The amount of magic that's visible in here to Opalyn, with her collar no longer interfering as much with her vision, is great enough to be distracting; not so much as to obscure her vision, though, after taking into account that her eyes and her magic senses seem to run by different roads.

There's a quite pretty young woman seated in front of what could maybe be a magitech imitation of a computer screen, though there's no visible trace of a keyboard or mouse.  She is dressed with such high coverage that in the Facility it would make her an Empress, if she were otherwise one of the inmates.  Behind her is an imitation window that doesn't quite show a holographically realistic outdoors, but does serve well to illuminate the room.

"What are you here for?" she says, not looking up from her screen.

"I'm looking for wizardry lessons with He-Who-Ascends, and I was told to come here?"

She taps the possible-screen in front of her (though it is obscured from Opalyn's sight), and then a moment later gestures at one of the several doors visible from here.  "Go in."

He-Who-Ascends is not his actual title, but correcting prison inmates about that is not her job and she doesn't want to dump her mental stack in order to hold a conversation about it.

This is a surprising number of layers of people to talk to before she gets to the Wizard! Opalyn had expected just to go to the library and pull up a chair at the tutoring table. Well, maybe it will be worth it?

She goes.

"What up?"

"Um."

Opalyn clears her throat. This wizard is intimidatingly majestic.

"I'm here for wizardry lessons? The academy said you take students?"

"Do you dress like that because you enjoy it, or because you came here from the Facility section?  'Both' is an acceptable answer."

"I'm an inmate of the Facility, yes, and I guess I'm somewhat surprised you get people wandering in here who are not inmates? Have I somehow managed to depart the secure zone of the Facility?"

"Oh, and, sure, I don't really mind dressing like this."

The man raises his hand and snaps his fingers and a force pokes Opalyn one centimeter sideways, in a dimension that isn't the usual three.

"I see you're unfamiliar with the more expensive kind of magic," he says, in the slightly different office that now contains both of them, occupying the same positions as before.  "There's more than one entrance to this room, and more than one room in this space."

Indeed! Opalyn was not expecting that!

Presumably the Facility has a way to contain its inmates even despite this kind of dimensional translation... though she wonders if it's overly reliant on the inmates having collars.

"Thank you for the demonstration! I would like to learn how to do that."

"I have a strange background: I know quite a bit of math, but not how to connect that math up to magic, and I'm hoping you will be able to help me with that."

"How'd you end up in that epistemic state?"

All right, how's she going to explain it this time?

"Does it matter? My family and schooling were quite unconventional by local standards."

"Doesn't matter immediately, I suppose.  If I was taking you on as a student later, I'd want to know what you knew about math and what you didn't know about magic."

"I know almost nothing about magic; I was arrested only seconds after starting to use my magic for the first time. The vast majority of my experience so far has been during a single lightline charging session."

"As for mathematics, it's been a while since I studied it formally, but I studied geometry, trigonometry, calculus, differential equations, set theory, probability, statistics, combinatorics... and probably a few other things that aren't coming to mind at the moment."

The man now looks quite a bit more interested than he did a few seconds earlier.

"I am asking myself what subject matter draws on all of those topics, and does not at all demand the study of magic, and drawing an utter blank."

Oh, crap. Opalyn might have said too much.

"In the view of my teachers, math is generally useful and can feed into multiple applications, and is therefore worth studying on its own."

This does not feel like the time to start explaining Earth physics and engineering, much less computer science. Let's definitely not talk about computer science. Opalyn is still hoping to keep this world far away from artificial intelligence.

"They're not quite wrong, but I would've expected the many many subfields of magic to be on that list of applications too.  So now, taking all your words at face value, we have the puzzle of who teaches those subjects, is careful not to teach any magic, operated under circumstances that you're reluctant to talk about even after you got sent to prison, and put you into conditions where you awakened your sorcery and got sent to prison immediately after that."

"I see why they put you in the dramatic section, at any rate."

The flow of information is going the WRONG WAY here. Opalyn has got to transmit a lot less than this if she's going to talk to smart people.

Stands to reason that the ones who are good at wizardry are also the ones to watch out for.

"So will you take me as a student, then?"

"Magic in both its basic and advanced applications requires extensive drilling.  Right now, I'm already drilling quite a number of students every day.  It doesn't sound like you're only looking to get drilled a little?"

Surely that's only a double entendre in English, right? She'll play it straight.

"I'm happy to work hard and practice a lot. I'd like to learn as quickly as possible."

"I do some pretty rigorous drilling."

"Uh... okay?"

"I'm also going to fuck you."