"The standard first, I think." Whatever Starlight's flaws, their standard of care has been thorough enough to earn her respect. 

And it's not like I have any idea where to start, anyway...

Yes, it was best to let Siobhán lead this one. 

"Alright. The dream is a collection of constructed realms that are where about half of our population spends the majority of their time. More than seventy percent of our populace at least visits with the remainder being mostly people who only count as our population as a technicality with the remainder being people who have various philosophical objections.

As the dream is constructed rather than natural a lot of things which would just be facts of life are instead customizable. If you want it's fairly easy to change your body in various ways. You can choose how you want to access certain sorts of information like the people's flags, background information about an area and the like. And you can set preferences about how automation works in realms that support that.

Different realms have their own rules some social and some enforced by simply being impossible to break. I think that's the very basic summary covered would you like to ask any questions before I move on?"

"Can you give some examples of rules in this realm?" 

"This realm is one of the many copies of a template called arrival, one of its rules is that it's completely impossible to physically injure another person without their prior agreement. You can't cut their skin or apply force past certain limits and if someone is stuck then they'll be able to phase through the people and objects near them."

Well, that removes a lot of options, doesn't it. 

Then why does she feel relieved? 

Well, she is a captive. Unusual for captors to tie their own hands in such a way. But, she supposes, if the prison itself is the substance the prisoners are made of, escape - or, for that matter, volition - is not really a problem, if the jailers don't want it to be. 

This unsettles her less than it should, for some reason. 

"And social rules?" 

"There's a few, give people space if they ask for it, try to be kind, don't try to convince people of things that aren't true. Generally the idea is to be accommodating to the other residents. For a lot of the people in arrival this is the first time they've lost a body and for many it wasn't under pleasant circumstances. This place is meant to make their transition to the dream as gentle as possible."

"How are social rules enforced?" 

"For most cases they aren't, if someone decides to make an issue of it though they can ask an auditor to confirm a violation and then that gets added to your flags and people can make decisions to avoid you based on that. You can petition to have those overturned if you think they're inaccurate or to have them sequestered after some time has passed and you can demonstrate that they're no longer representative of your current behavior."

All of that sounds entirely reasonable and frustratingly constraining at the same time. Oh, she's had long experience manipulating people who think they know how dangerous she is - was? - and why, but this feels different somehow. For one thing, Salem isn't sure she wants to anymore. 

She's not sure what she wants, at this point. What is there left for her to do? Moving against the gods was an uphill battle from the start. To do so from within a simulated prison, where her every thought, word, and deed could be audited - 

Salem shudders. 

A few deep breaths later - "I think I understand the basics. Please continue." 

"The usual next step is to set your interface preferences. I can also show you around to places like the local transit nexus, though depending on your preferences that could be redundant or nonsensical."

"Interface preferences?" 

"It's a general term for the ways you interact with the realm and the realm interacts with you. As an example you can choose if and how you see other people's flags. There's a lot of customizability but as a few examples you could speak a command to have them imposed on your visible field, have them always floating near people you encounter, or use an affordance like a scroll to display that information in a more diegetic fashion."

"...okay." 

"Flag display is a reasonable place to start, do you have any thoughts? People who aren't used to having things imposed on their vision tend to prefer either an invocation or something diagetic. Though my impression is that you're accustomed to having additional senses most people don't have so maybe you'd prefer something less visual."

"I want it to work like my old mag- "

" - no. I think a-a scroll would be less...distracting. It's not - others can't see what I'm looking at, if I want it obscured?" 

"Certainly, that's a common preference, most people don't like having others read over their shoulder without permission."

She produces a scroll from a pocket and hands it over it's designed to look and work like the most common model on Remnant. There's an app with an icon like a flag that provides a list of nearby and recently encountered people and an option to select any of them to look at their flags. Listed are Siobhán and feline automation subcomponent.

Salem fiddles with it for a bit before finding a setting that seems natural. "Thank you. What else?" 

She has a goal now, if a simplistic one. Get through orientation. Think other thoughts later. 

"There's a rather long list of possibilities most of them have pretty reasonable defaults. Given that you selected an multifunction affordance the settings on your scroll will let your customize everything. There's a few that I think are important to highlight though. In realms like Arrival, you can set a block list of people who you don't want to encounter and also how intrusive you want the world to be about enforcing that. In the least intrusive settings it will provide you with a warning before you'd encounter them to give you a chance to avoid them, in the medium settings most people use it will make it so you won't encounter them unless there's a shared social event you were both invited to and give you warning in those cases. In the most intrusive settings you literally won't be able to notice or interact with each other even if in a more physically constrained world you would be forced to. Similarly there's a setting that defaults to fairly strict about how reliably things remain in the same relative locations. The default keeps the changes to about the level you might expect from people redecorating and renovating spaces in a physical realm while the most permissive level basically allows reality to rearrange itself at will to be more convenient to you and the people around you."

The interaction settings seem cute. She immediately thinks of half a dozen ways to exert hostile influence on someone in an environment of mutual imperceptibility. She takes quick and shallow breaths until the thoughts fade. 

The trouble with the "getting through orientation" plan is that it keeps expecting her to have preferences about things that aren't death, gods, or Grimm. Well - she's been able to reshape her environs and servants to her convenience for most of her existence. But for some reason, thinking about that makes her hands shake and her vision blur. She elects to keep things strictly lawful. 

"What happens when two people with different reality-warping settings are in a room together?" 

"Arrival generally doesn't change things where people are currently looking so it wouldn't come up standing in the same room but if they went for a walk together it would maintain consistency to the level of the person with the highest preference for it until they separated. Some minor cheats would still be allowed like someone pulling an item out of a purse or pocket that wasn't previously there. There's also a preference that has the realm notify you when things like that happen in your vicinity."

A fuzzy system with significant potential for loopholes if properly exploited - 

Breathe.

"I think I understand. Please continue."

"I think I've covered what's critical now it's more about less critical things. This is a good time for a break if you're feeling overwhelmed. Otherwise as I mentioned there's a lot of minor things you can change if you want, generally you can customize most of your experience of this realm. You could change things to be quieter or louder for example. I could also show you some nearby points of interest if you'd like... given your expressed preference for consistency if you say what you'd like to have nearby before we go looking then it will be nearby insofar as that's possible without breaking consistency for other people."

No, no, she is not feeling overwhelmed right now, she is not feeling anything right now, because if she were to acknowledge feeling anything of the sort, she would spend the next week curled up in her! bed! and gibbering and not in any way making progress toward her long-term goals. 

Such as they are.

The hole-where-her-conviction-once-lay yawns especially deep, and she wrenches her thoughts from its edge. 

"What...are some points of interest?"