"I do not understand Jenny, but she is a good woman trying obey God. I not need food, I eated."

At some point Lucy's fervent atheism is going to make her be very annoyed by the way Iomedae talks, but currently she is doing her SACRED DUTY to be nice to newbies so she isn't paying too much attention.

"Ah, makes sense! Yeah I wouldn't want donuts if I'd already had dinner either. Well, not until I fought and then I'd want twelve."

Lucy thinks the sensible next step is to ask people for loaner armour so they can try loaner gear on Iomedae but Gabriel, the person she wants to ask about this, seemed to be strongly hinting that she should take Iomedae away so that he could talk to Robert about something.

"...do you want to try holding a shield as well?" She can offer to lend out her shield, at least until she's recovered. Once she's ready for her next fight she will need the shield to go FIGHT EVERYONE. 

"Yes please!!" 

Iomedae has wielded a shield before. She is not quite as delighted about it as she is about a sword but she is not zero delighted.

Lucy will happily give Iomedae a shield!

She has a side strap shield which is too small for Iomedae, but the loose leather elbow strap will slide nicely over her arm. Lucy doesn't think Iomedae wants to touch her sweaty shield glove (she got used to touching other people's sweat really fast but she knows most newbies aren't hardened to it yet) so she wiggles it out of the basket and lets Iomedae hold the bare handle.

It's a fairly standard heater shield, and Lucy wants to show Iomedae how to stand with one corner tilted up over one eye so that she can block her head while still seeing the opponent. But first she will wait and see if Iomedae is comfortable holding the shield and the sword at the same time. Her shield is a heavy steel loaner, not a lightweight aluminium one, and honestly it took her a long time before she was comfortable with it. 

It also took Iomedae a while to get comfortable with a heavy steel shield, but she put that time in a while ago. She holds it up quite cheerfully. "You try to sword me?"

"...you aren't wearing a helmet! I can hit the shield carefully if you just want to feel what that's like, but Sir Reynhard will kill me if I hit you."

Roger has no such fears. He taps Lucia on the top of the head with a sword. "You're blocking the donuts, dumbass."

"Light!" but she still moves to let Roger get past and get donuts. 

"Helmet is -" she gestures at her head questioningly. "I do not have, still want to fight. That sword not steel."

"But - you'll get a concussion. You can't fight without a helmet. We can lend you one! We just need Gabriel to be done with whatever he's talking about with your dad." 

"Yes, ma'am." She will look impatiently over at Robert.

"Probably I should talk to the social worker. I think some sports would be good for her but swordfighting grown men is, uh, not where I'd have started -"

Gabriel is going to switch on absolutely all of his charm for this. He is the sort of person who fits the armour; he looks like a knight, not a LARPer wearing a costume. He is also, during weekdays, capable of roleplaying as an incredibly normal professional middle-manager who wears a suit and tie and says things about delivering sustainable value for stakeholders using innovative blue sky solutions. The correct character to play here is going to be something like... 'super-responsible sports coach', and he can play that.

"She definitely doesn't have to fight anyone she's not comfortable with! Lucy over there's been fighting since her sixteenth birthday, and she's an absolute gem, a really hardworking kid - she's won awards for service."

He's trying to make it sound like Lucy will be a good influence, which is easy because he really believes Lucy would be a good influence on just about anyone. 

Lay on the paperwork, people in his office love paperwork, especially official-sounding paperwork. Even better if he can do it in a way that isn't directly pressuring him to let her play with swords. "If you need some information for the social worker I can send you over a document for parents that lays out all the information and talks about the benefits of getting kids involved in historical education. The SCA really does teach kids good values - we're a 501c nonprofit, we tend to see teenagers doing a lot of volunteering and growing into amazing young adults." 

Lucy doesn't look alarming at all! "If you could send some things over that'd be useful, just so the social worker knows what's going on. I - we're pretty concerned about her. I think - I mean, she's been through a lot, and she'll say things like -" vague gesture at what they both just heard. "I think it could be good for her, I just worry she'll hurt herself...or someone else. ...she was really upset she couldn't carry a knife to school..."

"Yeah I'm.... getting the impression she's been through a lot."

Gabriel thinks about Roger for a second because he's the person at the practice who might be about to be demoted into the position of second most concerning young person. Roger has been through a lot and getting to fight is how Roger gets through the week - but that's not his information to give out to everyone who might think Roger is comforting or inspiring or whatever.

"Do you think maybe she just needs an outlet? I've seen kids with some real anger issues just transform into sweethearts once they realised they could take all those big feelings out on the battlefield. Maybe if she gets a chance to play as a Crusader for a bit, she'll realise she doesn't have to be one all the time?" 

"Maybe. She'll be supervised, and you'll stop her if she's doing anything dangerous?"

"On my honour I promise I will not let her do anything I would not let my own daughter do."

This is a very easy promise for him to make because he's pretty sure any child of his would be happiest roaming feral over the hills like a Spartan out of myth and only sometimes returning home for dinner, but Robert doesn't need to know that. 

"Then...I think it's all right if she wants to fight with the other girl - I mean, I'd be more worried for the other girl! - and I'll talk with Jenny and the social worker about whether she can safely do the adult version." He is assuming Lucy is Iomedae's age because she's just so much smaller when they're standing next to each other.

"Oh, Lucy is the last person you need to be scared for. Don't worry about her." Lucy is very obviously trying to live up to her superduke dad, and also somewhat obviously trying to get herself squired to a different superduke, and also last week he saw her go into a labyrinth under Danville and kill a minotaur and come out with a giant grin on her face. "She's tougher than she looks."

"Let's get her some loaner armour first before we let her try anything. I've got two loaner helmets in my trunk and if neither of those fit, Reynhard has a spare and Nicole's going to bring a spare as well, whenever she shows up." 

"Yes, that sounds like a good idea."

Iomedae had a suit of armor. It was made to her measurements - to the armorer's best guess of her adult measurements, actually, with an extra gambeson in the meantime - when Aroden chose her, at great expense, because that is what is owed to Aroden, when he selects one's daughter (or more usually one's son) as a paladin. Armor, and a shield and a sword and a holy symbol though she'll have to be a stronger paladin before she needs it.

She had to sell it, when she arrived in America, because there was no space in the van to take it with her. A man showed her how to list it on the internet, and she exchanged it - the wealth of a noble family of the Empire, ten times what her dowry would have been - for a hundred American dollars, which she could earn in a few weeks. 

She wishes that she had it back, very badly. Since she doesn't of course she should wear whatever they have spare but she feels very strange about it.

Lots of the loaner armour Iomedae is going to get later is going to be leather, or thermoflex plastic, or rusted old banged-up fifth-hand gear, or otherwise not as impressive as Gabriel's kit - unless she gets lucky and finds herself a household that wants to adopt her. There's a common attitude that loaner gear ought to be a bit shit, since it encourages people to spend the time or money to upgrade to their own gear and actually hand the loaner gear back - though Gabriel, himself, is profoundly irritated by that attitude. (It sounds to him like people making excuses instead of doing better, and there's plenty of people out there who aren't going to be able to upgrade to their own kit right now no matter how much they're incentivised to - like, say, talented foster kids.)

Helmets, though, are something absolutely nobody is willing to skimp on.

In the trunk of his car Gabriel has two fourteen-gauge stainless steel helmets, both solidly built and shiny, and a plastic bag full of handsewn helmet pads. One has cheek plates, while the other has just bars welded over the face. He casts a careful assessing eye over Iomedae and then stuffs an arrangement of velcro pads into the one with the more open face, trying to get as much padding as he can into the helmet for what he guesses will fit her head. The chin strap needs retying, which he does deftly, guessing at the length Iomedae needs.

"Try this. Don't worry if it doesn't fit, we have others you can try." 

It's a beautiful helmet, nicer than the one she had because America is good at metalworking. "Thank you, Sir Gabriel." She'll try it. It fits if she is a bit aggressive about squishing it down onto her head. It's...shockingly comfortable, actually. 

Wearing a helmet is so much better than not wearing a helmet. Iomedae loves being armored. Without armor she feels like a naked helpless worm.

In front of Robert and Jenny, Gabriel is going to be very visibly careful about checking the fit. He will look into both the corners of the bar grills to make certain there's no metal touching Iomedae's face, circle around behind her to check how the pads sit around the back of her neck, and then stand in front of her and... usually he'd just go ahead and do this but he's being ultra careful so he'll ask, "Iomedae, is it OK if I put my hand on your face?"

She is in fact visibly slightly uncomfortable with a man being close to her, though she is reminding herself that he is a knight. (And only a very tiny part of her is noting that, because he is a knight, it probably wouldn't work if she stabbed him.) He's not Evil, anyway. 

"This is - to try helmet?"