"What's funny?" says Zevros, poking his head back in the room, bits of leather retrieved to wrap Isabella's dagger.
"We are referring to our plan as a 'plague of utopias'. I hope you don't require that leather to remain intact, if it's for my dagger."
"All right then." Isabella draws her dagger and wraps it up. "I think there's room here if you don't rely on a lot of footwork. I don't."
He has a practice stick, all nice and ready. He is not going to use his actual sword on her. Because safety. (Also Edarial would make faces at him.)
Isabella tests the leather binding against her silks; the dagger doesn't bite through. "Okay," she says, and she drops into stance. "Anti-clumsy is nice, let's find out how nice."
He drops into a stance of his own. Wisely, Adarin and Edarial scoot out of the way. Then, without warning - he launches an attack. It's fast and brutal.
But she practiced them thousands of times with limbs less cooperative than this. She is now textbook perfect in the introductory moves of a fighting style he has never seen before.
This isn't going to let her win, but it'll probably give her a few minutes.
But he knows more than introductory moves, and he has been doing this obsessively since he was little. He knows how to adapt. So he does. That's when he starts winning.
It doesn't take long, after that.
"That was fun, I liked whatever that - weird fighting style thing was!"
"Olympic clan witch style," says Isabella. "Same thing your alt is learning, if you want to pick up with her later." Thanks to her armor silks she has only been knocked over, not harmed; she gets up and sits down on the bed again.
"Ooo, cool. Might do that, wouldn't have thought a dagger would do much but it was cool, anyway!"
"No idea. Do you not already know any? Have you not been practicing for a ballroom competition in your copious spare time?"
"I'm afraid not. I'm sorry, love, we'll have to learn how to dance together."
"Oh no! The horror! I have to learn a skill with someone I l- sorry sorry no flaunting sorry."
"You really are," snorts Edarial. "It's kind of cute, in a - freaky weird sort of way."
"I had - inklings - that - if we'd started on a better foot - it might have worked."