(And again, an open door means there's no visible indicator that people should delay before entering!)

Did somebody call in all previous managers to present themselves to the new secretary?  This man is the former head of construction minions before the previous secretary fired him.  He just goes by Chief Builder; he did have a regular name at some point, but one of the previous Doctors Disaster ran some experiments and now he doesn't.

He's heard rumors that there's a plan in the works for a GRAND BATHTUB.

"Oh, hello, welcome, come in, Chief Builder."

"It turns out my bathtub is sufficiently grand, so we don't need to improve it."

"What kind of experiment destroyed your regular name, and did you lose any other brain functions in the process?"

Mostly it just caused himself, and everyone else apparently on the planet, to lose all memories of him from before the age of 24.  He's fine with this actually.  He's never seen anyone else become any happier or more successful from anyone remembering what happened to them before age 24.

What sort of life ambitions does she have if not a huge bathtub?

It seems very likely that we'll need to build things, but Opalyn has only been here for less than two hours, and does not yet know what we need to build!

How many people work in the Building and Laundry departments respectively? How much spare capacity does each department have? Does either department need anything from the other? Does either department need anything from anyone, for that matter?

Opalyn will jot down notes while all of this is discussed.

What are her overall impressions?

They don't really have the whole department thing going, but there's like a dozen people in the castle who work on repairing or rebuilding the castle, another dozen who do nothing but work on Doctor Disaster's mad science projects, and lots of other people know their way around a wrench well enough to be dragooned into more temporary projects.  The situation in the city is more complicated, that place has its own chief but it's around the same number of people to partially maintain the mad-inventor pieces of the city, and then some distinct system for maintaining ordinary carpentry.  Ultimately, anything sufficiently weird in the castle or city is going to require attention by Doctor Disaster if it breaks.

Laundry is four specialists to operate four inscrutable machines, a bunch of kids who get press-ganged to deliver laundry if they can't convincingly prove themselves to be doing something else, and Doctor Disaster plus henchlings to repair or improve the inscrutable machines.

...Dame Fleur the Laundress would like an Assistant Dragooner to run around kidnapping and press-ganging kids so she didn't have to do that on a daily basis.

The Chief Builder would like to actually be a chief again.  Right now he's maintaining a list of all the major castle architecture and town architecture that breaks and is sort of gently suggesting to people what they might choose to prioritize about fixing it.  And he wants to be able to spend as much money on he wants on spare parts and tools, without anyone else complaining about that.

Opalyn dutifully records what she's learned.

How much money is "as much as the Chief Builder wants," relatively speaking? Like is it 10x the budget for the whole castle and city combined, or is it much more modest?

And why is it that only Doctor Disaster can fix weird machinery? Can the skills to fix weird machinery not be taught?

Oh, definitely not as much as 10x the castle and city budget, however that much is.  But the Chief Builder doesn't really have any numbers like that planned, he's just hoping there'll be money there whenever he wants it.  He's a construction manager, not an accountant.

Wow, her Supremacy really is from another dimension!  Only Sparks can make weird machinery.  Prudent Sparks can sometimes make it be the case that some of the parts are maintainable by trained normal minions.  But there'll always be some Weird Science parts that occupy a sliding scale of "you must be a Spark at least this powerful and/or specialized in order to do anything with this particular weird subinvention".  Whatever summoned Opalyn to this dimension, for example, probably the core of it was a bit of machinery that could only be built or repaired by Doctor Disaster or one of his direct rivals in dimensional mechanics; or by one of the great continent-bestriding Sparks like a Heterodyne or Sturmvoraus.

What makes a person a Spark? Can you become a Spark later in life, and what is the mechanism for that? Do Sparks vary in Sparkiness?

Nobody publicly knows what makes a Spark, though obviously all sorts of dreadful human experiments are conducted every day with the goal of making an army of obedient superinventors!  Also obviously, if anybody did know they'd probably keep it a dire secret!  Sparkitude runs in families, though not reliably.  Sparks definitely vary in power.  The more powerful they are, the younger, usually, when they "break through" and create their first invention; sometimes one of their most powerful or thematic inventions.

Additional minions are arriving while all of these discussions are happening!  This lady is the hereditary Milliner of the Disaster family, aka the Disastrous Hatter, and plays a subtle role in regulating status throughout the castle by determining who gets the fanciest hat.

Leader of the male soldiers.

Leader of the female soldiers.

Chief detective of the town.  Nobody summoned her.  She just... heard.

Very shady-looking fellow.  He'll not say much with so many other people around.

Presented without further comment.

And also, Opalyn's dinner!

Okay! Good thing she ordered everything on the menu, just in time for her impromptu staff meeting! Opalyn snags a few of the more appetizing-looking items off the tray and stashes them away from the crowd, so she can eat them later, and then invites everyone to help themselves to a snack. Once that's under control, she stands in front of the crowd and clears her throat expectantly. And then clears it again, this time with the voice changer.

"AHEM."

"Thank you all for coming. As you may have heard by now, I'm the new Supreme Sultana. Doctor Disaster has summoned me from another dimension to run this place, and if he tuned the summoning device correctly, then he actually got someone good for the role for once."

"I've chatted with a few of you already, but I need information from each one of you."

She indicates to whomever is standing nearest to hand out paper and pens to everyone.

And Opalyn goes on to outline the kind of information she's looking for:

- Name, rank, serial number Name, what you do here, how to get ahold of you
- How many people work for you in what capacity
- What's going well
- What's going poorly
- What resources or budget do you request, for what purpose, and what goes better for everyone else if your request is fulfilled
- Your suggestions for general improvements of the castle or the city
- Your complaints
- Who else should I talk to
- Anything else you want me to know

While they start scribbling down all of that information, she asks if there are any questions.

Is the new secretary planning to engage on any additional fronts or launch any new offensives?

Does she need a hat?  This is a trick question, the answer is yes.

What does her home dimension taste like?

Opalyn is certainly not going to start any new wars, fronts, or offensives until she knows anything about relative strength of nearby potential combatants, what Doctor Disaster stands to gain or lose by engaging in conflict, what sorts of improvements in the general human condition Opalyn might be able to bring about by fighting about it, whether diplomacy is a potential alternate avenue, what kind of casualties might be expected on each side, and so on. But she won't rule out wars, that would be silly.

Opalyn would be happy to have a new hat though she cautions the milliner that it needs to stay on without giving Opalyn a headache or bothering her neck.

Opalyn perceives her home dimension as mostly flavorless unless Opalyn is actually eating or inhaling noxious gases.

Did the Secretary Supreme, or whatever she was called, demand maps of the town and castle?

Excellent. Is there by any chance a system of pneumatic tubes that will deliver messages all over the place, or perhaps mechanical ravens, or mail-carrying spiderbots?

Failing any of that, Opalyn is going to need to cultivate a small cadre of Irregulars to run messages for her.

Opalyn also makes a note to walk the castle and the grounds, little by little, matching map to territory and learning her way around.

There's a system of pipes which has its own gravity and its own spatial arrangements, which only makes sense to kids who've grown up in the castle and only before they turn seventeen.  To send a message you give it to somebody who hands it off to a kid if they see one; or alternatively hands it to somebody else who's still moving and might run into a kid, etcetera.