You wouldn't think walking across the parking lot of a Home Depot would come with significant hazard exposure to high-speed truck hazards.

Apparently, it does.

What the ---

Opalyn launches herself sideways out of the path of the truck but oh shit it's swerving it's gonna hit ---

There's only a split second for the truck to loom larger in Opalyn's vision, coming for her head.

And then, just before it hits -- she is somewhere else.

Indoors.

Inside a room of dark metal, lit by crackling arcs of green lightning.

Opalyn's eyes may take a moment to adjust to this from the outdoor daylight.

A man's voice is shouting something.

Opalyn was dodging to the side to escape the truck, before ---

--- and now she's on the floor, her shoulder a little wrenched, her hands scraped a bit from where she landed, blinking to adjust to the strange lighting, trying to make out the figure of the man,

who, while strange, is most assuredly NOT a giant truck ---

What in holy hells just happened.

And what does he mean, SECRETARY? Like, of STATE? Of DEFENSE? Of the TREASURY? It better be one of those.

He seems, after his final statement, to actually notice Opalyn and her disarrayed position.

"Are you all right, my new minion?" he says, in a voice that sounds like it would be drawn with jagged edges if it was a font.

"Minion?" Opalyn sputters as she stands up.

"Who the fuck are you that you think I'm your minion? Explain yourself."

He doesn't look at all offended by this language or this request, almost as if it's a very routine way of talking in his native culture.  "I am Doctor Disaster!  Builder and ruler of the glorious utopian city of Little Damar!  The mightiest spark that the southwest corner of the Black River region has ever known!"

Okay, he's just insane. No point in being indignant at him. She'll try asking nicely instead.

"I see! Nice to meet you, Doctor Disaster."

Uh, that came out a little skeptical. She clears her throat and tries again.

"If you really brought me here, and we're not just part of the same nightmarish delusion, please put me back where you found me. Er, correction, please put me back either a full minute earlier or else translated five meters south. Or both. Whatever. Just not in exactly the same time and place. But very nearby. Um, thanks."

"A ha!  I infer that the most intricate element of my design, to bring forth my new secretary from a moment when she would have otherwise faced a dire fate, has proven entirely successful!  Kindness is not unknown to me, you see.  I have made an extensive study of its most famous practitioners and their surprising effectiveness.  That is why -- in a stroke of genius that not one spark in a thousand could ever match -- I have summoned forth my future lieutenant under conditions that should ensure she faces me initially with gratitude rather than immense resentment for her permanent, irreversible, one-way summons!"

Permanent?
Irreversible?
One-way summons?

Bulllllll-shit.

To whatever extent this guy is even coherent, he would claim that there's no way for her to go back.

(Or at least, this is what Opalyn is desperate to believe, because if it's really true, then ugh.)

Opalyn does not have a lot of moves here. She's in a strange place with no resources and no local knowledge. This crazed loon is calling at least the next few shots.

"Well, now that you point it out, I CAN sort of see how kind you are! If I squint!"

"What do you have in mind for me, oh Doctor my Doctor?"

She wonders if he can even perceive sarcasm, or if he's the wrong flavor of narcissist for that.

WHY would he perceive SARCASM when his MINION is talking like a NORMAL MINION?

"If I'm going to take this job at ALL" -- not that she has a whole lot of choice here --

"I demand a better title than 'Secretary.'"

"Like... Supreme Sultana. Or the Zesty Czarina."

"I think that may be the most reasonable job benefit request I have ever heard.  You shall be known henceforth as the Supreme Sultana of Doctor Disaster, Miss... what was your name exactly?"

"Opalyn. Opalyn Miller."

She grudgingly admits to herself that being the Supreme Sultana of a castle and an allegedly utopian city sounds a little bit more fun than finishing packing her apartment and nursing a broken heart.

"Can you say more about what you expect me to actually... do?"

"If I knew how to run a castle I wouldn't need you."

Oh dear.

"Well, what are the things that are going wrong from your perspective, and what future state of affairs would satisfy you that the problems had been fixed?"

"So you're saying the people who work for you don't do what you want?"

Opalyn's top theory is that they can't figure out what he wants, if this is the way he tries to explain it to them.

"Precisely!"

"So, you basically just want everything to run smoothly while you go about making inventions, and something about that is not working for you. But also you're just about to leave and go deal with the resonance anomaly and the war. So... imagine two possible futures. In one of them, you conclude that I've done an excellent job as Supreme Sultana. In the other, you think it's gone terribly. How will you tell the difference between those two futures? What is the concrete, measurable thing or things you'll be looking at?"

Opalyn gets that there's supposed to be a whole ecosystem that works harmoniously together, but how does it cash out in ways he actually cares about?

Ohhhhh he's one of those kind of CEOs. He just wants everything to magically work without having to explain clearly or even think clearly, for that matter. Okay. That narrows the search space.

Still, he can tell that something specific isn't right, or he wouldn't be grumpy.

"Let me try one more thing. Which one of these sounds the closest?

1. You rarely get interrupted, somebody else handles most problems without needing to escalate to you.
2. Someone anticipates what you're going to ask for and has it ready to go when you need it.
3. You have a translator to explain what you mean to other people so that they actually get it.
4. You somehow end up feeling more glorious and preeminent than you even expected.
5. Other."

He's going to say all of the above, isn't he. Of course he is.

"I am tempted to say most problems not escalating to me, but I have been recently traumatized and it is hard to trust that you would achieve this end without murdering potential escalators like my last secretary.  Anticipating what I need in advance of my needing it sounds impossible.  I did not even try to work that into my summoning machine because I would not expect any secretary like that to exist in the entire multiverse."

"Okay! That helps! You don't mind me talking to you and asking you things, and it's okay if I don't read your mind. However, there's a big impedance mismatch between you and the rest of the world and you need help with that, and the outcome of the whole thing should be glory."

Opalyn would feel pretty good about this as a set of desiderata -- except for the part where she also really struggles to understand what Doctor Disaster wants!

Maybe it'll be moot. Maybe he'll go deal with his other problems and she can just run the castle and the city however she wants. Or maybe she can just coast a bit while she figures out what she really wants to do with her second chance at life. Because it's not obvious that being a secretary -- even one who's called a Supreme Sultana -- is what Opalyn wants to do.

Also, wait -- his last secretary:

• started a war,
• drugged people into appearing happy,
• murdered people who tried to escalate problems to him,
• and was possibly implicated in the dead cobra incident?

"An impedance mismatch?  Are you saying that my problems result from a simple defect of my electrical conductivity?  That thought had never occurred to me!  It seems straightforward enough to fix... perhaps by infusing myself with high-biocompatibility hyperconductors..."

Doctor Disaster looks quite taken by this helpful suggestion, and is already turning towards a dark-chrome whiteboard with equations drawn on it in glittering metallic colors.

That was not what Opalyn meant! But if he thinks it's plausible, maybe that's because physics is different here. She doesn't want to gainsay someone in his own area of expertise when she has no context and no understanding of how things work here.

And anyway, it's all beside the point. She doesn't know the first thing about how to survive here and she can't let him get distracted before he finishes talking to her. She's met these mad genius types before and once he gets hyperfocused on the next thing, it'll be too late. Opalyn will wither away into a skeleton before he remembers to feed her.

"Er, um, that's not totally what I intended, but more importantly, don't get distracted from this conversation, please! I still need more information to go on! Like, where do I go when I leave this room, where do I sleep, how do I find food, and is there anyone else at all who knows anything and who can help me with the hundred questions I have after those four?"

"I expect my surviving minions will be able to provide you with much of that.  I am not quite sure who is in charge of what, at the moment, besides of course my Supreme Sultana.  Your predecessor carried out a number of successive reorganizations.  I would offer you her former accommodations, but... I am not sure that all of the mess has been cleaned up.  Um.  You could have the suite for visiting Sparks in the meanwhile?  Yes.  Yes!  That should be suitably luxurious for my Supreme Sultana!  I... believe all the weird modifications from last time have been undone."

"Your... surviving minions?"

"Can you say more about how they died, or, like, best practices for not dying around here? I just almost died and I'd like to make it at least a week before I go through that again."

"Hm.  Best practices for not dying?  I have never heard of such a thing, and yet, now that you have suggested it, I can see its potential usefulness!  Hm.  Hmmm.  Item one:  Start working on immortality well in advance of needing it.  Don't wait until you're already getting old and senile to begin building immortality-related machines.  Item two:  Don't stick your head into any glowing energy fields especially if they are larger than your head.  Item three--"

Opalyn is mostly going to have to piece things together for herself. Or else start a comedy routine in which she's the straight man and he says all the punchlines.

"All right! Thank you for starting to work on immortality! That will probably serve us well eventually! But meanwhile, could you show me those quarters, or tell me how to get there?"

"Of course!  No, wait!  I almost forgot!  I must give you the means to command my machines -- and show others that you speak with my own voice."  He whirls over to one of his possibly-workbenches, and starts picking out assorted steampunk gidgets and geegaws, including in one case by smashing the clock on the workbench and picking several bent springs out of its wreckage.  "Begin speaking, Supreme Sultana.  Anything will do."

He must have a lot of confidence in his interdimensional summoning ritual if he's giving her full authority on a few minutes' notice! Or maybe he just has a lot of confidence in everything he does!

She has a premonition about what he's going to do.

"The Supreme Sultana is the bomb diggity and you must do as she says."

In a quite unreasonably short period of time, the man presents Opalyn with a steampunk torc to wear, hinged in multiple places so that it can click around her neck -- not all the way around, it'll stay open at the back.  The centerpiece is a huge red jewel-or-something that will fit over her throat.

Oh no. This mostly makes Opalyn think of the talking dogs from Up. She will try to be more dignified than they are.

The torc is pretty enough and she likes the look of it. She'll put it on.

"Excellent.  Now, whenever you tense your neck, for example when you are upset, you shall speak in a voice of command."

Opalyn takes half a second to remember that she almost died and that she's now beholden to a madman, which does serve to get her a little riled, and then wrenches her neck into a weird position.

She clears her throat, and says:

"You forgot to synchronize the beam modulator with the ship's warp core!"

It comes out in exactly Doctor Disaster's voice.

"Synchronize the what with the what now?"

Oh, this is fun. She's been kind of wanting to do an evil villain laugh ever since she got here and figured out what kind of place this was, but it's going to be so much more satisfying with the voice changer.

"Don't worry about it. Beam modulators are not for you. Bwahaha. Bwahaha. Bwahahahahaha!"

The man might possibly worry that he's created a monster, if that were something that Sparks ever worried about, ever.

"Good.  I see the authority torc is operating as expected under normal usage.  Now, let me show you to the nearest minion so that you can order them to see you settled."

In a castle like this one, you never have to look far to find a minion!

"What now--oh.  Is this the new secretary."

"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."

"Yes, thank you, that sounds great!"

"So what I am now expecting is to sit here in this room while a parade of people come by to offer me things and information that I've asked for. That sounds ideal! The only thing is, I will want them to stop when it's getting close to nighttime so that I can have some privacy and rest, and I will want to leave my room occasionally and wander through the castle trying to get a sense of the layout."

"Oh, that reminds me, if anyone is likely to have a map or diagram of the castle, the city, the whole world, or any of the above, add them to the list of people who should come and visit me."

"Anyway - I need some sort of sign or light for the outside of my door that indicates whether visitors are currently welcome. Visitors should still knock, even if the light is in the 'welcome' mode. Is that technology that already exists here or do I need to create it from spare parts found in this room?"

He's taken out a beat-up looking marker-pen and is now writing things down on his forearm, already smeared with many layers of faded ink.

"You'd probably be better off creating it from spare parts," he says absently and without much attention while he's doing that, "instead of trying to figure out which button does what?  I sure don't know myself what anything in the Spark suite does."

Opalyn's not quite sure how this world works, yet; evidently just wishing that the perfect door sign existed already doesn't do the trick; she'll figure something out.

"All right then! Thank you for all of your help. I've asked you for lots of things, I'll let you get on with it. Oh! By the way, what's your name? I'm, ahem, the Supreme Sultana, as the doctor already mentioned, but you can call me Opalyn if you like."

"Tihomir, Supreme Sultana.  Tihomir Castillo, if it matters, though I think there's only the one Tihomir here."

He departs.

And now Opalyn will look around her quarters looking for door-sign materials. She's looking for any of:

- very simple small lights of the kind where you push a button and a light comes on and you push it again and the light goes off
- simple standard small components like batteries, wires, light bulbs, and switches, such that you could trivially build the previous thing
- paperclips, brads, staples, little bits of wire, anything that you could use to attach two things but still let them spin freely with respect to each other
- paper and pens, which she already ordered from Tihomir but maybe there's some already in here?

She will explicitly not fiddle with things that look like they could open a door to a demon dimension, or shoot a freeze ray, or cause a cobra fork-bomb. She'll only play with things that seem too simple-looking to wreak havoc.

There's definitely things that are already glowing, which could conceivably be diassembled to extract the glowing parts.  The light-containing gadgets do have visible screws, and there's plenty of screwdrivers lying around.

There aren't papers and pens immediately lying about in this room; does Opalyn want to check the other rooms in her suite, or start opening desk drawers?

Yeah, she's not going to start taking apart the glowing things, though if she's supposed to sleep in here they are definitely going to need to stop glowing at some point. Why are hotel rooms always like this.

She'll start by checking out the rest of the suite, taking special note of:

- anywhere small and dark and cave-like, where she'll be able to sleep properly;
- the state of the current bathtub, to evaluate how important it is to improve it;
- books, looking especially for something like "A Beginner's World History";
- a mini-fridge fully stocked with Wild Cherry Diet Pepsi

After that she'll start looking through drawers, if she's not interrupted first.

Wow. Not bad, not bad.

Taking these things in order:

- No, that is not nearly dark enough, good lord, this is going to be a problem.
- The bathtub is large enough and does not need to be improved. Her BATH TUB has a LADDER! Maybe Opalyn can put pillows in the bathtub and put a roof on it and sleep in there? It looks big and dark enough.
- Is that... a mini-fridge? Opalyn is scared to open it and find out. She'll wait until the next minion is around.
- This book looks like a D&D companion guide; she'll look through it when she gets a minute.
- Ooh! Paper and... presumably a pen? And assorted other little bits of metal!

Opalyn takes the paper and pen and makes herself a door sign. She attaches the arrow to the main circle using a little bit of wire, and tests to make sure it will stay where she puts it even when it's hanging up. She puts "SILENTLY GO AWAY" at the bottom in case the arrow droops under gravity.

She hopes people even notice it. It doesn't light up. She also hopes they can read English, but everyone seems to understand her so far?

She hangs up the sign on the outside of the door to her suite.

Knock knock!

Opalyn almost says "Come in!" but realizes that doesn't match the protocol on her own sign!

"Yes?"

Did the Supreme Sultana order a wide variety of pillows?  A wide variety of pillows are here!

Why are so many of them... anemones?

She takes about eight of the most promising ones and sends away the ones that will give her nightmares, like why does one of them look like a lobster claw? shudder

Knock knock!

"Yes?"

Tihomir is back, bearing paper and pens.  If he notices anything anomalous about this delivery given the implied prior existence of paper and pen to create the sign outside, he says nothing of it.

"Oh good, Tihomir, you're back. Thanks for the pens and paper, you can put those down here. Can you help me with this object?"

She points at the potential mini-fridge.

"I hypothesize that it's a drink cooler but I'm afraid maybe it's a small nuclear reactor or something, do you know what it is or how to use it?"

"Got no idea what a 'nuclear' reactor is, but I could buy drink cooler.  You'd... pull the door open and see if there's drinks inside, I guess?"

"Sultana, maybe you've got the wrong impression of me, I've got no Spark myself to figure out how any of these things work."

Mostly she just wanted a friendly human around when she tried to open it and a thousand tiny mechanical spiders came tumbling out. She notes that he doesn't know about nuclear power; she rather suspected he wouldn't but good to have that confirmed.

She'll try to pull the door open.

"Based on your implicit knowledge of living in this world for (I assume) your entire life, would you guess that these are beverages, and safe to ingest? Or could they possibly be, like, battery acid, or antifreeze, or formaldehyde, or something?"

"Don't see how you'd possibly find out without a sniff and a taste, but those do look a bit like lab jars... oh hey there's a second side to this thing."

He opens the other door.

"I bet those are the drinks, unless somebody's having extra fun.  Oh hey, pickled mouse brains, they mostly use those in automata but they aren't bad snacks either."  He points to one of the jars.

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?"

"Oh, most of them were killed in a hyperspatial bypass accident when our current Doctor Disaster was just fourteen.  I'm sure he would have been a much more sensible Doctor Disaster if his parents hadn't died so young.  Though, to be clear, some of it must be down to him, plenty of his ancestors had parents who died just as early and they turned out fine.  There's bastards and bastard-descendants galore among the minions, naturally -- why, I'm one-eighth Disaster myself on at least five sides -- but in terms of the main Disaster family, I think old Detrimenta Disaster and her husband are the only survivors whom Doctor Disaster hasn't exiled, or accidentally teleported to the moon, or slain by his bedroom traps when they tried to sneak in to assassinate him.  Perfectly normal Spark dynasty."

Opalyn stares directly into the camera.

Opalyn thinks for a bit if there's anything else she wants from this guy in particular, and can't think of anything. Tihomir is supposed to be sending her several more people, that one shady guy who knows a lot about everything, plus anyone else Tihomir can think of who's in charge of something.

She does want to make sure Jurgis doesn't end up being underfoot, though.

"So, what have you been doing to keep busy since Pereira was fired, then?"

"Just maintaining discipline in a sort of freelance fashion, I suppose.  Someone has to."

"Say more?"

"Just stalking around the castle halls and city streets looking for possible miscreants, giving them stern looks, writing their names down on cards for future secretaries to look at, that sort of thing.  I'm not actually authorized to punish anyone, though I have every confidence that someone will change that soon!  Though Doctor Disaster had all the real punishment pits filled up with concrete the same month he took power, a decision I'm sure he's regretted many times since then."

This is far less terrible than Opalyn feared a moment ago! She should probably encourage this kind of relatively innocuous behavior!

"Okay! Well, thank you for your service to the Glorious Domain of Doctor Disaster! If you like you can continue what you've been doing, and deliver those cards to... do I have a mailbox?"

"I don't think so.  But I could seize the nearest minion and order them to stand outside your quarters to serve as your mailbox, glorious Sultana!"

"No, thank you, please don't do that! I will construct an inert, non-sentient mailbox at some point soon! For now you can just leave the cards in a tidy pile just outside the door of my suite!"

"I hope Doctor Disaster isn't cramping your style too much already, my latest glorious tyranness?"

Oh, gross, is he flirting?

"Oh, no, don't worry about me, I'm fine, thanks!"

"Thank you so much for stopping by," Opalyn says. She gets up and walks to the door and opens it, smiling invitingly for him to go through it.

"Did you still want that list of previously demoted troublemakers?  I wouldn't mind staying here and glowering at your other visitors while I write those down!"

"Yes, I do still want that list, but I don't want to keep you from your very important patrol duties! You can just bring the list by later and leave it with the cards. Have a good day!"

Opalyn's smiles and gestures toward the door are getting more emphatic.

"If such is your imperious command, I'll have the best day ever!"  He marches enthusiastically toward the door.

And Opalyn will close the door behind him and lean against it from the inside, catching her breath.

Is she going to find anyone sane in this world at all? Tihomir wasn't terrible, but he wasn't exactly BFF material. It's going to be pretty lonely here if they're all... "insane" is the first word that comes to Opalyn's mind, but it's something more subtle than that. It's like none of them have any self-awareness or sense of humor.

If she asked what to do about this problem, someone would probably tell her to build herself a talking robot friend and program it to her specifications. That might actually be the answer in this universe but if so it's going to take a while.

She could use a breather, but doesn't want to turn her sign to "Go Away Silently," because she's also pretty hungry and maybe the food will be here soon.

Sure, she can have a two-minute breather.

And then, knock knock again!

That little break helped! She moves away from the door so it can open.

"Yes?"

Dame motherfucking Fleur.  She runs the laundry.  She owns the laundry.  Some whisper that she is the laundry.

"Hello! Thank you for coming to see me!"

Opalyn explains about being new here and so on.

"I hear that your department runs smoothly despite the chaos all around you! How do you manage that?"

Please let it be through kind, careful, and thoughtful management, rather than by exclusively using dark red fabrics and washing them in the blood of her enemies.

Being allowed to wear clothes is a privilege, not a right.

Reducing the flow of incoming work is certainly one way to ensure timely service on the remaining work!

But Opalyn hasn't seen any naked people around the castle so far? What does that imply about the laundry equilibrium?

That people are fast learners.

...well, not in general, but they're fast learners about "which courses of action cause you to end up dressed in nothing but an old curtain you wrapped around yourself".

Dame Fleur has never been one for pussyfooting.  What are Supreme Sultana Opalyn's own opinions about laundry?  That'll determine whether this relationship gets off to a good start.

The Supreme Sultana's opinion is that nothing should be changed about the operation of the laundry, given that it is one of the few departments that actually functions around here!

And in fact, the Supreme Sultana is seeking Dame Fleur's advice on how to improve other departments.

Rule by fear.  Fear of nudity.

(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.

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.

Opalyn gets up and stares out the window again. The sun has fully set now. The outlines of the mountains have disappeared against the dark sky. There’s a warm orange glow of street lamps and storefronts down in the village.

Opalyn will get up tomorrow morning and run this castle. That should, in theory, mean that she continues to be sheltered and fed. She’ll keep meeting new people; maybe any of them will be friend material after all, and she can soldier on alone for a while if she just journals a lot. Maybe she has something special to offer this place. They seem completely lacking in Earthly common sense and they seem hidebound by local notions of what’s not possible. Maybe she can bring order to some of the chaos.

It does seem like she’s a bit lucky that she landed on Doctor Disaster in particular and not some other Spark. Everyone keeps making a big deal out of how kind he is not to murder people on his own side. If Opalyn helps him expand his empire, that seems purely good for this world, based on her current information?

Satisfied that she knows her priorities for tomorrow, Opalyn layers the bathtub with pillows, climbs in, puts another pillow over her head to block out all the lights, and falls immediately asleep.

KNOCK KNOCK KNOCK

"Your Supreme Sultananess!  There's an event in progress where we're not sure whether to define it as an emergency because we don't know how further delay will affect it!  Or what exactly counts as 'getting much worse' from the perspective of your own goals!"

Mumblrphmph what time even is it?

"Yes, come in."

Needing to calibrate people is to be expected.

"Doctor Disaster has been kidnapped again."

Again? Is this routine? How routine would a kidnapping need to be, before it wouldn't be an emergency anymore?

Opalyn fumbles through the drink cooler, trying to guess which one might be a mild stimulant.

"All right, tell me what you know."

Trying to drink THAT one sure will wake her up, though whether it was a stimulant per se remains an open question.

A team of mercenaries wearing power armor in the colors of Professor Predicament signed into the Disaster Castle using the recently streamlined and automated security system, writing down their purpose in the automated logbook as "to kidnap Doctor Disaster", and paid one of the local kids twenty disaster-dollars to guide them up to Doctor Disaster's bedroom.  Chemical residues reveal that a gas grenade was probably used to knock out the Doctor.  Afterwards they seem to have successfully navigated back to their entrance point, and properly signed out themselves and Doctor Disaster using the recently streamlined and automated security system.

A skyship with Professor Predicament's logo emblazoned on its side then picked up the mercenaries from the ramp of the castle.  The air defenses were offline due to nobody currently having the authority to sign a new requisitions contract for ammunition after the last secretary started a war with a neighbor that their previous ammunition shipments were coming through.

...

Opalyn is not normally a flappable person in a crisis, and she's not about to break that streak, but it is taking something of an effort to remain unflapped about this set of circumstances.

Bright side: she's getting a lot more confident that she can really help this place!

She sips the drink -- it tastes like sour carrot cake -- and starts barking orders in between sips.

She wants the leader of the male soldiers, the leader of the female soldiers, anybody who knows anything about Professor Predicament's demesnes and castle, anybody who knows anything about previous kidnappings and how they were resolved, the chief detective, and the shady guy.

They can be found in short order.

Chief Detective: What are the odds this was really Professor Predicament, given all of the livery and whatnot? Or did they maybe wear disguises to throw us off the trail?

Person who knows anything about the history here: Any intel about whether to attempt diplomatic vs. military solutions? Or ransom maybe?

Soldier leaders: Do they advise direct assault and if so by what means, or would recovering Doctor Disaster be better as a stealth operation?

Shady guy: What do you have to contribute, if anything?

Sending in mercenaries openly wearing his colors is fully characteristic with the previously observed psychology of Professor Predicament, who is another Spark specializing in similar but not identical dimensional shenanigans and an obvious past rival.  None of this, obviously, prevents anyone else from masquerading at Professor Predicament.

Ransom is beneath the dignity of the Disaster Dynasty, especially before anybody's even tried military and spy solutions!

She's honestly a bit confused about what "diplomacy" is supposed to mean in context.  If Professor Predicament has gone to all this trouble to kidnap Doctor Disaster, he's unlikely to give him back for being asked politely...?

She's not sure they could take Professor Predicament in a direct, uncreative head-on assault.  Professor Predicament is slightly weaker as a Spark; but the home-ground advantage is huge, if Doctor Disaster's forces are fighting on ground that Professor Predicament has prepared.

He'll observe for the record that Professor Predicament sure did seem to know a lot about Doctor Disaster's ammunition difficulties and recent security revisions.

The notion that there's a mole in Disaster's organization doesn't go unnoticed, but this is not the right time for a molehunt, so Opalyn lets that go for the moment.

Instead, she latches onto the suggestion that really anyone could impersonate Professor Predicament's forces. Anyone at all? Even the people in this room?

Do they have enough intel to infiltrate the Predicament stronghold and find their way to where Disaster might be imprisoned, without themselves being captured?

Do they by any chance have any of the following equipment to aid in such an adventure?

- more Predicament-colored uniforms or armor, or ability to quickly hack that together
- knowledge of Predicament passwords or shibboleths
- stealth devices
- homing beacon for locating Disaster
- rapid transportation mechanisms for a quick getaway once they've recovered Disaster

And also, are they only out of the kind of ammunition the air defenses use, or are they completely out of ammunition overall?

Some people in this room would have more difficulty in carrying out a successful impersonation than others.  He'd be fine.  He doesn't recommend the Disastrous Hatter trying it, unless they're expecting all security checks to be really, really easily fooled... which, to be fair, they might be.  Working in security for Professor Predicament is not any relatively sane person's first choice of vocation.

Professor Predicament doesn't have standardized uniforms and armor, just standardized colors.  Dame Fleur can get something thrown together that'll pass casual inspection in an hour.  If they want it to pass up-close inspection, that realistically takes longer, unless one of the lesser Sparks around here can do inventions for clothing alteration.

He does not already know Professor Predicament's passwords, but those aren't very hard to obtain if you kidnap a current security guard and, you know... tickle them for a while.  Offer some other positive inducements if they confess.  Their forces include specialists of both sexes in that sort of work.

Opalyn shoots a Look at the chief of male security forces but doesn't say anything while others are still reporting in.

He'll give her a very earnest look in reply!  These are good specialists!  Really!

There's not a homing device for locating Doctor Disaster, but Professor Predicament would probably put him in Professor Predicament's Special Spark Storage Cell, if it was actually the Professor.

She wouldn't want to try out any teleporters with Doctor Disaster not present to fine-tune them, and not reliably able to help after being rescued; but they could always unfold one of the folding catapults on-site and fling themselves out of the area.

Nobody is ever totally out of ammunition!  There's always, you know, more boxes of ammunition that you can... find... places.

A plan is definitely starting to form in Opalyn's mind, but first, just to double check... it's bad, if they don't get the Doctor back, right? Like, things get even more chaotic, Sparky machinery breaks down and can't be repaired, some worse Spark swoops in and captures this territory? Are Opalyn's models correct here?

Yes, obviously if they don't get Doctor Disaster back at some point, some other Spark will march in with an army and take over the city of Little Damar.

Though it's not that unlikely that, even if they do nothing, Doctor Disaster will charm one of Professor Predicament's lieutenants with his sheer earnest good-naturedness and show up back at the Castle of Disaster with a new lieutenant in tow.

Indeed.  That has happened before.

Twice.

But not to the point where he'd want to rely on it.

It is her own personal opinion that this outcome has its own disadvantages and should be avoided if at all possible.

Opalyn is more and more confused about whether this is an emergency and what bad outcome they're trying to fend off!

"What's the 20/50/80 on number of hours before irrecoverable catastrophe?"

Opalyn does not expect them to understand this question but wants to see what happens if she doesn't explain it at first. She's also curious what they'll fill in for 'catastrophe.'

"I've never seen him charm a lieutenant in less than two days or more than a week, if that's what you mean?"

"I think she's asking how long before another Spark marches in, or they finish playing with Doctor Disaster and do something permanent to him."

"Yeah. That, more or less. By 20/50/80 I meant, how long until there's a 20% chance of some kind of takeover, how long until 50%, and how long until 80%. But if that feels complicated then just give me one best guess."

"Sounds like Spark-talk to me, honestly.  I don't see how anyone would get that kind of knowledge unless they brought it back from the madness place or built some sort of inscrutable machine --"

"Five days, twenty-three days, seventy-one days."

Opalyn is surprised that Dame Fleur is here! She was not on the original invitation list for this hastily assembled meeting! Though it's actually kind of good she came, if she's going to be making costumes!

Anyway! Opalyn doesn't totally trust crazy-guy's estimates!

"Does that sound right to everyone else? Like it's equally likely that we'd have some kind of invasion sooner than 23 days vs. later than 23 days?"

"It... doesn't sound wrong."

(His estimates are UNBIASED because he ATE HIS OWN BIASES.)

All right! Here's the plan!

They don't need to rush right out in the next hour to try to rescue the Doctor. They have a little time to figure things out. Also, if they wait a day or so, he might just wander back on his own! For that reason, Opalyn intends to mount the counter-invasion the day after tomorrow. Are there any objections to this timeline, before she starts getting into details?

It's acceptable.  She'll go on providing her Supremacy with clothing.

So long as her plan works, anyway.

Great! In that case, they'll use the time to prepare.

Zoltan: Determine how many people to bring if it's meant to be a stealth operation and make a shortlist of people who would be good on the team. Consult with the two military chiefs to see if they have any good people for this. Also make an even shorter list of who should lead the expedition.

Dame Fleur: Make some outfits in the appropriate Predicament colors.

Male chief of security: Obtain the passwords. Good luck and godspeed.

Somebody find Map Guy and see if they have maps to Professor Predicament's Special Spark Storage, and if they don't, maybe they can draw some up from individual knowledge of people who have ever been to Predicament's castle, or using Male chief's tickle-victims.

Female chief: Develop three additional non-catapult-based methods of retreat that are less likely to squish the retreating team. With two days to plan, it's better to come up with more options and then pick the best one, rather than just going with the catapult thing.

Crazy guy: Find some ammo. And the weapons that fit with the ammo. Consult with Zoltan and the chiefs to make sure you've got enough of all of it.

Any questions?

NOPE.

He'll try to do it first, and then see if he has questions.

He'll get those passwords one way or another, and everyone will be happy.

Some people will be very, very happy.

People wouldn't use catapults if they just squished their users!  She's traveled by catapults plenty of time and not been squished once!  At most, like, one-quarter of a time!  If they can't retreat by catapult and don't want to rely on teleport, she doesn't actually have a better idea.

Huh! Opalyn did not expect catapults not to squish their passengers! Can she maybe see a demo and maybe try it herself because that sounds rad

She will arrange a catapult demonstration for her Supremacy.

The trick is that you tell the Spark designing the catapult's flinging motion to make it so that the cargo's trajectory goes up quickly but down slowly.

Then the Spark does that.

Huh!

Physics is almost certainly different here, unless very important parts of this system are being omitted from the description! She'll just check...

"Are there... parachutes? Or anything? Why does the cargo come down slowly?"

Because the catapult knows what is good for it if it doesn't want to be disassembled.  All invention is a contest of wills to see who is more stubborn, the laws of physics or you.

Hmph. This will bear further investigation.

....

....

....

Opalyn shakes her head and breaks out of her confused reverie.

"All right! Off you go then! Everyone report back here tomorrow morning so we can sync up on our plans!"

Bidden, they go!

What's Opalyn doing the rest of the day?

Good question!

Theoretically she should go back to bed, but between the adrenaline rush of discovering that her interdimensional patron has been sparknapped and the aftereffects of the sour carrot drink, she does not feel incredibly sleepy!

She needs to give her staff time to execute their orders without her bugging them to report on other things.

Is it light out yet? Maybe now is a good time to wander around the castle or even the city and gather her own firsthand data about this place.

It's summertime and they're not that close to the equator; even during the unfortunately early morning, the sky is dim blue light on the darker side and warming and brightening on the other.

Great, then she'll... not change her clothes, because she doesn't have any new clothes yet... note to self, should ask Dame Fleur about that. She'll wash her face and freshen up just a bit, and then head out to explore the castle.

Are the maps of a size that she can roll them up and take them with her?

She'll also bring paper and pen.

She can roll up the maps, sure, and carry those.  It'd be a pretty large map if Opalyn couldn't even lift it once rolled!

Relatively few people are about, at these hours; there's nobody in this cozy common room nearby, for example, though some sort of automated breakfastmaking(?) machinery is already burbling quietly to itself.

"Cozy," sure, that's a way to describe this vast atrium!

Opalyn infers that Doctor Disaster is actually quite wealthy, especially if this is just one minor common room and not, say, the main receiving room for the whole castle. And the windows look fairly clean, despite how numerous and inaccessible they are. That suggests that the cleaning crew is pretty well staffed and efficient - or, potentially, that there are mechanical window-cleaning bunnybots or something.

Can she tell if any of the machines on the tables do anything intelligible, or if they're just inscrutable tangles of gears?

This machine probably has something to do with making coffee!

And Opalyn thought the espresso machines at her old workplace were enigmatic! She'll avoid bumping any of the mysterious levers sticking out of the coffee machine as she walks by; she doesn't want steam burns!

What's down the next corridor as she leaves the atrium? And more importantly, does it seem like the paper map matches the castle territory?

Normal hallways and stairs in a modest interior decorating style, pretty much more or less where the map says they should be!

Also this person, looking not unfriendly.

"Oh hello, good morning, excuse me!"

That's three greetings. Opalyn should finish up with the greeting segment and move on to the main body of her utterance now.

"I'm new here. Can you tell me how safe it is to wander around the city alone in the early morning? Or any other time of day, really?"

Little Damar?  It's about one of the safest places in existence!  Plenty of people are still alive in Little Damar who'd have long since been dead if they lived anywhere else.

"So glad to hear it! Can you tell me how to get to the food market?"

It's not so much that Opalyn wants to buy food... or has any money to pay for it. It's just that when she travels on Earth, she always likes to check out the local grocery store. Exploring a grocery store tells her a lot about where she is: how wealthy or poor they are, what kinds of things grow locally, what weird snacks they have. And usually there's no dickering at grocery stores; you're left alone to browse and pick things you want and then pay at the end.

Huh.  There's enough turns along the shortest path from here to there that it seems hard to remember a set of directions like that.

However, it also seems solvable to compose a more memorable set of directions that will still arrive at that destination.

So, it's not the shortest path, but you'd get there if you went that way, then went up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B, A, and then start.

Opalyn starts to write down the instructions and then realizes she doesn't actually have to. Also what would 'start' even mean in this context? Is she being interdimensionally trolled or is this particular sequence of steps somehow fundamental to physics in a way that transcends dimensions?

"This may seem like a strange question, but... is that often a path to get from one place to another? Or is it really just the instructions to get from the palace to the food market and that's it?"

Sorta?  It's a decades-old memorable password based on a famous story about one of the recent Heterodynes getting lost in an alternate universe, and castle-builders will often arrange for that pathway to go somewhere interesting from an interesting starting point.  But in this case, it seemed sorta the right direction, so ve visualized the actual pathway, and in fact that'd take Opalyn to a Little Damar entrance where the smaller of two grocers ought to have a shop visible from there.  It was the fourth memorable set of directions ve tried before one worked.

"Is the... Heterodyne? Is that a family name? Anyway, is that Heterodyne still living? What's their name?"

Kazuality Heterodyne, and prooobably not although you never really know with Sparks.  She was last seen being swallowed by some sort of gigantic snake made out of mirrors along with her harem of enslaved logicians.

The Heterodyne dynasty is among the most famous, long-lasting, and terrifying Spark families on the planet.  They rule from Mechanicsburg.  It is wise to live your life in a fashion that never causes them to think about you in any way.

How far away is Mechanicsburg from here and what kinds of things should Opalyn not do if she doesn't want to get their attention?

Because, unspoken, Opalyn is now somewhat dying to get their attention and find out if there are any records about Kazuality's trip to some version of what was presumably Earth! But maybe this tale is so well known she can read about it in any library and not get involved with the scariest people on the planet.

(Also... harem of enslaved logicians? Opalyn doesn't ask.)

(Lots of people have harems of enslaved logicians!  It's not weird!)

Mechanicsburg is around 1,500 miles away and the main predictable way of getting their attention is to be an overly powerful Spark who might challenge them for dominance.  But you can also, for example, get their attention by sending two hundred warrior homunculi to assault the Castle Heterodyne, as in the famous case of the Skull-Queen of Skral who succeeded in getting Dagon Heterodyne to track her back to her own castle and overcome her army and storm her private sanctum and marry her.  Though this may also have had something to do with how the Skull-Queen dressed.

Noted! Opalyn suspects that Doctor Disaster is not currently prominent enough to draw the Heterodyne family's attention, and she will avoid sending any warrior armies to assault their castle unless she's thought through the inevitable marital consequences!

Wandering around and meeting people and talking to them is paying off!

Opalyn thanks this earnestly helpful young person and takes her leave, continuing to head for the exit of the castle.

It may take some puzzled moments for Opalyn to work out how to go B and then A at the appropriate intersections, but pressing Start on the final elevator will seem obvious enough!

She'll emerge in a place that has clear line-of-sight on this corner of Little Damar, with sunrise now fully in swing modulo some mountainous mists.

She made it! It's quaint and charming! The name of the market should probably be Ye Olde Foode Shoppe!

The fruits and vegetables all look familiar from a distance. Do they look like standard tomatoes and peppers and so on? How does that even work? Why is there such a high degree of commonality between this world and her own? Should Opalyn have read more physics books?

Yes, if Opalyn walks closer, they'll go on looking like standard tomatoes and peppers and carrots and also, it appears, giant orangish balls and inscrutable edible topiary.  And yes, probably anyone who'd read more physics books would already see why any random alternate universe would have recognizable hominids as well as standard tomatoes and peppers and inhabitants that speak English.

Hmph, well, the fact is, there were a lot of books to read and Opalyn read other books, under the theory that hopping to a parallel universe seemed vanishingly unlikely, and, well, here she is, underprepared and feeling a bit salty about it.

Anyway, she'll lift up her chin and go into the Shoppe and see if she can infer anything about the local culture and economy based on what they have for sale. She's a bit worried she might actually have to interact with the shopkeeper, as the place looks cozier and more enclosed than she pictured, but everyone's been friendly so far so she'll just brave it.

Household necessities do seem to include a lot of mysterious vials -- though behind the counter, maybe they're expensive.

Opalyn's strange interdimensional garb will garner an interested look from the shopkeeper.  "Welcome to our humble little shop, ma'am.  New in town?  New to Europa, maybe?"

This is indeed not the faceless, anonymous, snack-aisle browsing Opalyn was going for! She had hoped to browse the local equivalent of the Swedish Fish and Donettes aisle, but it seems like they mostly eat fresh vegetables around here! What a primitive place!

Well, she'll make the best of it.

"Yes, you're right, I'm new here, just exploring a bit on foot this morning. If you're not too busy," -- and it seems she's the only customer in the shop -- "would you mind answering a few questions for me? Like, how is this shop supplied and who shops here?"

"Ah.  Scoping the place out for an invasion, I take it?"

"As a matter of fact, no, more like trying to secure it from invasion and ensure prosperity and health for all. Question still stands though."

"Yes, of course, but you've got to invade us first, see, to secure us from being invaded by other people, and ensure our prosperity and health."

"We get our supplies roughly weekly, when the trade-blimp from Doomton descends in on its way to the Perilous Wasteland.  If you ask in at the guard-station a couple of streets down, they'll have a more detailed schedule."

The naming scheme in this place! Opalyn wants to found a new city and call it Happyville and see how confused people get.

"Is the blimp pretty reliable? Does it always come on time, fully laden?"

"...nnnnooooo?" the shopkeeper says, sounding very confused about where in the entire world you'd find a supply blimp that kept a reliable schedule.  "The Doomton Blimpers aren't exactly the Corbettite Railway -- who did you say was going to conquer us, again?"

"So what do people do when the supplies don't come on time? Do people have to stockpile a lot? How do they get on?"

Opalyn ignores the question about the invasion for now, though she should probably address it before she leaves, lest she inadvertently start a rumor.

"Nah, that'd be expensive.  There's always enough rats n' weird tentacle things bopping around in the basements and sewers to tide you over another few days if you run out of cabbages."

(Of course they have stockpiles of salt-fried ricecakes and the like!  But he's not going to say that to a would-be invader.)

A rather weary-looking man strides through the shop door, then.  "What's the issue, citizen?"

"Says she's here to conquer us in order to make us safe from invasion and ensure our prosperity," says the shopkeeper, who promptly pressed an alarm button to alert the nearest guard station.  (The nearest guard station is also not particularly where you'd go to find the blimp schedule, to be clear.)

"She threaten you?  Hurt anyone?"

"Nah.  Well, my feelings were hurt that she thought I'd betray Doctor Disaster that easily, but I don't blame an outsider for that one, she wouldn't know."

"I work for Doctor Disaster, you dunderheads. I'm new here and trying to figure out how to make Disasterland great again."

She crinkles her neck the way she practiced before.

"You can stand down."

"So it's not that I don't believe you, but that I ought to check.  Would you mind terribly stepping over to the command station with me to verify that, Mistress...?"

"What part of stand down felt unclear to you?"

Opalyn straightens her neck again. It's kind of exhausting using the voice collar.

"Doctor Disaster assured me that speaking in his voice through this collar would be sufficient to convey his authority. Is that not so?"

"It'd had helped if I'd received explicit orders to that effect from somebody I already knew to be in my chain of command?  I agree it does sound like exactly the sort of thing our good Doctor would do, and then expect everyone else to figure out on their own without his bothering to have sent anyone orders about it."

"Are you in the middle of anything urgent I'd be putting you out of your way from doing?"

On the one hand, Opalyn is by nature inclined to collaborate with this very reasonable request, and indeed to commend this guardsman for his sensible actions and decision-making.

On the other hand, it's a worrying update that the collar does not successfully convey authority, and Opalyn wonders if she takes any damage to her authority in the long run if she goes along with this request.

Back on the first hand again, he can totally make her, and there's nothing she can do about that. Getting forcibly arrested would definitely not be good for her authority.

Compliance it is, then!

"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.