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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.)
Lucy really wants to get back to fighting but she is dutifully trailing after Iomedae because fighting the newbie is her SACRED DUTY so she is going to do that before fighting everyone else.
She pulls her helmet back on and obediently mashes her face into Gabriel's outstretched palm, leaning most of her weight into his hand. "See, even when he does this, the metal still doesn't touch my face."
Gabriel has his palm flat against the welded bars that make up Lucia's visor, and even with her leaning all her weight into that hand, he still isn't actually touching her face. The helmet is snug enough on her head that her skin doesn't get anywhere near the metal, and only touches the foam pads inside.
"Yeah. For safety we don't want anyone to be able to hit you in the face and actually transfer force to your nose. This way we know your face is safe."
Gabriel has quietly noted Iomedae's visible discomfort and decided to be way more careful than he would be with the average fighter. He usually tries to treat girls the same way he treats anyone else, which means he doesn't think anything of casually punching Lucy in the shoulder or helping to get a measuring tape around her thigh or including her in group hugs or pulling chainmail out of where it's gotten caught in her armpit. But this is a foster kid who has been through a lot so it's probably best if everyone gets in the habit of not hugging her early on.
He will do the lean test and note that the helmet is letting the tip of Iomedae's nose just barely graze the metal bars.
"Okay, this will be perfectly safe for right now, but we'll get you something better before you go fighting in any tournaments for real. Lucy, nothing above a five to the face, okay?"
Gabriel thinks that sitting back and allowing Lucy to make this mistake will be both reassuring to Robert and Jenny and very funny for him personally, so he's going to just let that happen.
"I am new to this order but I wanted be holy warrior since I was -" She holds up eight fingers. "I good at fighting for a girl and not bad even for boy."
"...Girls are just as good at fighting as boys. Don't let anyone ever tell you that you're worse because you're a girl."
Girls are not as good at fighting as boys. Girls are weaker than boys, and less possessed of the martial virtues. Girls can usually best contribute to the great project of civilization by bearing it sons. Iomedae does not like it and she spent most of her life desperately praying it was not true of her but she does not see the point in pretending that it is not so in general. Scripture says that in Azlant strength was not relevant to most works of men and instead civilization required things in which men and women were equals, and that is great and good, but fighting isn't one such thing.
But Lucy is a fighter and a girl and it would be cruel and foolish to try with broken English to explain to her, if somehow she doesn't already know, that girls like her are rare. She doesn't even know the word for rare.
"...God choosed me, so I am good at fighting as God needs. And you maybe as good as any boy, have to fight and see."
Maybe there aren't as many female fighters as there are male fighters, but that doesn't mean anything. Lucy firmly believes that girls have the same inherent inborn ability that boys do, and it is society and culture that beats them down until the only regular female fighters at her practice are herself and Nicole (and occasionally there's some nonbinary people who show up who wouldn't mind being counted as female fighters, but they aren't regulars). Perhaps men have an advantage in strength and speed, but women have the advantage in cooperative teamwork and wits and endurance and pain tolerance and stealth, and Lucy is pretty certain it should all even out. Smaller fighters don't have as much reach, but they're smaller targets too. She's spent her whole fighting career learning to press the advantages she has as a smaller fighter, and learning that she has to work twice as hard to keep up but she's not lazy enough for that to be an issue.
They will have to fight and see. Lucy is no longer intending to be particularly gentle.
Also the God stuff is getting uncomfortable but... maybe she's trying to be Joan of Arc, and Lucy won't complain about that because Joan of Arc is feminist icon to plenty of SCAdians. Still.
"....I think Cináed wants to go a few rounds. Can I come back and fight Iomedae once you've got her in minimum armour?"
"Yeah, go wear yourself out," Gabriel says, smiling brightly.
He produces thermoflex plastic elbows, attached via narrow leather thongs to a set of splinted leather-and-steel vambraces. Vambraces aren't technically required for legal minimum armour, but he did just promise not to let Iomedae do anything unsafe, and he feels quite strongly that not wearing vambraces is the sort of choice you should only make after being hit in the forearm with a Dane axe several times. He'll show these to Iomedae and try to catch Reynhard's eye so he can beckon him over and ask about a demi.
Lucy needs her shield back to fight! She takes hold of the shield corner and waits for Iomedae to slide her arm out.
Iomedae will perfectly happily give back the shield and come check out the armor made of unfamiliar material. She pokes it. "God is good. This is - less money steel?"
"Yes! Much cheaper than steel and lighter, too. This is Kydex plastic. If you get it very hot in an oven it becomes flexible, so you can shape it to someone's body in only a few minutes. I fit these to myself before I upgraded to steel, so they might be too small for you, but I think they'll be okay." He is shorter than Iomedae but his arms are pretty muscular.
She'll try them on, then. "Thank you, sir. ...Lucy say, girls fight as good as boys. Other people think that?"
Oh man. He tries to avoid saying things about gender out loud because he historically has shattered his stealth several times by opening his damn mouth.
"Well, in the SCA we only recreate the parts of history we think are good and we leave behind the parts that weren't. We call it the Middle Ages as they should have been, sometimes. We do swordfighting and weaving and chivalry but we don't do sexism or serfs or the plague. If anyone gives you trouble because of being a girl, you can tell me about it - or Reynhard over there - and we will talk to them and make them stop."
That was confusing and didn't seem like an answer to the question! She turns it over in her head and then gives up and decides to just check her own best guess. "Most girls not fight. If a girl fight she is as good as she is, if you think you are better sword her, do not say she is a girl. And no one angry if a girl fight them and win?"
Gabriel is, on his own part, struggling to interpret that turn of phrase and realising he may need to use slightly easier English. He's been brushing off some of Iomedae's mangled sentences as someone trying to imitate a medieval peasant speaking Ye Olde Englishe but maybe she's just actually struggling that badly.
"You're right that lots of girls don't fight, but it's only because they are more interested in something else, like music or calligraphy. If they want to fight, they can. If someone is angry to lose to a girl, then they're showing you their own small-mindedness and lack of honour, nothing more."
"...would Spanish be easier?"
She relaxes slightly. She really understands Spanish a lot better, even if she's still limited in speaking it. She still doesn't understand him but that's more fixable if she speaks the language.
"Gracias, señor. ...En el lugar donde crecí, no era común que las niñas pelearan. Solo si Dios las elegía. Pero los Estados Unidos es muy próspera, muy civilizada, y scriptura dice que donde los lugares son próspera, entonces más de las virtudes de la civilización son poseídas por hombres y mujeres por igual. No sé si eso es lo que quiere decir cuando dice que los hombres y las mujeres son iguales."*
*In the place where I grew up, it was not ordinary for girls to fight. Only if God chose them. But America is richer, and Scripture says that where places are rich, then more of the virtues of civilization are possessed by men and women alike. I do not know if that is what you mean that men and women are equal.