//------------------------------//
// Shower 
// Story: Convention Hotel 
// by Admiral Biscuit 
//------------------------------//

Convention Hotel
Admiral Biscuit
Chapter 6: Shower

Sundew held her wings out for balance as she transitioned from the carpeting to the smooth, slippery tiles of the bathroom floor. Kukui, her roommate, didn’t seem to have as much a problem with the changing floor treatments, even though she wore shoes. Everypony said shoes didn’t get as much traction on hard floors, but then farmers wore them to tend their fields and she knew that some shoes had spikes on them—she still had some scars on her barrel from one, in fact.

Never pick a fight with a farmpony, that was a valuable lesson she’d learned.

Maybe it was just experience. Sundew didn’t care much for being on the ground and didn’t get much practice at it. Sadly, Earth did not offer cloud-based hotels, which was really odd, given how much other fantastic technology they had.

Humans seemed to like open spaces in the sky; the hotel had a big open atrium she was allowed to fly in the day of her arrival but then the hotel staff decided to ban ponies from flying inside. They really didn’t care that much if she flew down the hallways or took a spiral course down the stairs to the pool deck—that was the best way in and out, especially since that door didn’t require her to fumble with the hotel’s door cards, unlike the elevators.

It was a shame that the big windows in their room didn’t open. Kukui had studied them to see if they might, but as far as she could tell any mechanism was well-hidden.

Sundew had reached the same conclusion from a flight around the hotel. None of the windows were open, and she didn’t see how an opening mechanism could fit in the thin strips of metal that framed each window.

Still, everything else in the hotel was clever and even Kukui didn’t understand how it all worked. Their room had a movie screen that showed pictures even without a projector, and she’d discovered that they’d put them in the elevators and even some of the bathrooms, too, down on the upper lobby level.

Their room had a little machine that took water and a little pod and made coffee with no need to light a fire or put it out in the sun to brew, and it was good coffee. She was too clumsy to make it work right, but Kukui was willing to make her a cup in the morning. And the hotel staff had given them straws so they could drink it more easily, since the cups they offered were too flimsy to hoof-hold.

She’d woken up well before dawn, and pressed her muzzle against the glass and watched over the city, the unimaginably big city with all its electric candles making a false starscape, with its rubber-tired trackless locomotives moving all night long, and then she’d looked over at the coffee maker and a cup would be the perfect thing to wake her up, but Kukui was still asleep and it would be rude to wake her up for something so simple.

Downstairs was a coffee shop and maybe it was open. She’d have to have her plastic door-card so she could get back into the room, or find something to prop the door open with, and had decided that wasn’t worth the trouble, she could wait for her morning coffee.

For all her life, showers had been rainclouds and rinsing off in the lake during dry spells. This was something new, something she’d been embarrassed to admit to Kukui, and now was a good time to figure it out. There was a chrome lever which was obviously what made it work, and a drain in the floor. Over her head, a broad faucet which was surely where the water came from. If they’d been more clever, they could have shaped it like a cloud.

Human controls were sized for their fingers, and both she and Kukui had been using the pens that the hotel provided to actuate some of those buttons. The black button-stick that made the movies play was the trickiest; the back was curved and it slid away at the slightest provocation.

On another hoof, the handle on the toilet was easy enough to work and had a reasonable, strong feel to it. Admittedly, the first time she’d used it, she’d jumped away, afraid she’d broken it because of the loud whooshing noise it made.

The lever in the shower was not unlike the lever on the toilet or the levers for the sink faucet. Humans used symbols and colors to represent things, which she’d been figuring out. O meant off, I meant on; triangle-person meant it was for mares and rectangle-person meant it was for stallions and somebody in a suit had gotten all shouty when she’d used the rectangle toilets.

This lever had an O, where it was set, and then an arc which went from blue to red, presumably water intensity. When she used the sink levers, the more she turned it, the more water came out.

She gave it a push, and a moment later water started dribbling out of the showerhead in big, fat droplets, much like a proper raincloud. Another nudge, and it started to flow like meltwater, a near-steady stream. And she’d hardly moved the handle.

The hotel provided bottles of soap and shampoo and conditioner, and they’d amassed quite the collection of them. A maid had stopped by just after they’d checked in and given them a whole box of them. She didn’t care much for the soap; it smelled and tasted weird. She was willing to give the shampoo a try, though; it had a good smell to it.

Sundew pushed the lever further and more water came out. Now it was a steady stream, spraying down with enough force that it would probably rinse her clean even if she didn’t use any soap at all. A driving rain in intensity, but continuous. She stuck a hoof in it, feeling the water beat through her fur and against her skin, splashing back into her muzzle. It had the same weird smell as the sink water and toilet water, and the same feel as the sink water. More slippery than water should be, and completely sulphur and salt free.

Still, plenty good for showering. And the shower had a clever glass surround that would keep her from getting anything wet when she was done and shook off.

Sometimes back home they’d leave a cloud out in the sun for a while to warm it up, but that wasn’t always convenient. As she stepped into the chilly water, Sundew considered the advantages of waiting until sunrise to take a shower; she could sun herself on the pool deck and warm back up. She didn’t want to miss the convention, though, and she’d never experienced anything other than cold or tepid showers.

Twenty little bottles of shampoo and six bottles of conditioner later—she only conditioned her mane and tail—she was both clean and cold. The room had a box on the wall that made heat, and she could dry herself in front of it. Those buttons could be pushed by a pen, and she’d learned that bigger numbers were hotter air, that you could push the red arrow to make it hot and the blue arrow to make it cold.

Of course, there was the risk of overheating the room and making Kukui uncomfortable, so maybe that wasn’t the best idea.

She reached a hoof for the shower lever and was about to push it off when a realization occurred. The dial was also labeled in a blue to red scale. What if instead of volume, it was heat?

The sink could make hot water, so why not the shower?

Sundew considered this. She’d had hot water in teas and soups and coffee, she’d showered in sun-warmed water and she’d heard of fancy spas where they had a tub that was hot.

There was a spot where she could stand in the shower and not have the water hit her, and that was the safest place to be if she was wrong. The water volume coming out of the showerhead was like an intense rainstorm and she’d flown in worse but preferred not to.

Sure enough, turning the dial further didn’t increase the water intensity, and after the shower had run for nearly a minute she stuck her hoof in to be sure. It was the same volume, and it did feel warmer.

Hot water could burn, so she cautiously turned the dial up, and the water temperature followed. Comfortable, then luxurious, then decadent. It was like liquid sunshine on her back, and she sat down on the floor and let the water wash over her, warming and easing tension she didn’t even know she had.

Steam clouds rapidly filled the bathroom, quickly condensing on all the chilly, hard surfaces, and for a few minutes she played with it, making little clouds that were destroyed the instant they hit the relentless spray, and then she started to wonder if the hot water might run out, if she was being rude to other ponies by hogging it.

And then she stopped caring, and just sat down and let the hot water wash over her.