Orphan is ecstatic.  Dark sorceresses are spoken of only in whispers, in her little village, but even the whispers are enough to make it clear that dark sorceresses get to have a lot more fun than peasants.

The seasons turn twice again and Orphan is dressed in the fine clothing of a merchantess whose last crime was to wear clothing that looked to be in Orphan's size.

Her sorcery is still instinctive, unlearned, only a little less crude than it was the day it first ripped forth from her, but she is powerful enough to shred through a fancy academy wizard's shields before he has time to scream.

The seasons turn, and Orphan has slain five barons and two counts.

Orphan wishes she knew how to take and hold their territory, not just their gold; but she has a sense there are unknown and mysterious arrangements you are supposed to make about that, if you don't want Dukes and Grand Dukes and maybe the Dread Emperor himself arriving where you've conveniently set yourself up in a castle to be killed.

So in place of permanent territory Orphan has her own little bandit-army.  She doesn't really need them to win battles, but they're helpful at the rounding-up and the looting; and also she doesn't have much else on which to spend the loot; and also, how does anyone know you've come up in the world if you have no castle and also no army?

The seasons turn, and Orphan's story ends.

There hasn't been anyone powerful enough to contest Orphan head-to-head in all her experience.  But her sorcery is crude for all its power, and her shields don't extend through every dimension known to arcana.

Orphan runs out of gold one day, and her army rides to the nearest castle.

The baron there, in seeming folly, sends forth his own forces to meet her.

Orphan's first casually-tossed inferno disperses to the carefully prepared counterspell of a wizard, for such are the hazards of having a predictable signature spell.

The wizard doesn't survive for long.  Orphan becomes more powerful when she feels strongly about something.

But by then Orphan's army is already riddled by an archer's salvo, and the baron's elite knights have come to within a dozen paces of her.

And in the midst of those knights, a man who's skipped his dark robes today to clad himself in armor indistinguishable from the surrounding knights; a student of arts that some might call ill-advised, and powers that some might consider unnatural.

The baron's hired necromancer rips out her soul.

And right at that moment, in some totally other world, Opalyn Miller gets run over by a truck.

WHAT WHAT WHAT WHAT AHHHHHHHHHHHH

Welcome to Eldrida!  Here's your starter package!

One (1) new healthy body with a brief lifetime of memories of peasant life followed by magical banditry!  Don't open them all at once!

Several (N) new magical senses!  "Senses" might be something of a misnomer because they won't make any sense yet!

One (1) "armored knight" who's just finishing ripping something out of your body!

Seven (7) other armored knights beside the remains of six of their fellows, four of whom are still on fire and two of whom are still screaming!

Blood!  Screaming!  Fire!  More screaming!  Pseudo-medieval big stone castle in background!  Tons of planets in the sky with strands of light extending between them!

What do?

This bears little if any resemblance whatsoever to the day Opalyn was planning on having!

No time right now to figure out what happened, to figure out how she got here: first things first. There are people ON FIRE! In general, people should not be on fire!

Is there anything at all in the immediate surroundings that is anything like a blanket that could be thrown over a person on fire to snuff out the flames? Preferably something that is not synthetic? Opalyn doesn't want to melt polyester onto anyone's skin! Or failing that, is there perhaps a nearby pond or other source of water?

There is no water in your immediate range of vision!  Also, somebody is swinging a sword at you!  You might want to dodge--

Wait, never mind, your body has acted on reflex and is starting to leap back!  Also you seem to be doing something made of out of completely unfamiliar sensorimotor qualia that is going to totally incinerate that guy according to an instinctive flash of your own memories.

What do?

WHAT THE HELL why NO stop NO REDIRECT

As jets of fire start to shoot out of Opalyn's hands, she flings her arms up and to the side. The gouts of flame go over the shoulder of the sword-swinging guy, who gets a bit singed around the beard but otherwise does not burst into flames.

Opalyn can shoot JETS of FIRE out of her HANDS?

Wait, is Opalyn the one who set those guys on fire?

Okay, look, Eldrida means no offense here, but the part where you were about to kill that guy SWINGING A SWORD AT YOU was probably important to your own continued health, okay?  This is not Earth.

Moving your arms in front of you like that is going to stop that sword from directly taking your head.  But you are now down a left arm.  Stings a bit, will probably hurt more in a moment.

Also your spell seems to be in the process of exploding without you correctly managing it, and your memories indicate that this latter problem is actually the important one.

Why is the spell exploding? Opalyn still cast the spell, she just shot the fire that way instead of this way, shouldn't it still have discharged appropriately...?

Opalyn's sense of wrongness about the spell is rising faster than she can reason about it so with some effort she just lets go and lets her body take over. She immediately feels an internal wordless slip-pinch and the flow of magic to the fire spell twists off. That's a relief, that's how that's supposed to work.

But now OH FUCK oh fuck oh fuck FUCK FUCK my fucking ARM

The necromancer is CONFUSED about how ripping a bandit-sorceress's SOUL out of her (which he is pretty sure he did successfully) will cause her to GET WORSE AT COMBAT AND SPELLCASTING rather than IMMEDIATELY FALLING OVER DEAD.

By far the most obvious and best way to deal with this issue is to pretend for the rest of his life that he totally meant to do that.

"She's cursed and weakened!" he shouts in an unfamiliar language that Opalyn's memories understand perfectly, as he quickly backs away.  "Rush her!  If you cannot take her now, with all that aid, I wash my hands of you!"

Sure, the seven knights will all rush her at once, then.  Some of them are on fire, but on every life a little fire must fall.

This does not actually seem better than getting run over by a truck! Opalyn worries that if she lets these knights take her down, she'll be transported to a third place even worse than this, and then another and another, faster and faster, with less and less she can do! At least here she seems to be magical!

Seems like this is a time when setting people on fire is correct. Or maybe something better than that, since fire didn't seem to do the trick here.

Can she magically PUSH the knights away from her? She inhales, concentrates, and wills OUT-AWAY-SHOVE in a circle around her.

Did you mean to say CIRCLE or SPHERE?

CIRCLE. The knights are storming toward her on ground. She made the circle of force hit them all about hip-height.

At your current strength of emotion, this will send five of the seven knights flying off into the distance at a really quite high and not particularly survivable rate of speed!  The necromancer manages to divert most of what hits him but still gets sent flying back with ominous cracking sounds!

One knight leaps over your circle, one knight rolls under, and the one who leapt it has his sword going right for your head.  Inhaling and concentrating are not actually good moves in magical combat!  Just kill things!

BTW enemy archers have not been sitting around this entire time, flight of arrows incoming.

THIS IS BULLSHIT.

Opalyn is in way over her head here but she might as well just TRY TO LIVE.

She sends out a SPHERE of DEATH-HATE-FIRE-POISON-ACID-FUCKYOU.

This grand working of dark-sorcerous-button-mashing would probably have worked better if the combined spell was more familiar to you and had, like, 80% less instinctive casting time, and you were not trying to do it with ONE ARM while also in the middle of DODGING A SWORD.

An enormous terrifying surge of dark magical power blasts out of you in a perfect sphere, aimed in the WRONG DIRECTION along as many as SEVERAL OTHER DIMENSIONS BESIDES THE USUAL THREE.  

Also your body does manage to dodge the sword, after your sphere heads out in the wrong dimensional direction.  But behind that swung sword is also a mailed armored fist coming at where a highly trained fighter might predict your head would be--

--and you are waking up!  In chains!  Restored left arm included!  This is perhaps because the strange indescribably-tinged electricaloid current running through you, from those chains, would not work as well if you were down an arm.

The clothes you are wearing are torn and bloodied in a fashion indicating that there were probably a number of arrow holes in you at some earlier point in time that has been skipped-over.

You are in some sort of very fancy flying... prison... thing?  Suspended in chains, connecting to an ornate hollow sphere of gold prison bars, chained to a larger containing sphere of clear glass, held inside a spherical forcefield only apparent to your magical senses.

The nested spheres are flying in the air, very high, the ground is very far below you.

Anyways!  Good morning!  Welcome to Eldrida!

Huh.

Time to take stock.

Good news: Losing an arm is apparently no big deal at all, nor is turning into an arrow-pincushion. Physical damage is just an inconvenience around here. This is great! This means that all those guys Opalyn sent flying with her force-circle might make it! Even the ones who were on fire! Opalyn didn't want to let them kill her, but she wasn't really expecting quite so much spine-cracking and felt bad about it even while she was fighting for her life. She'd originally envisioned just knocking them down without causing any permanent paralysis.

Also, she's really very happy to have her arm back. She was in shock the entire time it was missing and hadn't really adjusted at all to the idea of missing a limb and now she can skip the entire adjustment and grief process and just not have that happen. This world seems to have an undo button. This is glorious.

More good news: Opalyn is very powerful and it takes over a dozen foes to take her down! Wheeeee! Opalyn knows that being powerful is not particularly a reflection of her own actual merit as a person, it is not as though she earned these powers as far as she knows, but she indulges herself in a bit of egotistical preening about being this much of a badass, and then tamps that back down again because it is not actually helping.

Bad news though: She did get taken down, and now she's a prisoner, and it does seem like possibly she even deserves to be a prisoner. She has a growing nagging sense that maybe in this world she's the bad guy and that if she's basically been arrested and is going to await trial for being an evil sorceress and then get the death penalty for that, well, that might actually be correct?

More bad news: Opalyn's entire previous life appears to be over nope can't think about that right now, that's a vast pool of grief and Opalyn really can't afford it at the moment. It's possible she only has a few more minutes to herself in these prison spheres before all hell starts breaking loose again and she needs to focus on figuring out as much as she can about who she is and what she's capable of.

Okay, so, what does Opalyn actually know? She seems to have two sets of memories: one from the life that she was living up until today, and another entire set that belong to this world. She wonders:

Is it true that she's an evil sorceress and would plausibly deserve it if she's about to be tried and sentenced to death?

Has this world heard of isekai before and would anybody believe her if she explained that she's not the real evil sorceress? Opalyn does not have a lot of hope about this one, probably all the evil sorceresses are always claiming "It wasn't me, that was someone else who set all those people on fire" but most of them are lying about it.

Who is in charge around here? What are they currently trying to do? How are they stuck? Does Opalyn have any way of helping them out in exchange for... whatever Opalyn ends up needing?

What are the major factions in this region and what's the deal with each of them?

Does Opalyn have any allies or resources?

What's the technology level here? Does Opalyn remember anything from her previous life that could plausibly completely shift the balance of power?

Is it true that she's an evil sorceress and would plausibly deserve it if she's about to be tried and sentenced to death?

Man, society as Healthy-Orphan knew it did not run on this 'deserves' concept at all.  The leading figure is literally called the Dread Emperor and rules from the largest planet visible in the sky above.

Healthy-Orphan didn't think about her role in existence very hard.  She saw that she had magical powers and wasn't a nobility-owned wizard and figured "oh I must be a dark sorceress then" and went off and did that.  Healthy-Orphan killed people who had things she wanted and whom Orphan expected to not just hand those things over.  She did have a tendency to go more for gold owned by merchants or armor owned by adventurers, and then trade that for food owned by peasants, rather than going after the peasants directly.  She never killed any children, nor any beaten-down fathers helping to juggle underfed toddlers, and doesn't seem to have thought of this as Morality so much as Orphan just not particularly wanting to do that.  She once saw a strong young man in a village and told him that he was now following around her army and sleeping with her whenever she wanted, and it did not particularly occur to her or him that "asking for consent" was a thing a dark sorceress could do.

Orphan has never heard of any such thing as a person being 'tried'.  If you transgress in a village, the elders get together and decide what to do with you.  If you transgress in a town, the town's ruler put in place by the Baron would decide what to do with you.  She was aware in a distant way that there were such things as written laws, but they were not for villagers and bandit queens, or beggars and city guards, more for merchants and nobles.

As Orphan saw the world, if she was defeated by a baron, she'd obviously die on the spot.  It didn't particularly occur to her that a dark sorceress would be imprisoned or judged, or enslaved or sold, or for that matter offered forgiveness or a chance to work for the government.  She knew there were magic-users who worked for the government and nobles with powers, but they were not labeled as present or former dark-sorceress-bandit-queens, so they did not seem to have roles or fates commensurate with Orphan's.

Has this world heard of isekai before and would anybody believe her if she explained that she's not the real evil sorceress? Opalyn does not have a lot of hope about this one, probably all the evil sorceresses are always claiming "It wasn't me, that was someone else who set all those people on fire" but most of them are lying about it.

Orphan will not have reliably heard of most things her world has heard of.  Orphan is from an illiterate peasant village.  She forced a guy to teach her to sound out letters, so she could read stolen books about magic; but then there were also numbers in the magic books, and nobody around her knew how to do anything with numbers besides counting small quantities of coin, so Orphan gave up there.

None of the songs and tales coming to Opalyn Miller's stolen memory have anything about people from another world in there.

Who is in charge around here? What are they currently trying to do? How are they stuck? Does Opalyn have any way of helping them out in exchange for... whatever Opalyn ends up needing?

The Dread Emperor rules all, and none rule him.  Orphan moved around a bit but never got outside the territory of Duke Greendeath.

Orphan does not have a concept that governments try to change or improve the way that things are, or that Eldrida (all the planets ruled by the Dread Emperor, Orphan does not seem to know very much about astronomy besides all that stuff staying up in the sky somehow) had been going anywhere it could get stuck on.

The village had spinning wheels, and a water-wheel turned by the river, and a crudely charmed ice-pit to keep food from spoilage which all the villagers chant over every 37 days.  If there is such a thing as electricity it is not known to Orphan's memories.

What are the major factions in this region and what's the deal with each of them?

The Dread Emperor sets Princes to rule over planets, and then there's Grand Dukes and Dukes and Counts and Barons below those, except that also there's songs mentioning Seigneurs and Marquesses and Presidents and Headstompers and all sorts of other weird titles that Orphan did not particularly try to sort out.

They don't fight each other, whoever was in charge above them would come in and settle any arguments.  Duke Greendeath is much stronger than any Count. 

Merchant lords get into trade-wars and assassinate each other a lot, but they wouldn't kill a smith who was good at his job because that might upset the smith's Baron.

Does Opalyn have any allies or resources?

Everyone in her little army is dead!  Happened with the first archer volleys after that wizard counterspelled her!  Healthy-Orphan was briefly angry and maybe even horrified and sad about that, before her soul got ripped out of her... oh, possibly Opalyn's eyes might be tearing up.  Because of a man her memories remember sleeping with, and there was a woman in camp who was really nice to everyone and she had two kids.

What's the technology level here? Does Opalyn remember anything from her previous life that could plausibly completely shift the balance of power?

Faux-medieval but with a bunch of magitek thrown in.  A peasant village might hold a couple of bicycles in common, with metal wheels instead of rubber tires, so that somebody can peddle over to a nearby village on a paved road if something comes up.  Healthy-Orphan doesn't know how to pave a road, probably a wizard does it.  Scythe-blades are forged of some unstaining metal and handed down for hundreds of years.

And what of magic? Opalyn had no choice but to give over to instinct and muscle memory during the battle, but what does her memory tell her about her capabilities there? It would be nice to be able to form actual plans that involve realistic assessments of her magical abilities, rather than just reacting while her opponents pull her puppet strings.

How strong is she, magically speaking? Is she the most powerful person in this universe? (Seems unlikely!) One of the top ten? Top thousand? Top fifty percent?

Her predecessor seemed to favor fire, at least in the battle they shared. Did she always favor fire? Is that because she's especially good at fire, or because fire is scary, or some other reason? Are there other kinds of magic, like water and earth and so on, or does it not work like that here?

How is magic fueled? Is it just for free, or is she draining her own life force, or the life force of other people, or the mystical energy that makes grass grow and birds fly? Does she get extremely tired or extremely hungry after she uses magic?

What are the limits to healing? She got her whole arm back, that was great! What if she'd had her back broken (as she did to those knights) or lost 99% of her blood or been decapitated? Is it possible to raise the dead, and are they basically good as new afterwards or is there some terrible price to pay? Does it matter how long you're dead?

Opalyn doesn't particularly expect this question to work, but does this place have physics at all? Like, is there conservation of matter, for example? When Opalyn shot out that circle of force she made it a circle rather than a wedge directed at the knights because she didn't want to get thrown backwards with equal and opposite force, but did that actually matter?

How strong is she, magically speaking? Is she the most powerful person in this universe? (Seems unlikely!) One of the top ten? Top thousand? Top fifty percent?

These are difficult questions to ask the memory of somebody who did not know what a fraction was!  Healthy-Orphan never met a magic-user she could not completely crush using brute force at the time she met them.  On the other hand, she didn't know anything about how to string lightlines between planets (she did know vaguely they were called lightlines).  The Dread Emperor is supposed to have cosmic-scale power of some vague kind and Orphan hasn't even tried uprooting any mountains.

Her predecessor seemed to favor fire, at least in the battle they shared. Did she always favor fire? Is that because she's especially good at fire, or because fire is scary, or some other reason? Are there other kinds of magic, like water and earth and so on, or does it not work like that here?

There are all kinds of weird things that magic is said to be able to do in legend!  They proooobably aren't all true unless the Dread Emperor literally once got hungry and ate a planet!  Orphan used fire because it was simple and reliable.  Magic can transmute base materials into weird new forms, some of which are long-lasting enough to form roads or scythes.  Magic can keep food cold or heat it up again.  Magic-users can fly... oh, Orphan has flown, but the first time she tried it, she got all airsick and threw up in midair, then frantically instinctively tried to get back on the ground again, then crashed into the ground hard enough to break her shields and some ribs.  Orphan never tried flying again after that.

How is magic fueled? Is it just for free, or is she draining her own life force, or the life force of other people, or the mystical energy that makes grass grow and birds fly? Does she get extremely tired or extremely hungry after she uses magic?

Other magic-users supposedly get tired!  This has never happened to Orphan.  If anyone knows about a deeper thing that magic draws upon, they haven't explained it to Orphan.

What are the limits to healing? She got her whole hand back, that was great! What if she'd had her back broken (as she did to those knights) or lost 99% of her blood or been decapitated? Is it possible to raise the dead, and are they basically good as new afterwards or is there some terrible price to pay? Does it matter how long you're dead?

Orphan's memory has a vague notion that dead dead isn't reversible, unless the person died around a necromancer who prepared for that happening in advance.  Her instinctive healing works reliably on herself, but when she tried it on a follower who'd lost a hand, the follower ended up growing a weird sickly 'that is not how a hand looks' hand and they ended up cutting it off again.  She once kept a woman giving birth and hemorrhaging from dying of blood loss, but the woman died as soon as Orphan got bored and stopped keeping her alive (she tried, okay).  The woman looked all pale so Orphan's guess was that magic was not making more blood inside her.  Magic in tales and legends can do things like shrink a person down to six inches, turn them old, or give a man tentacles so that he can impregnate all the women in a town in a single night.  These may or may not be reliable; Orphan didn't think of tales as really being things which were true-false rather than fun-unfun.

Opalyn doesn't particularly expect this question to work, but does this place have physics at all? Like, is there conservation of matter, for example? When Opalyn shot out that circle of force she made it a circle rather than a wedge directed at the knights because she didn't want to get thrown backwards with equal and opposite force, but did that actually matter?

Orphan's memory has never heard of any quantity in reality being conserved except for money.  She's never heard anyone suggest that if a thing goes in one direction then some other thing ought to go in the opposite direction, with or without magic being involved.

On examination, however, magic maybe has to transform stuff rather than make stuff, at least all the magic that Orphan has personally used or witnessed, rather than stories where somebody captures a witch and tortures her into a raising a castle in a single night.  This might be another reason that Orphan attacked with fire blasts rather than like materializing bullets or something.

Opalyn quiets her mind and body and opens herself up to perception, just to see if she will notice anything important. She's been thinking hard and trying to piece together her situation, but sometimes thinking hard can drown out immediate sensation, and sometimes immediate sensation matters, like when her fire spell almost exploded during the battle because she hadn't realized she needed to twist off the magic.

Any low-level alarms ringing in her mind or body or magic system? Anything going on around her she should maybe notice?

Well, all of your ability to use magic is being disrupted by threads of foreign magic running through you from your chains--threads that feel quite flimsy, but seem to do a completely effective job of shutting you down hard enough that you can't disrupt some flimsy threads.

The golden prison-globe holding you is accelerating hard upward, this is evident to magic even though it feels to you like you're in a stable single gravity.

Upward, huh? Is Opalyn going to one of those other planets right now? Is it possible to tell which one? If it's the biggest one, she might be on the way to the Dread Emperor. Yikes. That seems both alarming and maybe welcome at the same time. If she had been captured by some lesser person, she'd then have to fool around with middle-tier power games while figuring out how to secure a position for herself in this world.

Oh shoot, is it too late to look down at the planet she was on previously and see the rough layout, like whether there are any cities and how big they look? And if it is too late, is it still too early to do the same thing with whichever planet she's bound for?

Okay yeah, if she looks down again, this is now less of a 'looking down at clouds' situation and more of a 'looking down from space' situation; the planet is still very huge in her vision, but it's already looking curved and she's maybe getting out of the atmosphere.  A touch of night is visible on the far side of the planet's curve, and nothing in it that looks like an electricity-lit city.  She can see the outlines of lakes, one huge river wide enough to still be clear from up here, and everything which isn't water or stone looks like it might possibly be farmland.  Nothing that looks wild, untamed, like a forest; the only wild things are rocks.

...she's plausibly heading for that huge-looking but distant planet which her memories say is the capital planet of the interplanetary system, yeah.  But that one's still far away at least to biological eyes.

Opalyn's ideal situation when starting a brand new life in media res would be to get dropped in a secluded, well-stocked cabin in the woods, where she could think and experiment and plan, and only come out and start interacting with other people when she already had almost everything figured out.

This is not that. In particular she is really wishing for a computer or a whiteboard or a notebook and pen, some kind of outboard memory, on which to organize her questions and thoughts and track all the experiments she would like to run. But she doesn't have any of that, so she's just going to have to trust in this fragile brain that isn't even hers. She wonders what characteristics go with the hardware and what go with the software. She was very good at learning and remembering in her past life; will she notice a difference, now that the hardware's been swapped out?

It does seem like she has some time to think -- it seems like it's going to be awhile before she gets to the planet -- but not arbitrary time. Limited time. She'll have to prioritize, not waste time panicking or grieving or remembering her own first life or fixating on ultimately useless lines of inquiry.

It does not seem particularly like she can experiment much. She'd like to do so many experiments with magic and figure out how it all works, but that's been taken away from her in here.

Opalyn assumes she'll soon be speaking to someone with more status and authority than she has, maybe the Dread Emperor, maybe someone who serves him. She wants to come into that conversation with the strongest position possible. She should at some point think about techs she can reinvent, but she won't be able to promise anything about that until she can do a lot of experimentation to see what works here. She also can't tell what information she wants to reveal as a way of gaining immediate status, and what she wants to hold back for the long game.

Her mind flickers briefly to the possibility that there won't be a negotiation at all, that she'll just be thrown in a dungeon or tortured or pressed into sexual service without any recourse or hope. There is no law of the universe preventing that -- probably? -- but it doesn't help to dwell on it. If she's truly powerless, thinking about it in advance won't make that less true, so she might as well skip thinking about it for now.

And suddenly it begins to feel like Opalyn doesn't actually know how to make productive use of this interplanetary flight. There's just so much she doesn't know. It's going to be a political game -- she hopes! -- and her predecessor didn't have firsthand information about the players in the game.

Opalyn wants to scheme and plot and plan, but is somewhat lacking in the raw materials to do so. She needs data.

But she has to scheme and plot and plan or she's going to cry --

Update!  As your speed picks up, it becomes clear that you are maybe not heading as directly toward the capital planet as you ought to be if you are going straight there through space.

You are maybe heading toward that one glowing dendrite of a lightline which is connected toward the capital planet, though.

Oh thank goodness something is happening, Opalyn can pay attention to that and not actually freak out

Opalyn peers out of the sphere in whatever direction she can crane her neck. What's up with these lightlines, anyway?

They are giant light tendrils connecting the planets visible in the night sky!  They're magical!  They're... probably important somehow?  Orphan has no memory of seeing them change, or hearing about a catastrophe where they snapped.  There's stories about the Dread Emperor spinning them between planets to build his empire, but there's also stories about him eating planets, and stories about him impregnating every woman on a continent just by smiling at it from space in an incredibly masculine fashion.

Wait... is the Dread Emperor... hot?  What genre of story is this, anyway?

Everyone who has enough sorcery to use it for self-healing is hot!  Healthy-Orphan had all of her teeth and no plague-scars and everything!  Every man she has ever asked has confirmed to her that she is the hottest woman they've ever met, especially since Healthy-Orphan made it very clear that receiving any other answer would result in instant death.  Healthy-Orphan did not seem to feel that this changed the reliability of the answers she received in any way, and seems to have felt sincerely proud of having her peerless beauty confirmed to her by these countless reliable testimonies.

The Dread Emperor is in charge of everything, and any man who is in charge of everything should logically have muscles bigger than all those other men who are not in charge of everything.  Nobody in Orphan's memories has ever thought to question this.

...the prison-sphere is coming up on the dendrite now.

Opalyn doubts that she's actually hot, except maybe by comparison to people who have been riddled by plague, but is nonetheless enjoying the memories of believing she's hot. Opalyn was not especially hot in her previous life and it feels good to poke that place inside her and find it a source of strength rather than tenderness.

What does she see as she gets close to the dendrite? Are there other spheres? Is this a vast interplanetary network of sphere-exchange? How do the spheres not run into each other? Are there sorceresses inside all of them?

If she casts her eyes about carefully, or maybe a bit more than just her eyes, she'll spot a larger opaque black sphere heading towards the dendrite at a more sedate pace.  It won't get there before she does.

Nothing is emerging or has emerged from the glowing terminal, but Orphan's memory is dredging up some half-remembered fact about how lightlines have separate axons and dendrites--

--oh, apparently they're close enough now!  VOOP!

This planet has some glowing surface points going on, that could plausibly be cities-at-night.  Also a lot more lightlines, most of them going point-to-point on the planet's surface.

The capital planet seems... kinda large.  Opalyn maybe does not have a great point of comparison, because she did not have magical senses before this.  But looking down at this planet while having magic creates the feeling that this planet must be much, much larger than Earth.  Even taking into account that Earth was quite large, and Opalyn has never magically sensed anything the size of Earth.

The planet seems large? Not just the cities, but the planet itself?

Opalyn racks her brains to remember what she knows about large planets. Not very much, as it turns out. She remembers that large planets are often called 'gas giants' but is not sure if that means they are literally gaseous every time, and what that would mean about inhabiting such a planet.

It probably doesn't matter, they probably just magiteked around whatever they've got, somehow.

She does wonder if, like, gravity will be oppressively strong here, and whether she can just be okay anyway, because, MAGIC.

Does her memory have anything to say about what's going to be different here, and what she's expected to do to compensate?

Nnnooot really, no.  Stories include "everyone on the capital planet is a wizard" and "the capital planet has infinite free food" (source unspecified) and "the entire capital planet is filled with the Emperor's harem" and "gold is only as valuable as copper there" and "everyone is a noble and everyone challenges everyone to an honor duel every time they meet in the streets" but nothing about gravity or atmosphere.  The people telling stories about the Capital Planet may possibly have not been making an overwhelming effort to ensure scrupulous accuracy even at the cost of a less good story.

Do Opalyn's magical senses tell her anything about the population of this larger planet, or how they're distributed?

And what was up with the difference between axons and dendrites? Should she be thinking of axons as the backbone in the transportation network and the dendrites as little side branches, or is there some more literal neurobiology... you know what, never mind, there is no way her predecessor had a better grasp of neurobiology than Opalyn has.

As Opalyn approaches the planet, she decides to pay attention to what's happening rather than turn inward and scheme. The scheming wasn't getting her very far. Direct observation seems far more useful right now in expectation, and also it's just really pretty and she doesn't want to miss it.

It's probably just a translation metaphor?  Nobody talked to Orphan about neurobiology at any point, she just has concepts about lightlines which involve them having many-to-one reception and one-to-many transmission.

Opalyn can't sense population at this distance without an instinctive effort to stretch her magical senses that gets noped by the interfering magical current from her chains.

...her golden prison could plausibly be approaching this foreboding castle-like building in space, notable for its lack of any concession to centrifugal design.

It's so pretty.

Opalyn realizes they can torture people even in pretty castles, but come on, this really looks much more like "all of your little-girl dreams are just about to come true" than like "we're going to extract your fingernails and then grow them back again over and over."

Possibly these other castles now passing within visual range, that are not your destination, will recalibrate your concept of pretty space castles that would be all your little-girl dreams come true!

If, you know, they were the castles you were heading for, instead of that other one.

Opalyn has never seriously coveted a castle before. She thought they were neat at the same age she thought princesses and unicorns and fairies were neat, but as an adult she thought more of the overhead of maintaining such a thing. Previously she would have said that anything more than a mansion was vastly overdoing it.

But apparently pretty castles are very achievable here, and if it turns out that castles magically clean themselves and replace their own broken chandelier bulbs, she has a new potential life goal.

Her golden-prison bubble approaches the massive castle of steel unidentified silvery metal, and settles down on a landing pad.

There's some new friends waiting there to meet her!

These guys seem extremely ominous! They do not appear to have faces! This would be terrifying if Opalyn were allowing herself to feel terrified right now!

Opalyn wonders if they have bodies at all, and if not, why they bother to have armor or even human form.

Their helmets look a little bit like children's birthday party hats and Opalyn has to stifle a strained choke-giggle. It is probably unwise to giggle right now.

"We are your new friends.  Now you will come with us and engage in friendship activities."

(The Party-Hat Guards do not actually say this.)

Instead the leader speaks in an even, calming tone.  "Your magic will remain disabled for a time.  There is no point in feeling strongly about it."

The one behind his left hand speaks.  "We are stronger than you without magic.  There is no point in fighting us."

And the third.  "If you have been falsely accused, you may report it to the Deputy Headstomper of the Farm, to whom you now go for your intake interview."

"Your behavior with us now will reflect upon your future there," finishes the leader.

(Their voices sound distinct, all probably male, differently accented from Orphan's home planet and possibly from each other but all clearly understandable.)

The Party-Hat Guards then begin to approach the golden prison-sphere.

Headstomper?

Opalyn gets an appalling visual of someone in the same Party-Hat Guard garb whose job it is to curbstomp people and she recoils internally, but maintains her composure.

She can't make sense of the bit about the Farm, and feels vaguely insulted that she's only meeting with the Deputy.

"Accused? Of what exactly?"

"That is not our job to know.  Whoever sent you here will have included an entrance document explaining why they sent you here and why we ought to reward them for that.  The questioner will not believe all you say, and he also will not believe everything he reads."

The Party-Hat Guards open a gate set into the golden prison-sphere--though it's not obvious, among all the ornamentation, what was lock or hinge--and start uncoupling Opalyn's chains from the bars, though she's still wearing the cuffs and it's still sending that little trickle of interfering power through her.

Opalyn can't see that she has any viable moves here; anything she tries is likely to be met with force and leave her in a worse state.

"I have to urinate," she announces. It's only kind of true, but she wants to find out how they'll handle it. Will they accommodate this reasonable request? Will they take advantage of the opportunity to humiliate her or cause her physical and psychological discomfort?

"Then you will need to do so under our supervision."

They take her chains and move, at a pace she can follow despite those chains, into the dark silvery halls.

(Also, Opalyn is now recollecting of Orphan how to use sorcery to not need to urinate, but she in fact can't do that part right now.)

This is a mild positive update, assuming they now conduct her to a suitable place and do not leer at her or otherwise make it weird. Perhaps she is going to be treated with at least some dignity.

Also, there's magic for not needing to pee? This is even better than rainbow-spangled space castles.

They trod down silvery halls, and before long swerve to go through a force-screened archway into a clean silvery-metal room with a silvery-metal trench running through the floor.  It doesn't smell like anything, either urine or other scents to cover urine.

They move her over the trench.  One of the Party-Hat Guards reaches down below her waist, and taps her dress and underthings a couple of millimeters out of the way along a nonstandard spatial direction.

This is incredibly civilized, actually, under the circumstances?

Opalyn pees. This is Opalyn's "ahhh, that feels better" face.

Opalyn does not particularly feel modest about it; everybody pees. Except maybe unhobbled sorceresses and faceless bladderless people, but whatever.

The upcoming intake interview with the Deputy (hmph) Headstomper of the Farm is going to go much better with an empty tank.

Can Opalyn search her memories for more information about non-standard dimensions, because she keeps running into those. Can she store arbitrary amounts of stuff there and get it back whenever? Presumably time keeps flowing, so she can't just start some magical or chemical process and then effectively put it into stasis by shifting it over, but worth checking. Can she shift herself into other dimensions and thus creep around unseen and undetected and then pop back out? Can other people do that to her? Obviously none of this works at the moment with the cuffs on, looking for general precepts here.

Orphan's memories:  There was a wizard book she stole about this.  It had NUMBERS.

...possibly these numbers were literally just the generalization of Euclidean distance to N dimensions, but Orphan had stopped reading at that point.  Her sorcerous practice regarding this general idiom was "keep my spells inside the standard three dimensions and shield against anything that tries to come at me from outside it".

The Party-Hat Guards restore Opalyn's clothing to the normal three dimensions, and march her down more hallways, through another shielded archway, and into the office of somebody who looks like an incredibly fed-up magical bureaucrat in a comfy cushioned ergonomic throne.  Before him is a desk which betokens that this man has been given an amount of paperwork substantially and systematically greater than the amount of paperwork he can actually do.

His eyes narrow as soon as he sees Opalyn, brought forth in chains.  "Is there anything about your case that is the least bit complicated?" he says.

Opalyn recognizes this guy. Not this guy specifically but his function in a bureaucracy. Her case is complicated -- isekai! -- but if she says that flat out, she risks getting put in cold storage indefinitely while he attends to more straightforward tasks for the rest of eternity. She's only going to get a couple of sentences to make her case.

"I suspect we can find an efficient way through. In my previous life, I specialized in cutting to the heart of the matter and finding solutions that actually work. What makes this go fast for you without making it go horribly for me?"

"Sounds complicated.  Send her to the Assistant Deputy Headstomper."

The Party-Hat Guards hustle Opalyn out of the room without particularly giving her a chance to reply.

Well, shit. That could theoretically have gone better, but she has the impression it was a rigged game. Even if she'd said "No, I'm not complicated" that could easily have translated to "I plead guilty, send me to the Sorceress Magic Extraction Factory for the next fifty years." The fact is, her case is complicated.

Let's see what the Assistant Deputy Headstomper has to say for themselves.

It should possibly be mentioned at this point that Opalyn's memories suggest that powerful sorcerers can live for a long time.  The Dread Emperor, most obviously, but also Duke Greendeath supposedly hasn't been replaced in a while.

This comes up because the level of paperwork in this office has gone utterly and completely out of control, and some of it looks like it might be quite old.

The guy at this desk looks up as she's brought into the room, and not at all with a happy expression.  "Are you complicated?" he barks at her.

This is the same as before except even more rigged. Opalyn suspects that the only possible outcome of the next exchange is to get sent to a third sad bureaucrat who is actually already dead, having suffocated under a heap of paper, take his job, and work her way up from there. IF she manages not to get sent to space sorceress labor camp by this guy. She tries another tack.

"Do you want me to be complicated?" she asks seductively. She tugs at the top of her dress with one hand, not enough to reveal anything, but enough to make her suggestion obvious.

She does not especially expect this to work, but the way it doesn't work will be informative.

"DO I LOOK LIKE I HAVE TIME!?  Send her to the Deputy Assistant Deputy Headstomper."

"Is this going to take longer than literally three-quarters of a minute?"

If this universe supports more than three levels of recursion, Opalyn is going to be pissed.

"Yes, getting you out from under all of that paper will take more than three quarters of a minute, but we can probably make headway in under an hour. Let's get started."

Opalyn would start physically shoveling paper with her hands, except that she's still cuffed, but she tries to project an air of cheerful competence.

One of her guards laughs and is promptly hit upside the head by the guard leader.

"You look complicated.  Have a seat."

Opalyn recognizes this guy, too! This is Special Circumstances! She's finally reached the person who actually does complicated things! This seems promising. Opalyn sits.

"Hello, pleased to meet you. I'm Opalyn. What is the goal of this conversation, please, and how can I make it go well?"

"From your perspective?  Making the best you can of your situation.  From my perspective?  Doing this another five thousand times without fucking up badly enough to get demoted."

"I'll be taking a look at your file in just a moment.  But before then, why don't you tell me a story about how you got here?  Doesn't have to be true at all.  Can just be a complete lie, you've got my permission.  No punishment at stake one way or another."

This is the most reasonable-seeming person Opalyn has encountered since arriving in this universe, though admittedly it's not a high bar.

She's at a crossroads: does she tell the isekai story or hold it back?

Point in favor of holding it back: if they don't already know about isekai here, it's going to sound ludicrous. They're going to think she's delusional or a liar or both.

Point in favor of telling it: her comparative advantages here all stem from her experiences in her home universe, and she has little else to bargain with.

That settles it: she'll try the truth and see how that goes for her. He did say she was allowed to lie, so if it goes poorly maybe she can just play it off as a silly thing she was trying rather than outright psychosis.

She squares her shoulders and speaks confidently and earnestly.

"I'm not from this universe. I had an entirely different life in an entirely different place that ended... I'm not sure, a few hours ago maybe. Suddenly I found myself in this body..."

She holds out her arms as best she can with the cuffs on, and nods at them.

"...in the middle of a pitched battle. I have memories of both my homeworld and of this one, but I am not the person who was driving this body until very recently."

"I don't know why I was captured and brought here. I don't know if this system seeks to punish me, or what my predecessor might have done to earn that."

"My homeworld was very technologically advanced compared to this one. I expect I have knowledge that I can use to improve conditions here."

"Huh."

"And the truth?"

She's not giving up on this yet.

"Name any system in this world that you think is not working as well as it could be, and I'll tell you something of how we do it in my world."

If he'll answer this question, that of course gives Opalyn information she can use, even if it doesn't ultimately convince him.

"Heh.  Now there's a question with a lot of wrong answers someone might imagine they could use for blackmail purposes."

"But sure, I'll bite.  Organizing prisons for sorcerers."

"We do not have sorcerers on my world as far as I know, so we have not developed much tech for imprisoning them! That said, I would begin by learning as much as I could about how magic flows and how it can be measured and disrupted. I would look for technological crossovers from my world to this one that might allow for new ways to block sorcery. I would examine case studies of previous failures in imprisoning magic-users and learn from the mistakes previously made. I would invite friendly sorcerers to try to break out of my prisons and see if they could defeat me, and offer rewards for those who discover new exploits."

"Also, these cuffs seem pretty good and I wonder why they don't just completely solve the problem?"

"Because we want to actually get some work out of you lot.  If that wasn't true, an axe would completely solve the problem."

"What kind of work do you want to get out of us? And who is 'you lot'? And what did my predecessor do that got me into these cuffs in the first place?"

"Powering lightlines, mainly.  That's a lot of brute power and doesn't require us to trust in complicated enchantments you put on something."

"As for what you did, sure, let's have a look at what your entrance document says."

"Well, according to this, you're an illiterate peasant turned bandit leader with no grasp of tactics, strategy, finance, spellcraft, or mathematics.  And unknown raw power that would put you at least on the Duke level, if you showed the slightest trace of being able to cooperate with anything resembling an organized hierarchy."

"See, this is the point of talking to people for a minute before you read the paperwork.  It helps you notice when the paperwork is absolute utter bullshit."

"If I asked what in ninefold flaming fucks is actually going on, here, is there any chance I would get back a sensible answer?  Like, why did whoever sent you here even think we would believe this?"

Opalyn is feeling pretty good about taking a minute to demonstrate that she has a brain before Special Circumstances read her paperwork!

"I would not be surprised if that was a good description of the previous inhabitant of this body!"

"Yeah, I am not particularly getting what is going on right now, except that you are not acting like somebody who desperately wants to prove herself innocent of whatever ridiculous charges they slapped on you.  Somebody is playing stupid games, you know what the stupid games are, and you don't particularly think it matters to you that you tell me."

"Suppose we handled the sane part of this conversation.  Prison here is divided up the usual way, you want to apply to go to the boring section, the dramatic section, or the lewd section?  Or, I suppose, have me file the piece of paper which says that the story behind how you got sent here strikes me as possibly not correct and maybe the system could use you better elsewhere, though I'm somehow expecting you to not pick that one."

Opalyn's experience up until now has suggested that showing desperation is usually not helpful, but it's not like she lacks feelings of desperation to draw on, if that's going to help.

"If I'm not yet acting desperate it's because nobody has told me until now what's at stake! Now that you're talking about prison I am in fact starting to feel somewhat more desperate! Talking to you has been the high point of my time in this universe so far and I am a little afraid this will be the peak and then I will never have a conversation with a reasonable person ever again! I would very much like to secure a future in which I have any agency or ability to make things go better for myself!"

She takes a breath. There's showing desperation, and then there's actually yielding to it.

"What happens if you file the special piece of paper? I have the impression you're already the Special Circumstances guy. Do I go to the Even More Special Circumstances Guy after you, or what?"

Mr. Special Circumstances takes a while to think about this, tapping his fingers on his desk in an I-am-clearly-thinking-and-deliberately-informing-you-of-that way.

"...Realistically, if I file that paper, you go to a not-too-special special holding area, and get treated mostly like our other inmates.  Which is to say, decent so long as you don't make trouble, and offduty-recovery privileges scaling with however much power you actually have.  Nobody here wants an inmate getting angry enough to sacrifice their life in the name of spite."

"We send back a notice to your backwater hick region, saying that we aren't paying because we don't think you're a real criminal.  If you actually were a Duke-level bandit, they'd be motivated to demand further investigation so they could get paid for a Duke-rank.  I would not expect them to make that demand under the actual circumstances, but maybe you know something I don't.  If they don't reply, someone with pull would have to pull on your appeal for it to move.  By default it hangs around in the extraspatial-void-vacuum for a couple of decades, but it's not impossible you'd get released at the end."

"If there's actually something interesting about you, and word of that fact makes it to the right pair of ears, someone might make you one of the usual offers while you're in holding."

"Who turned me in, anyway? And why would you ever pay them for doing that? Why is that a good deal for you?"

"What was the name of that planet... Mayvos, right.  Obvious answer, Emperor wants the lightlines kept alive and also for overpowered idiots to not wreck Eldrida.  He gives us a budget, we pay for ranked-sorcerer criminals, other planets have a reason to send them to us after catching them."

"Subtle answer?  The fact that we pay for criminals means that the system has a reason to care if somebody sends us ridiculous papers about a bandit queen.  Means that bureaucrats perk up and go, ah, there's money involved, somebody's trying to get money out of us.  If it was just a question of whether the papers are true and if you ought to be in here or not, well, nobody really cares about that.  Imprisoning an innocent person doesn't make the system look weak, it makes it look strong enough not to give a shit.  But sending out money to people who tricked us, now, that makes a bureaucrat look contemptible."

"It sounds like you distinguish between overpowered idiots and powerful people who are otherwise law-abiding. You use the overpowered idiots to run the lightlines, but the law-abiders must have some function too, or you'd just scoop all of them up to run the lightlines or press them into other magical service."

"Not sure I understand why you're asking that, but yeah.  Maybe the Dread Emperor could take every other sorcerer in Eldrida, but that's not the same as organizing them into a system that runs itself effectively.  Some powerful people want to be in charge of things, throw their weight around.  They become Princes and Grand Dukes and so on down to the Barons.  Other, equally powerful sorcerers come to the Capital planet so they can live the high life, find a place in the system that pays well enough for a flying castle loaded down with concubines, and they think the Princes are idiots for preferring to run their own planet instead.  Not sure what arrangement the Dread Emperor is supposed to prefer to that one, where there's a stable bureaucratic system he could put in place to make it actually happen."

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."

"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."

When was the last time Opalyn had a long hot bath with a book followed by a massage in a room overlooking an opulent garden?

Opalyn begins to suspect that this is all a weird stress dream and that the truck didn't hit her at all and that she's going to wake up back on Earth and still have to nope, can't think about old life, this is still really not a good time for a breakdown.

"All right. So I'll see you again in a few days?"

"No promises, but probably.  And it may wait on your ranking just like some other things.  It's not worth the risks for me to exchange rumors with anyone about you, until you've proven a definite rank."

"I wouldn't actually softball it, I think, if I were in your socks.  Dukes don't get the same offers as Grands."

Suits her. Trying to titrate her power when she has absolutely no idea how anything works was going to be very difficult, and it was going to be even worse weaving a coherent deception about that when she has no idea what correlates with what.

"Noted, and thank you again for all of the advice."

He'll write a number of things into her entrance paperwork, then, including some writing at an angle suggesting it's not going into standard lines on the form, with the absorbed expression of somebody who does not care to be interrupted about his paperwork.

When he's done with that, he'll hand the marked-up entrance paperwork to one of the guards, and then immediately start filling out other paperwork, still not looking particularly interruptible.

Trāho has carefully selected summaries to write while they're still in his memory, and some paperwork about possible wrongful accusations that is definitely going to take a delicately worded interoffice memo clipped on.  Not that anyone will read the memo until it's way too late to do anything differently, but the memo still has to look right.

The Party-Hat Guards escort Opalyn out of her interview cell...

...down some hallways that bear distinct non-Euclidean overtones, to her magical senses...

...and into a prisoner transport.

Off to the luxury-hotel-prison for a bath and some books! This seems fine.

Are there any other prisoners on the transport?

There are!  Fourteen of them!  Their appearance ranges from Opalyn's age to late thirties, nobody who looks as old as the bureaucrats she saw.  Some are dressed in nice clothes, other in stark prison clothing no two styles of which are alike.  They tend to come one or three to a guard, rather than being escorted by three guards as Opalyn is.

Half of them are openly sobbing, or red-faced with gritted teeth.  The other half look stoic.  Oh, and one of them is fidgeting with a blushing expression, possibly because her prison clothes seem to have ended up torn in a somewhat revealing way.

Does Opalyn have any indication about whether they're all going to lewd dramatic or if this is generic prison transport, and some of these people are boring?

No more than what her eyes already see!

Opalyn kind of wants to offer a shawl or something to the one with the torn dress, but she doesn't have any spare clothing to offer. Second best would be a kind look, but the woman is looking down and away and Opalyn can't make eye contact.

Opalyn also wants to ask a bunch of questions. She's always wanted to turn to a fellow prisoner and growl, "So. What are you in for?" but it seems like they're all having a much worse day than she is, which is kind of funny considering. Now is maybe not the time to be jovial and friendly.

Instead she... can she look out the windows? Are there any windows?

More like the whole thing is a floating platform, but sure, she can see out from here.  They're still above Capital.

The prisoner transport bops another lightline, though a much smaller one than the last, and VOOPS a shorter and less impressive distance over to the landing platform of a prison-castle much larger than the last one they were at.  Half of the people on the transport, the stoic ones, are unloaded here.

Okay! That must be boring prison and those must be boring people!

That leaves the ones who are crying and/or gritting their teeth and the woman with the torn dress. Opalyn now suspects that they're "dramatic" and "lewd" respectively, and that she's the only one who's going to lewd dramatic. Is her prediction correct?

Nope!  The next stop has both Opalyn and 'lewd' being escorted out!

Not all masochists would be visibly fidgeting and blushing on a prison transport, you know.

Huh, how about that! The woman with the torn dress is clearly lewd, but it's not yet clear to Opalyn how to tell who's dramatic and who's not. Possibly that woman was a clear-cut case of "simply lewd," and Trāho suggested that very few people would go for both lewd and dramatic.

Apparently it's the lewd-dramatic prison's lucky day as they're getting two new inmates on the same transport!

The ominous Party-Hat Guards--three for Opalyn, and one for the other woman--will again escort them down ominous hallways and into an ominous magical prison holding office, where they join four other inmates already there.  Three women, one man.

The Party-Hat Guard assigned to the other woman transfers her chains over to the Party-Hat Guard already holding the chains for the three women and one man.  Opalyn's three stay with her.

The man is looking at her like he is possibly considering speaking but does not, actually, dare.

Seems like the rest of them are probably not Duchess/Grand Duchess level material if there's only one guard for the five of them. Are all the rest of them sending off sexual vibes like the woman from the transport? Does it seem like an orgy could break out at any moment? What's the energy in the room?

Opalyn is slightly concerned that she's misfiled herself, and isn't sure if it's about being much more powerful than everyone else, or just not fitting neatly into Eldrida's 3.5 buckets.

The guy is looking at her like he might have something to say but is, you know, scared of this terrifying person in a way where he would not have totally unconflicted feelings if she were to speak to him in a scathing tone and hand out some sort of punishment for his insolence in looking at her?  Or possibly Opalyn is just imagining that part.

Two of the women look more subdued.  The third is sidling nervously toward the blushing fourth who just got added to the group, possibly to offer comfort, possibly to offer something else.

Opalyn assumes the guy is just longing to be dominated but she doesn't want to do that for him because dominating people is exhausting. This guy looks like a bottomless pit; Opalyn's going to conserve her energy. Of course he'll probably interpret her unwillingness to be haughty at him as haughtiness, but there's nothing she can do about that.

Opalyn observes the sidling one and the blushing one with some interest but tries not to be obvious about it.

There's possibly some sort of nonverbal negotiation taking place there, but if so, it's gated on a cultural gap that is transparent neither to Opalyn Miller nor Opalin-Milyer.  Orphan didn't have very much subtle lesbian negotiation between educated sorcerers going on in her life.

The two nonverbal negotiators have not advanced to the point of actual hugs being exchanged, by the time a door slams open and a new bureaucrat storms into the room.

"All right you melodramatic sluts, listen up."

"This is your very quick orientation lecture.  I will not be repeating it except at a cost in pain."

"I don't care what you heard about how the Farm operates elsewhere.  My section operates efficiently, sensibly, and cooperatively."

"First.  You will not destroy the facilities or damage other inmates unless you have sufficient Farm credit to pay for it.  I'm not telling you to exercise self-control until it turns into a habit, I'm telling you to viscerally fear the consequences of transgressing your place in my facility."

"Second.  You will all be among the most productive inmates of this Facility, to my own credit as a senior bureaucrat.  You will form enjoyable high-tension relationships; ones that can and will fail catastrophically, to your own loss and horror, if your lightline output falters and key privileges of yours are taken away.  Many people form highly fraught, drama-laden relationships without even trying.  There can be no excuse if your own relationships end up any less tense than that."

"Third.  Maintaining a high level of drama and sexual tension is everyone's job.  It is everyone's job to see that no relationship issues are allowed to come to a head unless someone is in the middle of charging a lightline.  It is everyone's job to break up and abort any interpersonal interactions that seem to be approaching an important resolution at the wrong time.  If someone is visibly upset, hug them!  If someone looks calm, give them nothing and act like they don't exist!  Attempts to sabotage your competitors in your section--whether by giving them sensible advice, pointing out better solutions to their problems, or resolving what seem to you like obvious miscommunications--also interfere with this Facility's productivity, and will not be looked upon kindly."

The intersection of "sorcery makes lightlines go" and "emotion makes sorcery go" and "this set of prisoners has emotions about relationships and sex" sure does have some straightforward implications that Opalyn had nonetheless not fully predicted!

Opalyn feels oddly peaceful about this new situation. For one thing, she still hopes it will be temporary. For another, she knows a lot about how relationships work. This is territory she has mapped pretty carefully. The same knowledge that she'd normally use for good, she can use to generate power instead!

It's like if you go to medical school and use the information you've learned not to be a surgeon, but to be an assassin.

But is this good? Is this right? Should Opalyn actually be participating in this?

She does wonder about that. It's easy to imagine trying to create the worst possible fight amongst a bunch of strangers, but once she gets to know them, maybe she'll care about them and not be so sanguine about hurting them. That's probably what's going to happen.

How is she going to make this okay with herself?

Well... it's not yet clear whether she has a choice! Wumi claimed the prisoners should viscerally fear doing anything else, but Opalyn also has the sense that the sorcerer containment system isn't perfect, or else Trāho wouldn't be asking for tips about that. Opalyn might have a choice, and shouldn't just do bad things because it seems inconvenient not to.

She's going to have to wait and see how bad the things are, and what degrees of freedom she actually has.

The rest of the speaker's lecture/threat doesn't have the same surprise impact on the margins.  It amounts to some repetitions of "don't make trouble", albeit with a somewhat different perspective on "trouble" in which causing a screaming physical fight to erupt during a major magical ritual does not count as "trouble".

She introduces herself as Headstomper Wumi.

It's clear from implications that the people around Opalyn are not particularly those who've had papers filed about their possible innocence; Opalyn may have a special bureaucratic status but it doesn't seem to correspond to being in a distinct building.  Possibly the people like Opalyn are too few to have a distinct building.  Especially since the system seems to be set up so that a cohort of newcomers (larger than just the seven of them) get introduced in tandem to the existing population.

But the most important thing that happens next is that they all get fitted for their permanent custom-fitted magic-blocking slave collars, so that the guards guarding them can be freed up!  This being the Facility for melodramatic sluts and hence sluts, they'll also need a chastity belt, but it is literally just a belt, a thin chain around their waist.  It serves to prevent unauthorized sexual activity, that's all, for people who haven't paid tokens properly earned by lightline charging in order to authorize that sexual activity.

Off with them to be fitted!

Opalyn is not amused. She's supposed to spend all day stirring up sexual feelings in other people and then not have 'unauthorized sexual activity?'

Yeah there better be massage therapists and hot baths.

That's right!  You SHOULD be eager for your first chance to be good lightline-charging sluts!

Having the slave collars fitted is an expensive operation involving powerful magic and people using what look like enchanted abacuses.  It'll take around ten minutes.

Someone will start crying, during this operation.  They will immediately receive a hug.

Okay, okay, maybe it's not all bad. The part where everyone receives exactly the attention they need in between PROVOKING A CRISIS to GENERATE POWER seems fairly non-evil.

Though in the limit it's going to have to turn out that the hugger is secretly sabotaging the efforts of the hug-ee somehow, so it will turn out that the HUG WAS A LIE. Opalyn's mind is racing ahead to create maximum emotional wreckage, and she feels kind of bad about how much her mind is attracted to plotting like this.

(Note:  You are now cleared to click on and read the spoilered HIDDEN THOUGHTS of Trāho starting from here.  It is not important that you interrupt your reading to do so.)

And after that, they will be taken on a quick tour of The Facility, a dramatic lewd section of The Farm!

Among the first things you will notice at The Facility are the helpful signs everywhere!

Reading is a popular activity at The Facility!  You'll see plenty of it happening even before you get to the library!  Sorcerers with some wizard training especially often choose to spend their time learning, from hired teachers, or from books taken out of the library.  Some of the people who've already been here a while have spent some of their earned Farm credits on magical artifacts, often in the form of wands, to compensate for their usually-sealed magic.

(Opalyn might have some stumbles reading ambient Eldric; Orphan wasn't very practiced at it.)

Some of the younger inmates especially are too wild to let fear restrain them.  They're in cells.  You definitely get to go past the cells, so you can see what happens to you if you're not afraid.

You get homework, is what happens.  Caning alone would not totally work on everyone here to provide the correct incentives.

In worse cases, they take your pretty clothes away too.

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.

Opalyn decides to look around her quarters systematically and see what else is here.

Are there any cues about what time it is? Is there any food here, in case she gets hungry? Does it seem like she ought to take a bath? Is there any way to signal for help, if she wants to ask about books?

At some point, somebody must have hit Opalyn with a cleaning spell, or she must've walked through the right archway; her dress is no longer bloodstained from her wounds.  She doesn't feel icky.  She could, in principle, walk out of here without a bath, if she wanted.  (Even torn, her dress is nowhere near revealing enough for her to go outside with zero Farm credits to her name; but there's a grace period pending her first lightline event.)

It was explained to Opalyn during her tour that lights are on in public areas at all times, and the refectory open at all times.  Everyone just keeps their own sleep cycle.  There is no food inside the room and no refrigerator or oven; to obtain a meal you must dare to venture outside and take on the corresponding risks, though once food is obtained there's a dining-area inside the suite where you could eat by yourself or with up to three sufficiently close friends.

Nobody has mentioned anything about a way to call for help, that's for sure.

The suite contains a lot of unfamiliar things, only a few of which Orphan's memories recognize at all.

There's a fancier version of something Orphan once looted from a baron's wife's bedroom, what the fence said was a magical vanity that helped apply makeup (though not very smartly so).  Orphan had no use for such things; she sold it rather than learn how to use it herself.  It is not particularly obvious how to use.

There's what looks like a gameboard, with triangular symmetry suggestive that it takes three players; the board and pieces glow to Opalyn's magical senses, but not in a way that makes clear what the magic does.

The bedroom contains several decorative clocks, all showing different times, all proceeding at different rates; and indeed, a close inspection would reveal that those rates were subtly varying.  A decorative sign on the wall explains what might be the underlying philosophy here, from the perspective of any inmates hoping to be able to meet a lover at an agreed-upon time and place:

The magical fireplace is apparently complicated enough or unusual enough that the user guide has been left next to it.  One of the inscrutable other objects lying around was a remote control for the fireplace, apparently?

This place is very foreign. Of course it is! It's a different planet, different universe, different physics possibly, the surprising thing is that Opalyn can make any sense of any of it at all. Opalyn tries to focus on how much commonality there is to her own flavor of humanity, how MUCH SENSE things make. She tries to count up everything that makes sense rather than count down everything that doesn't, because if she counts down she's going to lose her grip.

Meanwhile she wonders... can she just... wander out of her room whenever she wants? She had the possibly-mistaken notion that since this is a prison she'd be locked in her quarters some of the time and then escorted to meals some of the time and then who knows what else.

Does her door lock at all, from either the inside or the outside?

There's no visible outside lock.

You can use Farm credits to charge the inside lock, which will then hold your door until somebody spends more Farm credits than that to mutually annihilate your credits and force their entry.  If they want to sneak into your room undetectably to you, in a way where you can't tell afterward that they were even there, they'll have to spend more Farm credits again to recharge the lock.

If you have zero Farm credits, or just don't prioritize spending it on your lock, anyone could just come into your room and have their way with you any time they pleased.

There's probably a grace period on that too?  The Headstomper didn't mention it, but it's not like she was working from a visible checklist of what needs to be mentioned to every new inmate.

Then Opalyn will sally forth in the general direction of the refectory, if she can remember how to get there!

She has the following goals:

- Library! It wasn't on the tour, where is it? Maybe on the way to the refectory, or maybe she finds someone holding a book and asks them where they got it.
- See what kinds of food there are. She's a little hungry, but mostly she wants to know what her options are for when she's having a craving. Opalyn always likes to know what her options are.
- See what manner of humans she encounters. She wants to talk to them and see if she can learn more about the politics of this place. (She also needs a friend, but is desperately afraid that she will not find anyone she can really connect with here.)
- She knows the administration is coming for her at some point and would prefer not to lie around in a state of passive waiting.

The way to the refectory wasn't too complicated.  And if the criterion is just meeting anyone carrying a book, it won't be long at all.

The person coming down the hallway is unreasonably hot by Opalyn's standards.

Yes, the thighs and the hips and the belly are nice but also she's

~!~!~ reading a book ~!~!~
~!~!~ while she walks down the hallway, ~!~!~

and it turns out this is a powerful attraction signal.

(And the completely useless pieces of fabric pooling to both sides! Why is that hot! That makes no sense!)
(Why does the book have two spines? How do you flip the pages in the center section?)

Opalyn is going to have to pull herself together or they will have passed in the hallway and it will be too late!

"Excuse me! I'm new here... can you tell me where I can find the library?"

The person looks up from her book with a cool, assessing gaze.  "What's in it for me?"

"The joy of having been kind to a stranger, someone who is new here as you once were?"

"Or, y'know, name your price. What do you value?"

"What do you think you have, newcomer?"

"Possibly nothing you want! I don't have any credits yet. If you don't want to tell me, that's fine, I'll just continue to explore and ask other people. Have a good day!"

Opalyn makes as if to continue down the hallway. It's not a bluff, she will happily just move on, but she does sort of wonder if the other person will let the conversation drop.

"Library is blue door from the refectory you were heading toward, then left at the end of that hallway.  We'll all see what you make of favors owed."

The woman is already continuing on her own way.

Okay. That went... well? Maybe?

Opalyn attempts to follow the instructions to the library. Examining the food offerings can wait; if all goes extremely well, Opalyn can eat while perusing a pile of books.

She's done this many thousands of times in her life. Always find a book before you get your food, or else the food gets cold during the book search.

This then shall take her through the refectory, since the directions for the library assumed that.  The refectory has a high-end ambiance, comparable more to Opalyn's temporary bedroom than to some of the hallways.  Visible gender ratio runs about 3F:1M.

Food here does not look totally normal by Earth standards.  Something like a cupcake shape seems to be a popular presentation format but it does not... exactly look like Earth cupcakes.

Huh. The skull noodles with straws coming out are especially disturbing, but there also seem to be non-skull noodles so that's good?

Opalyn hopes they have any protein, this all looks very carb-y, but doesn't particularly pause to search. She's on a book mission.

The section of the prison that Opalyn has been sent to would seem to contain a lot of people her own age, or maybe, who chose to appear to be Opalyn's age.  (Orphan thinks sorcerers are supposed to look like whatever they want, though Orphan herself hadn't figured out how to do much with that, and her memories have the tinge of story-belief about them to somebody who knows what it's like to have beliefs that aren't stories.)

A lot of the actual couples, as one passes them, seem to be smiling; there isn't much drama visible right at this moment.

One of the least scantily-dressed women present is also the only one sitting at a table with two men, both rather less-dressed.

"Newcomer," she says, as Opalyn is passing her.

"Yes, hello, I'm new here! Nice to meet you!" Opalyn says breezily, undeterred on her way to the library!

She is aware that the rather-more-dressed woman might have been attempting a put-down, but as it was a simple utterance of fact, Opalyn does not feel dismayed by it.

On Opalyn's models, nothing particularly good comes of slowing down to talk to someone whose opening salvo is a mild power move!

If Opalyn didn't slow down, the woman at the table will say nothing more.  There's a low whistle in the background from one of the adjacent tables.

No one else makes any overtures to Opalyn before she's out of the refectory via blue door, and turning left at the end of that hallway does indeed take her to a library.  It's warmly lighted with... actually those are obviously fake candles, the flames on them are utterly steady and unchanging, and there's no heat waver above them, though aside from that they look just like regular flames.

"No borrowing privileges until you've done some lightline-charging," says the obvious librarian there as soon as Opalyn enters, his tone brusque but not unkind.  "Unless you're a really surprisingly excellent fuck in a field with a lot of competition."

Hmph.

"All right, but can you tell me more about how it works after that? Like is it just, charge the lightlines once and then as many books as I want?"

"Also, what kinds of books do you have here, and how are they organized? Once I have privileges, can I browse the stacks myself or do I have to describe to you what I want and you get it for me? Is there anything like a card catalog?"

Opalyn says 'card catalog' hoping that whatever magic does language translation fills in the most appropriate thing, and not something too literal to be meaningful to the librarian.

(It's not that she wouldn't fuck him for book access, he's pretty hot and kind of stern and books are worth a lot to her, but she also expects to charge the lightlines pretty soon and maybe doesn't need to be giving away favors just yet.)

"Four credits per day per book.  You can browse the stacks yourself.  No catalog, this is Capital and the Farm has a central library repository running on multispatial presence and semantic assortation.  That means once you head out of the front browsing area, the library offers you choices between different bookcases, you travel past one bookcase to choose, go down a virtual hallway, the library offers you another choice between bookcases and passages, you keep choosing in the direction that you hope is more like the books you want until you find a bookcase that has something acceptable."

"Is four credits a lot? How many credits do most people earn when they charge the lightline once?"

"Are there always lots of books no matter what subject you show interest in, or do you sometimes run out of selection?"

"Is there any way to get a random assortment of books, or random within some search criteria while remaining fixed in other ways?"

"Lightline opportunities are once per four days, a typical Baron-level gets their baseline set to 50 credits and 100 per unit extra effort."

"There's always more books, if the library starts to run out it'll pay less attention to some of your earlier choices."

"If you just look at the very first choice the library offers you, that's about as random as anything is."

Opalyn pauses to think. She really wants books, but also it sounds like she won't have to wait long, and on her current models she's going to be able to afford a lot of them once she starts earning credits. She could apparently fuck her way into book borrowing privileges but she doesn't actually feel like it at the moment, and it sounds like kind of a set up where she blows the guy and then he tells her it wasn't good enough, even if actually it was great, and she's not really interested in that, it's not her kink.

So... probably it's time to eat and then see if she can volunteer to charge the lightlines sooner than later so she can have some books during this subjective day.

"All right. Thanks for your help!"

And if the guy does not immediately respond in any interesting way she will turn and go back to the refectory.

She's allowed to browse books here, but the librarian isn't going to say anything if the newcomer doesn't ask.

(Besides, if he does point it out to her, she'll no doubt snap that she knew that and wasn't interested in browsing, in order to not look stupid to him.  This librarian has been in the Dramatic-Lewd section of the criminal-sorcerer holding facility for longer than a day.)

Opalyn often takes rules somewhat too literally and fails to read between the lines or guess at the gray area! Opalyns function best in environments where everything is legible! She's going to have such a great time in Eldrida!

Back to the refectory, then, in search of protein to go with her carbs. If the macronutrients on this planet are even the same, which, upon reflection, she's not sure about.

There's more eyes on her, this time.

...the food offerings do seem really heavy on items that look like what an Earthling might consider dessert.

This soup could be a savory dish, maybe?  It's got stuff floating in it that could be meat, and no obvious frosting?

Opalyn searches her Orphan memories: what do fit people eat around here? Is it likely that these people are just eating to stave off hunger but then they're using magic to transmogrify the food in whatever form into actual nutrition? Or would the collar prevent that?

Does what she eats matter in any way to how she feels or how she ends up looking?

...Orphan's memories are consistent with her eating Whatever and having not noticed any problems with this, but also Orphan still ate some fair amount of meat in there, and meat-vegetable stew, because that was what Orphan found actually tasty and merchant caravans didn't carry tons of chocolate cupcakes when robbed.

Opalyn's going to eat whatever actually appeals to her for any reason whatsoever and see what happens. It's a brave new world of nutrition science magic and she's just going to have to experiment. She'll also watch what other people eat and see what that seems to do to their physique and energy.

She takes the soup and three very different-looking cupcake things and goes to an unoccupied table that seats four and begins to eat.

How's the food?

Unfamiliar!  Tasty!  The soup is in fact savory and the meat-like stuff could legit be meat, though smooth and tender.  The most brightly-colored of the three cupcakes has inedibly sweet frosting, unless Opalyn thinks that there's no such thing as "inedibly sweet" in which case it is no doubt the tastiest thing she's ever eaten.

Opalyn has met lots of people who'd be thrilled by "inedible sweetness," but she's not one of them. She finishes the soup and attempts to eat just the cake part without the frosting part. Normally this would be a messy process but it's her first day here so she's somewhat neat about it. She'd rather not have someone come up and power-move her right when she has rainbow-colored frosting all over her face.

A woman brushes past the table without turning or looking in Opalyn's direction; if Opalyn is not being Constantly Vigilant it may take her a while to notice that there's now an unobtrusive scrap of paper on the tabletop.

It does take a while, but when Opalyn realizes that she's been Passed a Note she's kind of thrilled! In middle school, participating in Note Passing was a popularity-marker.

What does the note say?

woman you snubbed was Baron-level
but enforces for Duchess-level Carnidine who dominates in this section
enforcer not usually cruel but she won't let it pass if you do nothing

Woman she snubbed, woman she snubbed...
Who did Opalyn allegedly snub, now? What could this be about? Could the note have been delivered to the wrong place?

Let's see, there was the woman in the hallway who directed her to the library. There were the people she passed by the first time through the eating area. There were the people she passed by when she fetched her food.

If this note is true at all, it's probably about the woman who called her a "newcomer?"

Is that woman still around? Will Opalyn even recognize her? She had more clothes on, that could be a way to locate her again. Opalyn tries to look around without obviously looking around.

Still here.

Opalyn is not entirely sure what to do here! She is quite certain she didn't 'snub' this woman, and equally certain it won't matter what her intentions were. She is not, at this point, afraid of the enforcer. Opalyn could just ignore the situation, but that doesn't sound right. If there really is a problem, she'd rather address it head on than wait for it to catch up to her at a less convenient time.

She walks up to the table with the three people, pulls a chair from a nearby empty table, and says, "Mind if I join you?"

She does not go so far as to sit down, she waits for a response.

The woman there quietly but audibly exhales, and then says, "We can try."

Huh. Opalyn expected either a haughty rejection or, outside chance, something both positive-and-dominant sounding at the same time, but this was neither. This was quiet and subdued. There is definitely something strange going on here.

She pushes the chair into place and sits down, orienting herself toward the woman.

"Hi, I'm Opalyn. What shall I call you?"

"Tiraff will do."

"I'm in the habit of offering a helping finger, if not a whole helping hand, to newcomers.  Walking right past me after I called to you makes that a little difficult for me to do, in terms of keeping up appearances, but it's not the sort of mistake that's beyond repair or reparation."

Ha! Apparently the previous overture was intended as warm and welcoming as well as being a power move! Good to know!

"Nice to meet you, Tiraff."

What does one say to another prisoner? Most of the Earth-standard openers don't work. Might as well skip straight to the important parts.

"What do you value, here in this place? I have little in the way of resources or power at the moment, but I like to help people, and to do that it helps to know what they want."

She chuckles quietly, at that.  "Well, a less perceptive person might perhaps talk about Farm credits; or contributing one more strong arm as we dance just short of the level of violence that provokes the Headstompers to separate us and tell us to save it for later; or, of course, the sort of tradeable relationship influence that we all want individually as we do our best to fall in and out of love."

"But really I'd say that the most fundamental thing a human being wants, in the end, is appearances.  I'm trading away some of mine for letting you just sit down at my table after insulting me earlier.  I'll want it paid back at some point through you making me look good.  Once you phrase it that way, and realize it's at the bottom of everything, there's so many ways for one person to make another look good.  Even a newbie Baron-level with no underworld savvy can do it."

Opalyn can't claim that she doesn't value appearances at all, that wouldn't be true. She did refrain from getting rainbow frosting all over her face so as not to look a fool; she knew that being obviously unkempt would result in a worse opening position in any subsequent conversation. She has such a thing as a concept of personal dignity.

But Tiraff's claim that "the most fundamental thing a human being wants is appearances" does not have the ring of truth. It's not generally true of all humans, and Opalyn wonders if it's even really true of Tiraff. If she only looked powerful but wielded no actual power would that really do anything for her?

Still, there's probably something in it, and Opalyn would rather learn more than start picking it apart, so she'll just ask more questions.

"I apologize! I did not actually realize that walking past your table would harm your reputation, and I probably would not have done it if I'd realized."

"Who here are we trying to impress?"

"I don't think there's a single person in the universe whose opinion I don't care about, so almost anyone will do, really.  It doesn't have to be the people I'm losing face in front of today, it just has to outweigh the mass of the couple of dozen Barons here.  One Count would do it, or five million mundanes."

"You won't improvise any attempts to help me.  You'll wait until I ask."

"We also haven't talked about what you might want from me, perhaps."

Fair enough! Opalyn has certainly been on the wrong end of enough attempts to "help" that she can understand Tiraff not wanting Opalyn just to guess.

Opalyn does not particularly care for the bossy tone, but presumably Tiraff includes the two men at the table as "people to impress" so Opalyn will let it pass.

Opalyn wants information, of course, but has decided not to broadcast her isekai story broadly in this place as she doesn't think it will be believed. It's better to try to get library access, and to get that, she needs to power the lightlines.

"How do I get a chance to power the lightlines sooner rather than later?"

"Petition the Headstompers and expect 'no' for an answer.  Influence on that level is beyond my remit entire, to say nothing of what I'd do for you."

"They are a little more likely to say 'yes' if you emphasize that you have anger or grief to give, rather than that you want your status set early.  But even so, we ultimately exist for their convenience and at their whim, and they value our knowing that beyond almost anything else we can do for them."

"Does it by any chance help if I start having a tantrum or weeping and tearing my hair or otherwise visibly freaking out?"

"And whose attention am I actually trying to get? Like, will they even notice if I start to freak out?"

She smiles, briefly, at that.  "If you knew the name of a Headstomper who could be so easily moved by a brat wasting her feelings so, you could trade that information for a great deal indeed.  They'd tell you that you were the author of your own loss."

"The obvious person to talk to would be the Deputy Secretary to Headstomper Wumi's Secretary's Assistant Secretary, if you were trying anyways."

Opalyn can't quite manage to stifle her amusement at this title.

"So... you're telling me that people actually do manage to save up their emotions and then then have them all at once at the right time?"

This is news! Opalyn previously had the notion that everyone here was a completely dysregulated mess!

"Hardly anything so dangerously self-controlled.  We manage to save up the triggers."

"Well.  Some of us do.  Others do more poorly, and end up as prey to their superiors in the art."

"Okay, so let me get this straight. People who play the game well arrange to get triggered by other people right before they go charge the lightlines? Because... those people owe you a favor? Or why do they do it at the time that's most convenient for you?"

"You can ask for your lovers, or your enemies, to be brought with you to lightline-charging; or go out of turn to theirs, if you've recovered enough by then.  Though they'll hardly let you bring along someone more productive than you, to start a fight with--the emotion of the stronger sorcerer is the one they'll prioritize harvesting."

"To be concrete, say, if Duchess Carnidine felt like bringing me with on her next charging-trip, so she could let out some of her feelings and slap me and berate me, they'd bring me with to her.  I could hardly ask the same in reverse, for it's not worth wasting any of her feelings to strengthen the feelings of a Baron-level like me.  But if Carnidine made a habit of it, and gave me no recompense, she'd be making an enemy, for whatever the enmity of a Baroness could matter to her.  And if she made enough of a habit of asking for me to be brought along, they'd synchronize our charging-trips, and hook me up to the same lightline."

"If Duchess Carnidine wants to bring you, does she ask you, or does she inform the Headstompers and they bring you along, like it or not?"

"What planet do you even come from where it'd ever be the first one?"

Okay, fair. Opalyn did actual think these people had some notion of collaboration, and thought that the power games involved in negotiating who was going to a charging session would be a source of drama, but apparently not.

"Can I ask for anyone to be brought to my very first charging session? I don't actually have feelings about anybody here yet so I probably wouldn't ask, but just curious."

"Certainly, if the Facility already knows you to outrank them as a sorceress, and you don't mind making enemies of your lessers and whatever unknown friends they might have."

"And this is probably completely obvious and basic, but I like to say things out loud to make sure I understand them. If I direct that a specific person be brought with me, that's considered... unkind... to that person. Because... it uses up some of their emotional energy and tires them out, and then they can't charge as much the next time?"

Opalyn wonders about that. She believes that for some emotional wounds, rehearsing them only makes them more powerful. It's not the case that every time you rehash a fight in your head, you feel better about it. But she decides not to wonder about that out loud.

"Depends on what you do with them, really.  Climactic breakup that they've been building up to for months?  If they're not entirely below you, I think the Facility would look unkindly on the two of you not being hooked up simultaneously."

"Grinding them into the dirt the same way you have five times before, if you have some hold over them where they've no way to fight you back?  Why, that you could do every time you went to a lightline, over and over, and the Facility will smile on you for it."

Tiraff's misunderstanding is telling but Opalyn will try again!

"I don't actually mean to ask what the Farm thinks about it, I meant to ask what the other sorcerer will think about it! They take it as a hardship?"

"I'm truly confused about the concept of a planet where you can do someone an injury, in the form of setting them up to gain fewer credits of their own, purposefully to your own benefit, and have that not held against you."

"Like I said, I like to say even very basic things out loud, especially when I'm in a new situation, so I can be sure I've understood what's going on! I catch a lot of mistakes that way!"

Opalyn is really not sure yet that the lower-status person is necessarily going to end up with fewer credits out of the deal, even if they get dragged to a higher-status person's charging session. Seems like it would all be grist for the lower-status person's mill, but maybe there's some other factors she hasn't properly understood yet.

Her current theory is that people here are so entrenched in their beliefs about power and hierarchy that they're not actually measuring the results of various combinations of actions, they're just making assumptions and to some extent their prophecies are self-fulfilling. But only experimentation will settle this question.

"This policy will cause everyone to think you're an idiot, in case you hadn't realized that."

(There is something really off about this weird person...)

"I'm curious, at this point, what turn of events brought you to our Prince Purplesupper Memorial Facility for the Harvest of High-Drama Slutty Supercriminals."

"I feel cheerful about being underestimated, for the most part!"

"I seem to be here because I set too many of the wrong people on fire."

Opalyn has a policy of telling the truth, but the words 'I seem' are doing a lot of work in that sentence.

"How would you kill anyone who mattered using fire?"

"Well, in the end, it didn't work out for me, did it?" Opalyn is not having trouble being cheerfully dopey about what happened there, as she actually has no idea!

"I think, if I were in your shoes, I'd be asking me about who here might be inclined to guide me around the place and what I might offer them."

"Thank you, that is a very helpful suggestion! Yes, please tell me who here might help me, what I might explicitly offer them, and what else they might be getting out of helping me!"

"Well, only now I need a moment to actually think about it, you see.  This might take three quarters of a minute, or even, dare I say, longer."  Tiraff begins drumming her fingers on the table, leaning back some into her chair.

"What do you have to offer, to somebody who helps you?  Are you the sort to fall easily in love?  To naturally run hot and cold?  To get half of someone's friends upset with the other half?"

"I do fall in love pretty easily, too easily perhaps. I've been making an effort in recent years to slow down and look harder for compatibility, but maybe I should hold off on that project! I can be quite persnickety about my expectations for a partner, and some partners say I'm impossible to please."

"I don't recall ever making a bunch of friends upset with each other."

It occurs to Opalyn after she blurts out this truthful statement that this might have been an opportunity for, if not prevarication, at least some spin, but the words are out now.

"Anyone can be impossible to please.  I'd even say that most people are.  The valuable quality is having it look like it should be possible to please you."

"Well, if it helps, I meet my own standards, and my hope that someone else might meet my standards someday seems to spring eternal. I probably invest too much in trying to teach people."

"Mm."

"I can think of a plausible match.  I won't, of course, tell you what I consider his drama-inciting qualities to be, and you shouldn't come right forth and blurt out yours.  Going in blind on that sort of thing is elementary enough that I shouldn't have to explain it, that's half the point of matchmaking being the favor that it is."

"His name is Iilasir, and his room's coordinates are 3-kek by 9-pft.  Tell me your room's coordinates, and I'll have them passed on to him, without it being clear that the suggestion came from me; and you shouldn't identify me as the matchmaker either.  It's how things are done around here."

Opalyn's grief momentarily rises up within her as she remembers the partners she left behind. As recently as this morning she thought she had pretty much worked things out. None of the partners were perfect, none of the relationships were perfect, but she'd worked hard to cobble together a life with them, and it felt sustainable, if sometimes a little lonely.

If she let herself feel it, she'd be pissed that now she has to start all over, in this strange place with these strange rules, and somehow assemble a new harem here, where people try to have terrible relationships on purpose. She does not like her odds of feeling secure and stable here, ever, and while of course that is the entire point, she doesn't have to be happy about it.

But she doesn't let herself feel it, not yet. Opalyn's form of dignity is to manage her emotions and feel them only when she's alone or with someone she trusts. Or, in this place, she can save them for the lightlines.

She's more than a little competitive, and the idea of churning her despair into productivity is more than a little attractive. She's feeling really good about her chances on the sorcery test.

"Thank you very much for your assistance in this. I won't forget your kindness. My room coordinates are 7-boop by 12-mix."

Opalyn manages to utter these coordinates with a straight face, despite wanting to laugh as she hears them come out of her mouth. The alphabet here sounds ridiculous to her ears.

"Then we're done here, I believe."

"Is there a way that I should depart the table that helps you out the most?"

"A bow of your head as you rise would not go amiss."

Sure, why not? Worst thing that happens is she's now ceded some status to Tiraff that Tiraff doesn't 'deserve,' whatever that would even mean, and that seems fine, at least for now?

Opalyn rises, bows slightly, puts the chair back where she got it, and begins to head back toward her room.

Opalyn starts to walk toward her room on autopilot, but as she walks, she thinks about what she actually wants to do next.

It has been a hell of a day. Under any other circumstances the obvious next action would be to take a hot bath, curl up in the fetal position, and cry herself to sleep. And pretty soon, she'll reach a point where she essentially has no choice about that, when her mind and body are just too exhausted to hold it together anymore.

But here? Here, she should try to hold out just a little longer.

Does she remember the way to someplace with a lot of natural beauty, like a park? But also it should be not too hot and not too cold and not too bright and not too windy and not too buggy and... well, maybe it should be an indoor garden, now that she thinks about it.

Opalyn is this picky in general but the length of the list of her demands says something about how wrung out she's feeling.

Sure!  Natural beauty is one of the easiest things for AI image generators magical architects to build into space stations!

All right! Off we go then! Let's see some natural beauty!

This world does have some redeeming features! This is gorgeous. It is hard to be wrung out and grumpy in here. Opalyn finds a place to sit for a while and just look, really look, at all the different kinds of flowers and plants that she's never seen before, and marvel at the glowing butterflies, and wonder about the lightlines.

How do they work, anyway? Do they stretch? Does that even make any sense? Opalyn would expect planets to get very far away from each other when they're on opposite sides of their orbits. Having something like lightlines feels like it makes a lot more sense for a planet and its moons than for several planets orbiting the same sun. Her first look up in the sky when she started on Mayvos suggested multiple planets in very close proximity -- they looked huge in the sky. Are all the orbits stable? Does it take magic to keep them from crashing down into each other? How does this actually work?

Asking Orphan's memories presumably gets her nowhere, but in the absence of library access, she'll give it a try.

Orphan doesn't remember planets or lightlines moving.  Planets spin and lightlines stretch to make that work, but they don't wander around the sky.  There's no particular sense that planets do or should orbit anything, such as the light source that her memories map to the word 'Sun'.

Huh. Planets that don't move in the sky? WTF?