"Then take her place."

Blai goes and sits there, presuming she'll get out of the way.

The woman announces something rapidly in a foreign language, then takes the child by the hand and all but runs away while the crowd jeers.

And Khazer takes the black side of the other board.

"We accept this championship. Who will play?"

After some cajoling and mild threats are exchanged, Blai's opponent turns out to be an amorphous mass of violet ooze. The fourth player looks distinctly more demonic: a hulking, bat-winged figure with curled horns and a strange gait and sparks dripping from its jaws. It daintily adjusts the position of a few of its pieces before kneeling on the other side of the slab.

...in case it is hazardous to pick up pieces an ooze has touched, Blai is going to play with his right glove on.

"Building 12 in exchange for 267."

 "Is 267 that one?" the demon asks, pointing to the flaming building in the distance.

"Yes."

 "12 and its public access point."

"Acceptable. The game is bughouse chess, the time controls… ten minutes, five second increments?"

 "I don't care."

Khazer glances over at Blai and the ooze, in case either of them care about the time control.

"- how is the time represented?" He doesn't see a sandglass but maybe somebody has one up their sleeve.

"Ten plus five."

The surface of the slab lights up with four large circles, one next to each player. The circumference is marked with hundreds of small notches, ten of them larger than the rest.

"The clocks will start once white makes the first move and increment each time you let go of the piece on your turn."

Wow fancy. He's white but should probably also move when the white-playing demon does.

"Let's all have fun and play together," the demon remarks, and plays d4. All four clocks start simultaneously.

Blai also advances d4.

He loves chess. It can fill up his head more completely than anything except being tortured, and it's way better than being tortured. At any moment his mind is casting left and right for stupid things to worry about. So far he has worried about getting mud on the floor of the bathroom to which he was summoned, the expiration of his Guidance (he can feel it pop against the challenge of the chess game, so that's at least no longer a concern), whether it is rude to stare at air elementals, whether it is rude to stare at demons, whether it is rude to put on only one glove and not the other, whether it's rude to put on any hand protection at all lest he imply (correctly) that he would rather not touch purple ooze goo, whether he is maybe technically Called here and not just summoned and will be really dead if the demons eat him (later revised to "eat him, for losing at chess"), if the translation magic is working correctly (on four separate occasions), whether he is breathing too loudly, whether the building on fire is going to spread, whether the archmages will notice if he is on summon for long enough to be very late to the convention and what they could possibly do about that if they were, whether it will turn out that he will make an illegal move by being used to Crusading Queen movesets instead of the Vudran kind or some even weirder disconnect (and whether demons will eat him for that), and whether it was a terrible faux pas in this universe to offer to hit the civilized chess-playing demons with his mace.

Now he is worrying about chess, and only that. A fast game is ideal; a double game is even better. His brain looks for something to worry about, and there are so many: the threatening knight, the captured pawn waiting to be dropped into check, the bishop's angle of attack, the center squares, all those same things on the other board, whether he can pass his summoner a knight any time soon, all those same things again a few turns later when the board state is new and the worries are all fresh and perfectly absorbing again. He can be full of chess and nothing but chess and he can make every move in the time allowed and he can pass the elemental a pawn in time to save that rook and none of it hurts.

The angel and the demon play fast and aggressive, pausing only to wait for opportune captures on the other board. They're as good at chess as anyone Blai's ever met, although neither of them talk very much even when it would likely be advantageous to give their partner a heads-up.

The ooze struggles to keep up. It's clearly familiar with how to play chess normally, but its textbook defensive opening strategy is undermined by Blai's ability to drop new pieces on the board at leisure. It leaves no fewer than three pawns hanging by move ten, and on move twenty-five it slides its queen to a square vulnerable to an absolute pin from a redeployed bishop, a mistake that will almost certainly lose them the game.

(It does leave a thin film of purple residue on the pieces, slippery on the wood but not sticky enough to adhere to his gloves.)

He is so glad he put a glove on. Bishop!

The only thing better than one queen is two queens. The instant the black queen is off the board a cloud of silvery mist jerks it out of Blai's hand and slams it down on h6 hard enough to rattle the board, complementing a nasty attack on the queenside castle white has built up for himself. It's not checkmate but it will be soon.

This position is completely untenable, so the demon is going to take the only remaining option and give up. Their game has close to nine minutes left on the clock, which means he can simply stop playing and hope the ooze manages to eke out a draw.

Blai can beat this ooze.

The moment the game ends, Khazer offers the demon a handshake – except it doesn't have hands and the demon's digits are configured backwards, so this amounts to briefly waving their arms in synchrony – and immediately takes off in flight towards the burning building.

There is some polite clapping from the remaining demihumans in the audience, but the rest of them have found better things to do with their time and left several minutes ago.

"Damn," the demon says succinctly, sitting back on its haunches.

The ooze extends a single thin tendril in Blai's general direction.

Is this customary?? He will shake it with the gloved hand. And then since he seems to still be summoned he will follow his summoner.

The ooze manages a passable handshake before it subsides into a noxious puddle and glides away. The remaining demihumans pack up the game equipment, culminating in two men hoisting the stone slab effortlessly onto their shoulders and shuffling down the street with it.

The other demon follows Blai. He stands twice the height of a normal man and has the stride to match, forcing him to take exaggerated slow steps to keep pace. Anyone else that might've shown interested in the human is dissuaded from joining.

"How did Khazer pay you?" he asks without preamble.

"That is certainly a question," says Blai blandly.

"You're new here," the demon continues, "and you weren't altruistically defending any of these rotting carcasses yesterday."

One of the men carrying the slab shouts something at the demon, an angry comment that goes ignored.

"Gold and trinkets for services rendered? Or did someone lose a bet, and now he's holding your leash?"

"I see you have made some guesses."

A gale blows in unannounced. Above the distant building, a solitary black cumulus cloud has begun to rain over a suspiciously narrow ground area, hard enough to smother fire and pull smoke out of the sky.

"What does an angel think is equivalent in value to a human?" the demon asks philosophically.

He leaves without answering his own question.