"I am certain that two more rounds of bughouse chess are currently pending, but the true number is more likely five or six. It will take more games than that to repel them completely, but not all of those games will call for doubles, and if no team is required I will handle the match alone… this assumes we lose no games, which is a plausible assumption but not guaranteed to happen. Someone is directing the invaders, and I have yet to determine who they are or whether they have a motive beyond annoying me. Are you in a hurry to leave, summoned hero?"

"Not at all. I just haven't been summoned before and am not familiar with it from this end."

"I wished to have you for three days, at which point you will reappear as close to the spot on your homeworld you left from as is safely possible. I plan to extend the duration if it seems appropriate. The summoning is not inherently tied to the number of games you play."

"Could I appear farther south than that spot?"

"How much farther? I can easily push you up to half a radian south; any more than that and I would need to hire a specialist for assistance."

"I don't know how much a radian is. A couple hundred miles."

"Unless you feel significantly lighter on Disboard than you did on Golarion – or unless Golarion has an unusual composition for a terrestrial planet, something distorting its mass or physical dimensions…" Khazer does not want to assume anything about the god-killing planet using statistical averages but it's hard to see why that would matter, "… one radian should be close to four thousand miles. I can do that."

"I... feel the same weight as usual... There is an evil god trapped in the middle of the planet but I don't know the details of Its confinement situation."

Is this why Golarion killed a god? Is the lich that so concerns the summoned hero's goddess a lieutenant of the trapped evil god? Or are these three unpleasant facts somehow completely unrelated? Khazer feels destined to remain ignorant.

"I cannot extend your summoning indefinitely, if you do not wish to return to the evil god's planet, but there are powers that can keep you on Disboard permanently if they are moved to do so. I will plead your case to Avant Heim or Kainath, if you want," it offers.

"- I have obligations there but that's very kind of you. The evil god trapped in the middle of the planet is not relevant to my daily life, I mention it only in case that affects how hard it is to put me slightly south."

"Not especially."

The ephemeral tether between the summoned hero and Golarion is far more resilient than the average magical construct. The only salient way it could go wrong is hostile divine intervention, but if the hero doesn't think it's a problem then Khazer won't fret over it.

"Building 81 is this way. We have another game to play," it says, leaving in the direction of the river.

Chess!!!

It's half a mile away – half a mile of waterlogged roads and vandalized shopfronts. The denizens of Zeitnot aren't hiding, exactly, but they are to a one barricaded indoors. They peer silently through the windows of their homes and businesses, the children with their noses pressed against the glass and the adults with inscrutable blank stares. It's hard to tell what anything is supposed to be when it's actually in use, since all of the signage remains untranslated and many of the context clues have been defaced.

Building 81 is submerged in a river, though as they get closer it becomes apparent that the river has flooded over its foundation. Closer still and a keen-eyed observer will notice that no one has bothered to erect levees, permanent or temporary, and the river did not have to flood very much before it swallowed the foundation. Another stone table similar to the last one sits in four feet of water, the river lapping just at the edges. Two disgruntled catfolk are either stranded on the table or have simply chosen to not get off and wade back to shore, along with what looks like the corpse of a young girl.

Was this match always set to take place in the river, or have they been waiting for so long that the waterline caught up to them? The river's not flooding that fast, is it?

"Can you swim?" it asks the hero.

"No."

It nods in understanding, and a moment later Blai finds himself capable of flight. It's accompanied by a phrenic action for moving through space without physical exertion, so natural in comparison to his other mental faculties that it's only noticeable on account of not having been there before.

Blai has not actually happened to be subject to a Fly spell before. A lot of things come up in twenty years at the Wound but not that one. It's probably like this.

He flies across the river.

Khazer and an unidentified human flying towards them is apparently the signal for the catfolk to jump in the river and swim away. Neither of them look particularly happy while doing so – the water slicks their fur down thoroughly, giving them the bedraggled and sorry appearance that most housepets develop upon being bathed against their will – but neither seems to have true thalassophobia.

"This spell uses your innate magic," Khazer says, after they've reached the table. "It will last indefinitely, but you only have enough 「lilims」 to sustain one buff at a time. Inform anyone offering you additional magic of this fact, lest they intentionally ignore any dangerous details."

A 'lilim' is a unit of magic, quantized more finely than a spell circle, but Blai's relative unfamiliarity with magical theory means that additional nuance is lost in translation. It feels like Khazer is describing flight in terms of a non-integer number of cantrips.

"Does it cancel if I land, or anything?"

"No. This version of the spell does not fail gracefully, but it will inform you when your pace exceeds your ability to sustain it. It would take some recklessness on your part to fall out of the sky."

Blai nods and settles on the little island.

The corpse of the little girl lies naked and face-down in the water, her legs bobbing in the water along with the swells. The current isn't fast enough to pull her away. The chessboards on the slab are present but void of pieces, though now that Blai knows where they are he can see the embossed outline of where the time control clocks are, or will be. Someone throws an object through one of Building 81's highest windows, which falls for more than ten seconds before it hits the water with a muted splash. For a while, that's the only interesting thing to happen.

The calm of sitting by the river and doing nothing in particular is broken by the arrival of a distinctly aquatic demon. An enormous and horrifically bloated human-ish upper body fused to a serpentine tail wider than a man is tall bursts from beneath the surface, accompanied by the stench of rotting fish. The first thing that comes to mind is neither 'merman' nor 'sea monster' but 'ill-advised wizard experiment which hopefully does not breed true'.

"I've got the pieces," he announces, in a voice that sounds like a Chelish man trying to speak through a mouthful of water. "Finding them was— Khazer?"

"That is my name, and we shall champion this match. Will you play white or black?"

"… white," the demon says reluctantly. It drops a leather bag filled with pieces on the board and starts to set them up.