Just about strictly better than Preston Fairmont's investigator card in a Preston Fairmont deck. You get +1 to every skill, lose his passive drawback but keep Family Inheritance, gain a response trigger that combos well with a fair amount of Preston builds, and the Elder Sign ability is very slightly better (though it does lose the automatic success possibility for very high difficulty checks, +2 should cover most checks anyway). 10/10 would recommend being stuck in the City of the Great Race again.

As investigators work differently they can be handled differently.

• Duke is in the deck, not in play.
• Preston's permanent is in play.
• Joe has an unusable hunch deck and Diana has Dark Insight in her hand as those are deckbuilding requirements.
• Sefina draws 13 cards and Lola chooses a role.

I've asked specifically about Sefina for this and the official answer is here:

Generally speaking, unless otherwise noted, scenario setup occurs during step 10 of setup (see: “Appendix III: Setting Up the Game” in the Rules Reference), whereas Sefina’s ability triggers when you would draw your opening hand, which happens in step 8. There are a few steps specifically in City of Archives that occur before this step (such as removing unique items and Alejandro), but everything else in the setup happens at the normal timing, during step 10. This means that Sefina will have already triggered her ability to draw 13 cards, place 5 events beneath her, etc. (This is why the Body of a Yithian rules explicitly say that cards that were placed beneath your investigator are placed beneath Body of a Yithian!)