Where I think the people in the Fence comic will be in about 10 years:
Harvard: Goes to college somewhere with a fencing team, majors in biology with a concentration in human anatomy and physiology. Eventually ends up opening a fencing gym with Aiden and becoming an instructor there. The bio knowledge ends up being really useful when it comes to recognizing and treating injuries, and helps him teach students which muscle groups to train. (It’s one of those gyms that has fencing classes but also has open practice time, where people can either train individually, train with their own private coaches, or practice with each other. Several of Harvard and Aiden’s fencing friends have memberships, but most of them are more interested in the open practice than the classes.)
Aiden: Co-owns the fencing gym. Also teaches some classes, particularly in fencing strategy, but mostly handles the business side of things (he was a business major in college). Oh, and he and Harvard are married. They got together at the end of their senior year of high school and got engaged shortly after college. They’re currently in the process of adopting a child.
Coach Williams: Harvard pays her a visit shortly after he opens the fencing gym. There are a few sabre fencers who fence there during open practice time, so he asks Coach Williams if she can give him a basic explanation of sabre. Her eyes light up like fireworks. After a two hour conversation, Harvard has a very solid understanding of the rules of sabre, and Coach Williams has somehow convinced him to let her teach sabre classes at his gym during the summers. (Yes, she’s being paid for it. No, she doesn’t get to bring her wall of punishment to the Lee and Kane Fencing gym. Even Harvard has his limits.)
Eugene: Starts out as a PE teacher at Kings Row, and takes over coaching the fencing team as soon as Coach Williams retires. And yes, he keeps the wall of punishment, although he does remove the phrase "sabre is not better than épée".
Kally: Gets a full ride scholarship to a decent college, majors in biology, joins the college’s fencing team as soon as a spot opens up. Eventually goes on to become a physical therapist. A lot of the people he works on are athletes (both amateur and professional), and he even ends up getting a few fencers as patients. Rooms with Tanner throughout college, and eventually gets a two-bedroom apartment with him after they graduate. Ends up being Harvard’s best man at Aiden and Harvard’s wedding.
Tanner: Goes to the same school as Kally, joins the fencing team, and majors in something fun but practical like computer science or mechanical engineering. His relationship with Kally can probably be best described as a QPR, although neither of them really call it that. (They typically just say they're “really close friends” when people ask.)
Seiji: Finds a nice college with a good fencing team and a halfway decent accounting program. He strikes me as the type of guy to go for a job that’s strictly 9 to 5 and doesn’t force overtime, so he can use the rest of his time to train. (Harvard ends up giving Seiji the spare key to his gym, because he knows that Seiji likes to train at like 4:30 in the morning and he really doesn’t want to have to get up that early. Nicholas will almost always accompany Seiji for his early morning practice.)
Nicholas: Ends up getting a job as a fencing instructor right out of high school, at a place that teaches fencing to kids and younger teenagers. (It helps that he has glowing letters of recommendation from both Coach Williams and Coach Joe, and it really helps that, by the time he graduates high school, he’s nationally ranked in the Under-19s.) He’ll often refer kids to Harvard’s gym once they finish middle school. He and Seiji move in together shortly after Seiji graduates college. He continues to fence competitively, and while his ranking does drop a bit when he first enters the adult age bracket, he manages to slowly climb up through the ranks, and even ends up competing at Worlds in 2027.
Kyle Allen: Finds out he’s Nicholas’s cousin a few months after Jesse finds out that he’s Nicholas’s half-brother. He handles the situation pretty well. It helps that, by that point, Nicholas and Kyle are already friends. It also helps that Jesse is the one who tells him. Nicholas and Jesse’s relationship improves considerably once Kyle gets involved, since Kyle knows both of them well enough to help bridge the gap between them. Anyway, he eventually gets married and ends up as a marketing executive. He still fences as a hobby, of course.
Jesse Coste: Goes to Princeton for his first couple years of college and learns, the hard way, that juggling Princeton level academics with training for the Fencing World Championships is incredibly difficult. He ends up transferring to a different college at the end of his second year. Seiji and Nicholas were both on pretty good terms with him by the time he went to college, so they both saw firsthand how much he struggled, and how much his fencing performance suffered. And since he’s a grade ahead of both of them, they got to learn from his mistakes. Seeing what happened to Jesse was a major factor in Seiji’s decision not to go for an Ivy League school, and it was the deciding factor in Nicholas’s decision not to go to college at all. He eventually ends up working for whatever big, important company his mom works for, in a 9 to 5 position that gives him lots of time to train.
About the Olympics, since I’m sure you’re all curious: Jesse and Seiji make it to the Olympics in 2024, alongside 2 older fencers. Marcel also goes to the Olympics, albeit for France instead of the US. All three of them go again in 2028, and (to the surprise of everyone) ...so does Nicholas.
Seiji, Nicholas, and Jesse come back from the 2028 Olympics with a gold medal from the team épée event. Nicholas also comes back with an engagement ring because Seiji Katayama (correctly) decided that the best time to propose was the night after they won the competition.
(I think this might be a good time to remind everyone that a lot of Olympic fencers start in their early to mid teens. Nicholas, who started fencing at age 15 and then ends up making it to the Olympics when he’s 26, is actually not that different than many of the people who fence in the Olympics today.)
