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“The Party Poopers called. They want their poop back.”
Icky held the phone by her ear for a few seconds in silence, pondering over the odd words to make sure she hadn't missed something.
“Is this a crank call Toby?” she asked.
“No, the Party Poopers. The people you rent your extra-dimensional porta-potties from,” the Clown Town official said. She heard him shuffling through some papers on the other end before he resumed speaking. “Apparently the phone number they have for you is out of date, and they came here because you never stay in one place. I declined to give them your number, just in case you were trying to lie low, but I promised I'd pass the message on.”
“Okay, yeah. This is starting to ring a bell,” she said, putting her feet up on the ottoman of her private trailer. “We've had those porta-potties since Fuller was in charge. I wasn't really involved in acquiring them and I've never had a reason to replace them either, so I never thought about them much. I – hold on.”
Lolly had crawled up onto the couch beside her and was enticingly wiggling her bottom, eager for their evening activities to begin.
“Interrupting me while I'm on the phone? That's not a good girl.” Icky playfully swatted Lolly's bum, causing her to shiver and moan in lust. With a satisfied smirk, Icky put the phone back to her ear.
“I love those porta-potties. You just poop in them and its gone forever.”
“… Lolly's 18, right?”
“She's twenty-six.”
“And a half!” Lolly shouted into the phone.
“I said no interrupting,” Icky reminded her, giving her a second spank that made her squeal in delight. “Sorry Toby, we were discussing porta-potties?”
“Well, the thing is, the poop isn't actually gone forever. According to the Party Poopers, the porta-potties send their contents into a shared pocket dimension, and its capacity is not infinite,” he said, his raspy voice cracking more than usual.
“Wait, you're saying we're hauling around a microverse filled with decades' old shit and piss that's inevitably going to overflow?” she asked as her face contorted in horrified disgust.
“Yes, and you're dangerously overdue for service. If you want, I can tell the Party Poopers where you are.”
“Well, how much does the service cost? And do we owe them any back rent?” she asked as she grabbed a pen and napkin to scribble down any figures he gave her.
“No, that's the weirdest thing. The waste itself is the payment.”
“You're joking.”
“I wish I was, Icky.”
“What do they use it for?”
“They wouldn't say.”
“Well, that's unsettling. You're sure this is legit? This isn't a trap or a scam or something?”
“I went through the records, and they are a real company and Fuller did sign a contract with them. If you don't know anything about them then check with Manny if you really want to be safe, but you do have a ticking time bomb on your hands though with those porta-potties, so don't put this off.”
“I won't, don't worry. Thanks for letting me know. Talk to you later.” She hung up the phone and set it down on the table, looking wistfully towards Lolly. “I'm sorry baby girl, something's come up. I'm going to have to go deal with this -”
Lolly sceptically arched her eyebrow, and then stuck out her tongue as she shape-shifted it nine inches long with enlarged, pulsating taste buds for stimulation.
“ – in the morning.”

Early the next morning, a few hours before they'd be open to the public, Icky headed towards one of the Circus's several banks of porta-potties with a tall cup of coffee in hand. To fit in with the old-timey décor, they were made of cedar instead of plastic, with crescent moons carved into the doors like a stereotypical outhouse, and they each sported a unique paint job by a different volunteer.
One of the porta-potties' doors had been propped open, and she saw Manny inside doing some sort of inspection with his head stuck inside the extra-dimensional commode.
“You got my message, I take it?” she asked as she sipped her coffee.
“Mm-hmm,” he said, his voice echoing inside the wooden box. “A representative of the Party Poopers should be coming through the Kaleidoscope any minute now. These toilets all look like infinite voids to me, so I don't know if we're actually close to capacity or not.”
“And do you remember when Fuller got these? Because I'm a little fuzzy on that part. It was in the Eighties, wasn't it? It was definitely before Dicksy, because I remember him very clearly going on a rant about not being able to check his stool for blood, parasites, and small valuables he had swallowed for safe keeping.”
“It was thirty-some years ago, yeah,” he said, pulling his head out of the toilet and rising to his feet. He reached into his pocket and took out a browned stack of papers. “I dug up the contract Fuller signed. As usual, it's pretty convoluted. Fuller could never make a straight-forward agreement, even on something as pedestrian as this. Always had to try to swindle anyone and everyone. Not counting the parts that are intentionally meaningless, the contract is incredibly ambiguous about our end of the deal, other than that the Party Poopers get to claim the contents of the porta-potties at some point.”
“But we are renting them though? We don't own our own porta-potties?”
“Sadly, no. Since they do belong to the Party Poopers they could presumably reclaim them, but the contract is incredibly unclear about that. We're not going to be able to use this mess for negotiations. We'll have to start from scratch.”
Icky rolled her eyes and let out a heavy sigh.
“Even after all these years, we're still not done dealing with Fuller's crap,” she smirked. “Remember he used to actually have a two-story outhouse?”
“It was symbolic – mostly.”
Manny nodded slightly behind her, and she turned to see Noodles, the large Clown they mainly used for security, pulling a small cart completely surrounded by a shower curtain covered in sad ducklings.
“Is the representative in there, or -”
Icky was interrupted by lacklustre fanfare.
“Presenting, his melancholiness, Princeton Puntsworth Periwinkle the Worst, Envoy of the Party Pooper Pro-State, Paladin of the Porcelain Palisades, and septic waste technician,” a listless, nasally voice announced. The curtain was pulled back to reveal a short, stout, heavily jowled man in a three pieced suit, bowler hat, and thick glasses sitting on an ornate, pull-chain toilet. “Was it just the two of you out here? What a waste.”
“Hello, Mr. Periwinkle -” Icky began.
“Call me the Worst. Everyone does,” he insisted.
“Is that Werst as in sausages?”
“No, just terrible.”
“Well, whatever you prefer. Forgive me for being blunt, but are you feeling well? You look, um…”
“Constipated?”
“Well, yes.”
“You've heard the expression about the cobbler's children having no shoes?”
“I have.”
“Same basic principle.”
“Right. Getting to business, I'm Icky, the Ringmaster, and this is Manny. He and I are in charge around here. We're sorry you had so much trouble finding us, it's just that we took over from the previous owner rather suddenly and neither of us were fully aware of the contract with your company.”
“That's how it is. Everyone just takes toilets for granted. As long as they take all your crap without a problem, no one cares.”
“Listen, the contract you had with Fuller was a little unclear. We'd like to renegotiate it.” Manny said.
“Neither of us are in a position to negotiate at the moment. Either I take the quarter-million tonnes of fecal matter and ten million liters of urine that have been festering for over thirty years, or they exceed the carrying capacity of the cesspool pocket dimension and rupture out all over your Circus, which would be a horrid calamity for everyone involved.” Princeton turned his head to get a better look at the porta-potties. “Why are they covered in graffiti?”
“It's not graffiti. We painted them,” Icky replied.
“That's graffiti. Which I have to audit. Which will take a while,” he said, pushing himself to his feet with a loud groan. He pulled out a pen and notepad from his pocket and began writing. “ ‘Restrooms are defaced'. I'm going to need you to shut down the Circus for the day. Crowds make me gassy.”
“We are not shutting down the Circus for this,” Manny replied. “Just write them all off, and we'll compensate you for them.”
“Cosmetic damage isn't a write-off. I need to assess every porta-john and report it to my superiors, and they will decide how to proceed.”
He shuffled over to the nearest porta-potty and leaned in to read the sign they had hung on the door. It was pink, purple, and blue with a female, non-binary, and male silhouette.
“ ‘GENDER INCLUSIVE RESTROOM. Everyone is welcome to use this restroom regardless of gender identity or expression. Changing tables are available in our fully accessible family restrooms. Please inform Circus staff if our toiletries our out of stock or if you find the restrooms in an unsanitary condition. Thank you, and have a Disquieting day!'.”
He stared at the sign in confusion for a moment, then turned around to face them.
“What's the difference between unisex and gender inclusive?” he asked.
“Nothing. It's meaningless virtue signalling,” Manny replied.
“It is not meaningless!” Icky objected. “Non-gender conforming people need to know they're not going to be harassed or assaulted just for trying to take a piss! The term ‘Gender Inclusive' conveys that. Unisex doesn't. It's especially bad for them because they get discriminated against from both sides of the political spectrum.”
“You mean like that incident in the Library when you got into a heated debate with a witch named Tilda about whether or not she was ‘really' a woman?” he asked, her face blushing a luminescent pink.
“That, that was a long time ago. My opinion is more evolved now.”
“Exactly. These kinds of things evolve constantly, and they never stop evolving, which is why death cheaters like us shouldn't get too caught up in the ephemera of the current zeitgeist.”
“I… look. If it's important to Lolly, it's important to me.”
Manny smiled a concession.
“Fair enough,” he nodded.
“ ‘Restrooms are woke',” Princeton muttered as he scribbled it down on his notepad.
“You've got a problem with it now?” Icky asked.
“The Party Poopers are apolitical. Everyone poops, after all,” he replied. He pulled the door open and stepped inside to evaluate the interior. “For a woke water closet, there's an awful lot of swastikas carved in here.”
“Well, when was the last time you saw a public toilet without hate-speech scrawled in it?” Icky asked.
“Literally never,” he sighed sadly, scribbling in his notepad again. “ ‘Adequate lighting and ventilation. Foaming hand sanitizer in soap holder, peppermint scented. Cola-scented air freshener. Upside-down urinal cake, possibly an intentional reference to the owner. Addition of one small feminine hygiene product dispenser. Toilet paper is 2-ply and quilted with Big Top imprints. Notable graffiti: ‘For a good time call: 092-791-697-518-6', ‘I fucked a Squeedle and I liked it' ‘Moon Champion claims this public poetry booth in the name of the Moon King,' and ‘Herr Spankoflex did toot the fruit for the Fraggle loot. Cack!' . Overall Condition: Acceptable'.”
He placed the pen and notepad back in his pocket, then took out a long oil dipstick and slowly inserted it into the toilet.
“Now what are you doing?” Manny asked.
“We call it punditry; measuring how full of crap it is,” he said, pulling the dipstick out and up to his glasses. “It's close to critical. I'm going to have to harvest immediately.”
“And harvesting is the only payment you require?” Icky asked incredulously. “What could you possibly want with human waste?”
Princeton produced the first thing resembling a smile since he had arrived.
“There is no such thing as waste, young lady. Only resources we are not smart enough to use. The mundane uses of feces are manifold; fertilizer of course, but it can also be turned into biofuel and paper, the potassium nitrate can be used for gunpowder, and more recently doctors have even started performing fecal transplants to correct imbalances in an individual's gut flora. Surely it's not so strange to think that someone in the anomalous world would have found a way to exploit such a versatile resource?”
“And you're not going to tell us what that is?” Manny asked.
“Sorry. Trade secrets and all. You understand.” They saw him pull out an odd sort of spanner before he shut the door on them. The two of them exchanged worried glances at the sound of him tinkering around inside, followed by a 'kerplunk' and an “Oh bother, not again.”
He kicked the door open with his hands stretched outwards, as the eyeglasses he had worn were no more.
“I dropped my glasses,” he bemoaned.
“In the toilet?” Icky asked.
“It happens more often than I'd like to admit,” he said. “You might want to shut that door.”
Sure enough, the porta-potty was now beginning to rumble and shake portentously, and they both knew they weren't going to like what was about to happen.
“What did you do?” Icky demanded, the timber of her more monstrous form beginning to edge into her voice.
“I initiated a process that cannot under any circumstances be left uncompleted, then dropped my glasses,” he replied. “As we say in my business, we're up a creek.”
Manny didn't accept defeat so easily though. Rushing to the trembling box he knocked it over and set it back up so that it was upside-down.
“What did you do that for?” Icky asked as he dragged her behind the shower curtain of Princeton's sedan chair.
“Just a hunch,” he replied.
“Do what? I can't see,” Princeton groaned.
A geyser of unspeakably horrid septic sludge burst out of the porta-john's roof, blasting it into the air like a rocket. Some of the greenish-black liquid splattered over the immediate area, but most of it was taken away by the soaring lavatory, which rose so high and so fast it was out of sight within seconds.
Icky cautiously drew the shower curtain back, revealing a small crater where the porta-potty had been. The adjacent porta-potties had taken some damage, and everything within a twenty-foot radius, including Princeton Puntsworth Periwinkle the Worst, was covered in reeking septic sludge.
“Well, if the Party's been Pooped, I guess my work is done,” he said. “Would one of you mind showing me back to the Kaleidoscope?”
He felt a hand wrapped in a shower curtain grab him by the throat and hoist him into the air.
“You nearly drenched my Circus in thirty years worth of festering shit, not to mention killing my afterglow from last night!” Icky roared at him, her eyes glowing and her teeth growing sharp. “You are not just walking away from this.”
“But, I, oh, you, you wouldn't hit a man with glasses, would you?” he asked pitifully.
“You lost your glasses,” she reminded him with a sadistic smirk.
“Oh bother.”

Manny left Icky to berate the poor Pro-State rep, knowing her well enough that there was no chance she would really hurt him over an accident. He almost felt bad for him, but then remembered that some of that raining septic sludge could easily have fallen down the inverted nostrils of his upside-down face.
He stepped inside the Ringmaster's tent with the intention of drafting a new contract with the Party Poopers, but was instead surprised to find a pair of young women waiting at the desk.
“Manny? You haven't changed a bit,” one of them said. “Do you remember us, perchance?”
“The Levainn sisters, Erelynn and Elewynn. Of course,” he said courteously, more out of reluctance to offend Fair Folk than actual delight. “What brings you here after all this time?”
“We've come to seek your aid in a quest we've taken up,” the other girl replied. “We've come to collect on that favour you owe us.”
…
“Ah, crap.”

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