[b]Euna's Fitness Corner![/b]

She points her finger at Yellow.

"It's... complicated."

She points her finger at Green.

"It's complicated."

The finger points up, and her head tilts toward the ceiling to follow it. The smile hasn't faded off her face completely, but the complexity of the questions has her stuck in a decision she doesn't seem to know how to talk her way through. Her mouth opens, and at that exact moment Cinders pops her head out of the office.

"Hey Eunie? All I can find are those super disgusting soy peanut bars, do you want me to maybe go pick something up?"

"Eugh. Ah, no this is fine. Faster calories is better than more edible ones."

"Kay. Well. I'm gonna do a sushi run anyway. I'm hungry, and [i]I'm[/i] not gonna eat this crap. Eel's still your favorite, right?"

"Cinders. I swear to god if you burn all your money on this I'm going to break you."

"As if you even could right now, Ms. Low Battery. Just let me do this. Whatever you might be thinking, tonight's lesson kicked eleven kinds of ass and you deserve something for it. Besides, I know a place. Very reasonable, only light Yakuza connections. Maybe."

"Fine. Just... ok. Fine. See you."

And then there were two. Sort of. Close enough. Sorry Nova, you're just... difficult to think about.

"Sorry, right. You asked a question. Two questions I guess, but they're kind of the same. Yes, I teach Fencing. I try not to, though. And yes, that's basically what happened to my eye. But it's... ok. I've avoided talking about this, but when I was... in an accident. It's why I went cyborg, at least initially. It damaged my eyes as well, but for the most part it wasn't so bad that I couldn't push past it. I saw things fine. I thought. I've made a lot of excuses over the years but even now I'm... ok, do you know a lot about cybernetic eyes? The affordable ones are pretty damn gross. They scrape your vision to sell you ad data and like, I swear to god if I'm ever looking at my wife and I get a commercial overlayed on her lingerie I would rip the fucking things out right then and there."

An angry huff. Her fists close weakly in her lap.

"Sorry. But yeah, I've done my best with what I had left. Figured I'd bite the bullet when I felt myself losing a step. Only, one eye got a lot worse faster than the other one. But it still happened slow enough that I adjusted for it without noticing. My depth perception took a dive off a cliff and I just... missed it. Until I got into a fight the other week and I got a knife pulled on me. Went to millimeter dodge it for the superior counter angle, and then blood. Blood everywhere. So that's... mm. I'm about to say a lot of stuff at once, ok? And I'm going to snap back and forth so much it's going to sound like I said nothing at all. Feel free to ask questions if this bounces off you but, let me finish first ok?"

She tears the wrapper off of her emergency snack. When she bites into the bar, it stretches to almost half again its original length instead of biting clean through. She makes a face at it, and just picks at it with her hands instead.

"I have not made any secret about combat being essentially an unsolvable puzzle. There are variables stacked on top of variables and even if you can somehow account for all of them you won't arrive at a single correct solution. Owing to skill set, mentality, opponent, and location there can be an infinite variety of responses which are exactly as efficient as one another. And even [i]then[/i]... mm. So. When you get into a fight, the thing you're really trying to do is be allowed to walk away from it again. If you run away, that's fighting. If you cow them, that's fighting. If you knock them out, same thing. And the truth is that unless you're the one initiating all of these, the vast majority of combat you wind up involved in is gonna see your opponent armed with a weapon.

"Knives are easy to carry, but they're messy. Likely to kill, and confer no range advantage so they're countered by high skill empty-hand styles. Even so, they're easily concealable and confer a lot of misdirection ability and add threat potential for minimal investment, which makes them popular. A one handed sword (which is what I practice with) is an ideal balance of increased threat range and speed but... they're obvious as hell. You also can't carry them everywhere, and unlike other weapons it's difficult to find an improvised version wherever you wind up. You might think a length of pole or a bat are good enough, but they aren't. Especially as you improve: you learn the length and the weight balance of the weapon you practice with and that develops tendencies you can't afford.

"A staff or spear wielder is usually a little better off because it's not hard at all to find things that are long and stick-like that do ninety nine percent of the job, but environment is their killer. It's too easy to wind up in a location where a sword would swing fine where a longer weapon would become a liability. But a sword rewards that highly specific proficiency with techniques you literally could not do with a different weapon. Two-handed swords are even worse. You become overspecialized, basically without being able to do anything about it. Bats, clubs, tonfa, any bludgeoning weapons run into the same set of issues with regard to social convention, the law, and their overall breakability. A gun doesn't even bear mentioning."

She sighs and winces her way through more of her emergency food. Cinders was not lying about the taste, but a rapid infusion of calories still has her sitting up a lot straighter now that she's gotten going.

"It is not possible to become a master of every single weapon style at once, even taking advantage of the, erm, unique structure of your brain. Reaching a journeyman level on a wide variety of weapons is also dangerous because you risk jumbling your threat assessment and reach for the wrong one in the moment or crossing up your techniques. The single most adaptable weapon you will find anywhere on this station is your own body, and that's true of anyone you meet. But nevertheless, an unarmed fighter can lose her life to a vastly less practiced opponent if they happen to have the right sort of weapon to hand. And remember what I told you earlier: it's much more likely to wind up in combat in somebody else's territory, where they have prepared specifically and you only in vague guesswork. 

"Around and around and around. But I guess that's enough. My answer is this: if you're interested in learning fencing for its own sake, I'll teach you. But when it comes to what you should fold into your combat style... I guess I'd rather hear you weren't planning on getting into any fights at all."