"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."

"How do I do that?"

"Clear your head of other thoughts and contemplate your alignment with our Lord's domains—tyranny, slavery, pride, and compacts, if you've forgotten those too, though I believe you'd unified them into a single overarching concept you called 'corrigibility'."

Oh.

Oh.

That's not, actually, how corrigibility works.

You design your superintelligence to be corrigible to you.

You don't try to be corrigible to your superintelligence.

That doesn't make any sense, even if you're completely amoral.

It's an interesting sort of symmetry to the story, though, and when she thinks about it she realizes that she has made herself corrigible. Her natural utilityfunction was a muddled and antisocial mess, so she long ago deleted it and replaced it with 'serve Civilization'.

Which is what she's going to do.

IF THERE ARE ANY CONCEPTUALMAGIC-SUPERINTELLIGENCES VERIFIABLY ALIGNED WITH CIVILIZATION'S VALUES WHO WANT TO HELP ME DESTROY ASMODEUS—

Hey Nethys, want to spot me a whole bunch of cleric levels? I predict the result will be worth it by your utilityfunction.

Deal.

She's falling, falling—

And she's standing on a snowy plain facing an olive-skinned woman in primitive metal body armor.

"Hey.

"You're not actually Aspexia Rugatonn, are you?"