"YOU MADE AN AGREEMENT WITH AN UNALIGNED SUPERINTELLIGENCE?!!!"

GET HER AWAY FROM THIS PERSON BOTH OF THEM NEED TO BE PUT INTO CRYO IMMEDIATELY

—except if Asmodeus has a copy of her he probably predicted this and is using her to affect dath ilan's Future.

Every employee of the Basement carries at all times a small explosive device intended to be used irrevocably destroy their brain, should they come into contact with something that could contaminate even the Future.

Sleep.

You have two and a half seconds to kill the corrupted Keeper. It takes three to cast a Sleep spell.

Too late.

She's lying on a black stone floor in the middle of a very doompunk building.

"...Most High?" an unfamiliar man says carefully, in a language she doesn't understand at all.

Oh. Right. The Isekai Theory of Immortality.

There's an obvious inference about where she just landed, which she isn't certain of yet, but if it's correct then bidirectional and possibly repeatable travel exists between dath ilan and Abrogail's world, and she needs to kill Asmodeus before He can affect dath ilan, possibly by destroying this entire world.

Her resources: she apparently looks exactly like, and possibly in some metaphysical sense is the same person as, possibly the head Keeper of this entire world WHO IS ALSO AN AGENT OF AN UNALIGNED SUPERINTELLIGENCE but that's something she'll process after she's made a plan to survive the next five minutes.

Her obstacles: she barely knows anything about the world, doesn't know how to use the local alternatephysics, and doesn't even speak the language.

Probably she just needs to remove herself from Reality, especially since Asmodeus has had access to a copy of her for an unknown length of time and has apparently gotten good enough at optimizing her that her alternate self identifies as his 'Grand High Priestess', whatever that means. She would alert Civilization first, but Asmodeus has probably optimized that as well.

—she just tried that. It appears to have just made things worse.

Not to mention she probably couldn't anyway. People in worlds with mentalmagic often have alternatephysics souls, and she isn't sure that she has one, but if she does she probably can't easily destroy it, and killing her body would just send her to an afterlife. Possibly an afterlife run by Asmodeus, which is really not a place she wants to end up.

—maybe this is Asmodeus' afterlife? She needs more evidence to discern between that and her previous hypothesis.

Okay. Strategy. She can't, actually, pretend to be her alternateself long enough for that strategy to do more expected good than harm. Nor does she expect much goodwill from the alternateselves thing—maybe if they believed her, but why would they, and impersonating someone of her alternateself's importance is probably a serious crime.

"I'm not the 'Grand High Priestess'," she says in Baseline. "I just look like her."

Tongues.

"What did they do to you?" the man asks incredulously.

Updating.

This man seems to be assuming both that she's her alternateself and that there's a reasonable excuse for her not to speak the language. She'll run with that.

"...I have no idea," she says. "What happened?"

"You got a Sending from the Queen who's apparently trapped in some undiscovered plane and immediately Gated off to rescue her. A minute later you showed up here, no Queen. What the Abyss* are you wearing, by the way?"

*Both dath ilan and Cheliax do not use 'hell' as a swear word, but for very different reasons.

THE GRAND HIGH PRIESTESS OF ASMODEUS IS IN DATH ILAN RIGHT NOW?!!

Okay. This does have any advantages. She probably won't show up and ruin her deception, and she can blame her total lack of memory on dath ilan.

(Hopefully Civilization just puts her alternateself in cryo immediately, but)

"I was there much longer than a minute, I think," she says. "The Queen is still there, as far as I know. She claims she's going to conquer the whole plane, which I don't doubt, in Asmodeus' service, which I do. They were really paranoid about gods. They tried to wipe my memory to stop Asmodeus from influencing their world—they're insufferably Good, so they wouldn't just kill me.

"So I don't, uh, actually remember anything about this world or Asmodeus, except that He exists and I serve him."

The Grand High Priestess is asking him for theological instruction?

This is a test, right?

He'll suffer for refusing it, but not nearly as badly as for failing it.

"Most High," he says, "I am certainly not qualified to remind you the ways of our Lord; let me find you someone more suitable."

"Wait. What?"

"It's the Most High, I swear to Pharasma," the junior cleric says. "She Gated off to some literally godsforsaken new plane to rescue Her Majestrix and came back not even speaking Taldane."

"Did you consider," says Jacint Subirachs icily, "that she might be an impostor, and not even a particularly good one?"

He had not.

(—he's not ready for Hell he's not ready for Hell please don't send him to Hell—)

True Seeing.

She's not magically disguised.

"You'll suffer for that mistake," she tells the junior cleric, "but not nearly as badly as you would have if it had meant something.

"I'll take it from here."

"I understand, High Priestess," he tells Subirachs, and gets out of there as quickly as possible.

"Do you still have your cleric circles from Asmodeus?" she asks Athpechya.

"I don't think so?" she says, sounding uncertain. "I'm actually not entirely sure what a 'cleric' is."

This is going to be a long day.

She explains the basics of divine magic to the Grand High Priestess.

"You should pray to Asmodeus and try to get your circles back," she says. "In fact I insist. It's possible you're not meaningfully the same person who went to the other plane, and if our Lord doesn't recognize you, neither does His Church."