"As a bandit queen?"

"I'm not sure what you mean. Yeah, all my battles except the last twelve seconds of the final one were run by my bandit queen predecessor. I just got here."

"Instead of trying to ask what is going on, I am going to ask you the question that actually matters to me.  If I send back saying the entrance papers seem obviously false because you are clearly not an illiterate peasant bandit queen, does the Prince of Mayvos immediately dispute that and then provide apparently clear and cogent documented testimony from witnesses, about how somebody who looks just like you totally did all those things?"

"I imagine so, yes! The person previously occupying this body did totally do those things. Does that mean I definitely don't get the special offers?"

Opalyn is reconsidering her choice of lewd dramatic if it might be forever.

"No, those offers come to the general inmate population, not just special holding areas."

"What happens if we, in the fastest short order permitted by bureaucracy, before you could plausibly be given a new education, administer to this supposed illiterate peasant turned bandit queen..."

"...a test of her current mathematical education?"

"Sure! I like math tests! They're fun!"

"How much math, though?  Are we talking multiplication?  Fractions?  Algebra?  Type theory?"

"Trāho, are you holding out on me? Do you know surprisingly much math for the purposes of this job, or did you just memorize a list of kinds of math?"

If this were a story, it would turn out that surprise, Trāho is the Dread Emperor, dressed up as a bureaucrat for inscrutable reasons that you care less about after the inevitable sex scene.

"I may not know type theory, but I'm enough of a sissy wizard to know what the big-dicked wizards know."

"I can't wait to find out what the connection between math and wizardry is! Also, whether wizardry and sorcery are different things in this world, or if they're just synonyms for the practice of magic!"

"Anyway, yes, I can do multiplication and fractions. In my world, 'algebra' means two different things and I'm excellent at the easy one and rusty at the hard one, but I did ever learn it. And we distinguish somewhat between set theory and type theory and I have more training in the former than the latter, though I'm not completely unaware of it and if you let me noodle around with the problems for a while I could probably get somewhere."

"I do hope that the test will account for potential differences in vocabulary and notation."

"I see.  I do not, actually understand what's going on, at this point, so I'll say that depending on what's actually going on, it's not clear to me we'd even want to do that.  Taking everything for what it would imply at face value, Mayvos will be able to support and document your crimes as a bandit queen, and we'll be able to prove that you knew way more math than the person they reported you to us as being.  Setting events in motion that make your existence look weird and complicated and like different investigations are returning different results, is not quite the same helpful deed as filing papers that Mayvos will quietly let drop because they can't respond to them."

"Reading ahead in the swordfight, Mayvos plausibly responds by saying, oops, guess we were wrong about her being an illiterate peasant but that's not the main point, it's that she dominated and slew--wasn't it five Barons and two Counts?"

Whoops, well, that didn't work. Why doesn't that ever work?

"I wasn't sure if you needed me to be the one to lowball the number so you could dutifully write it down and have it be not your fault, but yes, your records are correct."

"Yeah, I can see what you were thinking there, but... no.  No.  Hopefully you get some valuable experience with this sort of thing in somewhat lower-stakes situations off in the Lewd Drama section."

"How close were you to your limit, during the fight with whichever of the two Counts was stronger?"

Theoretically a second attempt at deception might actually go better, given that the first one was so easily pierced, but Opalyn feels a bit out of her depth trying to figure out what to lie about to whom and when and why and decides just to stick with the truth. Besides, she likes the truth. The truth is fun.

"I think it was not at all close. I think my predecessor just crushed them."

"Was she... feeling strongly about that, at all."

"It's hard to decode. In my memory, she feels... smug, I think? Powerful, amused at herself, haughty. I don't have any specific memories of her feeling enraged or threatened or like someone was about to steal her harem members or anything."

"Right."

"See, that shifts me back toward disputing things with Mayvos.  If you are actually Duke-ranked and possibly Grand, it's not a good look on me if I ignore anomalies and we just pay them."

"You are not going to lack for job offers either, though they are going to want to see that rank verified first."

"Who should I be trying to connect you with?  I should warn you right now, you're free to talk about illegal fantasies and I'm free to ignore them."

"I have no idea what's legal and illegal here so it's a good thing I'm allowed to talk about anything!"

"Let's see... I like to figure out complicated things that aren't working right and make them work better. I like being useful. I like building infrastructure, so that a thing that has to be done over and over becomes easier or more pleasant or cheaper. I like connecting person A who has problem X with person B who has solution Y and then having both of those people owe me favors. Lewdness is fine, as you already know."

"I am not used to having sorcery as a resource. It will probably take me a while to find out how to activate my own emotions in a way that really works for me and lets me use my power effectively, and I'm going to want to study existing materials and run my own experiments to test the limits of my magic."

"Thinking back to the examples you listed before, I should probably not actually be a spy, as I'm pretty big on just sharing information and trying to find multi-agent-optimal solutions to problems; I constantly worry that if everyone is hiding information we'll be leaving a lot of potential value on the table. Also I'm just outright bad at lying so it's mostly my value I'm leaving on the table when I try it."

"But the other ideas sound more promising. To be a really good assassin it would help a lot if I thought the people I was killing needed killing; in the absence of that, it's not great. Learning to be a detective sounds fun! Space pirate polycule sounds like a great stopping off point on my way to some other port."

...He'll handle the easy part of this first.  "So far as activating your emotions goes, for obvious reasons the Farm is always happy to supply training in histrionic meditation and to positively reinforce any visible signs of neuroticism.  Also for obvious reasons, while nobody's going to object to you reading books on the subject, you will only be enabled to use magic while somebody more powerful than you is watching you charge a lightline."

Histrionic meditation?  No, thank you!

"I do not actually want my neuroticism reinforced! I have worked hard to contain my neuroticism and would strongly prefer to maintain my large window of tolerance!"

"Well, you're sure committing to the bit about being from a different universe, I'll give you that."

"And if you're committing that hard, it may be a bit difficult for you to communicate to me what it is you want from life, here.  Being a connectrix isn't something that takes Duke-ranked sorcery, and also selling a Duke-potential to space pirates is the sort of decision that actually gets somebody in trouble."

"Maybe your previous examples were not ideal because you didn't know me very well yet, and you could generate some new ones? I still don't really know what sorcery is good for other than lightlines, or why political power seems so strongly correlated to sorcery and not to anything more obviously useful in politics!"

"Most Dukes wouldn't want to waste their time defending a fake Count who couldn't defend theirself against a Baron.  It's one thing to shut down violence between your subordinates, and another thing to have to defend your subordinates from random passing wizards.  For the strong to rule is the most natural structure, which takes the least amount of work from stronger powers to keep in a state of pleasant stability."

"If, possibly, you had a chance to hit up some library books or seduce information out of your fellow inmates--you can't beat it out of them until you've had your first lightline session--would you then feel like you weren't violating your bit by appearing to have learned some things and have some better idea of what you wanted, if I wandered by and chatted with you again in a few days?"

Would Opalyn like to be given some library books about magic and time to read them?

YES SHE WOULD!

"That sounds fantastic! In addition to textbooks about sorcery and wizardry, if indeed those are two separate things, I'd also like history books, novels, cookbooks, ettiquette manuals, memoirs, self-help books, ... you know, is there any way I can go to the library myself and just poke around?"

"They'll have a library, and baths, gardens, masseurs, whatever.  You might need your Duke ranking before you can take the best ones away from people who did worse on lightline duty, but they'll have the goodies there for you to seize."

"Prisons for criminal sorcerers are, you know, ordained by the rulers of the system, who are, how can I put this, emotionally sympathetic to criminal sorcerers.  The system goes way lighter on someone who loots a town by raining stones down on it, compared to how it treats somebody who, say, steals the same amount of gold by cooking books in a merchant consortium.  They'll say the accountant violated trust that was given them, and the bandit just tried to take what they want and never promised anyone otherwise.  But sometimes I wonder whether, if continents were ruled by accountants, they'd somehow end up going light on people who embezzled a million gold."