"I suppose that chess variations are an appropriate subject of discussion for my encyclopedia. Very well."

"I used to have a whole book of them and don't remember the ones I never got around to trying, but..." He makes up a second board and set of pieces. "It's two teams, each team a black and a white. When your partner captures a piece, you get that piece to place on your own board in any empty square you like, in place of a normal move."

"Dibs on the Chief."

Neither the Count nor Nenio contests this arrangement.

Blai sets up - no handicap, you can't really do that fairly this way - and then proceeds to have a month's worth of fun.

The idea of relegating fun to a monthly occurrence is the sort of absurd idea that only Iomedaeans could possibly see as reasonable, but he isn't actually trying to antagonize the Select at the moment.

Woljif has never actually played before; he managed to mostly figure out how the pieces move from watching the earlier games, but he's not familiar with some of the particularly obscure rules. He will endeavor not to lose pieces to the Count too quickly, and sometimes he manages to take the Count by surprise and send a piece over to Blai's board.

Nenio is very good at thinking through board states several moves in advance, but this sometimes manifests as making a move perfectly calibrated to respond to something that Blai could theoretically have been setting up for in eight turns but that leaves her vulnerable to his actual plan three moves in the future. She's also slowed down somewhat by the fact that she's taking notes on this variant while they play; over time, both the black and white pieces start to migrate to their board.

Then they will have an entertainingly crowded field with lots of easy pickings and Woljif will spend a while with two queens and three rooks.

Possibly he should have clarified how exactly the whole 'checkmate' thing works. Instead he will put his queens to use sending more of the Count's pieces over to the other board.

No, but she had a perfect plan for how to checkmate the select boy and now it's ruined!

That means it wasn't perfect!!

Nenio is sluggish enough that he can eventually tell Woljif where he should place that knight to checkmate.

Happy tail-twitch!

"Good game! What was that thing you did when you swapped your castle?"

He is perfectly willing to explain what castling is.

"How fascinating! When was that variation invented?"

"...Retreating into the castle has been part of the game since long before my childhood tutors learned to play. I don't know about this particular four-person form of the game, this is the first time I encountered it."

"The book I had claimed to be from the River Kingdoms and mentioned castling but I don't know how old the first scrivening would have been. ...It claimed they play with a more limited queen moveset in Vudra, though."

Scribble scribble. "That is valuable information for my encyclopedia! Did your book provide details about the Vudran movement rules?"

"Yes, their queen moves like so -" Demo. If they still have time to kill he will tell Nenio what else he can remember from the book that seems like her sort of fact.

Nenio is so pleased with this!

Eventually, a runner comes to tell Blai that Irabeth is ready to meet with him.

Off he goes.

Irabeth has another briefing for him!

The Desnans are in principle willing to cooperate with an arrangement wherein Prelate Shappok goes with Irabeth's team and they go with Blai's, or vice-versa, but in practice it's going to be difficult to keep the two groups apart to the necessary degree. (It also seems like it might be a wrong to the Prelate to secretly recruit the Desnans if he wouldn't willingly aid the mission if he knew.) Voyager Ramien is willing to lend his Cloak of Resistance to the endeavor, providing it is returned afterwards if possible (with the understanding that it might not be).

As a back-up plan, Ramien is willing to Dimension Door himself and two others to the chamber containing the Wardstone while the distraction team attempts to distract the demons. Irabeth is currently leaning against this plan because it seems likelier to just get everyone on the Wardstone team killed without actually accomplishing their mission, but she might have missed a way to make it more workable.

In terms of priority tasks for this afternoon: the possible succubus has not yet been dealt with. A nobleman sheltering at the Defender's Heart disclosed the location of the scroll cache within his manor and gave them permission to appropriate the scrolls (all arcane, previously intended for use by his wife, a sorceress killed during Deskari's attack) for personal use; when he left the manor it was in the process of being destroyed by demons, which may or may not still be present. They should continue to recruit interested parties for the Gray Garrison; Ramien mentioned that a Desnan wizard is currently missing, who might be willing to provide longer-duration buffs even if he doesn't come along (though Irabeth suspects he may be one of the ones currently on the run from the Inquisition).

Blai is willing to have either of Hulrun or the Desnans added to his entourage if this makes sense but he agrees that it may not; a cloak is a good thing to have; has the Storyteller been consulted about how many are likely to be needed for the Wardstone thing and how long it is likely to take? Can she describe the Desnan wizard, in case Blai saw him? Is the manor on the way to the succubus or vice-versa?

The Storyteller thinks that eliminating the corruption can plausibly be done with a single person (and an appropriate focus), but they want to account for the possibility that even if Irabeth's team is very successful at distracting the demons, some of them will still be guarding the Wardstone. He did not have a useful estimate for the duration; one of the obvious ways for their plans to fail even if everything else goes perfectly is that it turns out it will take much longer than expected, but it isn't obvious there's much they can do about that that they aren't already doing. She has a description for the Desnan wizard (it isn't anyone Blai has already met). The manor is more-or-less on the way to the last known area where the succubus was spotted.