Cody's room is quite a mess, but there is a reason why. He is a sort of boy who is too sentimental to throw away things he doesn't use anymore, which makes for a messy lifestyle. He has an old Sega Saturn on his desk--hidden under a stack of badly stained pre-calculus algebra and trig worksheets--that his father had grown up playing and passed down to his son, and it even has the Sonic the Hedgehog game that came with it, which Cody verifies is still playable after all of these years.
At first, Mary watches helplessly, from her position on the bed, as Cody spends hours poring over the many memories he has in the room instead of cleaning it. Her master is coming across to her as disappointingly lazy, and he doesn't really seem to have his heart in his work at all. Her 14 year old human self would have quickly become resentful toward Cody, and she would have stormed out of the room and left a dumb boy to rot in his own filth. This story would have turned into more fodder for Stephanie and her to laugh about him at the lunch table, and she would have once again felt glad to be so remote and detached from creepy boys like Cody.
However, Mary's current position as Cody's little pet doesn't put her in such a position, and as Cody chatters on about his things, Mary eventually has no choice except to start understanding what he has to say. To her surprise, there really is a story behind everything that Cody has, and he talks so much about his things only because there is so much to say about them. The room is like a time-capsule, harboring reminders of everything that Cody remembers from his earliest childhood, and the more Cody talks with Mary, the more Mary realizes that Cody is really a sweet and poetic sort of boy, although she remains terribly anxious about how his tidying up is not really going anywhere. If not for things just not getting done, she might actually start warming up to her master.
After the day has worn on for a while, Mary starts to squirm about once again, and once more, she finds a very small trickle running down her thigh as she whines helplessly. As an animal, Mary must wait to be taken out by her master. This is one of the more cumbersome rules for anthros in this altered reality. Why did the Chronivac create a world where anthro slaves were expected to do their toileting outside while crouching like beasts at the feet of their masters? It was so debasing, and being bereft of speech makes it so hard for Mary to communicate her situation.
Luckily, Cody hears Mary's whine long before the trickle can become a true torrent. Unlike Mary's father, Cory doesn't rush or panic, but instead, he calmly clips the lead to Mary's collar, and he takes her out into the back yard, rather than the front. "Too many people walking by must make you nervous," Cody observes, leading the little, red anthro dragoness behind a hedge of overgrown topiaries. Well, this is true, Mary realizes. Someday, she might be ready to squat naked out in public like the animal she is beginning to realize she truly is, but she is still far too jumpy and scared for that, for right now. It's been too much change at once.
They pass by where some garden shears have been left out to rust next to a pair of gloves that look to be in the terminal stages of decomposition on one side and some plant containers in various stages of ruin, mostly overrun with weeds, on the other. He leads his pet to a private, quiet place next to an ivy-covered privacy fence, and he gives her a nod.
This time, there is not as much of a sense of burning shame or debasement as Mary does her business, but by comparison, she feels safe and almost comfortable squatting down at her master's side in this private place. Unlike Mary's parents, who were as cruel and overly image-conscious as Mary had been growing up to be, Cody has shown himself to be a warm and considerate master. She relaxes her bladder far more readily, and even when Cody bends down to wipe her dry with a cloth once she is done, she doesn't feel any sense of trespass. She realizes, as she wipes her clean, that it's silly to get bothered over her own master cleaning her up, and she really finds herself enjoying the feeling of being pampered so.
Once Mary is brought back inside, Cody finally gets a little bit more serious about making his room safe for Mary, throwing away any spent light bulbs that have been left lying around and even putting away anything that she might inadvertently swallow. Whenever Mary shows an interest in one of his belongings by bumping it with her nose and then looking up at him, though, Cody stops and tells her a story about it before putting it away, which really makes the work go a lot faster as he remembers several things that go together with it or which fit into the same category. Eventually, Mary ends up helping Cody deal with every individual item in the room by bumping it with her nose and looking up at him with shining, questioning eyes, thirsty for another story.
After clogging, unclogging, reclogging, and then finally having to ask his father to come perform a quick repair, amounting to a band replacement, on the vacuum cleaner, all that is left for Corey to do is to wipe his things down with a dust-cloth. His father's old Sega Saturn sits proudly displayed on his entertainment system, now looking every bit as clean and as good as when it came out of its box.
Toward the end of the day, Cody's mother finally comes to inspect the room, and it turns out that she had gone out and purchased a pet-bed for Mary to lie on when the family is in the living-room together, and by the way...