Carissa keeps pace.
It....seems likely that she is being reprimanded? If she had been proactive, and sought out the senior cleric stationed here, then Asmodeus could have delivered whatever instruction He intended -
- except, He could do that anyway, right -
- well, He said to seek it out proactively, and she hasn't done that yet, so if it's a test she failed, which is terrifying, except also, it has been less than an hour, and she spent the entire time reflecting on what questions she was going to ask so as to do the job properly! She's not complaining (even internally) that it is unfair, for her to have failed the test; the test is whether she's useful or not, and there's no fairness in that. No one shopping at the market and picking over vegetables, leaving out the bruised ones, worry that those ones aren't getting a fair shot. But it seems like the test isn't necessarily discriminating very well, if spending an hour thinking through what you're going to ask before asking is failing it.
So possibly she is - not being reprimanded? Evidence for this theory: she isn't in even a little bit of pain! Possibly she is just being - because it's very unlikely that the offer to walk with Aspexia Rugatonn was extended without specific intent - reminded of what it means, to be raised high in this world by Asmodeus; reminded of what she has been offered, if she is good enough.
And possibly she is being evaluated. Actually, that shouldn't have come to mind third. Asmodeus bothered with her; this is confusing; possibly it is confusing even to Aspexia Rugatonn, and she wants to know whether it is some specific feature of Carissa as a person which prompted the offer or whether it was, effectively, offered to the girl who got in with Keltham fastest, on the assumption all of them would be minimally competent from there - that doesn't quite fit, but she doesn't have a better theory to replace it with -
- well, if it was something specific about Carissa, the only thing she can think of - the only thing that felt like a thought pattern no one else in Cheliax had thought before - was the question she was puzzling over during Keltham's lesson, about how to reconcile dath ilan's teachings of law and chaos and heredity and humans having been copied rather than created and what free will is. Her going interpretation, she thinks vaguely, of Asmodeus's message, was that she was being too Lawful Neutral; she was going to reconstruct it all and arrive at the wrong place. She is grateful for the warning, and intends to take it to heart, and won't try again until she's better at Evil. But presumably Asmodeus wouldn't have said anything just to save her from becoming a heretic and dying of it, so it must be important, in some way outside her; maybe, if she gets it right, she can convince Keltham. That's probably her top guess, if she had to name one. (What's confusing about it, what's the strongest argument against it.... well, if a really good theologian was projected to succeed at convincing Keltham, they'd have gotten a theologian in to do it, that's a little confusing.)