bathroom I could use?”

And it’s out there: the first instance of one of you admitting to needing the restroom in your relationship. It was inevitable, though it doesn’t make it seem any less awkward. At least Zecora is an understanding mare when it comes to pressing matters such as this.

“I do not.”

Or so you had thought.

Your eyes open wide in shock. “No? But–”

“My home is built in a wild Everfree tree,” says Zecora as she walks toward you. “There’s no room for a bathroom, as you can see.”

To your dismay, a quick glance around the house proves her right. Only two rooms comprise Zecora’s home: the room you’re in now and her bedroom, separated only by a curtain. There's not a toilet to be found anywhere.

“Okay, then do you have a chamber pot I can borrow for a sec?” You turn back to Zecora, who is now right in front of you, and offer her a smile. Unfortunately, she maintains the same frown from before.

“Sorry, that one was too gross,” you quickly continue. “Would you mind if I ran outside and behind a tree real quick? Not this tree, but, you know, some other tree where I can go-eep!”

A hoof on your lips is all it takes to silence you. Zecora’s eyes lock with yours, pitting stern wisdom against shy desperation.

“We must be strong to finish this brew,” she says calmly. “Which is why we can’t use a pot, tree, or loo.”

You can’t stop yourself from letting out a whimper. Though you can’t recall having this problem before, you definitely sympathize with every schoolpony who had to hold it because their teacher wouldn’t let them leave their seat.

Maybe it was your puppy-dog eyes or your whimper, but Zecora lowers her hoof to the ground and smiles once more. “I see you worry, but you need not fear. The release you desire draws very near.”

“So we’re almost done with the potion?” You ask with the same tone as a kid who wants to go play with his toys.

Zecora does not answer you at first. Instead, she turns sharply and walks towards the cauldron. She stares into her refection in its murky, colorless surface. Against your better judgment, you find yourself staring into the cauldron as well.

“This potion requires a part of us, for you see…” You see Zecora’s reflection speak these words before she turns to you. Doing the same, you notice a certain pink discoloration breaking through her black-and-gray face.

“The ingredient it needs most of all is our wee.”