Opalyn is trying to figure out how this place actually works, what magical power is for, and whether it often straightforwardly translates into political power, or if it just makes you a target. When she understands what the Dread Emperor and other important people want and how they go about it, maybe she'll be able to figure out how to get what she wants and how to go about that.

It now seems like magically powerful people are left to do their own thing if they want to be Princes or Grand Dukes and they seem effective at that, but if they become marauding bandits like her predecessor did, then they get scooped up and turned into lightline fuel.

It does not seem like she's going to be allowed to press the "undo" button and go be a Grand Duchess now, and she's also not particularly sure how sexist this world is. Maybe there's no such thing as a Grand Duchess?

So here are the options then:

1. Be a Grand Duchess - too late, she's already been arrested, and also maybe sexism.

2. Be a prisoner who fuels lightlines, with sub-options of boring, dramatic, or lewd - no thanks, doesn't sound like there's much agency available there.

3. File for special status and see what the 'usual offers' are and if there's any possibility of more agency there.

"Can you tell me more about the 'usual offers'?"

"Same concept as your local pissant Baron sweeping the town jails for new thugs to hire, or a brothel that comes in and offers girls an alternative to execution, maybe after being the ones to frame them for the crime in the first place.  But upscale, because we only take ranked sorcerers here."

"Anyone with the legal right or extralegal capability can come in and offer one of our inmates a role as their dark lieutenant.  Or--could be the spymaster of a Grand Duke's personal spy service, retired assassin looking for a worthy apprentice, Prince's brother-in-law who wants to be a great detective and wants a legman to do all the work, space pirate polycule that decides one more peer node can solve their relationship balancing, that sort of thing."

"The Farm is ultimately for powerful idiots that nobody in the system has any better use for.  People who cannot keep to anyone else's rules, or who take up too much managerial capacity to be worth it.  Though I do not recommend getting sent here twice, you're not going to get attractive second offers if you fuck up the first one."

Now we're talking! Some of these jobs sound fun enough that Opalyn might even choose to spend some years of her life on them voluntarily! This may or may not be the final stop in her new Sorceress career, but it's definitely a move in the right direction!

"Okay! Let's file for special status then!"

"Can I put together a dossier or a resume or something so that people will hire me into the best roles? What are the median and maximum times someone has to wait for a placement? Can I say no or am I required to take the first offer that comes along? How do I find you years from now to reward you for being so helpful to me? Because I'd really like to give you a gratuity but I am not currently in a position to do so!"

He's just going to put his palm over his face and breathe deeply a few times.

"I think you are overestimating how bureaucratically legible this process is supposed to be."

"That said:  Yes, we can do that.  Everyone's case is individual so I couldn't guess your wait time.  Whether you can say no depends on how much money they offer someone with the authority or just capability to hand you over anyways.  My name is Trāho."

Opalyn suspects Trāho of possibly fucking with her... the phrase "bureaucratically legible" sounds suspiciously well-informed, even for a Special Circumstances guy, as though maybe he has at some point worked in some entirely different bureaucracy that had a different amount of legibility. Her model of this world is that there's one monolithic bureaucracy, so where would he get experience like that? She wants to squint her eyes at him or call him out on it but decides she's been weird enough at him already and lets it go for now.

"Wonderful. Can you supply me with some paper and something to write with? You seem woefully undersupplied with paper compared to your colleagues but I bet you have some around here somewhere."

"Also, are you so well-known that a single two-syllable name fully identifies you?"

"It identifies me as a low-level intake officer in the Farm.  There's only a couple hundred of us in the intake office of the Farm's Headstomping section, and we usually stay a while.  I wouldn't try it with the ten trillion souls of Capital."

"And let's get your regular intake finished, before we consider what brief words I might pass on to any entirely legal agents who happen to chat me up."  

Ten trillion souls? With a T? The planet looked big but not that big. How did they manage to get a thousand times more people on a planet that, despite its size, probably has nothing like a thousand times the surface area?

MAGIC is the obvious explanation, though not a very satisfying one; the details matter. Opalyn files it away under "Eldrida Mysteries" to reconsider as she gathers more data about how everything works here.

"All right. What else do you need to know?"

"Well, usually at this point I'd ask you about boring versus dramatic versus lewd prison.  But I cannot in good bureaucratic-conscience offer you boring prison.  If you wanted to go to boring prison, you needed to not arrive here with blatantly fake entrance papers proclaiming you to be an illiterate bandit queen.  I think it's down to dramatic, or lewd and dramatic, and few people want lewd and dramatic."

When Opalyn thinks about lewd prison she thinks it might have its advantages, but then again, it might really not, it might be nonstop assault and rape with no recourse. There's no guarantee that lewd implies fun if you have no power.

But then dramatic doesn't sound that great either. It sounds like people being irrational and emotional and upset at each other for illegible reasons.

Opalyn does actually kind of want boring prison, on her current models anyway. There are always books to read to get lewd and dramatic content on your own terms (she hopes), but getting lewd and dramatic content on other people's terms sounds unbearable.

"Can you say more about each type of prison? I realize I have a bunch of guesses about what you might mean, but they're only guesses. What does a typical day look like in each place?"

"I suppose that, supposedly coming from a different universe with no sorcerers in it, supposedly you wouldn't already know, hm."

"Sorcerers can use more power if they feel strongly about things.  I imagine that would seem like a pretty central fact about Eldrida to somebody who didn't already know how it worked."

"Boring prison is for sorcerers with the ill luck to have been born with the sort of low-drama personality that doesn't lend itself to rulership positions.  It's hard for them to ever get hysterically worked up enough about anything to keep a planet subordinate to themselves.  There's various things we do to get low-drama sorcerers into a state where they can recharge a lightline, and then, when that's over, they just want to go quietly relax with their equally low-drama harem."

"Dramatic prison is for the sort of sorcerer who can manage to get really worked up about the prospect of losing relative rank or a member of their polycule breaking up with them if they fail to recharge the lifeline."

"Lewd prison is for sorcerers who can sexually enjoy being hurt or ordered around, who obviously have a lot more fun in prison than anyone else could possibly be capable of.  We work with it."

Ohhhh. Opalyn previously thought they sorted the prisoners for entirely different reasons. She thought the boring prisoners would have a lower guard-to-prisoner ratio and produce better work because they were not constantly being fucked with by high-drama cellmates, but that's not it at all.

"Okay, I get why you ask us whether we want to be in lewd prison or not. People who like to be hurt will say yes and people who don't like to be hurt will say no. The incentives are properly aligned. But I don't get why you trust inmates to self-select into dramatic vs. boring correctly. Doesn't everyone say they're dramatic, to avoid the probably-very-distressing stimuli you provide to get them worked up? I'm sure the mis-sorting becomes obvious pretty quickly, but I would expect a bunch of people to lie."

"Also, where's the prison for people who just... do the thing... because that's how you provide value in this context, and you would like to be a functional member of society, as long as that society is not itself so fundamentally bad that you need to overthrow it? And by functioning well, get whatever privileges are due to you thereby?"

"Well, the problem is that most people have trouble getting hysterically worked up about the importance of being a functional member of society, so that is not where you get maximum sorcerous power-output.  I'd dearly love to live in a universe where people could go into complete histrionics about, say, the importance of good ops skills and basic organizational logistics, and those were the people who ended up ruling continents.  That is not, actually, the world that we live in."

"And yeah, lot of people ask to go to dramatic prison and then turn out to not be able to get worked up in the right way to recharge a lightline.  This is not an issue that I would say the Farm deals with in an optimal fashion.  The present system is founded on the deep and abiding conviction that every criminal fits into one of three buckets, or four if you count lewd dramatic.  If you aren't a perfect inmate according to any of those three buckets, fuck you."

Opalyn remembers some times she got pretty worked up about how people were not doing ops correctly and feels a bit like an alien in this world, but then she was kind of an alien in her previous world too, if that's how we're measuring.

"Why don't people generally pick lewd plus dramatic? I would think having the stimuli rotated would provide some nice variety."

"Also, if I can reliably get myself amped up without help, will they just leave me to it instead of constantly messing with me? Because I'd rather try it on my own first. It sounds like an interesting challenge."

"We can try lewd dramatic.  You wanna?"

"Wait, no, tell me why first, maybe there is on this occasion some wisdom in the crowd!"

"It's a mix of being hurt, ordered around, made to do sexual things, making other people doing sexual things, and the relationship polycules constantly breaking up and forming with much crying and much wild laughter, and people trying to get the upper hand on each other, gaining and losing all sorts of statuses inside the system.  Obviously, who manages to put out the most lightline charge is at the center of it all.  I wouldn't wanna."

Is she gonna do this?

Yeah, she's gonna do this.

"Allll right. I guess it's just until someone picks me to be their top spy or overhaul their economy or something."

It's always the fucking quiet ones.

"I am still filing the paper which says that your entrance papers are obviously wrong.  I'd expect that sends you to a nicer holding cell, and gets you better offers.  But I should disclaim that I have not actually seen for myself what goes on in whatever section of the Farm exists for lewd, dramatic inmates who were possibly sent to us on false pretenses.  I'd expect it to be a bit niche and for all I know they now have developed their own weird-planetary-subculture."

"With that kind of setup, any other result would be shocking."

"Still very grateful for your help here! Because I'm new here, what kind of favor would you most appreciate in some distant future where I'm in a position to bestow favors? I can't guarantee this will ever come about but it would be nice to know what you value, just in case I get there."

"It really does depend on where you end up, ya know?  If you end up with pull inside the system, I wouldn't mind a few people getting fired who I'm not going to name on the record.  You wind up with a billion gold, I'd take a million."

"But we're still not done with my proper job here.  Key question, what's your actual sorcerous rank?  Entrance paper says Duke, not sure I can get you out of stressful-power-testing where they try to get a Duke's power output out of you.  I can try to write in a note asking them not to try too hard because the paper is wrong, but there isn't actually a line of the form for that."

"Obviously I have no idea what my rank is! I spent a grand total of about twelve seconds with access to my powers before I got knocked out and cuffed, and I was very confused the entire time! Also I haven't particularly seen anyone else in action!"

Opalyn thinks for a moment, and then remembers that wait, she has two sets of memories. She keeps forgetting that. They don't particularly integrate with her own sense of self, she's not used to reaching for them, and they don't really rise up in her consciousness on their own, she has to actively decide to query them.

"Oh wait. Strike that. I do have some memories left over from my predecessor, though I guess I'm still not sure how to interpret them. Mostly I remember winning a lot and not losing ever until now. But I still don't really know what that means; maybe I was a medium-sized fish in a very tiny pond."

"I assume that it would be somehow to my advantage to sandbag that initial power testing, so it'll be easier to meet expectations later, and I further assume that they expect sandbagging and have ways of getting people not to sandbag. I wonder why they even ask you your opinion if they're just going to test me anyway." 

"I mean, there's no point in taking somebody who's never shown power above Count under even the most extreme stress, and going on trying to push them further once they get to half-Count.  We do understand the concept that if you keep hammering on a person they are likely to break and then not be as good for recharging lightlines.  Same reason we provide amenities like harems, we'd like our generators to go on generating."

"I... am going to say plainly that I am confused about this memories business.  But saying what I'd say if I took it at face value, who's the strongest opponent you remember defeating?"

Opalyn remains unimpressed at the Farm's metrics if they can't tell what's going on better than that. If she were in charge... but she's not, and that's probably not where she's aiming in the long run.

Opalyn actively queries the secondary set of memories. She remembers defeating five Barons and two Counts, though she's not sure which one is which... ah but now her memories say that Counts are beefier than Barons, which sort of lines up with the numbers. And it seems like rank is tied pretty directly to sorcery power. Opalyn is confused about that. Shouldn't something other than sorcery figure in? Like, being an effective administrator in any way whatsoever?

Now, how much of this should she reveal to Trāho? Plausibly the time to sandbag is now, if she's gonna, though she feels a bit bad about it as she believes dealing directly with Trāho so far has the appearance of going well. He hasn't visibly defected yet, and she's reluctant to defect first. Also, she's a terrible liar and will probably get caught immediately.

On the other hand, he might want to help her out here and all she has to do is give him some plausible deniability. He did state at the beginning of the interview that lying was acceptable and would not be punished, though she's not sure if that is still in effect.

Meh, this is taking too long, she'll try it.

"I've defeated two Barons."