Uhhhh.

"I think I'll wait until that chef person you mentioned comes to talk to me before I resort to the mouse brains, but thanks for the tip!"

He can go now.

Knock knock (wait for yes) enter.

What's she wanna eat.

She looks, and then she looks closer, but that doesn't help.

"How... food-scarce is this place? Like, if I order one of everything, do twelve orphans go hungry tonight?"

Nah.  Survival won't be food-limited until the war is over and there's been more time for new refugees and settlers to arrive.

Great! She'll have one of everything, then. The Gear-Grilled Gers are probably her best bet but you never know how the Gokduira Tars are at a new place until you've tried them!

Also... war? Oh! Right, probably the one the last secretary started. Somehow it hadn't sunk in that the war would be so big that it would affect immigration levels and food supply and such. Say more about this war?

Last secretary ate an ambassador.  Or something.  He wasn't paying close attention.

It's, like, war?  The enemy spark's soldiers come in with giant clanks and your guys fire the ray guns and a bunch of people on both sides die and eventually the clanks march away for a while and then come back again.  He's not sure of the details.  He's more the kitchen type, and gets more than enough danger that way without trying to skive off and play soldier.

Ate an ambassador?

Is there much cannibalism in this world?

Are any of the dishes she ordered for dinner made out of ambassadors, or other humans, or other sentient creatures?

Nah.  Doctor Disaster'd probably be sad about that.  Guy never like eats anyone even if they're already dead.

Great, that's so reassuring! Thanks!

He can go.

This guy enters right as the other guy is leaving!  Maybe the fact of the door being open caused him to miss the signage.

Opalyn will let the lack of knocking slide, given the open-door thing!

"Hi, come in. Who are you, please?"

"Jurgis, your Supreme Sultanitude.  Jurgis Schäfer.  Chief assistant to your predecessor."

She tentatively likes the jazzed-up title, though she'll wait to see if he's mocking her!

"Ah, yes, right, thank you for coming so quickly, I appreciate that."

"As you may have heard by now, Doctor Disaster summoned me from another dimension so I'm starting from scratch here. What can you tell me about how this place works, or doesn't work?"

"Oh, I hadn't heard about that other dimension part.  Kinda figures, I'd expect him to have trouble hiring locally given the way he treats his secretaries."

"Doctor Disaster is an incredibly nitpicky, micromanagy, impossible-to-satisfy boss who goes through secretaries like he's dealing through a deck of cards.  I hope whatever dimensional shenanigans he tried, it got him somebody who'd put up with him.  Though, the one big advantage of working for Doctor Disaster is that he won't actually kill you, at least, not on purpose.  Just fire you as soon as you somehow manage to upset him, no matter how hard you try not to."

Huh! Opalyn really did not have Doctor Disaster pegged as a micromanager, quite the opposite. The part about firing people might be true, though. Opalyn wonders what happens to her if she's stranded in this world without a fancy title and voice changer and people to do her bidding. She'd rather not find out on the first day.

"What kinds of things does he fire people for?" 

"Doctor Disaster complains that 'morale' is low among his henchlings.  Pereira, your predecessor, tries to find out what Doctor Disaster even means by this, or how to measure morale, or how to know if morale is getting better or worse, or how Doctor Disaster even knows that 'morale' is low in the first place, and eventually Doctor Disaster finally explains that when he sees his minions, they're not smiling as much as they used to.  Pereira works for three days on very little sleep and manages to adapt some stuff in the medical cabinet to make people smile more.  Doctor Disaster is all like 'no no no that's not what I meant' like he expects Pereira to be a fucking telepath."

"I guess that's not literally the part that got Pereira fired, that was when Doctor Disaster said there were too many complaints and Pereira turned some of the complainers into zombie-automatons but I think at that point Pereira was basically fed up with the guy and trying to get fired, if you know what I mean."

"Got it, cool, that explains a lot. Thank you."

"Would you be able to help me figure out who all works here, who's in charge of what, and where there are big gaps in the org chart?"

"And, how would you like to be compensated for helping me with that?" She tacks this on hoping that she can essentially hire him as a contractor for two hours, not as a long-term employee. She does not want this guy as her assistant.

"What's an 'org chart'?"

"And there's no need to compensate me, ma'am.  The pleasure of serving a glorious tyrant ought to be enough for anyone!"

"An org chart is a drawing of the organizational hierarchy in a company, or, um, in a Spark's glorious tyranny."

Opalyn grabs a piece of paper and starts drawing.

"See, here's Doctor Disaster up at the top, and then we put a line going down to me, I'm the Supreme Sultana, and then I am guessing there are several department heads. People who are in charge of particular functions within the organization. So there might be someone in charge of housekeeping for the castle, and someone else in charge of the exterior grounds of the castle. There might be someone who keeps track of currency and spending. Someone in charge of food. Someone in charge of procuring supplies for the Doctor's experiments. And so on."

Opalyn is adding boxes and labels to her chart.

"And then presumably each of those people also has people who support them and help them get everything done."

"I would like to make a chart like that, but accurate, with all the correct names and boxes and labels, and empty boxes anywhere there's an obvious role that no one is filling."

Opalyn smiles at Jurgis and checks if he seems to get it.

"Hmmm.  Yes.  There were temporarily some people like that at various points before they acted insolent to Pereira.  Though I'm not sure there's ever been anyone who keeps track of currency and spending, I think that'd just make somebody sad."

"What happened to the ones who were insolent to Pereira?"

She also needs to follow up on the budget thing, but first things first.

"Just demoted," Jurgis says scathingly.  "Doctor Disaster doesn't like actually maintaining discipline, he only wants the results of it."

"Hmph!" Opalyn scoffs noncommittally, hiding her relief.

"Maybe you can give me a list of those folks! It's important to keep track of the insolent ones!"

"And what were you saying about the budget? If anyone looked at it, they'd just be sad? Why is that? How does Doctor Disaster fund this place?"

"The Disaster family specializes in dimensional technology, as you may have gathered.  We sell twisted plants that grow better under the light of alien suns, engine lubricants that are easier to synthesize in vats with non-Euclidean geometries, spy-bred rats that were raised in four dimensions and can sneak around the corners of space, that sort of thing.  Then the money goes to Doctor Disaster and Doctor Disaster gives it out to people who need it and if they ask for what he thinks is 'too much money' he complains to his secretary about it and his secretary tries to do something about it and then Doctor Disaster fires the secretary.  I think that's our basic system.  But I don't actually know how else you could run a system under Doctor Disaster's constraints -- if you try to write down all the places that people are spending money, it just encourages them to try to get other people to spend the money instead, so they don't get blamed.  The usual method is to perform brain surgery on people to make them be passionless financial decisionmakers, but Doctor Disaster doesn't want to do perfectly normal brain surgeries either."

Opalyn has so many questions, but she'll just start at the beginning!

"The Disaster family? Are there more of them? Do they live here or do they have their own castles?"