"Yes."

Okay. She can't take this guy, at least not at her current level of experience. If he doesn't have more raw power, he definitely just knows more.

If she hates how things are going, she always has the option of defying him and potentially moving on to the next universe.

"Accepted."

"They didn't know you were Prince-level, or they'd have killed you on the spot; the facilities don't exist to safely hold a Prince and extract power from them.  What did they think you were?"

He's going over to retrieve the papers from Fdera's body even as he speaks.

"My papers estimated that I was Duchess or possibly Grand Duchess level but they were only guessing when they wrote that. My background is... strange, but I don't assume you have time to hear about that right now."

Opalyn has made the snap decision not to hold back on her alliance with this guy. He holds the power of life and death over her; she might as well go all-in, holding death as a viable alternative if needed.

"What I need to know right now is what sort of attention you have already attracted."

Opalyn is really not willing for this guy to kill Trāho and Iilasir and everyone else she's spoken to so far, so perhaps her idea of going all-in was a tad premature.

"Nobody who has seen me do magic since my arrest is still alive. There are a few people who think I'm strange but none who have any idea of my power level."

He is skimming the papers even as he speaks.  "On this little notice I have nowhere I trust, to stash you with your power level restricted to something unremarkable, and where I can be confident of finding you again.  I am not ready for my own part to set you loose."

"I am trying to think of anything more prudent than sending you back to the Farm with false marks as mid-high Duchess.  I am not succeeding.  I'll place you on the transport with your paperwork falsely filled out, and you will simply be thought to have evacuated with the others here.  There will not be someone whose appearance is known, missing."

"Before then I will reseal your power more intelligently, and let you secretly learn the wizardry you lack.  Do you consent?

"Wait, what does that mean to reseal my power more intelligently?"

"I mean that I'll modify your collar so that you can prod it to let through barely-Baron power when no one is watching."

He's already filling out the paperwork that he took from Fdera's body, by staring hard at it until letters write themselves rather than by using a pen.

"Oh! Then yes, I consent!"

Opalyn is jarred by all the very sudden murder, but for her own part this test is working out splendidly. She will set aside her feelings about these two people who died adjacent to her and probably have a lot of big jittery grief about it later.

"You're visibly not exhausted by this day's work, and they may check.  I'm pulling you to something bigger than a lightline to charge.  Don't resist.  End."

Hmph. Looks like he's about to find out her real power level.

"Ready."

He grabs her hand and opens a portal, a tear in space; the center seems disturbingly to pseudo-reflect a distorted version of Opalyn's own form, though maybe it would do the same for anyone else who looked at it.

If Opalyn is paying attention she can see how his own power is tearing through wards that were laid down upon this space, to prevent portaling like this if somebody much less powerful were to try it.  It's not quite at the level where Opalyn could will this magic into being from having seen it only once.  It's complicated, and sharp, and feels like it really would be a lot easier to build if you were aware of how magic interacted with magic and didn't just will all of it to jump into place on demand.

He pulls her through.

And then they're standing in front of... whatever this is.

"Charge that quickly and without worrying about the ramp-up.  Put all of your feelings into it.  If you can put out enough power to break it, you can also take the Dread Emperor head to head and wouldn't that be a nice problem to have."

Opalyn looks at it with her magical senses. Does she have any idea how to charge this thing?

It's got a power port that resembles the one on the lightline, but at a much lower frequency, the sort of frequency you could just eyeball; and also there is much much much more magical energy bound up in this than in the lightline.

...actually she can tell what this is doing, if not how, the output action is not complicated.  The artifact is outputting raw Newtonian force, pulling toward itself in all directions across a distance so vast that it feels at a first glance like infinity; except for an artificial dead zone in the immediate vicinity, in which they're standing now.

Opalyn does, at this point, believe that people can tell when she's tiring and tell when she's worn out, so faking it does not seem at all prudent. This guy will just crush her if he thinks she's malingering.

But she does wonder, should she charge this force generator thing. What even is it? She would prefer not to charge up a weapon of mass destruction that will subsequently be used to kill a trillion people.

She takes a guess. Her guess does not quite make sense by her own notion of how physics should work, but maybe it will be interesting enough to provoke a helpful correction rather than getting her killed.

"Is this what keeps the planets stationary with respect to each other?"

"It generates the gravity on Capital's surface.  Correcting planetary positions doesn't take nearly the same order of power."

"We're short on time, start."

It generates the gravity? That's batshit. The mass of the planet should generate the gravity. Either this is a very stupid lie or else physics is just completely different here, and there is considerable evidence so far that physics is different.

But wait, how in the world did they ever even evolve or for that matter form planets in the first place if gravity needs to be artificially generated?

This really makes no sense.

"I would really rather not provoke you into killing me, but why do you need to generate gravity? This is a very big planet, it shouldn't need the help."

"You're already coming very close to dying because I need to see you as reliable.  You offered me your obedience; I command: start establishing the charging link, now."

"Capital is hollow, if it were solid the gravity would crush everyone who tried to live on it."

Ohhhh she's inside the Capital planet right now, very near its core! This is utterly bizarre but is at least coherent. Opalyn is willing to gamble that it's true and that she's not being duped into something awful.

She charges the force generator and she doesn't pussyfoot around about it.

"Put your emotions into it.  We don't have time for you to exhaust yourself slowly."

Opalyn lets the feelings well up, slowly at first, but then they start to snowball.

The dead lightline monitor and crown guy, arguably her fault.
How she's been railroaded from one weird, dangerous, unfair situation to the next.
People trying to cut her with swords. People actually cutting her with swords. Losing an ARM.

Her entire life on Earth being OVER. Never seeing her partners or her family again. Never getting to find out WHAT HAPPENS NEXT in her FIRST and MOST IMPORTANT LIFE.

It's not as showy as when she was faking. She doesn't rage or scream or clench, but the grief is massive and nearly incapacitating. She worries she's going to lose control of the magic.

He's doing something to her collar that involves taking the very intricate magic in place there and yelling at it with tremendous power to be a different intricate enchantment instead.

Without taking his attention from that collar, his magic also wends gentle braces around Opalyn's magic, ready to steady if she wobbles, contain if she breaks.

"Do you need or want to be hurt?"