"Wait, you... shoot jets of fire out of your hands without knowing how?  As in, spontaneous sorcery, no explicit spellcraft?"

"That's right! I would really like to learn some explicit spellcraft but they won't let me check out books from the library until I've charged the lightlines! That's why I was so glad you invited me today!"

He turns his head back to look at her, at this point.  "There are unspoken premises here and I think I am missing a large amount of context.  Did you just awaken your sorcery and then immediately end up in prison after shooting jets of fire from your hands and before you got to read any books about spellcraft?"

"It is a little more complicated than that but if you went with that as your working theory it would not lead you to make any actual errors, I don't think?"

"How would you feel about disabling her collar a bit early, so I can watch her shoot jets of fire from her hands and see if I can figure out how that works," he says in the direction of Opalyn's own guard.

"No."

"And, nice try, fucker."

"The context there being that shooting jets of fire from your hands without any spellcraft implies that you have literally enough magical power to materialize it as fire, which... I'd have to sit down and calculate numbers but I'm pretty sure Counts can't do that, possibly Dukes can't do that, which means that if somehow everyone in Facility admin was unaware of that, there was an outside chance we could've escaped from prison if I'd successfully fooled them into disabling your collar just now."

"Very slim chance, to be clear, but it doesn't do to pass that sort of thing up."

Sweet! Opalyn is a badass! She had suspected as much but the evidence is mounting and that's pretty fun.

"What rank are you? And what prevents me from attempting prison escapes when they remove my collar to charge the lightlines?"

"Barely Baron-level.  What prevents me from escaping is a greater annihilation weapon pointed at the back of my head at all times my collar is switched off.  What prevents you from escaping is, I presume, a greater annihilation weapon and the Prince of the Farm supervising you in person."

"Well, now I'm feeling all interested.  Let's begin, shall we?"  This is spoken by him to his own guard.

Huh! Apparently the actual charging still hasn't started!

"Am I still supposed to yell questions at you?"

He turns back from her, to the lightline, and raises up his hand, even as the guard at his back points a dangerous-looking wand straight at his head.

A moment later, Opalyn's magical senses tell her that power is welling up from this man--though nothing impressive by Orphan's standards, to be sure--and then it intensifies, and begins flowing from him toward the lightline.

"Yes," he says, his voice now slightly strained.  "In fact, you'd better, under the conditions I invoked to bring you here."

Opalyn is feeling the pressure, a little bit, despite herself. She wants to help Iilasir, but she barely knows him and doesn't know what will interest him. There's nothing she can do about that, though, might as well just keep following her own curiosity!

"Can you help me figure out how to direct my magic in the three spatial dimensions before us? I've had some problems with that. I sent out a force spell and it went into the wrong dimensions. Is it just a matter of concentrating?"

"A matter of watching magic move in the nonmundane directions until you can both perceive and understand what you perceive.  A matter of practicing sending small amounts of magic out in mundane and nonmundane directions, until your movements correspond to your perception.  I doubt it's any different from how a baby learns to see with their eyes and move a hand toward what they see.  You will not get much chance to practice while you stay within the Farm, I fear."

"Yeah, about that. Is there any way to get magic practice in here? It sounds like you've made some unconventional arrangements. What's the key to making deals in here?"

"I think it'd be very hard for you to make an unconventional arrangement like that.  While unblocked you are a danger unless you're watched by someone at least one rank up from yourself, and that's a Grand Duke if you're a Duke yourself.  There can't be many of those who work for the Farm.  You would need to be terrifically valuable to them, more valuable than a Grand Duke's time and in a way they could not just force from you."

"The key to an unconventional arrangement is to have something that an upper bureaucrat of the Farm actually values, and which they cannot force from you more easily than they can bribe you for it.  In my case, that key is my ability to create mass amounts of drama in a legible form that shows up on the Facility's performance metrics."

"Ohhhh I was wondering about that. You know how to make people feel things. That does sound valuable here."

"Would it be entertaining to you to hear me speculate about how you might go about that? Or would it just frustrate you to hear a beginner fumbling around with ideas you've long since mastered?"

"Oh, I haven't mastered a fucking thing.  My own relationships have little drama that isn't caused by my own lack of reaction to events.  But when I take actions myself, such as moving around and breathing, I exude some mysterious effluvium that causes enormous amounts of drama to start happening in everyone around me."

"That... makes no sense? At least according to my own current understanding of anything at all?"

"What is your own working theory of why you have this property? Is it some form of magic that isn't disrupted by your collar?"

"I think it's more that in some point in my life, I started having bright ideas about how we could all do things better, not just in the grand scheme of things but in the minutia of our daily lives and relationships, and these ideas appeal to exactly half of whichever audience I happen to be speaking in front of at the moment."

"Oh, you were exaggerating before when you said that just moving around and breathing is enough. Also you have ideas and you speak those ideas aloud. That seems pretty important! And totally nonmagical!"

"Except maybe the part about 'exactly half.' Were you exaggerating again, or did you literally mean that in a crowd of fourteen people, exactly seven will like any idea you speak? Because if that is what actually happens then I will have additional questions."

"You're extremely literal.  I like that in a woman."

"I was speaking sardonically.  The actual phenomenon is approximate and goes through a further step in which almost everyone in the audience, including those both for and against me, have a different interpretation of my words that they do not realize is different."

"Was it always like this for you, including before you came to prison? And is your divisiveness a big part of how you ended up in prison?"

"Yes and yes."

"Yourself?"

"Are you sure you want to ask me about myself? I'm supposed to be asking you interesting questions. How's the lightline charging going, and will changing the conversational focus help or hinder your efforts?"

"Asking me questions about myself isn't that interesting.  I know myself quite well.  I was more interested in the strange questions you were reputed to be asking earlier, such as how spontaneous sorcery would go about materializing fire."

"Lightline charging is boring.  This is a problem for me because I don't, actually, find relationship drama fascinating."