"The age of the universe itself is probably not particularly relevant. There have been human-like creatures on my planet of origin for one or two million years, but they were not very intelligent for most of that time. Quite a lot of human history has taken place in the last handful of thousands of years, with the pace of technological innovation steadily doubling and redoubling. We're developing technology so fast right now that parents have trouble advising their children, the world has changed so much in a single generation. There's been a society-upending innovation in just the last year, I think, though it's hard to be sure when you're right in the middle of it; certainly there have been multiple such within my own lifetime."

"I have the impression that this world is quite a bit more unchanging than that."

"Indeed.  What force makes people in your world more intelligent over time?  What was that innovation from the last year?"

"I am thinking about how much to tell you, because I am not sure that all of this information is actually safe for a human society!"

"What I can share is that you get big apparent intelligence gains simply by feeding your people properly and not letting them get exposed to poisons. On my world, for example, there's an element called lead, and if you are exposed to it, you're mostly functional in most ways but just... not as much as you otherwise would have been. So getting lead out of the water and the cooking vessels makes a big positive difference."

"There are also systemic changes, such as reserving childhood mostly for education and deferring work until later, that do not increase native intelligence per se but allow people to develop to their potential."

"And of course, you can incentivize reproduction among those whose characteristics you want more of, though any such program is pretty easy to do dreadfully wrong."

"Huh.  That seems to imply either an extra-soul origin of intelligence, which is classically considered the most intrinsically soul-like feature of a soul short of consciousness itself, or alternatively that you somehow have parent-child heritable variation in souls--"

The glow in Iilasir's hand goes out.

"It seems we must resume this later.  We now have one minute to finish up and then they'll take you to your own charging."

"You don't need to worry about the Farm bureaucracy deducing the reality of your story from the fact that I'm taking it seriously; the bureaucracy here hasn't worked out that I'm enormously smarter than them.  It's very amusing, really."

What? They think intelligence is in the soul? Opalyn has additional questions! But no time to ask them at the moment.

"I hereby invite you to join me for my charging session. Hey! Guy with the wand! I want Iilasir to come with me!"

"Unplanned rearrangements during charging are not permitted."

Hmph.

"The guards here don't get paid more for greater sorcerous outputs.  Nobody ever gets paid for anything, really, some days I don't understand how this whole society works either."

"Sorry, not literal.  Almost nobody gets paid for the vast majority of things that somebody else ought to want them to do."

Opalyn is escorted by her own guard then towards her own platform, with a magical circle that looks a lot larger and more impressive than the one that Iilasir used.

Well, this isn't intimidating at all.

Opalyn feels like she's just been escorted to the center of the field at halftime at the Super Bowl and handed a microphone.

An armored figure waits for her there, rather more dangerous-looking than the guard that escorted her.

"Hello," the figure says in a cheerful tone.  "Heathy-Orphan, correct?  I understand that you're a fresh inmate and this is your first time with us, and that you have relatively little education in spellcraft?  My name is Fdera and I'll be walking you through the charging process."

Opalyn elects to see this guy as a friendly preschool teacher who's going to show her how to hang her coat in her cubby, wash her hands, and get a snack - who happens to be dressed up as an executioner for Halloween.

"Okay!"

"All right!  Now, the first important thing to understand is that as part of this process, we obviously need to permit your sorcery to work under your voluntary control again.  You need to only use it to charge the lightline, because if we see you doing anything else, we'll immediately kill you.  Any questions about that part?  It's not meant to be complicated."

"How exactly do you kill me? Just curious. No need to demonstrate, a description will do."

"I completely understand!  I'm glad you asked, it saves us all a lot of trouble if you don't have any doubts about our ability to kill you."

"The main reason you'd die is that the Prince of the Farm is present whenever Grand Duchesses and Duchesses--your file says you're probably a Duchess--are unlocked, and he's powerful enough to lock down space so you can't teleport out and kill all of you at once.  It's just like being part of a regular hierarchy that way!  We wouldn't let a charging session get large enough that the Prince couldn't kill everyone who was unlocked in it."

"But also, I've got an annihilation wand and I can fire it faster than a Grand Duchess should be able to raise shields that work against an annihilation wand.  They're very expensive, though, so I'm not going to demonstrate.  The whole point is that you know we have the wand and so we don't have to actually use it."

It seems to Opalyn that there's a chance that she's more powerful even than a Grand Duchess. Maybe she's as powerful as the Prince, or even more than that. Who knows? And if that happens to be true, these precautions are probably not enough. Furthermore, they're just about to test her, and so this might be the only chance she ever has of surprising them. If she's Prince-level or above, and they find that out five minutes from now, she'll never be this lightly guarded again.

But what is she supposed to do with that possibility?

If she gambles now and loses, she's dead.

And even if she gambles now and wins, she has absolutely no idea where to go next from here, or how to get there, and she'll very quickly be chased down by anyone up to the Dread Emperor himself, and then killed.

She doesn't know enough to win decisively and permanently if she makes a break right now.

It would, however, be to her advantage to be read as a Duchess and nothing better than that. She doesn't like her odds of being able to titrate her power consistently, given how little mastery she has, but she should maybe do something other than trying her very hardest.

"Thank you. Please go on."

"Part of why lightline charging is what the Farm does is that it's very simple!  You want to perceive the charging port we'll open on the lightline, perceive its oscillating frequency, express your power as falash, and send it into the port by extending it out from you in a straight line that matches the target frequency, timed so it arrives with exactly opposite phase to the port.  If your file says that your sorcery isn't very sophisticated we don't distract you in any way the first time you do it, since some sorcerers aren't very smart.  I hope you aren't one of those and that you manage to use your sorcery precisely the first time!  Just in case, though, don't use all of your power right away!"

"I have absolutely no idea how to do any of that! I don't know how to perceive the port or the lightline's frequency, and I have no idea what falash is!"

"That's fine!  We'll start out super extra slow.  I'll show you how to create falash using my own power, and you just will your sorcery to be like the magic that you see.  If you're a Countess or higher you should have no trouble perceiving its nature directly!  Then, if you can't see the port oscillating, I'll oscillate a tiny bit of my own magic at the same frequency as the port--that'll help you see where the port is, too, it's the magic which has that oscillation frequency."

"All right?" Opalyn makes it a question without really meaning to.

She also remembers, belatedly, to see if any of these instructions make sense when compared to Orphan's memories, or if Orphan knew about falash.

Orphan has seen magic increasing or lowering at a regular frequency, or 'rotating' through other dimensions at a frequency.  Fancy wizards do it quite often, in the fraction of the second they last before Orphan blasts right through them without any of that fancy stuff.

Falash means--something, possibly, to Orphan's memories, though it's not a word Orphan's memories ever recall hearing, the word is pointing to a thing the same way that 'type theory' points to something in Opalyn's memories without Orphan or Opalyn having ever heard the Eldric for it?  The word has a sense in it of compactness, maybe, of tight packing, like (now Opalyn's memories) a molecular crystal in which positive and negative charges on the atoms form a neat packing order and thereby closely align.

"It'll be easier to see and do then it is to describe, especially if you don't know any math at all!  That's why I'm not trying to use words for it."

"Now, next, everyone who comes to the Facility who isn't a complete idiot--and even some of the people who are complete idiots--have the thought, 'Why don't I just not show them my real power?  That way, I'll always have an easy time of lightline charging and I'll always seem to put out lots of power for my assigned rank and get all those extra effort credits every time.'  The thing to remember is, we've thought of that too!  We've seen it tried literally millions of times!  We have all sorts of ways of telling!  I'm not going to go through all of them, but one of the most obvious ways is that we could poke you when you're done, in a way that's hard for a sorceress not to react to, and see if you've still got lots of energy left to react with."

"If you try to lowball your power today, we'll hurt you until you try harder.  Now, I know you might think you'd like that, since you're one of the lewd ones, but if you want it to happen that way, you can just ask.  If you make us do it instead of asking, you'll get zero credits for all of that work!  That means making yourself pretty vulnerable, in the lewd dramatic section of the Facility!  You won't even be able to lock your door at all, if you come back from your first charging session like that!"

"If that also sounds like fun, then, yes, we can do it that way.  I'd have fun with it too!"

So if she lowballs, they might discover it, and if they do discover it, she stands to get hurt and go without credits. Lack of credits translates to being other people's free-use object, potentially, and more tragically, four more days without library access.

To evade capture, she will have to appear tired and refrain from reacting magically when they startle her. Can she do that? She has no idea.

The downsides do not seem terrible, and the upside of having her true potential undiagnosed seems quite high.

Opalyn's going to try to lowball.

There's also the very real chance that she will just completely fail to figure out falash and be kicked out of this prison for not even making Baron rank!

"I do know quite a lot of math, actually. I suggest that we start just with the demonstration, and then if I don't seem to be getting it, please describe it in mathematical terms and that may help."

"Thaaat's not what your file says!  But maybe you just don't realize how much math there is to know!  For example, what is... the square root of forty-nine?"