"About that... what did you find, when you tested me?"

"I suspect -- though do not ask -- that you were not straining to hold me off, any more than I was straining to press you.  Had we gone much beyond that level in public, the more magically sensitive sort of noble would have started to be suspicious about how powerful you were, exactly."

"I choose not to test you exactly, and not to ask, and not to answer.  Ignorance can be undone more easily than knowledge."

"How do you suggest I get better at using these powers? I know very little about them."

Should Opalyn explain why she knows so little about them? Maybe not. Should she be defending the Emperor's ignorance on this point also?

"Well, you could do what I did when I was your age.  Wait for people to attack you or otherwise make you angry, then kill them.  It works given enough practice."  He gestures at Opalyn's library book.  "There were fewer books about, when I was a lad.  It must have been some number of decades before study started to seem to me like a more interesting use of an hour than crushing men or fucking women, who'd offended my pride."

"The battle that immediately preceded my arrest did not go well for me and I would like to prevent that sort of thing from happening again."

In the background, Opalyn is still wondering if she should bring up her very strange day. Why has the Emperor not noticed that she doesn't talk like an untutored bandit? That she wants to read library books, and thinks about systems theory before overturning governments?

Who says he has or hasn't noticed?  From his silence may be deduced only any number of possible reasons for choosing not to speak.

"Extremely understandable.  I am trying to figure out if I'm supposed to just assign you a fighting tutor whom I know to be competent, or leave you to flounder your way to your own.  I have never been not-actually-a-father to a young lady before, and have no idea where the boundary lies between offering her a helping hand and strangling her potential."

"Don't ask me, I've never been not-actually-a-father to a young lady before either!"

"I have been a mentor, and I think assigning me a fighting tutor would probably not cause magical crib death."

"From your saying that, I can only deduce that it's what you've decided I should hear.  Unless you really are a lot more naive than that, and are honestly blurting out whichever apparent truths cross your mind.  I admit this seems like quite the running possibility."

"I'll give it a try.  Should I be looking for a fighting tutor who's hot as well as competent?  I think fathers are theoretically supposed to object to this sort of thing when it comes to their daughters, but I feel nothing of the sort and don't even have much sympathy for why they would."

"Sure, why not?" That does actually solve another problem Opalyn wasn't going to ask her DAD about.

"You know, it was somehow very annoying when my few acknowledged sons wanted all of their tutors and servants to be beautiful women, even though this was objectively a perfectly reasonable thing for them to want.  Somehow it is not annoying when it is you.  In retrospect, I think I must not have thought they deserved to have nice things."

Now who's just blurting things out?

Unless... he's trying to win her over, for some reason? Why in the world would he need to do that, he's the Emperor!

"To be clear, the hotness of my tutor is much less important to me than their competence, and I would be willing to do without the hotness entirely!"

"Even if that's only a pose, it's pleasant that you know what to pretend in order to appear competent.  So few people do, really."

"The literal most competent magical fighter I can think of, who teaches at all, has more grey in his beard than I, though he still has some muscle on his bone; Jaylin, Duke of the Black March.  Duke Cornilt, as is the best teacher I can think of who's also a hot young man... is probably not significantly worse of a teacher, at your starting point.  But to demand more of one thing is almost always to receive less of another."

Opalyn should probably not explain that she's much older than she looks and that older men can be pretty hot actually!

"I couldn't agree more. As I said, competence is the most important thing, so I would prefer the Duke of the Black March, if he's available."

What else should she ask for, while she has the Emperor all to herself? Surely he'll need to attend to something else soon.

"Is there anyone here at court that I should consider trusting? Or anyone to be sure not to trust?"

"That really seems like the sort of question it'd be strangling your potential to answer.  Figuring out who to trust is arguably the sort of thing you shouldn't learn until after you've figured out the fire and lightning parts of rulership, and had your heart broken by a dozen hot people."

Ahh, but Opalyn has had her heart broken by a dozen hot people, on another world. It's not the general mechanism of trust she wants to understand better, though there's probably work to do there, it's more the particulars of this court that she was asking about. Still, she can let this go. She'll get better gossip from people who are in the thick of it than the one who rides above it all.

"Fair enough, and thank you anyway."

He still doesn't seem to be leaving! Opalyn wants to milk this precious access to the Emperor for all that it's worth. Unfortunately, she didn't have a pre-cached list of Emperor Questions, so she'll just keep blurting out whatever else she can think of, quickly before he loses interest.

"Is there any magic that helps me be strong and healthy and energetic without needing to sleep very much?"

"None comes to mind that I'd recommend using.  If you're afraid of the world going out of control while you sleep, well, it also goes out of control any time you're not watching any particular part of it, take it from me.  Ultimately the only solution to that is to have competent and trustworthy subordinates, which is to say that no solution exists."

"I think I should perhaps go, now, before you start to imagine that I can be trusted.  It doesn't seem like it could possibly be good for a young lady to trust in her father."  He inclines his head courteously to her, and rises.

Sheesh, the Bleak Emperor certainly is Bleak!

"Thank you for coming!" she spits out awkwardly. "Uh, wait, will I see you again anytime soon?"

"What is soonness?  I wouldn't trust to it."

He bleakly walks away.

Pilara has no idea why she was previously barred from entering with the meal she retrieved for her new mistress.  To say that Pilara doesn't know and doesn't care wouldn't be quite right.  Pilara does not at this point feel any deep care for her mistress's potential woes, but actively prefers that Pilara's own next phase of life be more interesting.  So, yes, Pilara is privately hoping that her Lady has already been caught up in some dreadful entangling intrigue.

Outwardly, Pilara will be seen to enter shortly after the last visitor departs, expressionless as usual, escorting a maid bearing a fancy but quickly-preparable palace meal suitable for a hurried Princess.

Wonderful! Opalyn is famished.

She'll pick up the basic book on sorcery and page through it while she eats with the other hand. She realizes that this is probably not how Princesses are supposed to eat, but she's in the privacy of her quarters, and she's just going to go for it. 'Begin as you mean to go on,' as they say, and Opalyn doesn't want to set a precedent that she has excellent manners even when she's in private.

What sorts of things does she learn from the book?

Oldoria has all sorts of wonderful magic, including several more esoteric sorts of which Healthy-Orphan had no inkling, none of which will enable Opalyn to short-circuit the plot!  You can't foretell the future.  You can't read minds.  You can't resurrect the dead, at least not if they've been dead for any noticeable period of time.  You can't contact arbitrary intelligent aliens.  Nobody here has made spells act as powerful computers.

Aside from that, you can set practically anything on fire that you prefer to be on fire!

Okay, so is this sort of an elemental magic situation? There's fire and lightning, we know that much, are there also... ground and flying and water and fighting and ghost? For example?

You know what?  Sure.  So long as "ghost" doesn't let you start copying and pasting people Hansonian-ems style.  Oldoria is not actually familiar with Pokemon terminology.

So wait, seriously? Is ghost super-effective against psychic and other ghost, and weak to dark? Really? Is this what we're doing?

Suuuure.  As long as Opalyn understands that Oldoria may need to quickly look up all this shit if it ends up relevant to the plot in any way.