"What do you have to offer, to somebody who helps you?  Are you the sort to fall easily in love?  To naturally run hot and cold?  To get half of someone's friends upset with the other half?"

"I do fall in love pretty easily, too easily perhaps. I've been making an effort in recent years to slow down and look harder for compatibility, but maybe I should hold off on that project! I can be quite persnickety about my expectations for a partner, and some partners say I'm impossible to please."

"I don't recall ever making a bunch of friends upset with each other."

It occurs to Opalyn after she blurts out this truthful statement that this might have been an opportunity for, if not prevarication, at least some spin, but the words are out now.

"Anyone can be impossible to please.  I'd even say that most people are.  The valuable quality is having it look like it should be possible to please you."

"Well, if it helps, I meet my own standards, and my hope that someone else might meet my standards someday seems to spring eternal. I probably invest too much in trying to teach people."

"Mm."

"I can think of a plausible match.  I won't, of course, tell you what I consider his drama-inciting qualities to be, and you shouldn't come right forth and blurt out yours.  Going in blind on that sort of thing is elementary enough that I shouldn't have to explain it, that's half the point of matchmaking being the favor that it is."

"His name is Iilasir, and his room's coordinates are 3-kek by 9-pft.  Tell me your room's coordinates, and I'll have them passed on to him, without it being clear that the suggestion came from me; and you shouldn't identify me as the matchmaker either.  It's how things are done around here."

Opalyn's grief momentarily rises up within her as she remembers the partners she left behind. As recently as this morning she thought she had pretty much worked things out. None of the partners were perfect, none of the relationships were perfect, but she'd worked hard to cobble together a life with them, and it felt sustainable, if sometimes a little lonely.

If she let herself feel it, she'd be pissed that now she has to start all over, in this strange place with these strange rules, and somehow assemble a new harem here, where people try to have terrible relationships on purpose. She does not like her odds of feeling secure and stable here, ever, and while of course that is the entire point, she doesn't have to be happy about it.

But she doesn't let herself feel it, not yet. Opalyn's form of dignity is to manage her emotions and feel them only when she's alone or with someone she trusts. Or, in this place, she can save them for the lightlines.

She's more than a little competitive, and the idea of churning her despair into productivity is more than a little attractive. She's feeling really good about her chances on the sorcery test.

"Thank you very much for your assistance in this. I won't forget your kindness. My room coordinates are 7-boop by 12-mix."

Opalyn manages to utter these coordinates with a straight face, despite wanting to laugh as she hears them come out of her mouth. The alphabet here sounds ridiculous to her ears.

"Then we're done here, I believe."

"Is there a way that I should depart the table that helps you out the most?"

"A bow of your head as you rise would not go amiss."

Sure, why not? Worst thing that happens is she's now ceded some status to Tiraff that Tiraff doesn't 'deserve,' whatever that would even mean, and that seems fine, at least for now?

Opalyn rises, bows slightly, puts the chair back where she got it, and begins to head back toward her room.

Opalyn starts to walk toward her room on autopilot, but as she walks, she thinks about what she actually wants to do next.

It has been a hell of a day. Under any other circumstances the obvious next action would be to take a hot bath, curl up in the fetal position, and cry herself to sleep. And pretty soon, she'll reach a point where she essentially has no choice about that, when her mind and body are just too exhausted to hold it together anymore.

But here? Here, she should try to hold out just a little longer.

Does she remember the way to someplace with a lot of natural beauty, like a park? But also it should be not too hot and not too cold and not too bright and not too windy and not too buggy and... well, maybe it should be an indoor garden, now that she thinks about it.

Opalyn is this picky in general but the length of the list of her demands says something about how wrung out she's feeling.

Sure!  Natural beauty is one of the easiest things for AI image generators magical architects to build into space stations!

All right! Off we go then! Let's see some natural beauty!

This world does have some redeeming features! This is gorgeous. It is hard to be wrung out and grumpy in here. Opalyn finds a place to sit for a while and just look, really look, at all the different kinds of flowers and plants that she's never seen before, and marvel at the glowing butterflies, and wonder about the lightlines.

How do they work, anyway? Do they stretch? Does that even make any sense? Opalyn would expect planets to get very far away from each other when they're on opposite sides of their orbits. Having something like lightlines feels like it makes a lot more sense for a planet and its moons than for several planets orbiting the same sun. Her first look up in the sky when she started on Mayvos suggested multiple planets in very close proximity -- they looked huge in the sky. Are all the orbits stable? Does it take magic to keep them from crashing down into each other? How does this actually work?

Asking Orphan's memories presumably gets her nowhere, but in the absence of library access, she'll give it a try.

Orphan doesn't remember planets or lightlines moving.  Planets spin and lightlines stretch to make that work, but they don't wander around the sky.  There's no particular sense that planets do or should orbit anything, such as the light source that her memories map to the word 'Sun'.

Huh. Planets that don't move in the sky? WTF?

All right, well, evidently being grumpy at Oprhan's memories doesn't actually get her anywhere. Stands to reason.

Opalyn wanders the paths, peering out the various windows, trying to get a glimpse of any point where the lightline joins the facility she's in. Presumably 'charging the lightlines' involves being in close proximity with one end of a line, though Opalyn has no mental image at all of how she'll be connected to it when she throws her sorcery into it.

She'll run across a man wandering the other way, wearing more than usual for the Facility, with red leather(oid?) that covers his arms if not his chest, and a matching full pair of pants.

"You're new," he'll say, in a calm respectful tone.

"I am! My name's Opalyn, and I just arrived today. Pleased to meet you."

Opalyn assumes he's relatively high-status, as prisoners go, and is encouraged that he's started the conversation warmly.

"It's a beautiful planet, isn't it?  At least outwardly.  The view onto Capital beats any other view from space I've ever seen.  You can hardly see the planet for the lightlines."

"It really is stunning."

Opalyn wants to say something about how there are no lightlines where she's from, but that's going to lead into isekai conversation territory. Her plan is to withhold that story since she doesn't expect it to be believed anyway.

"Have you been in here a long time? Any tips for a newcomer?"