Disclaimer: I don't own Discworld, however bloody funny it may be. Sigh.
Ankh-Morpork, it can be said, is a city where dreams can come true.
Remember some of your dreams?
So you will be glad to learn that this story does not start in Ankh-Morpork, but in a little fishing village about five miles away, on the coast of the circle sea, with the customary pier and rocky outgroves that all sea side towns seem to need, just in case they're going to be visited by a mermaid or selkie or some such thing from the deep. (1)
It was early morning in the village, and for anyone who was looking at the time, they would have been able to see a figure making its way across – and sometimes over – the rocks on the shore near the pier, with a basket under one arm. It was a young woman, though with the muffling jacket wrapped around her form it was hard to tell the difference between genders at first. In the nicest way possible, or course.
The young woman's name was Miranda. Her mother, who had been educated to be a 'high society Ankh-Morpork lady'(2), but had effectively flushed all the said education down the metaphorical plughole by marrying a fisherman, claimed that it meant 'she who must be admired', and the village had to admit that it rang true; though the young Miranda had grown up to be admired more for her ability to pick limpets off the bottoms of boats than for any extreme beauty on her part. But nobody thought any the worse of her for it – living in a fishing community, everyone acknowledged that the talent of pulling in a whole net full of fish, single-handed, beat being a dazzling good-looker who struggled to even lift a half-full basket, hands down.
Miranda clambered up over a pile of rocks. She was making for the mussel pools, further along. The season for the delicacies was approaching in Ankh-Morpork, and at this time of the year the fishwives went into the city wearing strings of them, like larger, smellier versions of the pearl necklaces society ladies wore. She was the only one in the village who could pull the strings off the rocks in one piece.
And a pair of unseen eyes watched her from the water, as they had for a long time before now.
This morning was very important. One could say it was the exact point where the dawning of a new age began.
Others could say it was the very beginning of the extreme cock-up that was to follow.
1) It's no use being serenaded by a gorgeous woman with a fish's tail if she doesn't even have a rock to stand on. Or rather lie on, as the case may be.
2)Which is the same as a low society Ankh-Morpork lady, except that the higher sort tend to wear more expensive if even less tasteful clothes, and charge a great deal more than the average seamstress, however subtly.
Umm, yes. Guess what the new arrival in the species front is?