"You will refer to her as my Supreme Sultana!"

"Mm."

Good, having Doctor Disaster correct the minion is slightly less awkward than 1) correcting him herself, thus cementing her new identity as an unbelievably arrogant jerk, or 2) not correcting him, thus cementing her identity as a meek secretary!

"Can you show me to the quarters normally used by visiting Sparks, please?" whatever that means.

"Mm."

He turns and heads off down one of the many steampunk-appearing corridors in this steampunk-appearing castle.

Doctor Disaster will also turn to head back to his important experiments, if nobody stops him.

Opalyn will follow the minion, paying attention as she goes, so that maybe she can find her way back to Doctor Disaster in case she wants to ask him more questions later. Or in case she wants to break into his lab and build a device that will launch her out of this universe and into one she likes better. She hasn't made up her mind about this universe yet, and isn't sure whether it ranks better or worse than her expected-average-universe.

Does she see anything in the corridors that strikes her as especially noteworthy, worth further investigation later, or just nifty?

It all kind of looks like this, is the issue.  Opalyn hasn't been here long enough to decode which mysterious inscrutable arcane flashily-lit dangerous-looking doorways are more noteworthy than others.

After they've been walking long enough to probably be out of earshot of Doctor Disaster, the minion speaks!

"So.  What sort of Supreme Sultana are you, exactly?"

It doesn't exactly sound like the jagged-font voice when the man says it, but one can tell it's meant to refer to that voice.

What does this question mean? It's the kind of thing people on Earth say all the time, and it's probably supposed to have a standard meaning in Neurotypical, but Opalyn has trouble guessing. He probably doesn't literally mean that Opalyn should index over all possible Supreme Sultanas, organize them into some sort of ontology, label the types, place herself in one of the categories, and then emit the label on that category. Right? That's not what he means?

So... probably he just wants her to say anything at all about herself so that he can get a better sense for what he's dealing with?

"I think hexagons are the best regular polygons, because they tile the plane but they're not boring like triangles and squares."

"Got it."

He doesn't say anything else until they're at her new suite.

Ohhhh. It's so pretty! The mountains out the window! All the gadgets to examine! The total lack of moving boxes, or expectation that she is supposed to pack! She loves it!

"Thank you! This is great!"

"I also need: paper, pens in various colors, a selection of pillows of different squishiness, a washroom that includes a giant bathtub, some help finding food, and a list of the most pressing problems to solve in the castle and the city."

"That is a much more sensible list than I was expecting.  You sure you don't also want... a sack with 200 hamsters, or something like that."

"Not yet! I'll let you know when that comes up, and glad to know that's an option!"

"Right then.  I'll get you the paper and pens, ask Dame Fleur to send someone over with the pillows, Von Gaston to send over someone with a menu.  Larger tub in the washroom means you're going to have to appoint somebody to be a new manager of construction minions and then talk to them about that."

"I'd say the most pressing problem in the castle is that nobody knows anymore who's doing anything or in charge of anything, except for food and laundry.  I can try to get a message to the chief assistant under our last secretary to present himself to you, on the very remote chance that he knows something helpful."

Opalyn did not actually expect to get everything on her list. It's heartening that she can, in theory, spin up a team of construction minions! And that the food and laundry services supposedly still function!

"Right then. Two questions. First, when you say 'our last secretary,' do you in fact mean Dr. Disaster's last head secretary, the one who allegedly started a war and drugged a lot of people into appearing happy and so on? Or is this some other person?"

"Second, if I wanted to take sort of a census of who all lives and works here and what they do, how would you suggest I go about that?"

"Yeah.  That secretary."

"I'm... sort of surprised that you wouldn't just construct a giant robot that roams the halls of the castle, kidnapping people and forcing them to answer a list of census questions?  Finding it a bit hard to think past that, honestly.  I guess you could just appoint a census-taker?"

"Yes! I would like to meet that assistant! And also, roughly how many people are we talking about here, and how big is the castle?"

If it's twenty people and she can walk all the halls of the castle in half a day, she wants to do all of it herself. No substitute for direct data-collection, unfiltered by alien sensibilities. But if it's five hundred people and it would take two weeks just to walk swiftly through the entire space, then she's going to need to delegate.

"Dunno.  Three hundred?  Six hundred?  You've always got new hopefuls arriving and old hopefuls getting accidentally teleported to the jungles of Iguana."

"The... Jungles of Iguana? Why do people continuously get transported to the same strange location instead of getting randomly teleported to other strange locations sometimes? Do people continuously make the same mistakes over and over instead of making new mistakes? You know what, never mind, I'm getting distracted, that is not the most important thing. Cancel that question."

"Instead, what is it that makes people so hopeful about working here? Why do they want to do that, despite the obvious risks of accidental teleportation, cobra infestations, marauding robot census-takers, and so on?"

"For as long as I've known Doctor Disaster, his entire life, the man has never deliberately killed a single person who's pledged allegiance to him.  There's people who come to Little Damar -- that's the town you can see out below your window -- who've traveled a thousand miles to get there, carrying all that's left of everything their family owns, just because they've heard about that part and figure it's maybe one-third of the way true."

Not killing the people who are on your own side is enough to get people to swarm to your team? That is a depressingly low bar and Opalyn's opinion of this universe just plummeted.

On the other hand, she seems to have landed in a relatively decent part of the world, and maybe she's standing in a solid enough place to improve the rest of it, once she gets her bearings? Worth further investigation anyway.

But before she can overhaul a world, she needs to overhaul a city, and before that, a castle. One step at a time.

"Going back to the census thing, now that I realize there are hundreds of people, I don't need a complete list of them yet. How would you suggest I identify the most important people? Feel free to make up your own metric for 'important' but tell me what it is."

"I guess I'd try to get everyone who's in charge of anyone else, and then maybe ask them that question?  I'm not, actually, important."

Sigh, yes.

Opalyn had been hoping this was the sort of situation where the first minion you meet in the castle turns out to be the quiet, steady, brains of the whole operation, but that doesn't seem to be true here. This guy is pretty friendly and helpful but is not poised to do Opalyn's job. She'll try again to explain it better, kindly.

"Yes, that's right! Being in charge of other people is probably a good metric for who's most important! And how would I go about locating those people? For example, do you have a suggested list of names already in your mind? Or do you have an idea who I could talk to who would have such a list?"

"Um... huh.  I could run around asking everyone I know who's been in charge of anything to come by your quarters, if they can get there before sunset?  Or I could send over Zoltan Lennart, he's a bit shady but has a reputation for knowing who's been up to what."