Okay, so, what does Opalyn actually know? She seems to have two sets of memories: one from the life that she was living up until today, and another entire set that belong to this world. She wonders:

Is it true that she's an evil sorceress and would plausibly deserve it if she's about to be tried and sentenced to death?

Has this world heard of isekai before and would anybody believe her if she explained that she's not the real evil sorceress? Opalyn does not have a lot of hope about this one, probably all the evil sorceresses are always claiming "It wasn't me, that was someone else who set all those people on fire" but most of them are lying about it.

Who is in charge around here? What are they currently trying to do? How are they stuck? Does Opalyn have any way of helping them out in exchange for... whatever Opalyn ends up needing?

What are the major factions in this region and what's the deal with each of them?

Does Opalyn have any allies or resources?

What's the technology level here? Does Opalyn remember anything from her previous life that could plausibly completely shift the balance of power?

Is it true that she's an evil sorceress and would plausibly deserve it if she's about to be tried and sentenced to death?

Man, society as Healthy-Orphan knew it did not run on this 'deserves' concept at all.  The leading figure is literally called the Dread Emperor and rules from the largest planet visible in the sky above.

Healthy-Orphan didn't think about her role in existence very hard.  She saw that she had magical powers and wasn't a nobility-owned wizard and figured "oh I must be a dark sorceress then" and went off and did that.  Healthy-Orphan killed people who had things she wanted and whom Orphan expected to not just hand those things over.  She did have a tendency to go more for gold owned by merchants or armor owned by adventurers, and then trade that for food owned by peasants, rather than going after the peasants directly.  She never killed any children, nor any beaten-down fathers helping to juggle underfed toddlers, and doesn't seem to have thought of this as Morality so much as Orphan just not particularly wanting to do that.  She once saw a strong young man in a village and told him that he was now following around her army and sleeping with her whenever she wanted, and it did not particularly occur to her or him that "asking for consent" was a thing a dark sorceress could do.

Orphan has never heard of any such thing as a person being 'tried'.  If you transgress in a village, the elders get together and decide what to do with you.  If you transgress in a town, the town's ruler put in place by the Baron would decide what to do with you.  She was aware in a distant way that there were such things as written laws, but they were not for villagers and bandit queens, or beggars and city guards, more for merchants and nobles.

As Orphan saw the world, if she was defeated by a baron, she'd obviously die on the spot.  It didn't particularly occur to her that a dark sorceress would be imprisoned or judged, or enslaved or sold, or for that matter offered forgiveness or a chance to work for the government.  She knew there were magic-users who worked for the government and nobles with powers, but they were not labeled as present or former dark-sorceress-bandit-queens, so they did not seem to have roles or fates commensurate with Orphan's.

Has this world heard of isekai before and would anybody believe her if she explained that she's not the real evil sorceress? Opalyn does not have a lot of hope about this one, probably all the evil sorceresses are always claiming "It wasn't me, that was someone else who set all those people on fire" but most of them are lying about it.

Orphan will not have reliably heard of most things her world has heard of.  Orphan is from an illiterate peasant village.  She forced a guy to teach her to sound out letters, so she could read stolen books about magic; but then there were also numbers in the magic books, and nobody around her knew how to do anything with numbers besides counting small quantities of coin, so Orphan gave up there.

None of the songs and tales coming to Opalyn Miller's stolen memory have anything about people from another world in there.

Who is in charge around here? What are they currently trying to do? How are they stuck? Does Opalyn have any way of helping them out in exchange for... whatever Opalyn ends up needing?

The Dread Emperor rules all, and none rule him.  Orphan moved around a bit but never got outside the territory of Duke Greendeath.

Orphan does not have a concept that governments try to change or improve the way that things are, or that Eldrida (all the planets ruled by the Dread Emperor, Orphan does not seem to know very much about astronomy besides all that stuff staying up in the sky somehow) had been going anywhere it could get stuck on.

The village had spinning wheels, and a water-wheel turned by the river, and a crudely charmed ice-pit to keep food from spoilage which all the villagers chant over every 37 days.  If there is such a thing as electricity it is not known to Orphan's memories.

What are the major factions in this region and what's the deal with each of them?

The Dread Emperor sets Princes to rule over planets, and then there's Grand Dukes and Dukes and Counts and Barons below those, except that also there's songs mentioning Seigneurs and Marquesses and Presidents and Headstompers and all sorts of other weird titles that Orphan did not particularly try to sort out.

They don't fight each other, whoever was in charge above them would come in and settle any arguments.  Duke Greendeath is much stronger than any Count. 

Merchant lords get into trade-wars and assassinate each other a lot, but they wouldn't kill a smith who was good at his job because that might upset the smith's Baron.

Does Opalyn have any allies or resources?

Everyone in her little army is dead!  Happened with the first archer volleys after that wizard counterspelled her!  Healthy-Orphan was briefly angry and maybe even horrified and sad about that, before her soul got ripped out of her... oh, possibly Opalyn's eyes might be tearing up.  Because of a man her memories remember sleeping with, and there was a woman in camp who was really nice to everyone and she had two kids.

What's the technology level here? Does Opalyn remember anything from her previous life that could plausibly completely shift the balance of power?

Faux-medieval but with a bunch of magitek thrown in.  A peasant village might hold a couple of bicycles in common, with metal wheels instead of rubber tires, so that somebody can peddle over to a nearby village on a paved road if something comes up.  Healthy-Orphan doesn't know how to pave a road, probably a wizard does it.  Scythe-blades are forged of some unstaining metal and handed down for hundreds of years.

And what of magic? Opalyn had no choice but to give over to instinct and muscle memory during the battle, but what does her memory tell her about her capabilities there? It would be nice to be able to form actual plans that involve realistic assessments of her magical abilities, rather than just reacting while her opponents pull her puppet strings.

How strong is she, magically speaking? Is she the most powerful person in this universe? (Seems unlikely!) One of the top ten? Top thousand? Top fifty percent?

Her predecessor seemed to favor fire, at least in the battle they shared. Did she always favor fire? Is that because she's especially good at fire, or because fire is scary, or some other reason? Are there other kinds of magic, like water and earth and so on, or does it not work like that here?

How is magic fueled? Is it just for free, or is she draining her own life force, or the life force of other people, or the mystical energy that makes grass grow and birds fly? Does she get extremely tired or extremely hungry after she uses magic?

What are the limits to healing? She got her whole arm back, that was great! What if she'd had her back broken (as she did to those knights) or lost 99% of her blood or been decapitated? Is it possible to raise the dead, and are they basically good as new afterwards or is there some terrible price to pay? Does it matter how long you're dead?

Opalyn doesn't particularly expect this question to work, but does this place have physics at all? Like, is there conservation of matter, for example? When Opalyn shot out that circle of force she made it a circle rather than a wedge directed at the knights because she didn't want to get thrown backwards with equal and opposite force, but did that actually matter?

How strong is she, magically speaking? Is she the most powerful person in this universe? (Seems unlikely!) One of the top ten? Top thousand? Top fifty percent?

These are difficult questions to ask the memory of somebody who did not know what a fraction was!  Healthy-Orphan never met a magic-user she could not completely crush using brute force at the time she met them.  On the other hand, she didn't know anything about how to string lightlines between planets (she did know vaguely they were called lightlines).  The Dread Emperor is supposed to have cosmic-scale power of some vague kind and Orphan hasn't even tried uprooting any mountains.

Her predecessor seemed to favor fire, at least in the battle they shared. Did she always favor fire? Is that because she's especially good at fire, or because fire is scary, or some other reason? Are there other kinds of magic, like water and earth and so on, or does it not work like that here?

There are all kinds of weird things that magic is said to be able to do in legend!  They proooobably aren't all true unless the Dread Emperor literally once got hungry and ate a planet!  Orphan used fire because it was simple and reliable.  Magic can transmute base materials into weird new forms, some of which are long-lasting enough to form roads or scythes.  Magic can keep food cold or heat it up again.  Magic-users can fly... oh, Orphan has flown, but the first time she tried it, she got all airsick and threw up in midair, then frantically instinctively tried to get back on the ground again, then crashed into the ground hard enough to break her shields and some ribs.  Orphan never tried flying again after that.

How is magic fueled? Is it just for free, or is she draining her own life force, or the life force of other people, or the mystical energy that makes grass grow and birds fly? Does she get extremely tired or extremely hungry after she uses magic?

Other magic-users supposedly get tired!  This has never happened to Orphan.  If anyone knows about a deeper thing that magic draws upon, they haven't explained it to Orphan.

What are the limits to healing? She got her whole hand back, that was great! What if she'd had her back broken (as she did to those knights) or lost 99% of her blood or been decapitated? Is it possible to raise the dead, and are they basically good as new afterwards or is there some terrible price to pay? Does it matter how long you're dead?

Orphan's memory has a vague notion that dead dead isn't reversible, unless the person died around a necromancer who prepared for that happening in advance.  Her instinctive healing works reliably on herself, but when she tried it on a follower who'd lost a hand, the follower ended up growing a weird sickly 'that is not how a hand looks' hand and they ended up cutting it off again.  She once kept a woman giving birth and hemorrhaging from dying of blood loss, but the woman died as soon as Orphan got bored and stopped keeping her alive (she tried, okay).  The woman looked all pale so Orphan's guess was that magic was not making more blood inside her.  Magic in tales and legends can do things like shrink a person down to six inches, turn them old, or give a man tentacles so that he can impregnate all the women in a town in a single night.  These may or may not be reliable; Orphan didn't think of tales as really being things which were true-false rather than fun-unfun.

Opalyn doesn't particularly expect this question to work, but does this place have physics at all? Like, is there conservation of matter, for example? When Opalyn shot out that circle of force she made it a circle rather than a wedge directed at the knights because she didn't want to get thrown backwards with equal and opposite force, but did that actually matter?

Orphan's memory has never heard of any quantity in reality being conserved except for money.  She's never heard anyone suggest that if a thing goes in one direction then some other thing ought to go in the opposite direction, with or without magic being involved.

On examination, however, magic maybe has to transform stuff rather than make stuff, at least all the magic that Orphan has personally used or witnessed, rather than stories where somebody captures a witch and tortures her into a raising a castle in a single night.  This might be another reason that Orphan attacked with fire blasts rather than like materializing bullets or something.

Opalyn quiets her mind and body and opens herself up to perception, just to see if she will notice anything important. She's been thinking hard and trying to piece together her situation, but sometimes thinking hard can drown out immediate sensation, and sometimes immediate sensation matters, like when her fire spell almost exploded during the battle because she hadn't realized she needed to twist off the magic.

Any low-level alarms ringing in her mind or body or magic system? Anything going on around her she should maybe notice?

Well, all of your ability to use magic is being disrupted by threads of foreign magic running through you from your chains--threads that feel quite flimsy, but seem to do a completely effective job of shutting you down hard enough that you can't disrupt some flimsy threads.

The golden prison-globe holding you is accelerating hard upward, this is evident to magic even though it feels to you like you're in a stable single gravity.

Upward, huh? Is Opalyn going to one of those other planets right now? Is it possible to tell which one? If it's the biggest one, she might be on the way to the Dread Emperor. Yikes. That seems both alarming and maybe welcome at the same time. If she had been captured by some lesser person, she'd then have to fool around with middle-tier power games while figuring out how to secure a position for herself in this world.

Oh shoot, is it too late to look down at the planet she was on previously and see the rough layout, like whether there are any cities and how big they look? And if it is too late, is it still too early to do the same thing with whichever planet she's bound for?

Okay yeah, if she looks down again, this is now less of a 'looking down at clouds' situation and more of a 'looking down from space' situation; the planet is still very huge in her vision, but it's already looking curved and she's maybe getting out of the atmosphere.  A touch of night is visible on the far side of the planet's curve, and nothing in it that looks like an electricity-lit city.  She can see the outlines of lakes, one huge river wide enough to still be clear from up here, and everything which isn't water or stone looks like it might possibly be farmland.  Nothing that looks wild, untamed, like a forest; the only wild things are rocks.

...she's plausibly heading for that huge-looking but distant planet which her memories say is the capital planet of the interplanetary system, yeah.  But that one's still far away at least to biological eyes.

Opalyn's ideal situation when starting a brand new life in media res would be to get dropped in a secluded, well-stocked cabin in the woods, where she could think and experiment and plan, and only come out and start interacting with other people when she already had almost everything figured out.

This is not that. In particular she is really wishing for a computer or a whiteboard or a notebook and pen, some kind of outboard memory, on which to organize her questions and thoughts and track all the experiments she would like to run. But she doesn't have any of that, so she's just going to have to trust in this fragile brain that isn't even hers. She wonders what characteristics go with the hardware and what go with the software. She was very good at learning and remembering in her past life; will she notice a difference, now that the hardware's been swapped out?

It does seem like she has some time to think -- it seems like it's going to be awhile before she gets to the planet -- but not arbitrary time. Limited time. She'll have to prioritize, not waste time panicking or grieving or remembering her own first life or fixating on ultimately useless lines of inquiry.

It does not seem particularly like she can experiment much. She'd like to do so many experiments with magic and figure out how it all works, but that's been taken away from her in here.

Opalyn assumes she'll soon be speaking to someone with more status and authority than she has, maybe the Dread Emperor, maybe someone who serves him. She wants to come into that conversation with the strongest position possible. She should at some point think about techs she can reinvent, but she won't be able to promise anything about that until she can do a lot of experimentation to see what works here. She also can't tell what information she wants to reveal as a way of gaining immediate status, and what she wants to hold back for the long game.

Her mind flickers briefly to the possibility that there won't be a negotiation at all, that she'll just be thrown in a dungeon or tortured or pressed into sexual service without any recourse or hope. There is no law of the universe preventing that -- probably? -- but it doesn't help to dwell on it. If she's truly powerless, thinking about it in advance won't make that less true, so she might as well skip thinking about it for now.

And suddenly it begins to feel like Opalyn doesn't actually know how to make productive use of this interplanetary flight. There's just so much she doesn't know. It's going to be a political game -- she hopes! -- and her predecessor didn't have firsthand information about the players in the game.

Opalyn wants to scheme and plot and plan, but is somewhat lacking in the raw materials to do so. She needs data.

But she has to scheme and plot and plan or she's going to cry --

Update!  As your speed picks up, it becomes clear that you are maybe not heading as directly toward the capital planet as you ought to be if you are going straight there through space.

You are maybe heading toward that one glowing dendrite of a lightline which is connected toward the capital planet, though.

Oh thank goodness something is happening, Opalyn can pay attention to that and not actually freak out

Opalyn peers out of the sphere in whatever direction she can crane her neck. What's up with these lightlines, anyway?

They are giant light tendrils connecting the planets visible in the night sky!  They're magical!  They're... probably important somehow?  Orphan has no memory of seeing them change, or hearing about a catastrophe where they snapped.  There's stories about the Dread Emperor spinning them between planets to build his empire, but there's also stories about him eating planets, and stories about him impregnating every woman on a continent just by smiling at it from space in an incredibly masculine fashion.

Wait... is the Dread Emperor... hot?  What genre of story is this, anyway?

Everyone who has enough sorcery to use it for self-healing is hot!  Healthy-Orphan had all of her teeth and no plague-scars and everything!  Every man she has ever asked has confirmed to her that she is the hottest woman they've ever met, especially since Healthy-Orphan made it very clear that receiving any other answer would result in instant death.  Healthy-Orphan did not seem to feel that this changed the reliability of the answers she received in any way, and seems to have felt sincerely proud of having her peerless beauty confirmed to her by these countless reliable testimonies.

The Dread Emperor is in charge of everything, and any man who is in charge of everything should logically have muscles bigger than all those other men who are not in charge of everything.  Nobody in Orphan's memories has ever thought to question this.

...the prison-sphere is coming up on the dendrite now.

Opalyn doubts that she's actually hot, except maybe by comparison to people who have been riddled by plague, but is nonetheless enjoying the memories of believing she's hot. Opalyn was not especially hot in her previous life and it feels good to poke that place inside her and find it a source of strength rather than tenderness.

What does she see as she gets close to the dendrite? Are there other spheres? Is this a vast interplanetary network of sphere-exchange? How do the spheres not run into each other? Are there sorceresses inside all of them?

If she casts her eyes about carefully, or maybe a bit more than just her eyes, she'll spot a larger opaque black sphere heading towards the dendrite at a more sedate pace.  It won't get there before she does.

Nothing is emerging or has emerged from the glowing terminal, but Orphan's memory is dredging up some half-remembered fact about how lightlines have separate axons and dendrites--

--oh, apparently they're close enough now!  VOOP!

This planet has some glowing surface points going on, that could plausibly be cities-at-night.  Also a lot more lightlines, most of them going point-to-point on the planet's surface.

The capital planet seems... kinda large.  Opalyn maybe does not have a great point of comparison, because she did not have magical senses before this.  But looking down at this planet while having magic creates the feeling that this planet must be much, much larger than Earth.  Even taking into account that Earth was quite large, and Opalyn has never magically sensed anything the size of Earth.

The planet seems large? Not just the cities, but the planet itself?

Opalyn racks her brains to remember what she knows about large planets. Not very much, as it turns out. She remembers that large planets are often called 'gas giants' but is not sure if that means they are literally gaseous every time, and what that would mean about inhabiting such a planet.

It probably doesn't matter, they probably just magiteked around whatever they've got, somehow.

She does wonder if, like, gravity will be oppressively strong here, and whether she can just be okay anyway, because, MAGIC.

Does her memory have anything to say about what's going to be different here, and what she's expected to do to compensate?

Nnnooot really, no.  Stories include "everyone on the capital planet is a wizard" and "the capital planet has infinite free food" (source unspecified) and "the entire capital planet is filled with the Emperor's harem" and "gold is only as valuable as copper there" and "everyone is a noble and everyone challenges everyone to an honor duel every time they meet in the streets" but nothing about gravity or atmosphere.  The people telling stories about the Capital Planet may possibly have not been making an overwhelming effort to ensure scrupulous accuracy even at the cost of a less good story.

Do Opalyn's magical senses tell her anything about the population of this larger planet, or how they're distributed?

And what was up with the difference between axons and dendrites? Should she be thinking of axons as the backbone in the transportation network and the dendrites as little side branches, or is there some more literal neurobiology... you know what, never mind, there is no way her predecessor had a better grasp of neurobiology than Opalyn has.

As Opalyn approaches the planet, she decides to pay attention to what's happening rather than turn inward and scheme. The scheming wasn't getting her very far. Direct observation seems far more useful right now in expectation, and also it's just really pretty and she doesn't want to miss it.

It's probably just a translation metaphor?  Nobody talked to Orphan about neurobiology at any point, she just has concepts about lightlines which involve them having many-to-one reception and one-to-many transmission.

Opalyn can't sense population at this distance without an instinctive effort to stretch her magical senses that gets noped by the interfering magical current from her chains.

...her golden prison could plausibly be approaching this foreboding castle-like building in space, notable for its lack of any concession to centrifugal design.