Her name is Iomedae. Hundreds of years ago she was a mortal paladin - sort of like a cleric but more with the waving a sword around, less with the spells - of another god, Aroden, who later died. He doesn't know what the standard forms are that are popular in Her country but he can read aloud a grace She said to Aroden from the Acts if they want to pray over the food with the name swapped out?

Saying a Grace is a comforting ritual. They like it a lot.

After everyone eats, it appears to be social time, not more work time. People rest, hang out, gossip. The man he saw playing chess yesterday is here, but he doesn't have it out right now.

...well, he can't talk to that guy, but he can... go over there and get a Prestidigitation up and hanging in the air and start making pieces.

"-More magic? A chess set? I'd be delighted to play, sir, but I can't promise any particular skill."

Smile! Setup!

This New Londoner is perhaps too used to playing against people who only think one move ahead. He has the marks of a practiced rather than skilled player, and loses easily.

He takes the next game much more seriously and tries to force a stalemate.

Honestly nobody Blai has played with before is any good either except that one adventurer with the book of variants; if Blai is good it's by brute force, though he does bring a lot of that to the game. He doesn't require a skilled opponent to have as good a time as he expected.

After two games, his partner glances around. People are slowly moving to clean up and disperse again.

"One more, very quick." He plays recklessly and incessantly aggressively. Win or lose, it will be quick.

And then everyone is heading back to work again, in fairly jovial moods. Or if not jovial- Confident. The things he's Mended this morning are mostly gone, off for installation elsewhere. The workshop looks in much better shape than it was this morning already. Someone is making a new hatch. Someone is making pipe segments. Someone gives him more things to Mending.

When the game is over he lets the chess pieces wear off with the end of the Prestidigitation duration and goes to his Mending.

They'll keep giving him things to Mend if he keeps offering, pretty much for the rest of the day. They lead him around the maze-like network of half-frozen-over passages and tunnels under the crawler, too, to fix objects that are bolted in place here and there.

It eventually stops being big, complicated machines and more like hand tools and worn, torn coats. The gossip around him as people work grows more hopeful. Maybe they'll survive the next whiteout, whenever it comes. Maybe they'll find new villages to trade with. Maybe they can melt all the way down to the soil and grow real food.

"There is a very weird spell I can prepare that lets me breathe fire but I assume you have another mechanism in mind."

They shake their heads. "Oil and steam and a huge drill with a pipe in the middle that goes down, is the basic idea- It would be a major technical endeavor. Likely not feasible with current resources."

"What resources do you need?"

"More educated engineers. Large-scale manufacturing equipment, to make precise metal shapes dozens or more feet across. Likely at least one Steam Core- Marvels they built just before the end but now likely can only be scavenged, that could do a lot of math very quickly, this turns out to be surprisingly useful. New London had all of this."

"What... makes doing math quickly so useful...?"

"Let me think a moment... You can have devices that read out a number- Say, how hot is this fire? How much oil is flowing through this valve? Or how many times has this hammer swung down since we started from zero? And you can also have controls- Gears that turn the hammer on and off depending on the result of the math. Or pumps that speed up and slow down. And then you can go, oh, the fire needs to be between five hundred and five thirty degrees, and if it goes lower we need to add more oil or less water or both. And the hammer, it needs to keep hammering until the ingot it's working on is thus and such thick, and you can define these types of decisions in mathematical operations with enough planning and forethought. Then, machines can do all the work that a man would, or at least a good chunk of the simple tasks. I saw the Holy Generator's control room once... They had no less than ten Steam Cores within it, controlling temperature and water flow for the whole city!"

"Water for the whole city? Like aqueducts?"

"Yes! And hot steam for the whole city, too, all controlled from one room- Well, technically there were lesser hubs, but all ultimately answered to the Chief Engineer, with instructions and signals transmitted via electricity. It was amazing to see."

"It sounds it! Clerics create drinking water in cities in most parts of Golarion, though there are also wells and rain."

"Ah... I cannot help but wonder what has become of New London. We were on a scout team, you see, when an unusual storm gusted up suddenly. Try as we might, we could not see any signs of the city or even our comrades when it passed, and we wandered until we were freezing and starving... Whereupon the fine people of the old dreadnought found us and, despite what I am told is some disagreement among them, nursed us back to health. I believe this was seven years ago."

"So this isn't a - continuous single community, here?"

"We five are outsiders, yes."

"Well, it was good of them to take you in. And if this place is in traveling distance of New London it should be possible to find it again somehow. Inconveniently clerics don't get to fly and I'm not even strong enough to walk into the air or I'd suggest looking around from higher up on a clear day..."

"We thought about building a steam balloon and a long cable for it, but inconveniently, we don't have enough cloth or seal skins for that. We've summitted the nearby mountains on a clear day and looked for landmarks before, and we think it might be to the east from a pair of other mountains... But it'd be a disaster to go that far and be wrong."

"Are there dangers other than the cold? Supply problems other than food?"