"Excellent. I can see you have some good instincts about balance already. Let me get you a practice cover and then I'll show you a basic kata." He goes over to a chest and gets a thin transparent cover for her blade and holds it out to her. "Here. It barely weighs anything so it shouldn't throw you off but it'll stop you from cutting yourself by accident. You should still be careful, both because it's a good habit and because a sword is still heavy and blunt force isn't safe but it makes it safe enough that you can do katas without much danger."

She nods and accepts the cover, carefully sliding it over the blade, avoiding brushing hands in the process.

The cover is long enough that avoiding skin to skin contact is trivial.

"Alright, before we move onto katas let's work a little on stance. It's even more important with a blade than in unarmed fighting to have a solid stance."

He proceeds to walk her through three basic stances by showing them himself. "Is it alright if I touch you to fix your stance or should I stick to verbal instructions?"

She takes a slow breath. Looks down at their bracelet, then back up at him. "Verbal-only if the bracelet's green like this, can touch otherwise."

"A magic item already? Or do you just have a collection? Regardless, I'll honor your preference. Can you take the first of the stances I showed you?"

She carefully shifts into that stance, trying to match it as closely as she can, watching the rotation of his wrist and the angle of his joints and the angle of his blade.

"Something like that," she explains as she moves. "Doesn't do anything powerful, just personal."

"Fair enough." He gives a few corrections before running her through the other two stances.

She tries to incorporate the corrections as thoroughly as she can, working to memorize the motions of all three stances. It's tricky, but it's a kind of tricky she likes. And she gets the hang of it.

"Excellent. Now that you have the stances let me show you a simple kata." He retrieves a sword from the wall that's about the same size relative to his body and demonstrates a few slashes and thrusts with blocking orientations between them in a slow but flowing sequence. He repeats it three times.

"Now you try."

She works her way through the kata, then notices something off on her own midway through, frowning. "Want me to restart if I notice myself fucking it up, or complete it and then do better next time?" She's still going for now.

"I find that different things work for different students but usually just continuing is best for beginners. Do you have a sense of which would work better for you?"

"It's hard to say. I'm ADHD enough that I could forget what I wanted to change by the end, maybe, so that's possibly an argument for stopping."

"Then let's try having you restart and if you're getting frustrated by being unable to finish we can revisit."

She grins wryly and nods sharply, then begins again. The next attempt is noticeably closer.

"And stop, you were a little high there and your left foot is too far forward." They can continue in this vein for a while.

She doesn't make the same mistake twice, though some of them seem to be fixed in progressive steps closer rather than all at once.

When she does it all the way through correctly for the first time he claps. "Excellent, just like that. We've been at this for a bit so it's probably time for a break." He goes over to a cabinet and pulls out a water bottle to hand to her.

"Thanks." Hailey takes the bottle with a smile (still carefully avoiding contact). 

She hums thoughtfully as she takes her first sip, then looks over at him, brow briefly furrowed. No one's close-by or paying attention, so she's not outing them publicly really, right? "I... hm. Complicated question you might be able to give advice on, but it relates to the weird personal thing with the bracelet."

"I can't promise to have good advice but all of us teachers have agreed not to pass on anything shared with us except for very rare circumstances like treason."

"Handy." She blows out a breath, takes another, and nods. "Mmkay. Well, there's five of us up here."

She raps her knuckles on the side of her head indicatively. "Plural system. Bracelet color tracks who's got the hot seat. Heard of that kinda thing?"