It's so pretty.

Opalyn realizes they can torture people even in pretty castles, but come on, this really looks much more like "all of your little-girl dreams are just about to come true" than like "we're going to extract your fingernails and then grow them back again over and over."

Possibly these other castles now passing within visual range, that are not your destination, will recalibrate your concept of pretty space castles that would be all your little-girl dreams come true!

If, you know, they were the castles you were heading for, instead of that other one.

Opalyn has never seriously coveted a castle before. She thought they were neat at the same age she thought princesses and unicorns and fairies were neat, but as an adult she thought more of the overhead of maintaining such a thing. Previously she would have said that anything more than a mansion was vastly overdoing it.

But apparently pretty castles are very achievable here, and if it turns out that castles magically clean themselves and replace their own broken chandelier bulbs, she has a new potential life goal.

Her golden-prison bubble approaches the massive castle of steel unidentified silvery metal, and settles down on a landing pad.

There's some new friends waiting there to meet her!

These guys seem extremely ominous! They do not appear to have faces! This would be terrifying if Opalyn were allowing herself to feel terrified right now!

Opalyn wonders if they have bodies at all, and if not, why they bother to have armor or even human form.

Their helmets look a little bit like children's birthday party hats and Opalyn has to stifle a strained choke-giggle. It is probably unwise to giggle right now.

"We are your new friends.  Now you will come with us and engage in friendship activities."

(The Party-Hat Guards do not actually say this.)

Instead the leader speaks in an even, calming tone.  "Your magic will remain disabled for a time.  There is no point in feeling strongly about it."

The one behind his left hand speaks.  "We are stronger than you without magic.  There is no point in fighting us."

And the third.  "If you have been falsely accused, you may report it to the Deputy Headstomper of the Farm, to whom you now go for your intake interview."

"Your behavior with us now will reflect upon your future there," finishes the leader.

(Their voices sound distinct, all probably male, differently accented from Orphan's home planet and possibly from each other but all clearly understandable.)

The Party-Hat Guards then begin to approach the golden prison-sphere.

Headstomper?

Opalyn gets an appalling visual of someone in the same Party-Hat Guard garb whose job it is to curbstomp people and she recoils internally, but maintains her composure.

She can't make sense of the bit about the Farm, and feels vaguely insulted that she's only meeting with the Deputy.

"Accused? Of what exactly?"

"That is not our job to know.  Whoever sent you here will have included an entrance document explaining why they sent you here and why we ought to reward them for that.  The questioner will not believe all you say, and he also will not believe everything he reads."

The Party-Hat Guards open a gate set into the golden prison-sphere--though it's not obvious, among all the ornamentation, what was lock or hinge--and start uncoupling Opalyn's chains from the bars, though she's still wearing the cuffs and it's still sending that little trickle of interfering power through her.

Opalyn can't see that she has any viable moves here; anything she tries is likely to be met with force and leave her in a worse state.

"I have to urinate," she announces. It's only kind of true, but she wants to find out how they'll handle it. Will they accommodate this reasonable request? Will they take advantage of the opportunity to humiliate her or cause her physical and psychological discomfort?

"Then you will need to do so under our supervision."

They take her chains and move, at a pace she can follow despite those chains, into the dark silvery halls.

(Also, Opalyn is now recollecting of Orphan how to use sorcery to not need to urinate, but she in fact can't do that part right now.)

This is a mild positive update, assuming they now conduct her to a suitable place and do not leer at her or otherwise make it weird. Perhaps she is going to be treated with at least some dignity.

Also, there's magic for not needing to pee? This is even better than rainbow-spangled space castles.

They trod down silvery halls, and before long swerve to go through a force-screened archway into a clean silvery-metal room with a silvery-metal trench running through the floor.  It doesn't smell like anything, either urine or other scents to cover urine.

They move her over the trench.  One of the Party-Hat Guards reaches down below her waist, and taps her dress and underthings a couple of millimeters out of the way along a nonstandard spatial direction.

This is incredibly civilized, actually, under the circumstances?

Opalyn pees. This is Opalyn's "ahhh, that feels better" face.

Opalyn does not particularly feel modest about it; everybody pees. Except maybe unhobbled sorceresses and faceless bladderless people, but whatever.

The upcoming intake interview with the Deputy (hmph) Headstomper of the Farm is going to go much better with an empty tank.

Can Opalyn search her memories for more information about non-standard dimensions, because she keeps running into those. Can she store arbitrary amounts of stuff there and get it back whenever? Presumably time keeps flowing, so she can't just start some magical or chemical process and then effectively put it into stasis by shifting it over, but worth checking. Can she shift herself into other dimensions and thus creep around unseen and undetected and then pop back out? Can other people do that to her? Obviously none of this works at the moment with the cuffs on, looking for general precepts here.

Orphan's memories:  There was a wizard book she stole about this.  It had NUMBERS.

...possibly these numbers were literally just the generalization of Euclidean distance to N dimensions, but Orphan had stopped reading at that point.  Her sorcerous practice regarding this general idiom was "keep my spells inside the standard three dimensions and shield against anything that tries to come at me from outside it".

The Party-Hat Guards restore Opalyn's clothing to the normal three dimensions, and march her down more hallways, through another shielded archway, and into the office of somebody who looks like an incredibly fed-up magical bureaucrat in a comfy cushioned ergonomic throne.  Before him is a desk which betokens that this man has been given an amount of paperwork substantially and systematically greater than the amount of paperwork he can actually do.

His eyes narrow as soon as he sees Opalyn, brought forth in chains.  "Is there anything about your case that is the least bit complicated?" he says.

Opalyn recognizes this guy. Not this guy specifically but his function in a bureaucracy. Her case is complicated -- isekai! -- but if she says that flat out, she risks getting put in cold storage indefinitely while he attends to more straightforward tasks for the rest of eternity. She's only going to get a couple of sentences to make her case.

"I suspect we can find an efficient way through. In my previous life, I specialized in cutting to the heart of the matter and finding solutions that actually work. What makes this go fast for you without making it go horribly for me?"

"Sounds complicated.  Send her to the Assistant Deputy Headstomper."

The Party-Hat Guards hustle Opalyn out of the room without particularly giving her a chance to reply.

Well, shit. That could theoretically have gone better, but she has the impression it was a rigged game. Even if she'd said "No, I'm not complicated" that could easily have translated to "I plead guilty, send me to the Sorceress Magic Extraction Factory for the next fifty years." The fact is, her case is complicated.

Let's see what the Assistant Deputy Headstomper has to say for themselves.

It should possibly be mentioned at this point that Opalyn's memories suggest that powerful sorcerers can live for a long time.  The Dread Emperor, most obviously, but also Duke Greendeath supposedly hasn't been replaced in a while.

This comes up because the level of paperwork in this office has gone utterly and completely out of control, and some of it looks like it might be quite old.

The guy at this desk looks up as she's brought into the room, and not at all with a happy expression.  "Are you complicated?" he barks at her.

This is the same as before except even more rigged. Opalyn suspects that the only possible outcome of the next exchange is to get sent to a third sad bureaucrat who is actually already dead, having suffocated under a heap of paper, take his job, and work her way up from there. IF she manages not to get sent to space sorceress labor camp by this guy. She tries another tack.

"Do you want me to be complicated?" she asks seductively. She tugs at the top of her dress with one hand, not enough to reveal anything, but enough to make her suggestion obvious.

She does not especially expect this to work, but the way it doesn't work will be informative.

"DO I LOOK LIKE I HAVE TIME!?  Send her to the Deputy Assistant Deputy Headstomper."

"Is this going to take longer than literally three-quarters of a minute?"

If this universe supports more than three levels of recursion, Opalyn is going to be pissed.

"Yes, getting you out from under all of that paper will take more than three quarters of a minute, but we can probably make headway in under an hour. Let's get started."

Opalyn would start physically shoveling paper with her hands, except that she's still cuffed, but she tries to project an air of cheerful competence.

One of her guards laughs and is promptly hit upside the head by the guard leader.