There's a card game over there, and a dice game thataway. There's some of the wizards from earlier in that corner.

Staying at the fort is going to do nobody any good if she's scared to talk to them so she has to do this.  Probably they get foreigners with bad Taldane here all the time anyway.  She'll take a breath and head over, angling so that they'll spot her in time to wave her off if they're working on something classified.

"Good evening, may I join you?"

"Sure, why not," says a Female Wizard. "I'm Txell."

"Khalid," she says automatically, but if there ever was a time it's now, come on- "Or Khalida, in mufti, but we came here quite unexpectedly and without baggage."

"In... mufti?" says a different wizard, this one a man. "Is that Taldane?"

"I learned Taldane mostly from books, it may have been a loanword from something else?  Or I may be saying it wrong.  Off duty?  Not on a job?"

"You have a separate name for when you're on leave?" says Txell.

"It's the same name at the root?  Just-"

oh no this was a terrible idea- breathe.  Focus.  Say a different thing than the sentence that got stuck.

"-we do a lot of skiptracing? So it's- simpler, if men think they're losing to a girl they would fight harder..."

"...a girl with a sword sure. A girl wizard?" says Txell. "Man. Garundi."

"It's truly that different here, then?  You hear things, but..."

"Oh, people are assholes about women but they're assholes about everything. A wizard's a wizard at least once she's got Alter Self, anyone with sense knows that," says Txell.

"Girls aren't as good at keeping their heads in combat," objects a male wizard.

"All the ones that's true of? Die before they circle up," shrugs Txell. "I know you passed math, bitch."

She shrugs.  "Many people haven't seen a wizard in combat, and the ideal would be for them to surrender without fighting- my most dramatic spell makes it more difficult to take someone alive.  I imagine it's very different here."

"We basically never want a demon or a deserter alive," nods Txell.

"I can't imagine you would, what would you even do with a live demon... do you get many deserters?"  She's pretty sure she knows what that word means but not sure enough to risk assuming and being wrong.

"Well, how many is many?" shrugs one of the men. "- Janer," he adds, introducing himself.

"A pleasure to make your acquaintance."  Thanks, Janer, that did the opposite of help.  She's probably totally wrong and it's some kind of weirdly specific technically-not-a-demon Abyss-dweller.  She'll... return the shrug.

"I suppose I mean more... what do you do here, on ordinary days when there's not a demon attack?  Endure Elements for the patrols, of course, but..."  

"Prestidigitate everybody and everything," says Txell, rolling her eyes. "Lights. Detect Magic."

Khalida laughs in rueful sympathy.  "If you'd told me when I was twelve I could ever get bored of magic... I suppose my teacher did, really, she was a laundry wizard.  Not that I listened."

"It's better than farming," says Janer.

"Oh, certainly, I don't disagree," says Khalida, who has never in her life been closer to a farm than riding through one.  "And it's an incredibly versatile spell, for all that the other things it does aren't nearly so useful."

"You really don't want to try to take a bath at the Worldwound even in summer. We just prestidigitate everyone," says Txell. "I've gone a year solid without a look at my own tits."

Khalida doesn't actually know that word either, but there's a limited subset of things it could be in that context, and now she's thinking about Txell in the bath... she schools her expression into a coquettish duck-and-smirk after half a beat of looking poleaxed, but words in any language are not happening just at this moment.

Janer and a couple of the other men laugh at her. Txell grins brazenly at them.

Okay, focus, now is the time to turn this conversation to either a flirting one or a decidedly not flirting one... she doesn't know nearly enough about Chelish soldier social dynamics, there's got to be an unspoken hierarchy under the rank one, can she manage to flirt with Txell specifically without giving the men ideas... well, a full retreat would signal vulnerability anyway, maybe she can sally and pull back and see if she's pursued.  

She makes the smirk intensify slowly into a smolder while she marshals her sentences.  "Well, that does seem a shame," she murmurs, then takes a breath and leans back, letting the eye contact drop as she rolls a crick out of her neck.  "How warm does it get, here, in the summers?  The commander mentioned the snow" shit what was the special snow verb, no time "-departs?"  She's aiming to keep the tone at 'simmer' instead of dropping all the way back to 'polite small talk' but she's never flirted in Taldane before and isn't quite sure if she managed it.

Txell snickers at her. "Yes, the snow departs, but it still frosts overnight half the time and you still want your coat to go anywhere outside or hold still anywhere inside."