Eriape isn't very good at illusions, but she loves polymorphs. That baleful polymorph- does that use shadow substance, and actually change the shape of things into badger form, or is it purely a mental transformation into a badger? and if it uses shadow substance, does it actually compress the target somehow? If it changes what people look like, she's definitely interested. 

It does, at least if their fortitude isn’t high enough! That was the tricky part; he was able to borrow a lot of the diagraming work for shadow transmutation for the rest of it, but this part is entirely original work. His initial goal had been to make the entire thing merely will defended, she can see some of the architecture leading up to it here, but his efforts to get it to play right with the real polymorphing had ballooned so much he wasn’t even sure he could fit it in a 7th circle slot and he had to cut back his ambition a bit. It’s still primarily defended by willpower, though, and the range of possible targets is a lot larger than normal baleful polymorph.

Perfect! She's known quite a few martial types that would have made better badgers than men. He knows about the modification you can do to regular [Baleful Polymorph] to be able to choose if people keep their intelligence, right? 

He hasn’t. (There’s not much need for it when you can use grand polymorph, but Nestoras Crysanthou is only 6th circle). It’s not immediately clear to him how you could adapt it to his version, since the bit that tricks them into thinking they’re the target creature is a precondition for the shadow transmutation to trigger successfully, but maybe if they were a willing target you could tweak the matrix here…

At this point the other people are kind of getting bored of wizard gibberish, and a bit cold, so they go back inside.