When she was twenty years old, and running out of excuses to not have a husband that wouldn't be suspicious and draw her attention she didn't want, Alicia set about the difficult task of subtly sounding out her agemates for someone not so evil she couldn't tolerate them and not so obvious they would get her caught, without picking a match too far outside of her social standing in either direction. There she might have finalized her pick and settled down, but instead the four day war came to Cheliax, and all of a sudden it wasn't illegal to be a cleric of Shelyn. She cast aside her secrecy and began to offer a public channel and her cures every day, and citizens looking to prove their loyalty to the new regime flocked to her congregation. Repurposing the Asmodean church was hopeless, but she was able to get her hands on one a building that belonged to the local government and would be easier to work with - getting the proper aesthetics was something Shelynites were well suited for, and all the more so when she was able to test each design with illusions before painting them. This, she was confident, was her purpose in life - she was able to be herself without lies, and only a few people tried to kill her for it. She wrote letters to the her coreligionists overseas, asking for advice and getting her own copy of Melodies of Inner Beauty. 

Getting these letters from Cheliax was a very pleasant surprise! Their goddess didn't often pick clerics in the grasp of Hell - such infiltration work was primarily reserved for Nidal, and her ongoing efforts to save it and its people. Alicia was well spoken, and while her catechesis was poor, she had enough of the spirit to charm people and what else could you expect from someone who lived as a secret cleric without any teaching?

Eventually it rose to the level of meriting a commune, though, and then their assumptions were overturned. According to the goddess, Alicia was not in fact a cleric of hers at all, nor of any other good god.

Even once the war was over and they weren't a proscribed church, not that many members of Shelyn's church moved to Cheliax. Unlike in Andoran's revolution there wasn't a desperate struggle against evil that they could support from behind, and there wasn't a hierarchy of the sort that could decide that this was their biggest priority and order some of their clerics to go help out like Iomedae's did. When clerics trickled in to the various Chelish cities, they did so piecemeal, of their own initiative, and the one that got off a boat and set off to Halmyris was no exception. He wasn't the one that had made the commune, but he was friends with the cleric that did, and he wasn't exactly a fan of Asmodeans impersonating the eternal maiden's church to deceive their fellows. He brought with him his usual adventuring party, and they snuck into the city to get the lay of the land on what kind of cult had been set up before they took action. 

To his surprise, for all intents and purposes it seemed exactly as had been described in the letters. An unorthodox but mostly genuine retelling of Shelyn's theology, lots of singing and artwork, and a free daily channel for anyone suffering from injuries supplemented by cure spells as needed. It's the second one that gives it away in the end - while he can't explain the channels, the party's wizard recognizes the song she uses when she's helping people learn to do art as that of a song sorcerer. In the end, they openly confront the girl and explain the situation - he's not about to let her continue the deception now that he's here to do something about it, but it doesn't seem to be dangerous enough to merit force.

And so it was that for the second time, Alicia gets the privilege of experiencing her life fall apart before her eyes. The Shelynite (the real Shelynite, not someone like her who deluded herself into thinking a goddess would choose her) explains her error, but is at least kind enough to stick around and take over from her while she acts as a lay priest. Perhaps if she does well enough, eventually the goddess will choose her in truth, but she buries this pathetic desire under her flawless mask and simply does what she can to live up to her claims.

In a sense, it's a relief when the calls for an election come out. She's not a real cleric and thus doesn't get the automatic invitation supplied to the clergy of good gods, but she is still popular and eligible for election. Unlike most of the town's terrified notables, she has relatively little to fear from coming to the attention to the new regime for her acts - even her own impersonation had been forgiven by those she impersonated, and by now she was strong enough to weakly detect as neutral good. As much as the desire to shield those who feared the summons, however, is a desire to get some distance from her shame - if she's in Westcrown helping with the constitution, nobody has any reason to know her as something other than a neutral good sorceress who reveres the Eternal Rose.