"Yes."

She's a masochist, and she knows from experience that the best way to get ALL of her feelings out is to have someone help her jar them loose. Otherwise they tend to stick and build up.

"But it doesn't take a lot of pain. If you hurt me too much I might fight you." She gasps this. It's hard to form the words, but this part is important.

"Know that this pain is not real."  He slips one hand through one of the larger holes in her dress, and lays it on her back, near the base of her spine, as one might hold a dancer in a couple's dance.  Where he touches, that whole area feels like touching a spoon that's been heated under hot water, such as one might use to sear away the histamine reaction of a mosquito bite; the pain builds, from there, but not to the point of touching boiling water or a stove burner.

Opalyn sobs until she's choking on it, then sobs more. She sinks to her knees, somehow not losing contact with his hand, but holds the magic steady, holds onto it like a lifeline, like the only solid thing there is. She becomes a conduit, letting the pain flow from his hand through her back and out her hands, ripping out her guts along the way and pouring all of herself into the magic.

What this man wills, space obeys; his hand stays wherever it needs to be.  With another twitch of his will, he looks across space to where a prison transport is getting too close to the Facility, causes a minor equipment malfunction to slow it down.

Opalyn feels hollowed out, empty, used up. Tired.

She lets go of the magic. She brushes his hand gently away from her back, not in an act of defiance but just of completion, and curls into the fetal position at his feet.

"Good.  Tap the left side of your collar three times to open the security hole, or close it again."  He picks Opalyn up in his arms, holding her as if she weighs nothing, and activates her collar.

Opalyn is extremely wrung out, but not so far gone as to miss the feeling of being cradled. This is probably all the aftercare she's going to get; there aren't going to be snuggles and dark chocolate. She'll make the most of it. She doesn't know this guy at all and he may well be a monster -- certainly the way he killed crown guy was overly gruesome -- but at the moment, she just wants to be held, and he's holding her, so.

And they portal out.

Opalyn's viewpoint now occupies empty space above the vast planet of Capital, looking at a prison transport approaching the same Facility she was at before, or some other space-castle-prison just like it.  She can feel herself held in cradling arms, but not see the man who's holding her, or see herself.  Invisibility, apparently.

"You can call me Moamo, should the question arise.  Is there something I should call you that isn't Healthy-Orphan?  Or just shake a hand if you're too wrung out to answer."

This is all said in the tones of somebody who's never heard anyone tell him that he's not supposed to talk in outer space.

"My real name is Opalyn," she'll say, if she can also talk in outer space.

Whatever magic is doing this, it's treating them as being in gravity and having air to breathe... she can actually sense it, the collar now interferes less with Opalyn looking more closely at magic.  They're sort of in two places at once, taking advantage of somewhere else's gravity and air.

"Opalyn," he says, pronouncing it exactly correctly on the first try.  "You evacuated that platform with everyone else when the first instability occurred.  I'll figure out how to make the rest of it look like an accident, or maybe like the Dread Emperor intervened.  You are a perfectly normal mid-high Duchess or at least not any stranger than they already know."

"In reality, you're at the level that would exist between Prince and Dread Emperor, if the Dread Emperor suffered people to live who could maybe kill him and take over Eldrida if thirty of them were ever to combine forces."

"Give no sign of this, ever."

Opalyn would be very excited about this, if she had any emotional energy remaining! As it is, she just feels a faint warm glow.

Her brain is starting to come back online, though.

"I told you before, I have a strange backstory. It is very hard for me to blend in, here. It's not a matter of being unwilling, it's a matter of being unable, and I rather expect to be caught out as a foreigner at some point. It will help that I will gain library access now, so I'll have less motivation to ask strange questions."

"I also wonder what happens at my next lightline charging. I am not completely clear how much power a mid-high Duchess is supposed to make, and I don't know how to feign being tired when I'm not."

"They shouldn't force you to try again for... eight days, maybe twelve, I had your paperwork show you as exhausted.  I'll figure out something to do before then.  Don't volunteer."

"Thank you for not killing me. I realize you could have."

"I don't actually expect you to answer this truthfully, but I'm going to ask anyway: how powerful are you? And if you're on par with me, why does the Emperor suffer you to live?"

"I'm roughly the same level as you, so far as I could tell from looking.  A good deal older and more experienced.  It will be a long time before you can fight me evenly, and a somewhat shorter time before you can force me to kill you rather than capturing you alive."

"So far as I know, the Dread Emperor doesn't know I exist.  Either that or he's playing a long, sick game.  I give it 30-70."

Opalyn takes this information and files it away in the "Moamo claims" folder and not the "facts" folder. In particular, she hopes that with work and study he won't be able to overpower her for long, though it's not the sort of thing she'll get to take several runs at; the first time she fights him will be the last, one way or another.

"Do I have any way of contacting you, or do I just need to wait?"

"And what happens if I get attractive offers for leaving the prison?"

"I don't know how you'd contact me safely, at your current level."

"Offers--turn them down, unless the offer is so good that declining would be suspicious, in which case it's probably a test and you should accept.  Don't take anything where I wouldn't be able to find you again, after that, by inquiring at the Farm."

"All right. I'm guessing we're almost out of time, here, but if there's still just a moment..."

"I have a long list of subjects I already plan to study at the library. Anything you recommend that I read first?"

"All of the fucking wizardry."

The prison transport shakes, then, as its engines glow brighter and restart.

...and as most of the inmates are picking themselves up from where they were shaken onto the floor, Opalyn's curled-up form is among them, at the rear, sealed papers in hand.

They track everything with physical paper and that's it? No wonder all the intake Headstompers were deluged in paper! Opalyn strongly suspects there's some way to fake everything if she ends up wanting to stay in the prison past her next lightline charging.

She's not sure how many hours have actually passed since breakfast, but she feels about ready to go to bed again. She wonders, though, if she needs to stop somewhere for her paperwork to be processed and turned into tokens, so that she can lock her door before she pushes the sleep NOW! button again.

(Realistically, if the time she woke up is to be designated as 7am, it can't actually be any later than 1pm.  But there's no clocks in the Facility except ones all running at different variable speeds; so bedtime is whenever you want it to be...)

The prison ship docks at the Facility, and they all shuffle on out.  Opalyn will find that her muscles aren't drained, when she tries to rise, only whatever aspect of her might be drawn down by having a lot of feelings.

But, yes, you need to stop off somewhere and get paperwork turned into tokens.