The Facility's dress code is complicated but one critical aspect is, "Being allowed to wear higher-coverage clothing in public areas is a privilege that requires Farm credits."  Anyone who wears relatively less, therefore, is someone lacking in Farm credits, and therefore someone vulnerable in all sorts of ways to those who have more.  (Or, of course, that's just what they want you to think.)

The point is, customs have been arranged to preserve some of the signaling-value by which exposure suggests defenselessness, rather than letting the entire thing devolve into a meaningless personal choice.

And finally, the promised gardens are there, and they look to be all that they were promised to be!

Well, this certainly is one way to do it!

Opalyn has a hard time imagining that posters full of Wrong Thoughts are actually very effective for their purpose, in the same way that she never met anyone on earth who was earnestly inspired by posters of eagles soaring over mountains.

She wonders if maybe the person writing the Wrong Thoughts posters just really likes writing Wrong Thoughts posters and sort of got carried away with the project without actually checking to see if it was helping.

Opalyn has lots of ideas for how to get people to be even more emotional, and how to efficiently harness their emotions, since that seems to be the goal... but is not yet sure she should be participating in making the Farm operate better.

It sure would be nice to get library access very soon now and try to figure out what she's trying to accomplish in this universe and what affordances she has for doing so, before she gets nerdsniped into optimizing this corner of the world, possibly against her own values and best interests.

(It's indeed a similar systemic behavior as the one that produces ineffective posters in Earth schools:  Once an Authority knows how their captive subjects should behave, Authority will instinctively order their captives to behave like that!  It just feels really good to order people to be the way you think they should be!  Very few Authorities would have the strength of character to resist that temptation, especially if their surroundings reward rather than punish them for giving in to that temptation.

Also in terms of Eldrida-specific phenomena, a noble sees little point in trying to hide knowledge of what causes a fraught relationship, even if it might otherwise be more useful to let people be taken by surprise, when the nobility already talks about that topic so much.

Also also, it's a rare Authority who doesn't think they are super good at having highly fraught relationships.  Why, their life experience on the topic makes them a super expert!  One way that an Authority can share this incredibly valuable expertise is by ordering a new poster put up after their most recent breakup.)

Anyways, at the end of the tour, Opalyn will be escorted to her temporary personal quarters pending her assigned sorcerous rating.  Loss aversion being a thing, she will be shown some quite nice quarters to be afraid of losing if she doesn't contribute lots to the lightline!

A four-poster BATHTUB? That's so nuts! The steam will get into the velvety drapes and make them all moldy nah, magic fixes everything.

Yeah, this is all right. Opalyn can definitely make this work.

She knows, from past experience, that when she really relaxes she is probably going to have really a lot of feelings about everything that has happened.

- she DIED
- her old life is apparently ENTIRELY OVER and she will NEVER SEE HER LOVED ONES again
- her ARM was CUT OFF
- people were trying to KILL HER for a second time in the same minute
- she engaged in INTERPLANETARY TRAVEL
- she has been SENT TO PRISON
- the prison she has been sent to is OPERATING INEFFICIENTLY

Yeah, it's really best not to think about anything but the very last point, that's a safe place to hang out, mentally and emotionally.

On Earth, she would think about this as avoidance practicing self-care by grieving in the proper time and place.
On Eldrida, she can think of it as being a productive member of society!

So... does everyone on Eldrida attempt to be as batshit as possible, or only people with magical potential?

Presumably lots of people have no magical aptitude at all. Are they running around being all dramatic all the time, too? Or are they just cowering and fawning and trying to people-please the magicians?

Since no books have been provided yet, Opalyn checks to see if her Orphan-memories have anything to say about that.

Orphan never really thought about it in those terms, because her little village did not have much truck with wizards, let alone nobles.  Orphan has heard tales about nobles behaving in very dramatic ways, like having their girlfriends or boyfriends tortured to death in amusing ways for amusing reasons, or wiping out somebody's whole family because they didn't bow low enough to a carriage, or noble children being incredibly spoiled and going into screaming tantrums that ends with some villager flogged or dead.  But this doesn't make it immediately obvious to an Earthling that this was about deliberate drama generation; Earth nobles were like that too.

Orphan has heard about rich merchants behaving like this, though less so.  But that doesn't make it obvious whether the merchants were aping noble behavior or for that matter if it was all lies because obviously everyone hates rich merchants.

The people in her village did not behave like this.  The people she recruited to her little army did not behave like this.

The people in Orphan's memories and the bureaucrats she's met in the Facility... well, the phrase that comes to mind is "different planets" and in fact they are.

(Her room does have some books already in it, but they're not, like, history books.)

Opalyn cannot actually resist paging through the book to see what it's about. She predicts:

- it will be written from the perspective of the protagonist
- no other points of view will ever be shown or even credibly guessed-at
- the dramatic tension, if they bother with that here, will be derived from other characters constantly behaving even worse and the protagonist finding clever ways to get even 
- certainly the protagonist doesn't learn any constructive lessons; any "growth" is in becoming even more neurotic

How did Opalyn do?

Also, did she read anything that provided new information about this world, or violated her predictions? She's not just looking for her biases to be confirmed here, she's looking for new data.

The story does often dive into the thoughts of the... at least three men that this woman is stringing along!  It's hard to be sure of their total number without reading cover-to-cover.  Literary technology here either hasn't invented third-person limited omniscient viewpoint or has abjured it for some reason; the viewpoint just freely talks about the thoughts of both sides in a way that an Earth reader might find jarring at first.  It can be hard to tell whether a man is thinking a thought, or the protagonist thinks that he's thinking it.

P. 34:  A man says something that the female lead finds very insulting.  His thoughts show that he totally meant to insult her like that, even though he acts outwardly surprised that she'd think he meant it that way.

P. 57:  Female lead perfectly divines the man's subconscious motivations from subtle hints.  He reacts with outward surprise that his inward thoughts show to be about the sudden realization that she's nailed him perfectly, and even some amount of internal gratitude that she showed him that truth about himself, even as he outwardly denies that she could possibly be on to anything because then he'd owe her and he doesn't want her knowing that he owes her.

Towards the end of the story, the female lead's thoughts have become much less uncertain-sounding; she's overcome her early uncertainty about whether she's really that good at reading men's minds, and has come to the understanding that her instincts are accurate and men often have a reason to hide from her how accurate all her guesses really are.  She no longer tells her men what she's guessed about them, and instead reserves that confident knowledge for her own, internal plotting.

In terms of updating about Eldrida... unfortunately the romance novel seems to itself be set in a fanciful alternate universe, possibly?  Or at least, there's a mention in there about how the character has something called Love Spirit which is more powerful than sorcery, and they're in some sort of giant underground cavern setting with no mention of planets existing.

It will nonetheless be possible to pick up that "wizardry" is the use of (potentially small) amounts of the same magical power that sorcerers have, in mathematically structured ways.  The author seems to think that this is a crutch for people who lack raw power, but even mighty sorcerers are also praised as being precise and efficient and leveraged and pinpoint and various other such qualities.  There's a brief magical fight scene which casually refers to a lot of concepts that neither Opalyn nor Orphan had, but you can maybe see in retrospect from Orphan's memories that Orphan's opponents were trying to come at her with efficient spatial-slicing spells, and Orphan was simply blowing away everything in her path.

It is not terribly surprising that Orphan had not been using her power optimally!

Opalyn wonders: is there a real dichotomy between wizardry and sorcery? Like, do some people have wizard aptitude and some people have sorcerer aptitude? Or should she be thinking of this as "math aptitude" and "magic aptitude" and if you have both you can use the math to wring more precision and efficiency out of your existing magic?

Opalyn feels a little hopeless about figuring this out from Orphan's memories and one overwrought romance novel, but if she doesn't have enough data here yet she can just hold these ideas as theories to investigate later.

Nothing overtly contradicts the hypothesis that there's no ontological difference between wizardry and sorcery?  There isn't any difference in the ontological language that the book uses for describing wizards when they're being very mathy, and sorcerers when they're being a little mathy.

Orphan knows that not everyone can be a wizard; you need to have the potential to be a wizard.  The question of whether this is the same kind of potential as noble sorcery, but less of it, is not one that ever occurred to Orphan; she had little impulse to organize her thoughts into an ontologically tidy universe.

Actually, if Opalyn is staring at words and checking Orphan's memories at the same time, she's liable to notice at some point that Opalyn seems to understand words in the book that Orphan has no memories of hearing or reading as words.

Huh. Why would Opalyn know words that Orphan didn't know? She previously thought she was running on Orphan's memories of the language, but apparently something deeper is at work. She files it away as yet another mystery about this place.

Now that she has leisure to try experiments in relative privacy, can she do anything at all with magic with this collar on? Like, even if she can feel how much intensity she's putting out (and then having blocked), that would be interesting.

First she'll try very gingerly remembering the feeling of the fury of getting her arm cut off, at maybe 5% of the original intensity, while simultaneously trying to send a 10cm-ball of PUSH at something safe like a pillow, and just see what happens. Can she feel anything at all?

The collar seems to interfere with magic generation somewhere far upstream of getting anywhere near that far, blocking her before Opalyn can really generate or call forth the magic; the item does not try to let her generate it and then block it!  (If reasonably economical magic items could generate power on anything like Orphan's scale, then Orphan would not have been able to lawnmower over wealthy enemies, right?)

It's like being drunk, maybe, in a very selective way.  Like your magical motor neurons are in their own personal REM-stage dream, where every time they try to be sensible they just end up feeding the pillowcases back to the crocodiles again.  The impulse to cast a spell is not going nowhere, but it sure is not going into generating the magic that could actually feed into that spell.

And not particularly expecting this to work either, Opalyn slowly recites the times tables to herself while trying to generate the same 10-cm ball. Same result? Or different at all?

Same result, no detectable difference.