A couple of them stick around to try but their hearts aren't really in it.

Yeah. Well, it was worth a try. 

The lunch routine is becoming familiar: food flavoring, chatting with people, some non-magical music when it feels appropriate. 

The music is popular. One guy snags a whore out of the water-carrying line and twirls her around the room before putting her back to go get another batch of snow. His friends make fun of him though.

D'awww! (She mostly keeps the reaction internal, lest the man catch more flak, but her heart sings. Little sparks, lighting up the darkness...)

Security on the corridor for the commander's office lightens later in the week, as nobody murders any of the other #11 ex-clerics nor appears to try.

Cool! She loves it when people aren't murdering each other.

She'll find some time to drop by. 

He lets her in. His Light-globe is aglow but the adjacent letter-opener and copper piece have expired. "Do you need something?"

"Nothing urgently, if now's a bad time! But if it's not..." she's been assembling a mental list of fort personnel who she thinks are struggling the most (or at least the most visibly) with the current predicament, at least in terms of morale. 

"I do not at this time have a lot of ability to affect our predicament. Do you have a suggestion, or just advise me to keep an eye on them?"

Yeah, lots of them are in fact just stressed and scared and the situation is objectively stressful and scary, and the kinds of things she'd do as a bard to improve morale don't seem like they'd land very well due to cultural differences - she's already doing what she can, there. But some of the troops have fixable problems - in particular, she's found a few pairs of people she thinks would benefit from being discreetly offered squad swaps for personality fit reasons (she can go into her reasoning for each pair at length, if required).

Squad swaps he can do. He can guess at the general shape of most of them but what's behind this one -

Oh, that guy and his squad wizard had some kind of falling out since the announcement. They've both been really professional about it (she continues to be impressed with the professionalism here), but to her it's obvious the way they... shut down a little bit in each other's presence, in a way they absolutely did not when she arrived. She thinks they could really use some space from each other, at least for now.

...well, he has no particular objection to swapping the guy out of the wizard's squad, he's plausibly ready for a promotion anyway and they do need a couple new sergeants since the hezrou, he can put a bunch of the Musical Guys on his preliminary squad and let him approve it.

That makes sense to her! (...hmm, that bit of hesitation... because it's a very un-Asmodean reason to swap people around?)

If she doesn't ask she will not find out. He writes an appropriate order and puts it under the Light-paperweight-doodad presumably to be delivered through whoever that Light belongs to.

She looks at him consideringly. "Would now be a good time for some chess? I don't have anything on my schedule for a while."

He stills his hand mid- some casting-esque gesture that obviously won't work, reaches for his water pitcher instead, and pours himself some snowmelt. "...yes. This would be a fine time."

He can still cast Prestidigitation.

...She keeps her wince of sympathy internal; she's pretty sure he wouldn't appreciate it.

Once she catches on to what he's doing with Prestidigitation, she starts making pieces for her side of the board.

"One without a handicap, to guess how much of one would be best?"

She nods.

Venn knows the rules to chess, has watched people play it, and has even halfway-listened while someone explained opening strategy to her, during a particularly slow day.

None of these things are a substitute for any real experience. Blai easily trounces her.

They can try again with him missing nearly half his pieces.

Venn laughs at the sight of the board.

She tries just as hard this time, and it's much closer! (Blai may notice she's paying a lot of attention to him relative to the board, as though she's hoping to figure out how he thinks about the game from external observation.)

That doesn't work very well, but maybe she is one of those people who can make it work more than zero! He is paying as much attention as he possibly can to the board. Paying attention to things that are not the board is awful, why does anyone do it ever.

(Because people so interesting!) 

She can definitely make it work more than zero, but not enough to win this game.

"You keep making me move my king and then taking other units when I do!" She's grinning. "I guess I need to be protecting him better?"

"The king is the win condition. If you don't protect him, you lose," Blai says, setting up again and taking an additional one of his pawns off the board. "That's why you are forced to move him when he's threatened; if the rules did not require that it would just be an elaborate way of resigning, to decline to do so. Every other piece can be traded, sacrificed, handled carelessly if you're trying to do a timed game - not the king."