"They require extremely sophisticated wizardry but no great sorcery, and are rooted to a single point once created, then last... I don't actually know how long they last.  They are all over the place on those planets where wizards prefer to trade their services..."

"Hm.  Now that you point it out, local bank branches should also exist in some form on planets less welcoming to wizards, and wouldn't easily be able to dispatch their accounting work entirely to home branches.  I wonder how those arithmetic machines are powered."

There's more to investigate almost everywhere she looks, but she's going to keep on surveying broadly rather than diving too deep on any one topic.

"Does this world have any notion of -- what stuff is made out of? Like if you were to take apart the leaf of a plant, or a chunk of ore, or the air that we are breathing right now, what do you know about what it's made out of? What are the smallest building blocks you know about?"

"From the existence of apparently conserved quantities within chemical transformations we infer the existence of 'atoms', of which there appear to be exactly five hundred and eleven varieties; an obvious conjecture is that there exists a five-hundred-and-twelfth form, the theorized null atom, which does not participate in chemistry.  It is said that philosophers have carefully reasoned out that beneath the atoms must be some quintessence that takes the form of a physical quantity whose meaning is the quantitative degree of reality possessed by a mathematical structure, but that has not been among my fields of study."

Five hundred eleven! That is more than Opalyn was expecting! Does this mean that physics and chemistry are actually different here, or does it mean that Iilasir's 'atoms' are not Opalyn's atoms, and he's really talking about molecules or something?

She is eager to get her hands on a chemistry textbook and see what she can find out. In particular, getting a look at anything like a periodic table is likely to be informative.

"What is your current theory of whether I'm really from another universe, and if you think I'm not, what do you think is really going on with me?"

"I'm currently suspending judgment.  You're behaving like somebody who actually is from another universe, and not like almost anyone from this universe would think to imagine a visitor from another universe to be like, and there is no previously obvious reason why I should expect to be the target of a mind-game on that level.  It is, however, very very very improbable--unless of course it happens all the time, and the knowledge of it is suppressed.  I will be sad and at least slightly irate if this is the circumstance that finally gets me slaughtered."

"How did you come to be in this place?"

"I will absolutely answer that question in just a moment, but first... how is the lightline charging going? How does this conversation compare to your baseline for 'interesting?'"

"Two-thirds of the way to exhausting myself."

"This conversation is the most interesting thing that's happened to me in the last three years, so I'm probably around two-ninths of a standard deviation above my baseline.  This is very impressive and you should be proud of yourself."

Hurray! Opalyn is helping! By being interestingly herself! This is among her favorite ways to help!

"I'm glad to be of service! I would be happy to help you charge as long as it's actually helping, as I am also enjoying this conversation and it's not at all a burden!"

"Anyway... how did I get here? Well, it was a fairly normal day for me on my own world. I was on my way from my home to a friend's home when I was suddenly and accidentally killed. In my subjective experience, no time passed at all, and then I was here on one of your rural planets, in this body, in the middle of a battle. I lost that battle, was captured, and was transported to an intake facility and then to prison."

"Do you have any idea or theory about why that happened?  Is it a known kind of event within your own world?  Maybe more importantly, does the bureaucracy know that this happened to you?"

"On my world, there are many theories about what happens when a person dies. Many people believe that the dying person simply ceases to exist. Many others believe in some sort of afterlife in which the spirit of the deceased person goes on to some other plane of existence, often one ruled by some much more powerful entity. Still others believe that the same spirits are recycled over and over, born into one body after another, within the same world."

"And then some people believe that, under certain circumstances, the dying person's intellect may be 'summoned' to another world."

"I previously believed that I would simply cease to exist when I died. Looks like I was wrong."

"What do people in this world believe happens after death?"

"I don't think I've ever heard any theories besides 'you are your soul and its dissipation is synonymous with you ceasing to exist'.  What evidence exists such that your world was ambiguous about its interpretation?"

"But first I ask again, because it's important.  What has the Farm bureaucracy told you, or shown you, that they believe you to be, in the way that bureaucracies have of believing things?"

"Oh right, sorry. I have only told one other person the truth about where I came from, and that was the intake officer who ultimately sent me to this prison. I don't think he believed me, but he didn't say out loud what he thought the real story was. He did say it was obvious my intake paperwork was wrong, given that it said I was a barely-literate, completely innumerate peasant."

"As for evidence about afterlives, we have none. I always assumed that people with any theory other than 'you stop existing' were just telling themselves stories to be less terrified of death. Are people here somehow not terrified of death?"

"Of course they're terrified.  And now that I think about it, any evidence suggesting that people shouldn't be terrified would be hugely inconvenient to the supervisors who can otherwise threaten people with death.  Well.  This is exciting."

"Is this the kind of thing you say out loud that is extremely divisive and causes a great deal of drama? Yeah. Start a religion. Can't believe you haven't done it already."

"You know, I think you spotted that faster than I did, which, after all this time, really is a bit embarrassing for me."

"All right, here's one more question to pique your interest, to take you through the last little bit of lightline charging for today."

"On my world, sexual power and other kinds of power do not always run together. For example, someone might be both the mayor of a city and also sexually submissive... and not just submissive to the leader of the next greater political territory, but flat out just submissive. And the humblest laborer might be sexually dominant."

"So far I have the impression that sexual dominance runs strictly along the magical power hierarchy. Am I wrong?"

"Yes, and I don't know how you would've gotten that misdeduction, actually?  Even the least of Barons is dominant above a hundred thousand mundanes; but the very existence of a lewd section of a Farm that only takes sorcerous prisoners of at least Baron-rank, implies that some of those Barons are, at the least, masochists... I suppose masochism does not correlate perfectly with submission, but yes, a supermajority of those in the lewd sections are submissive."

"I am decidedly not so.  I executed my deal to be in lewd-dramatic instead of just dramatic because, if I must be in prison, I prefer to be imprisoned with a large number of submissive, masochistic sorceresses in a male-light environment."

Opalyn feels a bit of a tingle at Iilasir's proclamation. She'd been getting worried that she wouldn't be able to find anyone suitable in this culture at all, if she were limited to selecting from the pool of people more magically powerful than herself, but apparently there's some hope yet. She's coming to like Iilasir, a bit, and is glad to know he's in play for her, despite his weaker magic.

"I haven't been here very long so I'm operating from very little data, but some of the status games in the refectory suggested to me that the more magically powerful people are also the socially dominant people, and then I guess I had trouble imagining that would just... reverse... in a sexual situation. Seems rough, and hard to execute well."

"I was imagining that everyone here functions as a switch, whether that is their natural inclination or not, and dominates downward while submitting upward."

"Whether someone finds submission or dominance more pleasant is to first order considered a property of that person.  To second order, it varies with a thousand factors; the social positioning of the person they're interacting with might be sixth on that list, maybe.  I'm a rather first-order sort of person myself; I've never seen the point of being different people in different situations rather than just being me."

"Magically more powerful people are socially more powerful, in the Farm as in all other places.  In particular, in the lewd-dramatic facility, while the general Farm credits of higher ranks do not nearly scale linearly with their sorcerous contributions, they receive a generous allocation of chastity-unlock tokens which can only be used downward on those of lower rank."

"Among those inmates being dominated by other inmates, I think it'd be rare but not unheard-of for a higher-rank to be dominated by the lower-rank.  They'd need to be an exception to the more usual rule that submissives prefer to be conquered rather than yielding themselves, but those exceptions are hardly rare; or of course the lower-rank could've gotten the upper hand by other means, such as discovering blackmail material."

"How does conquering work, then? On my world, we have no magic, so 'conquering' is mostly a social dance. Although many dominants could in principle physically overpower their submissives, it's rare for them to do so unilaterally and without negotiation, and in fact that is wildly illegal and heavily socially stigmatized. So in a sense, our submissives usually yield, even if they play at being conquered."

"I would expect it to be the same here, at least in the prison. Although I don't understand magic, don't our collars equalize us? What is different, here, such that 'conquering' is that much of an option?"

"How does a universe function without magic?  What does that even mean, there's no sharp division within ultimate reality between effects that happen because of spells and effects that happen for other reasons."

"Oh goodness, sorry, I guess that hadn't come up before! I am so used to a reality without magic that to me, your world with magic is the weird one, and I failed to mention that my own world is normal!"

"I do not yet understand anything about what magic actually is, what it makes possible, or how it functions, so I'm not yet in a position to explain to you what the division is."

"In my world, people cannot cause effects in the world simply by willing it. In the few seconds I had access to my magic here, I cast three spells. I had never done anything like that in my previous life, nor had I ever seen anyone else do anything remotely similar."

"Hmmm.  I admit, that does make it seem more probable that this is someone's mindgame."

"Among the events which contributed to my imprisonment, was my extrapolating a society in which sorcerers did not exist, and noticing that there were vastly nicer possibilities than our present one.  Though of course there were less pleasant possibilities as well.  I did say that it was obviously going to remain pure theory.  And also that it was entirely possible that what you'd actually get--absent the basic structuring force of all society where a ruler can outfight the combined forces of everyone they rule--was a total absence of stability; just endless mundane armies taking their chances on attacking other armies.  Those nuances, like so many of my nuances, seem to have been missed."

"I'll bite the obvious bait.  What was your nonmagical society like, and why was that configuration for it a stable one?"

"I'm not entirely sure I'd call my own world 'stable,' though it finds various equilibria and hovers there for a time, until something destabilizes that equilibrium. Then there is a transitional period with a lot of upheaval until we settle into the next equilibrium. We go through unstable periods when, for example, there's a technological advance or a plague."

"While we still get into mundane wars from time to time, it is far more common for factions on my world to grapple with each other via other means, such as embargoes on imports or exports. And many mundane wars are averted because it is clear from the outset who would win that war, or that everyone involved would lose together."

"We worry a lot, these days, about the terrible things one person or a small group can do to many others at the same time. It used to be very difficult for individuals to wreak much havoc, but current advances in technology have favored offensive rather than defensive capabilities. In that way maybe our world is becoming more like yours, if you think of those individuals as high-ranked sorcerers who are not plugging into the current hierarchy but rather upending it."

Opalyn doesn't bother to mention the impending invention of superhuman intelligence; these people don't have computation, and now that she thinks about it, maybe she should take care not to introduce it.

"How old is your universe, if there's still--technological advances?  New things being invented of an order that upends societies?  What was the last invention like that?"