"I meant showing me to the kitchen might be inconvenient for you."

"Ohhh, well. I feel a touch silly. And no, it would not inconvenience me to show you."

"Thank you."

This way to the kitchen! They are not actually going into the kitchen as there's staff in it right now.

Annie doesn't even need to look through the door. Since she can't look at things. "Thank you."

"You are welcome. Are there other things it would be helpful for you to know?"

"Do you have... indoor plumbing, that I'm just not noticing for some reason, or... are there other arrangements for when people need to bathe and relieve themselves and so on."

"There's a chamber pot in your room, and a nicer room for relieving yourself during the day down the hall. Maids will take care of emptying and replacing the chamber pots as needed. Similarly, for bathing, you can ask a maid to bring a tub to your room and fill it - I suppose in your case, you might prefer a cold bath to a warm one, so you should let them know that too. Does your world do this differently?"

"Yes, we've got pipes that run through the walls and under the floors to carry fresh water in and used water out."

"Oh that's fascinating - how did the water move through the pipes?"

"I don't know very much. Pumps were... involved in some capacity... the outflow pipes led to the sewers, the inflow would be from whatever the nearest reservoir was... with water treatment on the way so you wouldn't get bits of algae or whatever in your tap water... there were little doodads that heated the water if you turned them on so you could have a hot bath easily..."

"Was there a single sewer system for each city?"

"I... think so, but I'm not sure."

"I'm jealous - this city, York, has what used to be one of the best sewer systems in the world, though not with anything indoors, but the system's mostly in ruins now."

"Why, what happened to it?"

"It's well over a millenia old, I think it wasn't doing all that well even before the Dark Ages three centuries ago and after that there wasn't much left."

"Dark Ages?"

"About 300 years ago, when powers first showed up, there was a rather large societal collapse, and in the case of the sewer system, I suppose a literal collapse as well."

"How'd the powers cause a societal collapse - probably this is the oldest of old news, I can read it out of a book or something if I'm boring you -"

"Oh, you definitely aren't boring me - you are probably the most interesting thing that's ever happened in my life. The powers caused a societal collapse in part because if you do not properly attend to the demon that comes with your power, the demon grows more powerful and eventually escapes, wreaking havoc. Additionally, I believe lots of the empowered were commoners - possibly most of them - and they overthrew the unempowered nobility, though nowadays everyone claims that their family was noble even before the Dark Ages."

"Attend to it? Like you have to personally defeat it in single combat or something?"

"You have to let it torment you often enough."

"W...hy."

"It grows more powerful over time if you don't, I don't know of any mechanism deeper than that."

"How did people even discover this?"