1) Please confrim that characters' stance meters begin an encounter at Neutral. The rules imply this to be the case, but never explicitly state it. The "Managing Stances" example on p.47 does state "The activation token begins play on the neutral stance piece..." I assume this means it starts at Neutral every encounter. That's further justified by Rally steps moving stances one step closer to Neutral, from which I infer that a character settles down when the action is completely over.
2) What, exactly, is an Initiative Check? The first sentence in the right column on p.55 states "At the beginning of an encounter, each participant makes an initiative check." Specifically, is this a Simple (0d) Agility/Fellowship check? The few examples seem to imply that Initiave checks are standard checks (not opposed) and they never mention challenge dice, I assume because nothing is really hindering the character's initial awareness/reaction. If there were good or bad influences, those would be reflected by adding fortune or misfortune dice.
Additionally, if I am correct that stance meters begin the encounter at Neutral, the only dice rolled are Characteristic dice (and the fortune die for the Agility characteristic, if upgraded.) Characters can't convert any dice to stance dice since they are all in a neutral stance.* Additionally, they can't spend fortune points to help the Initiative Check since fortune points can only be spent on action checks, not skill checks (p.14.)
*However, if a character chooses to reroll Initiative during a Rally Step, they would convert characteristic dice to stance dice based on their stance meter.
Beyond GM fiat, which is encouraged an easy enough to do, are these the correct default interpretations?