Xaviers!

Where Gemma had managed to find a pair of practice broadswords was probably best not to ask. She picked up one of them and gave it a couple of test swings, testing the balance as she adjusted her grip on it.

Sam looks a bit out of sorts as she arrives, disheveled and with an expression that says she's tasted something odd. Her movements are tired as she walks towards Gemma.

"I'm sorry about this. I'm not too late, am I? I dozed off."

Gemma shakes her head, assessing Sam a bit. "No, I'm here to teach you, so show up whenever you feel like it. Are you sure you're up to this though?"

"I'm fine, I probably just need to warm up a bit."

Gemma tosses her the practice weapon and picks up the other one. "How much of this sort of thing have you done?"

In spite of her apparent state, Sam's hand is up almost before Gemma tosses the practice sword, and grips it immediately.

"I've been training pretty hard with Miss Kinney, but that's all hand to hand. I don't know. Sometimes things just... work for me. I can feel the flow of a fight."

"That's not all that surprising," Gemma says, adjusting her stance and watching Sam closely. "Whenever you're ready..." She says, beckoning.

Sam's stance is tightening up quickly. It's not that it's especially disciplined, but she's aware of the weight of the practice sword and seems to have balanced herself accordingly. Gemma can see a number of easy gaps in the stance, all the same.

She lunges at Gemma, trying an angled swing.

Gemma parries the blow, sliding it to the side and following up with a punch to Sam's shoulder.

"Oh, are we not just fighting with swords?" She smirks as she stumbles back from the blow.

"That changes things..." She tries to deflect Gemma's sword to give herself an opening to kick at the fae's legs.

Gemma dances away from the kick, "As soon as they get a sword in their hand, too many people forget that their whole body is a weapon. That's your first lesson." She smiles, circling Sam for a moment before darting in with a low swing at Sam's hip.

Sam tosses her sword up almost like one would a drumstick and catches it pointing down,angling it to block Gemma's strike.

"Should we be recording this for Trev?"

"I would not want to incinerate his brain," she says with a grin, rotating her wrist and blade against Sam's block to bring Sam's sword to the outside. "You have a lot of natural talent, as I would expect from a war goddess." Keeping Sam's blade blocked, she hooks a foot out to yank at one of Sam's ankles.

"I'm coming to terms with having a talent for violence," she smirks back.

Sam goes tumbling but rolls with it, managing to switch up her grip by the time she finally finds her feet again.

"Nothing wrong with a talent for violence, so long as you know its time and place." She brought her blade into a guard position in front of her body. "Your other sparring partner tends to be the aggressive sort, but a werewolf's energy is not something you want to rely on running out. The typical 'wear-your-opponent-out' strategy won't work. You'll need to use her aggression against her."

"...fair. I haven't talked Viv into sparring just yet."

Sam tries a few forceful swings, trying to force Gemma onto the back foot.

"But it does get a whole lot more fun working with an aggressive opponent..."

Gemma gives ground under the force of the swings, doing very little to try to blunt their force with her own blade. She follows up one of Sam's swings with a couple of thrusts that seemed designed to get her inside Sam's reach before Sam can bring her own blade back.

"I suppose that's the part where they say 'touche,' though one doesn't usually fence with broadswords..."

While she's quipping, without even looking down, Sam's free hand sweeps to try and grab the wrist of Gemma's sword arm.

She gets a hold of Gemma's wrist, the grab keeping her in close as she reaches for something behind her back.

"Not much of a talker in a fight, are you?"

Sam sharply pulls back on Gemma's wrist and tries to further the unbalancing by kicking at the fae's legs.

"Plenty of time to talk when you lose," Gemma grins, stepping over the kick with her legs suddenly tangled in Sam's, pulling them both down into a heap.

"Oh, is that worth bragging rights?"

Sam tries to take advantage of their momentum and pull Gemma into a roll.

"Would they believe that at ye olde hidden faerie locker room?"

Gemma rolls with her, somehow managing to come out on top of the wrestling match. "That I thumped a baby war goddess? They'd buy it." She grins.

At about that moment the ruckus attracted the attention of a certain loudmouth who had started jogging on a treadmill on the other side of the gym, headphones in and BLARING.

Man, my girlfriend is good at that. And--oh shit that's hot. Wait fuck she's a telepath don't think about tha--

Trev at this point in his gawking stepped on the edge of the tread and tripped, narrowly avoiding falling completely off the machine, instead hanging off the console with a death grip and flailing his legs to get back into a jogging rhythm while he reached for the safety key that no one actually attaches to themselves but they totally should.

"Let's make sure you earn it, then."

Sam brings her arms up between Gemma's and throws her practice sword up in the air in a broad spin. Then, she claps both hands down on Gemma's shoulders to try to pull herself out from under the fae, her limbs twisting at angles that frankly look a bit unnatural.

Getting out from under Gemma isn't terribly difficult. While she is stronger than her size would indicate, Sam has "biophysics-defying-shapeshifter" going for her. Gemma, for her part, comes up swinging as Sam gets to her feet, somehow now armed with a much shorter practice blade in her off-hand.

Sam is bobbing and weaving against this onslaught, barely managing to keep her nose clean before her arm shoots out to catch her practice sword.

Gemma brings her longer blade up, trying to smack Sam's sword arm while the shorter blade pokes at Sam to try to distract her.

Sam's hand falls just short of catching her sword, the wood clattering against the practice mat.

Her eyes refocus and her expression tightens, never glancing down from Gemma's face as her other hand shoots out and grabs the blade of Gemma's short sword. It's a move that wouldn't work on a real sword but that doesn't seem to be in her thoughts right now as she quickly follows that with a kick to Gemma's gut.

Trev after a moment had righted himself on the treadmill, and it would seem the girls were lost enough in the fight that he could continue observing and have a much more interesting run in store. He adjusted the volume on his headphones down and found some suitably epic battle music to prove a soundtrack to the fight for himself.

Gemma stumbles backwards with an audible gasp, losing her grip on the shorter blade, leaving it in Sam's hand. "Nice one," she says, coughing a bit as she recovers her stance and comes back at Sam with some aggressive swings, "You're learning fast."

"Fight's a fight," she mutters, quickly flipping the shorter practice sword around to grip it, parrying as she circles around to where the broadsword fell.

Her eyes still never leave Gemma's as she kicks at the fallen sword, sending it spinning into her free hand.

Gemma steps back, opening up a bit of space as she looks at Sam now with two blades. "Next lesson, always have a backup." Her empty hand clinches into a fist and small round shield of rainbow light appears on her arm. Her stance adjusts to accommodate it, blade held higher.

"Suppose I am going to have opponents that can conjure things out of fairy dust..."

Sam grits her teeth, falling into a rhythm as she alternates hands with her strikes, trying to drive Gemma back.

"Wolves that regrow, opponents that summon things from nowhere. It's a strange life you've decided to embrace." She uses the shield to catch the rhythmic blows, adjusting the angles slightly to try and break up Sam's rhythm in preparation for a counter strike.

Gemma does get Sam to falter, but the opening is incredibly brief. If anything, disrupting her rhythm just seems to launch her into a more complex rhythm.

"I'm at least as strange as anything in that life, aye? So are you."

"I never claimed to be normal," Gemma taunts her, going on the offensive, leading with the shield in short feints and bringing the blade over the top of the shield to stab at Sam.

"And it's long past time I stopped trying to be," she says as she sways away from the thrust at an unnatural angle.

As Sam focuses her attention on the thrust, the shield stops being a feint as Gemma slams it forward hard into Sam's stomach.

Sam stumbles back, the wind knocked out of her momentarily before she recovers.

"...seems I'll have a few bruises to explain," she smirks and readies her guard again.