When my daughter was 13, she cut herself badly enough on her first sword that we had to leave the Faire and go to the ER to get her stitches, still in our glitter and Elf ears. The sword slipped out of its sheath as she was climbing over the railing of a bridge, and she caught it by the blade, slicing a good chunk out of her finger, but not severing the chunk, so it could be stitched back.
How badly one gets cut by catching a falling blade depends on the angle at which it's caught. My kid could easily have lost a couple of fingers if her luck had been worse; instead she only got a scar and some loss of sensation. The lesson was "don't be climbing around on things while wearing a sword, especially one you can't tie into its sheath."
I could easily see your character 'just looking' at Aiglos, dropping it accidentally, and catching it by the blade in a similar way. Maybe the kids were trying to put it back where it belongs - standing upright in a corner? on a horizontal rack on a wall? - but didn't get it in place quite right, so it fell toward them.
While obviously elves age differently from humans, from the perspective of just how dumb kids can be, balanced against the fact these kids have had prior weapons training, this is actually the most likely situation for how they'd get hurt in the first place.
Also, if there are two kids, the likelihood that one of them accidentally hurts the other also goes up dramatically (i.e. one tries to do a cool move and doesn't see/remember where the other one is). In many ways, this could actually scare them off from playing with it even more - not the fear of the injury itself, but from the guilt of having hurt a friend.
I'm about to graduate college and half the guys I know have the maturity of 12-year-olds. -_- Most of their first instincts would be to play around with a weapon like that (which is very disturbing given at least two of them own firearms).
More particular to the kids in your story, given they've already had archery and sword training. Most likely, they would try to do the most complicated or cool-looking sword moves they know, and then completely forget to account for the much longer handle. This would be especially problematic if this happened in an enclosed space - they might try to move their hand up the handle, and then forget about the part of the handle that's behind them and they can't see while moving.
Thanks! (And I'm glad your daughter didn't lose her fingers, yikes!) I think this is going to be the winner--they mess with it some without incident, but it falls on the one who needs to get injured when he's putting it back.
'Yikes' it was, for sure, but I was spared having to panic about it, because I was all the way up at the far end of the Faire when it happened. Finger wounds bleed a lot, and the kids were all scared, but my daughter's cousin ran for the nearest grown-up, who escorted my girl down to the medic tent. Ordinarily they couldn't have treated her without my permission, but the chief medic claimed her as a niece, so by the time I got there, the elf-maiden was all neatly bandaged, and sitting there 'holding court' to a circle of warriors showing her the scars on their hands and telling how they got them.
After we got out of the ER, I took her to her Dad's house. When he heard what had happened, he smiled fondly and told her "That means it's yours." She still likes to tell the tale of her weird parents' reaction to the whole thing: "Awww, our baby blooded her first blade." The finger she cut was third finger left hand, too: awwww. She named the sword Bite.
How badly one gets cut by catching a falling blade depends on the angle at which it's caught. My kid could easily have lost a couple of fingers if her luck had been worse; instead she only got a scar and some loss of sensation. The lesson was "don't be climbing around on things while wearing a sword, especially one you can't tie into its sheath."
I could easily see your character 'just looking' at Aiglos, dropping it accidentally, and catching it by the blade in a similar way. Maybe the kids were trying to put it back where it belongs - standing upright in a corner? on a horizontal rack on a wall? - but didn't get it in place quite right, so it fell toward them.
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Also, if there are two kids, the likelihood that one of them accidentally hurts the other also goes up dramatically (i.e. one tries to do a cool move and doesn't see/remember where the other one is). In many ways, this could actually scare them off from playing with it even more - not the fear of the injury itself, but from the guilt of having hurt a friend.
Reply
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More particular to the kids in your story, given they've already had archery and sword training. Most likely, they would try to do the most complicated or cool-looking sword moves they know, and then completely forget to account for the much longer handle. This would be especially problematic if this happened in an enclosed space - they might try to move their hand up the handle, and then forget about the part of the handle that's behind them and they can't see while moving.
Reply
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'Yikes' it was, for sure, but I was spared having to panic about it, because I was all the way up at the far end of the Faire when it happened. Finger wounds bleed a lot, and the kids were all scared, but my daughter's cousin ran for the nearest grown-up, who escorted my girl down to the medic tent. Ordinarily they couldn't have treated her without my permission, but the chief medic claimed her as a niece, so by the time I got there, the elf-maiden was all neatly bandaged, and sitting there 'holding court' to a circle of warriors showing her the scars on their hands and telling how they got them.
After we got out of the ER, I took her to her Dad's house. When he heard what had happened, he smiled fondly and told her "That means it's yours." She still likes to tell the tale of her weird parents' reaction to the whole thing: "Awww, our baby blooded her first blade." The finger she cut was third finger left hand, too: awwww. She named the sword Bite.
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