"Does your flight have trouble with any ordinary amount of wind at all?"

"Only if it suddenly changes directions."

Sophie can and will keep discussing the weather indefinitely.

Eventually he will have to beg off for his other scheduled pastimes of the day.

Unfortunate considering how fun he is to talk to.

The next scheduled activity is dance lessons since the opening ball of the season will be during the evening.

Dance lessons are good but he's got a bit of alone time deficit he should introvert about between the lesson and the ball if he can squeeze that in.

He's doing well enough at his dance lessons that it wouldn't actually be an issue if they end early this time.

Good, then he'll emerge for the ball in an equable mood.

The ball is a much more elaborate affair than the prior events. Upon arrival, Haru is directed to a large ballroom with the attendees who are neither debutantes to be presented nor their mothers. The room has light refreshments being brought around by waiters as the men and other attendees of the ball wait for the event to commence.

Haru partakes of refreshments and listens around for a tolerable conversation.

These two men are discussing the construction of an opera house - one seems enthuastistic about the opportunities for specific operas he enjoys to be staged so close, and the other seems to mostly want to talk about the financing of the construction.

This woman is having confident and somewhat humours opinions about the crop of debutantes (lacking in people with interesting family histories, with the exception of Miss Hornfellow and Miss Oakhill who are both trying far too hard to fit in to be interesting), the season's fashion (so many men have ugly hands and those should be kept hidden by gloves which are for some reason not for men this season!), and the appetizers (sad, acceptable, bad, and terrible respectively of the four she's sampled - each pronounced immediately after taking a bite).

God but people are tedious when they aren't instead the placebos for his magical brain damage. What's English opera like, pray tell.

Most of the operas the man is mentioning are italian and feature love triangles and dramatic speeches from towers.

Anything familiar or has the timeline change completely displaced opera he's heard of?

One of them does have a name and many plot elements in common with one he's heard of.

Well, he's not going to let on he's familiar, he doesn't want to explain how it made it to Narnia, but it's nice that some things are the same.

Eventually, someone announces that all should rise for the king, and the ballroom gets mostly quiet as the king comes out and sits on a rather plain-looking throne. Each debutante is then brought in and presented to the king, with a man reading off their names and titles before they curtsy, the king nodding after each, dismissing them. Most members of the ballroom watch the debutantes do this, whispering amongst themselves about their suitability for matches.

God, these poor girls. Haru had never before considered how load-bearing it was to the relatively low rancidity of the dating market that people could just be permitted to fail at pairing off. Someone in this society is the worst human being on Eighteenth Century OK Cupid and someone still has to marry them.

Lucette is accompanied by a distant cousin rather than her own mother. She dips in an appropriate courtesy, having practiced exhaustively given the stakes.

He should ask Lucette later if there is a technical reason gay marriage wouldn't work. She could marry Lady Brynd and they could talk about the weather and not have any children slated for routine torture.

Unfortunately, nothing so far indicates anything not strictly heterosexual as an option. After the presentation, the debutantes are free to mingle, each holding a dance card for men to fill out to reserve one of the ten dances that will be occurring later in the evening. Lucette has hers signed by three different men by the time she makes her way over to Haru.

"Hello there. Shall I take one or two of those?"

"Two would look presumptuous coming from an unempowered, but I would be grateful for you to take one."

He signs his name next to the fifth dance.

"I also have opinions on other people you should dance with, for political reasons, if you are up to navigating such interactions."