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"How was school, honey?"
She tries to make the kids' favorite meals on their first day of school, but when she asked Iomedae's favorite meal the girl first stared at her blankly and then after some extended clarifications proposed that they could roast a pig, and she can't actually roast a pig, so dinner is pork chops, and potatoes, and salad from the farmer's market. Iomedae is not a picky eater.
(The girl is in fact clinically obese. The doctor suggested they talk with her about cutting back on junk food, but the social worker said that was a bad idea, with a kid new to care - don't restrict her food access at all, just get her more exercise. So Jenny signed her up for swim lessons at the YMCA and for track and field at school. Iomedae balked at the swimming lessons on the grounds that swimsuits were immodest, and they do actually make hijabi wetsuit things but apparently not in her size. Hopefully track and field she'll actually enjoy.)
Robert doesn't actually think of it until he sees Barry pouring himself a cup of coffee at work the next morning. Barry is into some kind of hobby swordfighting thing. Civil war reenactment? Except the civil war wasn't fought with swords - doesn't matter. It'd be something to suggest Jenny take Iomedae too, and then hopefully they can bond with the kid.
"Hey, Barry, uh, you do that swordfighting thing on weekends, right?"
"Weekends and a few evenings a week, yeah! I'm in the SCA."
Barry does several other things in the SCA besides swordfighting but he's learned that work colleagues generally respect a man with a swordfighting hobby more than a nalbinding one, so he's not going to mention that.
"Is there a junior league for kids? You know Jenny and I foster, and we've got this girl right now - terrible situation - who said she wanted to take up swordfighting."
"...sort of. So kids are always welcome to come and do the other medieval activities, arts and crafts type stuff, and in theory we've got a version of the swordfighting that is a bit safer for the kids - with foam swords rather than wooden ones - but there's not a lot of interest and, uh, funding and support for that, in this area, right now. She can try it but she might not get a lot of opponents... Is she sixteen? We'll let her fight adults, if so."
"Oh, not quite, she's fifteen. And honestly foam swords sounds lots safer than wooden ones and I wouldn't really want her fighting against adults anyway. But maybe we'll check it out...is there an organizer we'd need to speak to in advance? What would we want to bring?"
"Oh, no need to worry about doing things in advance! She can just show up. Preferably in comfortable clothes, loose, long sleeves. I can let folks know we have a newbie coming and to bring loaner gear for her, or honestly I could just bring her some loaner kit - hmm, roughly how tall is she?"
Barry is also aware that he cannot ask questions like 'what size cuirass does she need' in the workplace. People in his office will not consistently know that a cuirass isn't a kind of technobabble that they should get a PowerPoint about.
"Oh, she's, uh, pretty tall, five foot nine, five foot ten? But I don't know if loaner gear would work out - she's, uh, on the big side, if you get what I mean. That's why we're trying to get her more active."
That is taller than Barry was expecting for a fifteen-year-old girl! He rapidly revises his list of people he can ask for potential spare kit.
"There's plenty of people who have a little extra weight and fight - honestly it's one of the reasons I love it, we're super diverse, there's people in their sixties and people who are really out of shape and we all get along just fine. Medieval reenactors like to eat and drink!"
(Barry is five foot three and made of pure muscle. He gives off a sense of compactness, as though you took a much larger person and squeezed them down into a tight-fitting frame. But he grins genuinely as he says this, like he thinks this is a self-deprecating joke, because he privately knows about the nearly three bottles of mead he drank last weekend even if Robert doesn't.)
"We almost certainly can find enough kit that she has the bare minimum to legally fight, and then people will go easy on her until we've scrounged up the rest - though, I actually don't know the youth armour standards off the top of my head."
"Well, then I suppose I'll see you this weekend! Thanks, Barry. She's been through a lot and it'd be good for her to make some friends."
"People who fight with swords? Yes, I want to do that. Is they a holy order?"
"They're just into history, I think. But, you know, the Crusades and stuff were part of history, so you can probably pretend to be a knight from a holy order if you want to."
" - well, okay, honey, you don't have to, I'm sure you can also just go and practice swordfighting and not pretend anything. Barry said to wear comfortable, loose clothes, and I thought to myself, well, fantastic, that's all she wears anyway."
Iomedae is reasonably confident that her 'foster parents' are virtuous people endeavoring as far as it is in their power to do a duty that they took on because they believed it was important. She should admire them for that, and she should be grateful.
"Thank you, sir. I will try make some friends, have some fun."
"Fantastic, kiddo. I'm proud of you for trying something new." He would like her to drop the 'sir' but probably that'll happen naturally as she gets to know them better.
Jenny arrives early and looks around anxiously for the person in charge. She wants to make sure they have some context on Iomedae and her traumatic situation, so that Iomedae doesn't just retraumatize herself with this whole swordfighting thing. There are some people around. They're mostly in costume. "You didn't say we were supposed to wear Halloween costumes!"
That man is in armor. Real armor.
Iomedae is suddenly filled with a reckless yearning. She has not been filled with a reckless yearning in a long time. It is like remembering that you can feel temperature, or smelling again for the first time at the end of a long cold.
There are quite a few people who aren't in armour or garb, because this is a practice and not an event, but it's pretty understandable that the people in armour are significantly more eye-catching.
The Kalomeros chapter practises on Saturday afternoons in a church with a pretty big lawn. In winter they retreat inside one of the church's back rooms (the ones that are usually for music practice and group therapy meetings) but in summer they like to be outside on the grass. The church doesn't mind, and barely charges them anything for use of the space because they're a nonprofit.
There's a few people around the edge of the lawn who are sitting in folding chairs and on steps, mostly in mundane clothes, their laps and folding tables covered with sewing projects and musical instruments and calligraphy pens. Only one of them is wearing a thirteenth-century gown - and that's because another woman is helping show her how to pin all the veils and layers onto it.
Practice is just getting started, so people are still armouring up. Several people stand by haphazard piles of discarded metal and leather, gossiping while they lazily strap themselves in. There's no rush; there'll be plenty of daylight. Someone has brought a box of donuts and is distracting the fighters with them.
One fighter has already been in armour for a while; it's impossible to see much of them under their ill-fitting armour but they wear a blue-and-white tabard. They have been pacing, waiting for an opponent. As Iomedae and foster family arrive, one of the other fighters finally gets his helmet on - the finishing touch to his armour - and walks out to salute the patient earlybird.
"Always."
She aims her sword forward to show Roger the thrusting tip. "I have a pointy."
On her other arm she has a shield. She hasn't registered a device yet, so she's painted it white with a blue unicornate seahorse as a way of showing allegiance to Atlantia.