"No serious competition, anyway. Though if I said 'magician' it would be a term shared with a lot of people who do performances designed to seem physically implausible through means like sleight of hand."

"I suppose that couldn't become popular on Golarion, considering."

"Because people can detect real magic?"

"Oh, most people can't, it would just be... the obvious assumption if someone did something that looked like magic, would be that it was."

"If someone was seemingly taking rabbits out of hats and guessing what cards people picked and turning cloth into candies and such, would that still be part of viable entertainment in Golarion?"

"I haven't... gone to a lot of entertainment shows. I suppose it would not be very much more confusing than people watching chariot races if I heard that this was popular somewhere."

"That's fair. Shall we play more of the audiobook?"

Nod.

Sometimes people see chess as a form of mental combat. There have been a surprising number of historic attempts at banning or restricting chess.

Huh. On what grounds? He can try to use the list to reconstruct whether Iomedae might hate chess.

The book unfortunately does not go into that.

Alas.

The book has a lot of chess history and, especially with all the pauses, is not over by the time the plane descends for landing.

Good thing Blai hasn't eaten anything since they took off!

The plane lands smoothly.

McMurdo is not completely composed of snow-covered ice. There's visible mud, and coastline, and more buildings.

"Do you want to see if we can fly to New Zealand today or do you want to spend the night here regardless of flight availability?"

"It would probably be best if I had time to digest something before a longer flight."

"Overnight it is, then."

Blai makes a complete recovery from airsickness and eats something and sleeps!

"I looked it up, and the most recent chess ban was made due to concerns that it counted as a means of gambling. There was also another one last century just on people in the military playing correspondence chess, due to concerns that they could be using their moves as a means of transmitting coded information to enemy forces."

"Were people in fact wagering on the chess matches, in the first case?"

"Possibly some of them but presumably not all?"

"Huh. I didn't allow people to gamble for money in my fort but never saw a man ruin his life over being fourteen raisins in debt."

"This was a group enforcing religious law very harshly."

"- well of course if the religion forbids gambling then its enforcers will forbid it and anything that seems to foment it, that only stands to reason."