Healthy-Orphan's memories are adorably enthusiastic about magic! For the first time since -- whatever that was -- happened -- Opalyn feels a sense of warmth and amusement.

Until she gets to the part about setting people on fire! She shoves that part of the memory back in the box to take back out again later when she has more room to process it.

Okay, so: she's in Oldoria, or at least this other set of memories is from Oldoria. Maybe she should double check that. Hey memories, do we appear to be in Oldoria right now? Or are we maybe in some third place, to which neither of us are native?

Healthy-Orphan's memories have never contemplated the thought of anything existing that is not Oldoria?  If the stars in the night sky were also suns, Healthy-Orphan had never been told anything of it.  The village out the window looked unusually wealthy for peasants, but didn't give any sense of weirdness or foreignness.

All right then. Working theory:

- Opalyn died.
- She's in an ?afterlife? or some other plane of existence.
- It's Oldoria.
- She has a set of memories she can access when she has questions about Oldoria.
- It's very confusing to keep the memories fully online all the time, it's better mostly to keep them in the box.

Hey, Healthy-Orphan. What's your deal? Why do you live in my head?

???

She has always been here.

Healthy-Orphan was not much of a metaphysicist.  Or a thinker, really.

Hmmm. Wait a second.

Opalyn got hit by a truck.
This is not Earth.
Healthy-Orphan has always been here.

Opalyn looks down at her body. Is it? Her body?

Well, it's her body NOW.  But her skin seems visibly younger and she's got larger boobs now n' stuff.

Can she... get a look at them? Despite the cuffs? Nobody can see her, right?

Opalyn tries to pry the top of her dress away from her chest a little bit and see what's in there.

Oh. Nice.

The wagon begins to slow to a halt, and almost at the same time, a sharp military voice cries out, demanding someone state their business.

Their business, apparently, is: transporting a magical prisoner-bandit, very powerful but taken alive, to the Bleak Emperor's court.

Oh, crap, they're arriving, and Opalyn hasn't figured anything out yet! She should have spent more time orienting and making some sort of plan, and less time looking down the front of her own dress!

Within a minute or so, some scary-looking individuals in well-kept but incredibly Bleak armor will open up the cage-door of her cage-carriage.

Yeesh, this cannot possibly be good. What do they seem to want her to do? Can she just do that, and not get hurt?

They'd like to tap her lightly on the forehead and thereby render her unconscious.

When she wakes up again, she'll have been dressed in sorta-modest doompunk clothing befitting a possibly-penitent young sorceress.

She will be in a kneeling position in an emperor's throne room, or at any rate some sorta huge-ass doompunk meeting room.

There will be a crowd of fancily-dessed nobles around her, and scarily-dressed mages.

One of the guards she saw before is drawing back his finger from Opalyn's forehead, and stepping back.

Wow. This is impressive. Opalyn is impressed.

Opalyn was not really the church-going type in her life on Earth, but she's toured some of the fancier cathedrals and mosques. She wonders if there is going to be some sort of religious service, and if she is supposed to sing any hymns. She doesn't see pews or a hymnal. Maybe Healthy-Orphan will know the words.

Hey, Healthy-Orphan, do you think we're going to have to sing, and if so, do you know the words?

Healthy-Orphan would be pretty terrified if she was still in here and doing her own sorta-thinking.  Her mind never really tried to figure out what might happen to her if she ever got caught and hauled up before the Bleak Emperor; she'd just decided that wasn't going to happen to her, more or less.

Opalyn will take that as a no, they are not going to have to sing, and so she is not going to need to know the words.

Can Healthy-Orphan's memories help her model what is actually happening here? She's been... 'hauled up?' What for?

She really doesn't know!!  The justice process for captured dark sorceresses was not a well-known topic of discussion in peasant villages!  She knows three songs about this, and in one of them, the dark sorceress gets seduced and poisoned by an incredibly handsome noble-hearted peasant boy who gets a barony for it, and in the second one, the dark sorceress turns aside from her dark ways and marries a count and lives happily ever after as his obedient housewife, and in the third one, the dark sorceress gets captured and shipped off to the Bleak Emperor and that's it, that's the end of her story.

Oh, so... there might be singing after all?

Healthy-Orphan's memories would not ASSIGN THIS A HIGH PROBABILITY!

Also, wait, back up, is Opalyn in trouble for being a DARK SORCERESS?

Does it count for anything that Opalyn is completely innocent of this ludicrous charge?

Er, what?  Healthy-Orphan has totally been running around setting innocent barons on fire and taking their stuff!  Would Opalyn like to review any of those memories?

It does seem sensible to have a quick review of the facts of the case prior the trial, yes.

Healthy-Orphan is an UNSTOPPABLE INVINCIBLE DARK SORCERESS who does not seem to have much contemplated any other options in life besides this meaning that she got to take whatever she wanted!  She killed anyone who got in her way!  Nobody could stop her!  So yeah she's looted a few castles, killed some nobles, wiped out their armies, that sorta thing.

Sometimes she saw a handsome man or pretty boy and then she'd kidnap him and order him to satisfy her sexually!  To be fair, it doesn't seem to have occurred to any of the half-dozen victims that their fate was an unusually gruesome one; though, it's not like Healthy-Orphan wouldn't have hurt them for saying so, but still, they didn't seem unhappy.

So Healthy-Orphan is in fact a terrible dark sorceress who did terrible dark things and is not at all sorry about any of that, and she did it in the body Opalyn now shares with her?

And so if she's about to be put on trial and maybe sentenced to death or something, that will be actually extremely fair and just?

UGH this BLOWS.