Fern and Celia knew that the real change had come with the development of indoor plumbing and, specifically, the management of sewage.
Celia and Fern were more sensitive than usual to the problem of human waste and its effective management.
After all, they’d both watched the Red-Rose Knight be assassinated by Orson’s shit.
The effective management of human sewage had been developed about one hundred years prior to the Year of the Froward Worm.
Homo sapiens had been on Earth for about two hundred thousand years, which means that it took the planet’s dominant species roughly one hundred and ninety-nine thousand nine hundred years before someone realized that people shouldn’t do a poo on the living-room floor.
So don’t get your hopes up.
When Celia and Rose Byrne went to Los Angeles, they had difficulty in figuring out where they should arrive.
It wasn’t like London in the Seventeenth Century AD.
Fern hadn’t left any magical beacons hanging around to guide her mother through the landscape.
Los Angeles County was four thousand square miles.
When Celia cast her spell that opened a magic window onto Los Angeles, she had to do a little faery fudging, asking that the window open on the place which would be the most hospitable to their arrival.
She didn’t specify the exact nature of this hospitality.
The magical window opened in the lobby of the Vista Theater, which was a movie house in the neighborhood of Los Feliz.
The Vista, which was a giant single-screen theater, had been built in 1923 AD.
The exterior façade of the building was Spanish Colonial Revival, but its interior décor was early Twentieth-Century AD Egyptian kitsch, which meant that the theater was filled with Pharaonic heads and hieroglyphics.
Celia and Rose Byrne arrived on the evening of Thursday, June 2nd, 2017 AD.
This evening hosted the Vista’s first screening of Wonder Woman, the huge media spectacle in which a lesbian named Diana left her magical island with the intention of beating the shit out of some Germans.
For decades, the Vista had been managed by a man named Victor Martinez.
A curious feature of Victor’s tenure was his delight in dressing up as characters from the films that showed at the Vista.
Victor’s appearances in these outfits were always more enjoyable than the films themselves.
When the Vista had shown Iron Man, which was about a war profiteer who learned that war profiteering could be more profitable if the war profiteer built a suit of armor and personally killed Muslims with his own mechanical hands, Victor Martinez wore a version of the war profiteer’s suit of armor.
When the Vista had shown The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, which was about a fussy midget drawn into an unlikely adventure by a slightly pompous wizard, Victor Martinez dressed as the wizard.
When the Vista had shown Pirates of the Caribbean 3, which was a film about a pirate rapist with a charming accent, Victor Martinez dressed as the pirate rapist.
Because Wonder Woman was about a female character, Victor Martinez did not dress as the film’s lead role on June 2nd, 2017 AD.
Instead, he dressed as the film’s male sidekick, an indistinct American soldier during World War One.
Another of the Vista’s employees, who was a woman, dressed as the lead character of Wonder Woman.
They stood outside the theater, greeting attendees.
Victor Martinez and his fellow employee were not the only people dressed in costumes on June 2nd, 2017 AD.
A curious feature of early Twenty-First-Century AD life was that fans of media spectacles liked to dress up as characters which appeared within those media spectacles.
In the case of the Vista’s premiere screening of Wonder Woman, this was really weird.
No one had seen the film!
It could have been a total piece of shit!
Unlike Victor and his fellow employee, who had a vested economic interest in the film’s success, the people who dressed in costume at Wonder Woman had no stake in the property.
Wonder Woman had arrived at the Vista anointed in a sold-out madness emblematic of the United States of America in the Twenty-First Century.
This madness was long-brewing and the result of multiple historical occurrences and tendencies.
Some of these historical occurrences and tendencies had been running for decades.
Some had been running for centuries.
The culmination of these historical occurrences and tendencies was the recent election of Donald J. Trump to the Presidency of the United States of America.
The Presidency was the highest office in the country, to which individuals were elected every four years through an arcane process that had been designed, originally, to make sure the United States was cool with enslaving people from Africa.
Enslaving people from Africa was great business, and it was the economic bedrock of the fledgling nation, and it involved owning human beings who would be forced into labor and receive no benefits from that labor.
About seventy years after its founding, the country held a big debate as to whether or not it was cool to enslave people from Africa.
After this debate had killed about 716,000 poor White people fighting for the economic masters, and 36,000 Black people fighting for their freedom, everyone decided that enslaving people from Africa probably wasn’t too cool.
Because it was no longer too cool to enslave people from Africa, which was the country’s explicit purpose, the United States entered a malaise.
It had lost its demon.
The purpose of the Presidency shifted.
If its original function no longer existed, then surely some new purpose could be found.
It turned out that the Presidency was really good at making war.
After all, it had overseen about seventy years of war on Africa.
So new wars were made.
Decades and decades and decades of war.
By the time that Donald J. Trump was elected to the Presidency, the elections which chose the President had transformed from referendums about who would best administer the international slave trade into contests about who’d get the chance to reduce illiterate Muslims into pulpy masses of intestines.
Even by the dubious standards of candidates for the United States Presidency, Donald J. Trump was a wretched specimen.
He was the most famous person who had ever lived.
He was the most famous person who would ever live.
He was orange, he wore a stupid wig, and he was a pawn of multinational corporations.
He was hella racist.
By any honest account, he was into sexually assaulting women.
It was rumored that he was a speed freak, which would explain the difference between his public appearances as President and his public appearances in the 1980s AD and 1990s AD, when he’d been a fixture of New York City’s tabloid culture.
In the early days, the President had been, if not especially bright, then at the very least coherent.
By the time that he won the right to turn Muslims into shattered masses of agony, the President could barely speak.
Amphetamine abuse has a terrible effect on the brain.
For decades, the political liberals of the Celebrity branch of American governance had profited off Donald J. Trump’s crass public persona.