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 - 

Very casually and curiously: "...uh, Robert, do you know what she means by foster children not being allowed to leave?"

“Yeah. After she had been in care for a week she told us that she appreciated our generosity and was going to go back to being a migrant farm worker and we had to explain to her that, no, she can’t do that.”

Okay so this is probably not a situation where Robert is secretly a terrible person. That is very reassuring. It would not be the first time Gabriel has had to cut someone out of his life for secretly being a terrible person. Instead Gabriel is very very confused and thinks Iomedae is maybe crazy. 

...can he be unconfused?

Taking care of newcomers is something Gabriel considers a little bit sacred. He remembers very fondly the people he met when he was first introduced to the SCA, and how a few of the knights had seemed like shining paragons of chivalry and honour, and he'd immediately wanted to be them someday - and now he is them, and there's nothing quite like directly being in those shoes (being the first knight in shining armour to welcome a guest) to focus his mindset on striving towards that ideal. So the question that pops up is: how can he practice grace here, and compassion, and nobility?

Is there a stance from which he can make sense of that idea, even empathise with it? Yeah, absolutely. He likes being an adult and earning his own way in the world, and he wouldn't want to go back to being a kid even if he was pretty well taken care of. Being a migrant farm worker doesn't sound fun, but he supposes he's never tried it and it at least sounds like honest work. He liked school, but for a kid who hates school.... yeah, that can make sense.

Does he need to know what's going on? His hackles are up and something seems very off but... if there's something dodgy going on, he's not the right person to intervene yet. If he says something dumb now, he might damage a perfectly good relationship with a coworker, and this random teenage girl has no particular reason to trust him to try and... what is he even going to do, fix her life for her? Probably, in most of the situations that could reasonably be happening, the best thing he can do is make sure that practice exists as a safe respite for her a couple nights a week. So yeah, let's not immediately blow that up for her.

She seems prickly about her privacy. You know what, that's fine - actually that's so very reasonable of her given the tiny bit he knows of her life. Maybe she'll open up if she realises she's among friends and maybe she won't. 

"Well, Iomedae - I want you to know that we won't treat you any differently here because of your being a foster child. If you don't want to tell anyone, you don't have to tell anyone - I won't share anything unless you tell me it's okay. If you want to be in an order, then you can work towards that and you should have the same fair chance that anyone else gets. Mmkay?"

Iomedae has been watching this interaction tensely trying to figure out if the knight will be mad at Robert for enslaving a paladin.

This is so much better. She relaxes very noticeably. She isn't sure she caught all of that, but - "I want to be in an order, sir."

Okay this is back on track, he knows how to do this part of the pitch!

"We have lots of orders! There's Baronial level awards, where our Baron and Baroness can grant membership, and there's Kingdom level, which the Crown has to invite you to. If you get involved and do service - that means volunteering to help events happen - or arts and sciences or fighting, then usually after a year or two you'll get an award of arms."

Belatedly, he directs a reassuring look at Robert: "Honestly she shouldn't worry too much about awards and orders yet - she should focus on having fun and seeing whether she likes it, we won't push her - but it's not a bad thing that she's ambitious!" 

"Why don't you try everything out, kiddo, and see what you like? The swordfighting, but sounds like there's arts and crafts and stuff too."

She doesn't know arts and crafts but there's an obvious guess. "I knowing Scripture already but I need knowing - all the holy warrior rules."

She obviously doesn't know about magic because there's no way she would be casually mentioning magic in front of Robert but she is talking way too much like someone who knows about magic and it's a little unnerving. 

"We can't really do any scripture, because officially there's no religion in the SCA. That's not to say you can't be religious or have a religious persona, but we can't have official religious ceremonies and we definitely can't teach Scripture. But you can learn about chivalry, which I guess you could call a holy warrior code - it's the rules you have to follow if you want to be a knight. Is that what you're asking about?"

If she shows up and the first thing on her mind is that she really really wants to learn chivalry then it's not going to take that long before she knows about magic one way or another. 

"I don't know religion, sir, and I don't know if chivalry is what you're asking about."

She doesn't know religion but she claims to be a holy warrior and she knows about Scripture but she wants instruction in holy warrior rules but she's got no idea what chivalry is. 

What.

He would look over to Robert for rescue but Robert lost his being-a-major-part-of-the-conversation privileges when he told Gabriel about the crime-victim history of a girl who looked like she was expecting the sky to fall at the mere mention of explaining her "situation". Gabriel is being so very polite and practicing the virtues of patience and grace and courtesy, but it is an automatic reflex for him to take any child's side against any adult's even if the child is weird and deeply confusing, so he is going to be as courteous as he can while getting as much information as possible directly from Iomedae. 

"Do you mean you... don't know the English words? Religion means -" oh wow he's never had to define that word before, "- getting together with other people to agree on what you believe about God?"