"Tell you what. How about we go to the guard station together so you can give me a tour and tell me a bit more about your work and what challenges you regularly face."

"Sounds like an excellent idea along several different dimensions, really."

He gracefully pivots in a gentlemanly fashion and gestures toward the door, as though to request that Opalyn precede him or maybe just accompany him.

Then she'll sweep through the door in as dignified a manner as she can under the circumstances.

Is the direction of the guard station obvious, once she's outside, or does she now need to awkwardly wait again for him to catch up and point the way?

It's not ultra-obvious, but the man follows quite close behind her and it's obvious momentarily which direction he's moving in.

"Lieutenant Sergeant Josephus Twoodle, hopefully at your service," he says.  "Yourself, Mistress?"

"You can call me the Supreme Sultana if you're being formal about it, but just 'Opalyn' is fine too when it's not a state dinner or anything. I'm Doctor Disaster's new secretary."

She's mostly gotten over the 'secretary' thing.

"Wouldn't that be a nice thing to have be true, especially by contrast with his previous secretary.  You seem -- how can I put this -- not immediately obviously completely insane."

"I'd heard that Doctor Disaster had been kidnapped again, has he been retrieved yet?"

"Why thank you! You also seem not immediately obviously completely insane! I wonder if there are others like you!"

Josephus does actually seem like the most sane person she's met so far, on first impressions at least.

"As for Doctor Disaster, I'd rather not say what the status is there. Need to know basis, you understand."

That sounds a lot like 'I don't know either' but if so he's not going to press the point and maybe embarrass her.

"Most people who live up until their thirties have been filtered to either have some form of sanity that let them stay alive, or some form of madness.  I like to think I'm in the first group, and so are a number of the other town guards, because the problems we face aren't easily survived by being insane.  A few months, maybe, but not years."

"Were you serious about wanting to hear about our work and the problems we face?"

"Yes! Tell me more about these problems that are better solved with sanity."

Josephus Twoodle could talk about this subject for an arbitrary amount of time, though he will politely pause now and then to see if the Supreme Sultana has comments or further questions.

The city of Little Damar does not really have laws in the sense that polities have tried now and then; it has order-keepers and an assumed common sense of what constitutes disorder.  Disaster-controlled polities have occasionally tried having laws, but there's always some person with enough de-facto authority to overturn whatever that law says, and a tendency to actually do that -- mainly the various Doctors Disaster -- and that often makes people more upset than not having any laws at all.

And that makes sense.  But Lt. Sergeant Twoodle would personally like to live in a world where there was at least a clearer, more hierarchical process for having decided in retrospect what had constituted disorder.  Such that they weren't, for example, throwing some kid in jail for improper grenade handling, and then waiting to see if anybody with real authority in the entire Disastrous Castle felt like rescinding or doubling the jail sentence anytime in the next week.

Oh no.

"And you said... it was helpful to be sane, in this job? Are you really very certain about that? Seems like it would be far easier to tolerate that kind of chaos if you didn't actually notice it."

"Inconsistent enforcement of order tends to get townspeople upset with you.  At the very least you want it to be clear to the majority that it wasn't your fault and wasn't your idea."

"I see, so you need your wits about you to avoid getting the torch and pitchfork treatment?"

"Dunno what that is, but it sounds like the sort of thing that Doctor Disaster yells at everyone not to do again after the first time he hears about it."

"Oh, it's an expression where I come from, meant to convey that a mob of relatively unimpressive people is coming to hurt you, but there are so many of them that it's going to be a problem."

"Little Damar, for all the flaws I've been yakking about, might be the calmest city in the world that isn't ruled by a Spark powerful enough to impose peace via total surveillance.  If enough people get annoyed with me, there isn't a mob.  Instead there's... people asking their elderly well-reputed parents to ask their friends at the castle to pass word around and eventually the Captain tells me I've been fired."

(They are coming to what looks like a town center, more densely packed than the part that's nearest the Castle of Disaster.)

It's pretty! Opalyn could have landed in much worse places than this!

"What's that big eye-looking thing?"

"Bug-zapper."

"How big do the bugs get, here?"

He casts a critical eye around town, then gestures at one of the larger buildings.  "Haven't seen any bugs larger than that, yet, but you want some overkill in your bug-zapper."

Opalyn is going to focus on the fact that they are overprovisioned for the problem rather than on the problem itself.

Where's that guard station, anyway? Suddenly she'd like to be indoors.

It's here!

"Before we go in, just verifying that my stay here will be... brief?"

It looks like the sort of place a Sultana could get misfiled and never heard from again.