That's... strange. Opalyn is going to try to learn the message-pipes system, as soon as she can find a willing teenager to teach it to her. Opalyn's current theory is that adults can't use the message-pipes the same way Opalyn's grandmother "couldn't use a computer" or Opalyn's mother "couldn't use a cell phone" when they were in their seventies, having more to do with learned helplessness than actual physical, biological mechanisms preventing them from learning.

Does anyone else still in the room need anything else? If not, they can all go. Opalyn wants to eat her food and read the stack of papers that people have been turning in.

She's caught a couple of spies and a couple of criminals that she's been keeping in her home dungeon, for lack of a functioning prison intake system in the castle.  It'd be nice to know when her home dungeon can get freed up for normal use.

Normal use? Huh.

How long has the castle been lacking a prison intake system? Like, did this ever work, and what caused it to stop working, or does Opalyn need to invent this from scratch?

The prison intake pipe is broken.  It whooshes a prisoner halfway in, and then stops, and then whooshes the prisoner half of the remaining way, and stops.  A simple bit of math shows that the prisoner will never make it all the way into the prison.

Is there any reason at all that the person who stuffs the prisoners into the pipe can't just walk them to the prison?

Any change to the prison process requires authorization so that the warden can't just, you know, eat the prisoners.

Opalyn will authorize the new intake procedure using walking instead of pipe-based transport!

It's better than literally nothing, but the Sultanic Secretary needs a bigger hat.

Is there anything else or can Opalyn eat and think now?

Consider an entire room full of deranged minions of a mad inventor.  Then, consider that each of them has some independent probability of making an error about whether or not Opalyn needs to know something, or about whether it's important for them to respond to something that somebody else said.

At what point in this process does Opalyn start saying that everyone in her office needs to get out now or she'll turn them into mechanical spider parts?  Because that, in this world, is considered the natural way for a meeting to end.

Yeah, fair. Opalyn wants to know all of this stuff! She is learning something from each and every one of these questions! But also she's starving and she needs to collect her wits, and presumably she can get more requests of this nature whenever she wants, there's probably an unending supply.

Can Opalyn somehow guess or ask roughly where they are in the day-night cycle? It matters for how she closes out the meeting.

Her room has windows!

Yes, and what does she see when she looks out those windows, pray tell? Lightwise, that is. Does it seem like maybe the sun is starting to go down, or is the countryside blighted by industrial smog that makes it impossible to tell?

The Sun is maybe 20 degrees above a mountainous horizon; day's not as bright as it was when she first entered this room.  No industrial smog visible locally -- plausible dark cloud in the distance, to the right of the Sun, maybe.

Also her room has clocks everywhere.  Just saying!

Sigh

Evening it is!

Opalyn thanks everyone for coming and tells them she's done for the evening, but she'll hold office hours starting at... is 10am a time that makes any sense here? Mid-morning tomorrow, anyway, whatever time that is. Until then she should not be interrupted except for emergencies, where an emergency is defined as a somewhat serious problem that will get much worse if it has to wait.

And then she'll move them out the door, starting with polite requests and the gentle pressure of her hand on the small of their back, and only amping up to voice-changed threats if absolutely necessary.

As the Sun starts to dip below the mountainous horizon, the manifold glowing devices and lights of her suite start to dim and shift towards warmer, reddish colors.

Finally alone in her suite, Opalyn digs into her food – it’s not bad – and numbly stares out the window at the sun sinking behind the mountains.

This has been the most surprising day of her life, she thinks, maybe going back to the day she was born. Of course she doesn’t remember that, but surely going from the warm-dark-whoosh-whoosh of the womb to the cold outside world for the first time was even more surprising than this. Nothing else since then can really compare.

She wonders, of course, if this is all a hallucination or a dream, if she’s going to wake up in her own bed or a hospital bed soon, but this feels far more real than any dream ever has. It has much more rich detail. Things take the right amount of time. All of her senses seem to be operating normally. She should probably treat it as real, because it probably is, and it’s not like she loses points for trying her hardest even if it does turn out to be a dream after all.

If it’s real, what would trying her hardest actually mean? How should she run this new life she finds herself in?

This is a big question, and not one that Opalyn wants to think through while staring out the window with Copprer Chicken juice on her fingers.

She goes into the bathroom and washes up a bit. She amends the sign on her door to say “GO AWAY SILENTLY (UNLESS IT’S AN EMERGENCY)” and sets the pointer to that. She gets paper and pens, and she sits down to think.

(At least she has paper and pens, here… imagine if she were transported somewhere without those. She’d never be able to think straight.)

She writes.

PROBLEMS TO SOLVE

1. Basic safety: shelter, food, water, nobody immediately trying to kill me
2. What happens if I quit my job
3. Social and emotional support
4. Grief about my old life apparently being over
5. Sex / relationship
6. What to do with my life

Some problems on this list are new since this morning. When she woke up on Earth this morning, she had a basic understanding of how the world worked, what her options were for earning money and paying for shelter and food and so on. In this world, it seems like the basics are being provided because she’s the doctor’s new secretary, but if she quits this job, what options does she have? Is she basically immediately homeless in a world she doesn’t understand at all, with no obvious other means of employment?

She’s also up against the huge issue of needing to entirely rebuild her social substrate. On Earth she had friends, co-workers, neighbors, people she could call on if she needed to borrow a truck or get a hug or brainstorm ideas. Here she has no one, and none of the people she’s met so far seem like they have friend-potential. Mostly they just seem insane.

Grieving everything she’s lost feels like an immense task, too big to sink into, so she’s basically just going to have to ignore it until she feels more secure and established here.

On the other hand, her relationships were already in tatters on Earth, she hadn’t had good sex in months, and she was halfway through a career reboot that maybe wasn’t going to work out anyway. So… plus ça change.