Hell is truth seen too late.
- Thomas Hobbes
Cheaper than raising her from the fucking dead. Carissa assumes nothing's showing up to Detect Thoughts through all these trials?
...apparently nobody's performed a Detect Thoughts which this Security thought the last Security would have thought to do.
Asmodia doesn't have any visible thoughts, her Intelligence still detects as 17 but - possibly it's a weird 17? The feeling is not particularly describable.
Still go on dragonforming her?
"What's the worst that can happen," says Carissa, which she thinks means it'll go fine unless tropes are real.
- and then suddenly Asmodia is a dragon!
The shock of this is, in fact, considerable, such that she would have fallen over in a tangle of limbs if she hadn't already been lying down.
Her forelimbs flail out and strike mainly sand, and her wings try to flex but she's lying on one of them which is uncomfortable. She does have any instincts for her new body, but it's a struggle to override her conscious mind’s attempt to override those.
Somebody shouts “She’s aware!”
Wow if Carissa had considered that likely to work she would have put more thought into what to say next.
"....report."
She does soon manage to struggle to all four of her limbs and look down on Sevar and the Security, who do look noticeably smaller when you are an eighteen-foot-long red dragon with a thirty-foot wingspan and a seven-foot neck rising above a five-foot-high body.
It takes several tries to talk.
"I seem to be a dragon now," rumbles Asmodia. “I do not know why this would be the case.”
"You collapsed suddenly in my office and have been nonresponsive for several hours. We Polymorphed you into a dragon to try to get you back. Do you know why you collapsed - did you get a vision -"
“The last thing I remember is thinking that my new job was completely impossible, and our newly constructed universe was going to end up internally inconsistent and inevitably fall apart, and that if any of the gods running around wanted me to succeed at that they needed to give me an additional 20 points of Intelligence.”
" - that's a possible Wish-tier divine intervention and an urgent report to the Grand High Priestess," says Carissa who is keeping a calm voice but it hardly matters when you're using it to say words like that. "Do you have - the slightest sense which god -"
"No... except that I... feel weirdly like... my job is possible after all? I just have to accept that my boss is going to ignore all my reports, and everybody else is going to run around making my life harder, and all I can actually do is triage my universe's possible, probable, and definite inconsistencies and try to keep it all going for as long as I can until it inevitably falls over because nobody ever listens to me, but I can definitely do that for a while, so long as I just keep trying and never rise above a state of continual low-grade panic."
"Am I actually a dragon now? Keltham will have questions about this."
"It's a Greater Polymorph. Wears off in thirteen minutes or you can turn back right now if you want. ....put what she just said in the report to the Grand High Priestess."
Asmodia cranes her neck around. It's kind of a nice sunny day on the beach and she is a dragon and... even though she has an enormous backlog of work to do, which is no doubt even larger now that her coworkers have spent several hours unsupervised... Asmodia still feels an odd sense that she has never actually been religious enough to experience before, that the world is kind of neat and somebody put in a bunch of work to maintain it for her, and that flying around as a dragon would be one way of appreciating it.
"...you did just tell me to take a break. I'll possibly try flying around and maybe test out my breath weapon, targeted at the ocean obviously, if that's okay with you and Security. Somebody yell at me to get to ground before my thirteen minutes are up?"
"Someone make her invisible and tell her when her time is up."
Carissa needs to go inside and consult a list of all the gods she's allowed to know about and try to figure out who did this and what they want.
"Oh, and if I fall over when I turn back - try a Fox's Cunning, would be my guess?"
Asmodia is - not totally sure, thinking back - that there wasn't an almost infinitesimal fraction of a moment there when she did have an additional 20 points of Intelligence before, obviously, you would think this would be obvious to anyone who qualified for 'god' in the first place, her brain completely crashed.
WHICH GOD WOULD DO THAT COMPLETELY USELESS AND DANGEROUS THING? What was the point? Was it to tell Asmodia to be careful what to wish for? Why would a god spend intervention budget on that? Why not make Asmodia an achievable amount of smarter? Do literally any of the gods have a plan where they achieve their goals by doing things that make sense.
Asmodia will wait to be made invisible, and then try to turn off her conscious mind well enough to fly.
It's a lovely afternoon at the beach, and you are an appreciative dragon.
...that's probably Otolmens??? And, if it is, that's among the most disturbing pieces of theological news that Aspexia Rugatonn has ever come across.
After some reflection, the Most High classifies the entire affair at the level where only her successor gets to know the probable real story, and writes back to Sevar (for the evening packet back) that she thinks she knows which god that is, and Sevar need not inquire further.
Carissa gets this response from the Grand High Priestess.
Right. Okay.
Carissa would ALSO like to be twenty points more intelligent and grasp the entire universe and see every lie in it and shape it all towards perfection.
Asmodia steps back from the large wall in the room she commandeered as Project Lawful's secret meeting place for backstories, and exhales with a weird feeling of grim satisfaction.
Everything Keltham knows that's true across both realCheliax and alterCheliax and that's believed to be fine, is written in green; Asmodia obviously can't write everything like this, but she's summarized some major areas to keep in mind.
Everything that's true in alterCheliax but not realCheliax, is written in orange. Glimpse of Truth is Glimpse of Beyond, Pilar has an obligate rape fetish, Asmodeus is a great deal more benevolent.
Everything they've told Keltham that seems potentially dangerous or problematic, and doesn't have a known recovery or excuse that makes total sense, is written in red. This includes matters like Security wizards being paid 500gp/week, or 'Why doesn't Asmodeus count as Lawful Good?', or 'Why did Asmodia really get her new headband?', or 'Wait there's how many alterPilars per Subirachs and you're not doing anything else with them?' Similarly with old memories that Keltham might reexamine and find problematic even if he's not looking there right now; such as the previous history of less confident Project Lawful students going quiet when Keltham says potentially fraught things in class.
In black are the known inconsistencies, the cracks and flaws in their universe, where all they can do is hope that Keltham never looks in that wrong direction. At present there's a single entry, which is that they're hoping Keltham isn't tracking the phase of the moon, or the progress of time of moonrise/moonset.
Asmodia considered writing the name of everybody responsible for a red item or a black item next to those items, but ran into a snag when the only black item would have Abrogail Thrune's name written next to it. Hopefully the message is plain enough regardless. This is still Cheliax.
(It's not actually possible for Asmodia to have finished reading all her transcripts and sorted everything out this neatly, in the amount of time she had to work since ceasing to be a dragon. But so long as nobody notices this and complains, including Asmodia herself, it will hopefully be okay? There's a lot of stuff in Golarion like that, and one more hardly makes a difference at this point.)
Carissa noticed, but she doesn't really know how long it takes to do that kind of project, if you're very wise and very, very, very obsessive. "Good, Asmodia. Let's take a few hours to think about good excuses for the things in red. What do you think about asking for some Control Weather so it's rainy the next couple evenings, interfering with efforts to track moon phases."