Thursday evening it is, tentatively, at 8:00 pm. I'll put up a Zoom meeting link when the time comes, and I anticipate it lasting somewhere between ten minutes (for Istefan) and an hour (for new players). You don't have to learn many of the game mechanics or you don't have to buy any books (although if you enjoy D&D, you should eventually get yourself a hard copy of the 5th Edition Player's Handbook).
Nick, the one-shot is the actual game -- it will actually probably be two or three sessions, but it's just going to be this short adventure rather than a sustained campaign. I don't want to commit to something large-scale with (a) people I've never played with before and (b) only 36 days to go for a rather big project of mine. I'll be happy to support your bid for citizenship in terms of the extraTalossan contact, though, since I think it's pretty clear you're just a bit of a troll sometimes and you have no plans to actually try to hurt the country in some sort of antidemocratic way.