Writer's note: Arin is an andyne - andynes are bird-winged people from my other work, like Arthur Deepuin and Digitalis. Grisderms are kind of alien-lizard-looking people, and for a grisderm man to be "matronly" is considered a good/normal thing, since the male grisderms are the ones who give birth.
*
Arin's sparrow-colored wings twitched uneasily. She stood in the overcrowded break room of her airship's galley around 2:00 in the morning for a quarterly meeting with the galley staff, regarding orders and productivity. There were a few issues to work out, but the meeting had been short and sweet, mainly because the galley staff needed to start work for the day's first breakfast rush at 5AM.
Arin stowed her notes away in the pocket of her white, ruffled dress; she'd dozed off at her desk in Accounting sometime between 8 and 10pm, and woke just in time to sprint down to the galley in her socks for the meeting. Her sleep-tousled shoulder-length crimson hair was somewhat tamed, held back like a headband by her thick-framed cokebottle glasses, and there were dark rings underneath her eyes. In addition to forgetting her shoes, she'd neglected to use the bathroom in her hurry to make it to the meeting. Arin's notoriously large andyne bladder was painfully full, and her sleep-deprived brain couldn't even recall the last time she'd used a bathroom, though she knew it had to have been at least twenty-four hours.
"Take some fresh donuts with you, Captain, you're looking a little peaky," said the galley head, a matronly old grisderm, fastening his hairnet. There was a bag of fresh donuts on the table for Arin, and she took it gratefully, thanked the galley staff for their time and shuffled out of the break room. She had to get back to her quarters, three decks up on the opposite end of the ship. There was a long hallway that ran almost the length of the crew deck, an elevator ride, and another three corridors between Arin and her quarters. There would be bathrooms on the way on the crew deck, but they were all off of rooms that had been locked for the night.
The pattern of the dark, freshly-mopped linoleum of the crew deck was a repeating design of dark blue squares against a slightly darker green background. The subtle geometry of it gave it an odd, cascading quality, almost like a waterfall-
Arin looked up from the floor: waterfalls definitely weren't the mental image she needed at the moment. She quickened her pace, tightening her kegel muscles in order to further delay the inevitable, but her effort backfired. The pressure on her bladder was too great and a small, hot drop of piss leaked out of her, soaking into her underwear as she jogged along. Arin briefly tried to use her wings to propel her a little faster up the hall, but she could already feel herself starting to lose control: she couldn't hold it. She stopped and glanced desperately at the signs nearest to her in the hallway: "Calligraphy Club," "Office Supplies," "Bio Disposal Facilities," and "Swimming Pool."
Arin tried the closest door first: the calligraphy club. It was locked. She tried bio-disposal next since it would at least have a bucket, but that was locked too, as was the office supplies door. The last - which Arin approached with a hand clamped between her legs - was the door to the swimming pool. Arin pushed hard on the door in frustration and it opened easily, clattering against the wall behind it and breaking the early-morning silence like a gunshot. Arin barrelled forward into the pool area. The main lights were off but the pool lights had been left on, giving the room a soft, bluish glow. Arin immediately spotted the door to the showers and ran for it, yanking up her white dress to pull aside her soiled underwear. She pulled on the door handle with the hand holding her bag of donuts. It didn't budge.