"....right. Iomedae, if I can get you to sign a waiver real quick because otherwise people will get mad at me, then you can have a go at hitting me with this sword and see how that feels." 

Iomedae doesn't know the word but she can plainly interpret it all the same: a reprimand for giving the sword to a foster child. From a man that the man in gleaming steel plate feels the need to listen to. 

"Sir. You are great of men, God smile on you. I am sorry. I not know - sign."

Oh Jesus, did Robert tell her this was some kind of LARP and she needed to play a - no, address that later, that's not her fault right now and her English clearly isn't good but it is in fact his job to be gracious about this sort of thing. 

"Don't be sorry! Sign means you put your name down in a special way that legally makes it so you agreed to the writing on the paper. We have a piece of paper that says, if you get hurt learning swordfighting, you agree it's your fault for swordfighting and not our fault for letting you. Reynhard will shout at me if I let you pick up a sword without signing it, and technically he's right to."

Very technically. Gabriel can agree with needing to sign a waiver to get hit, but he thinks newbies needing a waiver to hit him is silly. 

"Oh. I no think I can do that, I no read English."

"It's just a liability waiver, kiddo. You have to sign them for everything. Jenny can probably sign it as your guardian."

Jenny is diligently filling out the liability waiver over at the marshal's table, chattering while she does. "- anyway it's so kind of you to let her try this sport of yours! I'd never heard of it!"

Reynhard sees Gabriel looking at him for approval and gives him a thumbs up. Waiver has been signed. The kiddo is allowed to fall over and break all her bones now if that's what she desires in her heart.

"Well, we all selfishly want plenty of new folk to hit, or we start running out of targets."

"....right, yeah, I forgot guardians did that for minors. Looks like we're all set!"

Gabriel pinches the helmet padding on both sides of his helmet so it doesn't slide out or fall around when he lifts it over his head and shakes the aventail out around his shoulders. Then he wrestles it onto his head, grabs the bar grille and pulls it firmly down until his chin fits into the chin strap.

"Alright, Iomedae, wanna have a go at hitting me?" 

She DOES. Also that helmet design is impressive. There's something profoundly reassuring about seeing America's impressiveness directed at something that makes sense, like good helmets. 

Swinging at his plate mail is stupid; the thing to try instead is to get the sword in between the pieces. Or to knock him over and rip his helmet off, but she was asked to show she knows what to do with a sword, not to show that she knows how to kill a man in armor. 

She straightens up into a good stance with her sword and then tries to take off his arm.

Gabriel sees the stance forming and the body mechanics going into the shot (core engaging, hip leading, wrist turning over) and realises - just in time - that this girl is either very talented or not new and he doesn't actually want to take that shot directly on his elbow. He'd flick his sword up to block but he literally just handed it to her. 

Sensible people have shields and swords in hand when they do this, or explicitly tell the newbie to aim for the head, but Gabriel often isn't sensible people and - the way that girl transformed when she had a sword in her hand, you can forgive him for getting a little impatient.

He twists a little and tucks his arm behind his back so that he takes the hit on his solid steel cuirass and the nice padded gambeson underneath, rather than on his nearly-unarmoured upper arm. It still hurts enough that he decides to go get his shield before letting her do that twenty more times. "Good!"

He glances at Robert with an exaggerated wince. "You didn't mention your foster daughter is.... what is she, a boxer? Tennis player? The designated duelist on her ice hockey team?" 

"- she, uh, says she's a holy warrior."

"Um. Like. So she's LARPed? We aren't a LARP but we get a fair number of people crossing over..."

...but a lot of the local LARPs are light-touch foam games and that does not make any sense of Iomedae clearly knowing how to generate power.

Robert lowers his voice. " I - we haven't pushed her on the 'holy warrior' thing. Iomedae was working until recently as a migrant farm laborer. She came to the attention of CPS when a man tried to rape her and she stabbed him five times."

WELL THAT WOULD EXPLAIN WHY SHE WAS VERY UPSET AT THE THOUGHT OF TELLING PEOPLE ABOUT HER SITUATION. THAT IS SO OBVIOUSLY PRIVATE INFORMATION WHY DOES HE NOW HAVE THIS INFORMATION - 

"Iomedae, that was pretty great for a first time ever. Have you trained with a weapon like this before?" 

"With a sword, yes. Not a sword of -" she gestures at the unfamiliar material. 

Okay, a steel sword, so.... fencing? No, no fencing school would've taught her to hit Atlantian calibration. Kendo maybe?

"The wood we use is called rattan. It's actually more like a grass - like bamboo. It's safe because if it breaks it doesn't shatter into sharp pieces - it separates into individual fibres and goes mushy and soft. So it's really safe, because it's not going to cut you even if you break it by accident."

"What's the word for the sword school you studied before? In whatever language you know, if you don't know the English word."

She surely cannot actually mean that she studied as a holy warrior - wait a second she doesn't mean the Knights Templar or something, does she? That would imply she knows about magic and she definitely absolutely would've... been given some letter of referral or something and not just shown up with her foster parents. She has got to mean LARP. But no, she didn't say foam sword, she said sword. 

"Sword...school, sir? There is sword schools? God is glad! Can I go to sword school. I go to America school but it does not teach fight swords."

"...uh, this is the closest thing to sword school I'm aware of around here, so congrats, you made it!" 

"But I meant the discipline you studied - uh, what sort of sword training have you had? Fencing, kendo, Dagorhir, HEMA, Amtgard, Buhurt....?"

He's pretty sure she hasn't been in the SCA before or she would know she does not have to talk like a confused medieval page. 

"When God sayed I a holy warrior, then a man who good at sword teach me sword. I am no in holy order. I want to be in holy order, but instead I was made a foster child and foster childs are not allowed to leave."

"Right, so, - has anyone explained to you how the SCA works? It kind of sounds like you think we're a LARP - with gods and magic and things. We're a historical re-enactment organisation - so we try to do things accurately the way they were in history, before the year 1600."

Gabriel's brain is busy running the standard script for the standard sort of problems that he might normally encounter, like teenagers showing up expecting more LARP elements than the SCA has, and - WAIT A SECOND -

- okay yes he's supposed to defend anyone who can't defend themselves but he should really make certain that he is not overreacting to - the incredibly loud alarm going off in his brain saying that sometimes very ordinary people turn out to be horrible monsters secretly - because that alarm is oversensitive, he knows it is -