Off-topic? Ha! No such thing! :)
So this is sort of an overall off-topic post for all other random things that don't quite fit the purpose of the request post.
You know, questions you'd like answered, random other bits of fluff, discussions about how thus-and-such pairing rocks way hardcore ...
So ... *claps* Get to it! Post to your Disney-loving heart's content! ♥
You know, questions you'd like answered, random other bits of fluff, discussions about how thus-and-such pairing rocks way hardcore ...
So ... *claps* Get to it! Post to your Disney-loving heart's content! ♥
Squinting one eye and tilting my head a bit, I'm guessing that dragons are sort of a class of creatures like 'primates' would be. Like, at about the Order level. So an extra branch of reptiles, essentially, probably a branch that survived the K/T extinction at 65mya and carried on gleefully through time.
The one thing that frustrates me is the varying number of limbs. I've ranted about this before with regards to Monsters Inc and U. Like, speed stingers or deadly nadders or even monstrous nightmares make sense, because they're still quadrupeds. And it's reasonable to lose sets of limbs, like the timberjack. But sorry, Toothless, you have six limbs and that is too many. There must have been some sort of mutation that let dragons end up with extra pairs of limbs, up to the extreme that is the Fireworm with ten limbs.
The thing that really gets me about Dagur is how much they got away with it. Like, if he was behaving like that towards Astrid, it would be blatantly rapey (and he would probably get his face caved in, because Astrid, but still) but I suppose they're sneaking it in under the double-standard with Hiccup. Whereas with Alvin, even when he was being violently threatening to Astrid, Hiccup and the others, he never struck me as sexually threatening to any of them. Even when he was manhandling 'Heather'. Which was oddly refreshing.
I can imagine Elsa seeing the Bewilderbeast and just going, "Fuck it, I can take a break now". Although fighting against a Bewilderbeast would make her useful. Just stand there and melt the blasts.
...Damn, that would be cool to see. Valka and Elsa would probably get on as well.
Okay, okay. Trying to weave together a longer-term plot for this bloody thing. A meeting is planned between Arendelle and Berk. Anna is among the delegates... she may still be a princess? (I haven't decided that yet. Arghhhh if I kill off Elsa's parents then this would be the first time she finds out.)
Anyhow, they go to the meeting, and Hiccup smuggles Elsa in as well. She sees Anna again, cute reunion, whatever. Probably even handles the fact that Anna and Hans are engaged, because she doesn't know the short engagement time. But then she finds out about her parents, and pretty much loses it, exposes herself and runs, dropping all of Arendelle/Berk into extreme cold.
Hiccup is probably like... eh, I'll put an extra pair of socks on. We get worse on the North coast.
So sorry, Kristoff, you're probably not appearing. Anna and Hiccup go to follow Elsa, eventually reach a point they can't cross (no ice staircase), and Hiccup gets Toothless instead. They're trying to persuade her to come home, and Anna says Hans's name again, and Hiccup is the one who recognises the name and is like, "I've heard of that guy. Didn't he get banished from his kingdom for trying to kill his father?!" and that's the ohshit moment that sends them running back.
And beyond that, I DON'T KNOW. But that is one idea, at least.
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And then it's sort of like with lions and tigers (part of all same classifications until you get down to species level). The species/breed thing tends to get me, because I just look at dogs and I'm like, all these different breeds of dogs are part of the same subspecies, Canis lupus familiaris and they can look wildly different appearance-wise while still being a dog (like dragons). The different types of dragons being different breeds of dragons rather than species makes more sense to me.
And plus, their official website says that the Hotburple is related to Gronckles, but a different breed of Boulder Class dragon. What. I think the class system for the different types of dragons is probably their wording for "Family" going with scientific classifications, and then the various dragons of the Boulder Class are different species. So, like Hotburples are a Subspecies of Gronckles? Like, Screaming Death is a subspecies/mutation of Whispering Death? This is so fascinating and so confusing.
Wait, how do you get six limbs with Toothless? I count four legs. Are you counting wings? He has two tailfins, those two middle fins that are just there, and then the two wings. With wings/fins, it's 6.
The only time I got sort of rapeyvibes from Alvin was probably his "I take what I want!" comment. But then again, Snotlout also says something similar in Gem of a Different Color, where he's like, "When Snotlout wants something, he takes it." But perhaps those comments are more along the lines of GREED. Perhaps why they didn't have rapeyvibes with Dagur towards Astrid was because she already is sort of dealing with sexual harassment from Snotlout like half the time they're on screen together. Stop it, Snotlout. You're supposed to be one of the good guys, stop acting like that, it's gross. Though, he definitely does not like it when Astrid pulls the same shit on him in Free Scauldy (and Ruff gets a beautiful haircut that lasts that episode). And, I think the only time I got rapeyvibes with Dagur towards Astrid was in The Flight Stuff when he gets this creepy smile when he finds out the rider is the girl, but that could be more because he knows if she's nearby, then Hiccup is nearby.
ETA: Also, it really struck me how Hiccup is literally preparing his friends for the possibility that Alvin may torture them for information (see Live and Let Fly). These are children! Like, holy fuck, that is horrifying to think about. And hell, these are child soldiers.
Ooh, Elsa and Valka getting on well, that would be cool to see. As well as Elsa just being one with the Bewilderbeast and also fighting against a Bewilderbeast. There are going to be 2 in the sequel. One is Valka's and the other is Drago's.
Oooh, meetings always work. And, hah, Hiccup just is totally chill (pun intended) about cold weather.
Ooh, yeah, no Kristoff, but his role sort of merging with Hiccup's. (Hah, so Toothless is Sven in a way. Congrats Toothless, you're also a reindeer, in addition to being wildly catlike.). Or flying back, because after all, they got a dragon.
And in response to this comment:
I even want a Night Fury! Though, I'm sure if I ever actually met Toothless (not likely, but I can dream!), I'd probably cry or something.
Hiccup is 15 in the first film, yeah. And probably mid-way through puberty at this point, but still has growth spurts to go through, I would guess (and gosh, that must be so difficult for him, especially with a prosthetic, and having to adjust it). Maybe have Elsa be 17-18? So she's right on the cusp of adulthood, and then Anna can be maybe 15, like Hiccup as well. Maybe Anna is 15 but is closer to 16. Like, she's a month away from her 16th?
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Personally, I still sort of lean towards them being different species, but I think that you can sway it either way. Like, all of Meatlug's eggs turn out to be gronckles as well, and all of the whispering death's eggs seem to be WD's, apart from the one screaming death mutation. And I just get these horrifying mental images of a Terrible Terror trying to mate with the Red Death and just humping its ankle or something. Although, to be fair, they probably would.
Sorry, when I say limbs I'm including wings. All vertebrates alive on Earth today come from the same four-limbed structure; it's just that some have adapted their limbs (from legs into wings or fins, for example) and some have lost them altogether. But the natural maximum is four, and if you want wings then you have to swap them for legs, as it were. So Toothless has four legs and two wings, which adds up to six limbs altogether. His wings actually look about level with his front legs, which would mean that he has four joints on that girdle, maybe? Or it could be two separate structures. But I am now rambling about osteology again and shut up, afterandalasia.
Astrid winding up Snotlout in Free Scauldy was hands-down one of the funniest scenes in the series for me. Because Snotlout freaks out not just at the whole ~omg let's be a couple~ thing, but at the fact that his 'flirting' (he probably thinks that it's flirting) has actually worked and that's never happened before and he has no idea what to do next. I do find it hilarious that by HTTYD2 he's apparently swapped to Ruffnut as the object of his affection (even funnier when you remember that moment in the TV series where he can't tell if Tuffnut is the guy or the girl).
But you're right, Dagur did seem to be getting his rapey on again. I think his train of thought was more that Hiccup must be nearby, because Hiccup wouldn't let any of the others go out solo, but yeah, even in context... pretty bad.
Then again, Alvin got his own moment of rapey right at the end of Cast Out Part II, when he practically leers at Dagur at says "you're mine" or something along those lines. Buuuuut it felt pretty justified by that point because Dagur and his Wall Of Stalkery (as described by my housemate) and consistent rapeyness pretty well deserved it.
Toothless is so perfect, omg. In looks and personality and everything. Like, so much of the time he's this giant pussycat, but he's inquisitive and protective and he's got a badass streak a mile wide. Of the other types of dragon, I'd probably go for the Deadly Nadder. I might have a bit of an adrenaline junkie in me, I suppose.
15yo Hiccup, 15-nearly-16 Anna and 18yo Elsa would work, yeah. I mean, in some ways Elsa would act younger than 18 because she's been so isolated, but on the other hand she basically had to look after herself from when she was 8. There are some other wildlings out there, but they're pretty rare; I guess maybe if some of them actually don't have magic, and people just thought that they did, and the ones without magic sort of banded together into little communities. Elsa would have spent some time with them, but when they found out she had magic they threw her out again. So by the time that she hit her teens and her powers really kicked in, she ended up striking out alone. So yeah, in some ways she's definitely an adult and quite capable of looking after herself physically, but she's probably younger than her age in terms of actually interacting with people. So it would take time for her to develop that, and Hiccup and later Anna would definitely be the sort who'd support her through that, because they're both sweeties.
Hans, you're definitely still a creeper for going after a fifteen year old.
But then again, depending on the era (pfft, who needs stable timelines anyway) that... might be adult. Young adult, sure, but more like eighteen or nineteen would be in our culture. In HTTYD they're prepping them to fight dragons, and Hiccup has already been apprenticed to Gobber for some years. So yeah, it's pretty nasty, but that sort of is Viking adulthood.
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I sort of figure that as a whole Sharpshot and Toothless get along MUCH better than Toothless and Torch ever did or ever will. I can picture Toothless and Sharpshot cuddling up next to each other and sleeping. I wanna know Stoick's reaction to finding out Hiccup got another dragon. Probably mildly annoyed/resigned.
Ah, I see. And given Toothless's unique structure, it certainly would be interesting to see what his skeletal structure looks like. Would give insight into his anatomy.
And when he shows up on the island, he's just like, "I don't understand women" to Hiccup. Oh, you poor baby, Snotlout. Personally, with Ruffnut's triangle-esque thing going on, I'm hoping that it ends up with a poly relationship where Ruff ends up with Snotlout, Fishlegs, and Eret (depending on his behavior through the film). That's what I want. But that probably won't happen, but I can dream.
I do love that Astrid and Snotlout have this brotp relationship that seems basically: "I'm gonna do the thing." "Don't do the thing." "I'm still gonna do it."
And then Dagur's never to be seen again with no explanation of what happened to him after Alvin grabs him and Dagur's like, "Brother!" to Hiccup. I'm kinda hoping Alvin killed him. Totally justifiable.
Oooh, I like that. Elsa being socially younger than her actual age due to her isolation. And I like that Hiccup and Anna would help her out on that level. Hiccup's a sweetie and Anna'a super suppportive.
Good point. Astrid's comment in HTTYD about "Our parent's war is about to become ours." is especially telling. I mean, in modern day USA (to use my own frame of reference), Hiccup and his friends being 14-15 years old, would be High School freshmen/9th grade, still figuring out stuff, not even applying universities yet. They'd be several years away from adulthood. However, in the world of HTTYD, they're practically on the cusp of adulthood, about to go to war, and like you said, Hiccup already is involved in a trade.
Though, Stoick does make a comment in How To Start A Dragon Academy that Hiccup is not yet a man. It kinda peeves me a bit because Stoick, your teenage son has already been in a battle/war, in which he lost part of his leg. I mean, it's a great scene/quote, but Stoick, come on now.
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Oh lord, Terrible Terrors would just hump everything. Including Snotlout, which would have Astrid laughing too hard to be of much actual help to Hiccup. And Fishlegs tries to help but gets flustered, and the twins are just trying to throw sex-crazed terrors at each other, because that's their sense of humour. But yes, I think Sharpshot & Toothless got on a looooot better than Torch, not least because they already know plenty about terrors so Hiccup isn't getting distracted by the shiny new dragon. Plus Toothless clearly new that Toothless's mother was going to come after him.
Astrid & Snotlout are funny, once they get themselves straightened out. Actually, it's A Tale of Two Dragons where they start getting their teamwork on, right? So Free Scauldy probably really was the beginning of the end for Snotlout's crush.
(To be fair, I have a character in one of my novels who is like that. Flirts with everyone, wouldn't really know what to do with himself if it worked. Also has the sense of humour of an eight-year-old and an inflatable alligator which gets involved in a lot of pranks. But that's a digression.)
I think part of Stoick's words might have just been wishful thinking... he probably doesn't want to admit that his son is basically an adult, because no parent does. And I'd guess as well that killing your first dragon was pretty much the rite of passage to adulthood, and without that they're not really sure what to do. Still not the best thing for Stoick to have said, though kinda in-character. Hiccup isn't what he expected in a son, so he's not quite sure what to do with him.
The demographics of Berk are another thing that bug me. For an isolated unit of that size to be genetically stable, you'd expect 500+ individuals (that's one of the reasons that Çatalhöyük was so important; it was the first time in human existence that a single settlement had been a viable unit), but in pre-industrial societies with high infant mortality, up to half of the population should have been 15 or under (250 kids, with a sort of pyramidal structure of age there as well). Yet somehow we only see a few small kids around, and nobody even close to Hiccup & co. in age. That's almost certainly a matter of production costs, though - it's much easier to just change the colours on a dragon to get a new one for crowd scenes! Notably, at the end of Gift of the Night Fury, the crowd seems to have a lot more kids among it, so there's that.
When Stoick and Gobber talk about "the next bunch of recruits" they don't specify a time frame, though, and I think that if you have them going through in six month batches then 6-7 at a time would actually work out. Suppose that stops you from having to wrangle too many teenagers at once as well. *snorts*
Hurstwic.org is absolutely AMAZING and my number one go-to place for Viking information right now (since I graduated, I don't have access to the academic stuff I used to). That link goes to the demographics page, which pretty much agrees with what I know generally and what I've read about Viking bone collections. There's some stuff on there about becoming adults that actually kinda shocked me, though:
"The age of majority is not clearly defined, but by the time a boy was 16 years old, he was expected to take on all the roles of an adult male in Viking society. Even younger children took on some adult responsibilities. In order to qualify to be a judge in court, a man need be only 12 years old. Although children were excused from attacks and battles and permitted to leave before a fight began, some young children initiated lethal revenge attacks. Notably, Helgi and Bergr were twelve and ten years old when they killed Þorkell Súrsson to avenge their father's death, as is told in chapter 28 of Gísla saga."
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*shrugs* I'm from the UK, so it's probably not that different for most - we're picking our GCSEs at that stage, which is only the very first step in narrowing down what subjects you do, but that's VERY minor. My situation was a bit different because of my family dynamics; my mother was disabled and my father worked two jobs, so I basically kept the house from when I was thirteen or fourteen. Everything except cooking (at which I remain terrible) and handling finances, which was my father's domain, basically became my job. Then again, until very recently you could also leave school at 16 in the UK and get a job, and I have friends who did. You could even join the army at 16, though I think you need to be 18 now. There was this weird thing where you could join the army and go to a warzone (although it was HIGHLY unlikely that soldiers that young would go to the front line) before you could vote. Weird as.
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Perfect assessment of everyone dealing with the humping Terrors, haha. Snotlout being humped, Astrid laughing her butt off, Fishlegs flustered, Twins throwing dragons at each other.
The only one to actually get distracted and ignore his dragon with the Terrible Terrors was Fishlegs. Poor Meatlug. She just wanted to torment sheep with you, Fishlegs. And Snotlout has one instance where he successfully interacts with a Terrible Terror (Appetite for Destruction), all the other times he gets attacked. Or gets frightened by them. And yeah, Toothless being well aware that Torch's mama was looking for him. The TV Tropes page for the series describes the issue so perfectly, "Poor Communication Kills: The plot of "The Terrible Twos" could have been avoided if Toothless had a reliable way of communicating "You took the baby and the mother is pissed.""
And then Sharpshot turns out to be amazing at mail delivery and is quite useful. And totally seems so chill with hanging out in Toothless's saddle bag until needed (see Appetite for Destruction and Cast Out Part 2). I remember half expecting that Sharpshot wouldn't make it back to Berk in the season finale, and would be seen by the enemy and get shot down. It was something that happened in The Mummy Returns to Ardeth Bay's falcon Horus. And it sort of seemed like something that could happen. Would have changed the outcome of the finale, certainly.
Free Scauldy probably marks the end of Snotlout hitting on Astrid and his thing for her and the beginning of a beautiful friendship, yeah. And, yeah, in A Tale of Two Dragons, they start working together and most of the tension isn't even because Snotlout's hitting on her. They're both sort of irritated with each other because of the dragon root bothering their dragons and out of concern to protect their dragons. And a small amount of romantic tension, I suppose. Like, the way the episode is, I almost sort of expect Hiccup to yell "Kiss and make up!" He probably would have followed that "What am I saying?" immediately afterwards.
To be fair, Hiccup killed a dragon with the help of Toothless (the Red Death), so even if the rite of passage to adulthood (and yeah, it probably was) was killing their first dragon, Hiccup did that. But, yeah, their culture/society is going to have to change that rite of passage to adulthood. Perhaps when they bond with a dragon instead? Though, Gustav's like, maybe ten and seems to have bonded with Fanghook so that might not work.
Yeah, I agree with you about the demographics. One of the guys that worked on the show said that they estimated that the tv series had around 250-300 Vikings with the feature probably having more. That's such a small number, though! My high school graduating class was more than that (around 400 iirc). And the crowd scene (AKA the spectators at the Dragon Races) in HTTYD2 seems to be pretty big, though.
Though, conversely, Dagur claiming he has 50,000 soldiers sounds TOO big.
I'd feel more comfortable if Berk had about 1000 people on it. But, hey, maybe Berk had a baby boom following the end of the War on Dragons. Little baby Hildegard/Magnus might have been the first baby born following the end of that war.
The twins mention having a cousin Lars (who could be close to their age) and Stoick mentions a newly married couple who sound like they're fairly close in age to Hiccup (within 5 years maybe?) in Viking For Hire, "I married the Svenson girl to the Odegard boy at dawn." So, maybe there are other teenagers but we just don't see them/they aren't important.
Poor Gobber having to wrangle teenagers all the time. I just sort of imagine him trying to herd all six of them and it just failing miserably. Heck, even when he's trying to get them to get to the Great Hall in Animal House, it doesn't work. Sorry Gobber, if Hiccup doesn't listen to you, the others probably won't. Oops. You're probably stuck with those six forever, Gobber.
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Though, I certainly can see there being some amount of fuss because of Ruff's haircut following Free Scauldy, yeah. Perhaps from Stoick and her parents, in particularly. I sort of picture Ruff not giving a crap about it, though. She seemed pretty happy with her decision, not an ounce of regret on her face. And I can see Hiccup defending her decision and even say, if you're going to punish anyone, punish me, she's my responsibility (heck, he even says that the twins are his responsibility in Zippleback Down). And then the issue just sort of going away. Obligatory mild sadness that her hair was back to normal the next episode.
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Terrible Terrors don't even seem to be smart enough to remember their own mating season, considering there's an egg that hatches in Animal House which is several months before Snoggletog. Which... again doesn't really surprise me, knowing Terrible Terrors.
Getting back to the topic of dragon sex... as you do. Apparently komodo dragon eggs incubate for 8-9 months and it looks as if some snakes can clock in at 6-7 months as well. So considering the eggs looked to hatch in about three days, my guess would be that the dragons incubate the eggs internally for... however long it takes. With their size, maybe anything up to a year? Thus explaining why there hadn't been the, "What do you want me to do?! Tell them to stop having such loud dragon sex right overhead?!" around Berk. But I'm not a reptiles expert. But maybe Terrors don't have the same mating pattern as everyone else.
I did spend a fair bit of Terrible Twos going, "What's that, Lassie? Timmy fell down a well?" because I am a terrible person.
Oh man, I was rewatching Thawfest today and Hiccup going, "Yeah, baby!" cracks me up every time. Because just for that moment, Hiccup is a headstrong 15/16 year old kid. But yes, you're right, he and Toothless did kill a dragon. So he only killed half a dragon, but it was a very big dragon. So it still totally counts.
The more that I watch, the more that I lean towards the headcanon that it's actually set in a post-apocalyptic universe. Like, they know about typhoons and boomerangs and magnesium and everything. And even the fact that Gobber chucks away the glass in The Iron Gronckle - Vikings loved glass! Then there's the "yak butter parfait" (parfait didn't exist until 1894). Just... yes. *clings to headcanon*
Dagur is probably exaggerating, because... well, Dagur. There was another comment somewhere about him having a hundred ships, and even that sounds huge, but there's no way that he's getting 500 men on each ship. Dagur, your bullshit is showing. Also, he must get through a lot of ships with the number that get set on fire or destroyed by Smokebreaths when he's nearby. *snorts*
And you're right there, Hiccup (and the others) would defend her. Or she'd just claim to be Tuffnut, in order to confuse him. She does seem to have a bit more in the brains department than he does. I heard that the reason her hair went back was all animation costs - check out the complex way that her short hair moves at the end of that episode, compared to the simpler way of moving that two long, heavy braids have. They get away with a lot of animation re-use, but even Astrid's hair can look chunky at times. Hiccup is about the only one who really keeps the hair movement.
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That certainly would make sense for them to incubate internally for a period of time and then lay their eggs like three days before the little ones are to be born. And up to a year certainly would make sense. Elephants take like 2 years, but elephants are mammals and not reptiles.
Perhaps, the four main dragon species of Berk (Nadders, Zipplebacks, Nightmares, and Gronckles) have the same mating pattern of being right around Snoggletogg and then the Terrible Terror are just sort of whenever it feels like it??
One of the things I noticed in Thawfest is that the roof of the arena can basically move upwards and off, and like, that's the only time that happens. You think they would use that more often. It seems pretty odd to keep the roof on when it'd probably be so much easier to fly upwards than through that rather small doorway. But then again, the teenagers probably aren't thinking about that?
And the fact that they say modern-ish terms sometimes, like "awesome" (which according to Merriam Webster, the first known use of that word was 1598), too. Post-apocalyptic universe is certainly reasonable, considering all the weird anachronisms.
They all seem to through a lot of ships, in general. Berk, the Outcasts, Dagur. The Red Death practically destroys all of the Berk fleet. Tuff blows one up in Heather Report. And Hiccup spends some of Defenders of Berk blowing up enemy ships whenever he gets the chance. Gobber fucks up a ship with iron in Viking For Hire. Destroying Ships: The Franchise.
Oh Ruff, pretending to be your brother. Tuff does claim that he impersonates both of them in Heather Report.
I wouldn't be surprised if it had been because of the animation costs. In general, they only ever really have complex hair movement in the show with Hiccup, everybody else is just sort of ignored. It's kind of a bummer, I suppose, but it's understandable: this isn't a big budget animated film, it's a tv show with a smaller budget.
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Unsurprisingly, it transpired that humiliation and a lump of wood for a pillow did not make for a particularly good night’s sleep. Nonetheless, Hiccup was actually asleep by the time that the door to the woodshed was opened the next morning, and rolled out onto Gobber’s feet.
Well, foot, at least.
“Good morning, sunshine,” said Gobber cheerily. He broke the usual pattern of grabbing Hiccup by the shoulder, and instead hooked him through his belt-loop to drag him to his feet. Because the last twenty-four hours hadn’t been humiliating enough.
“Morning, Gobber.” Hiccup straightened himself off and tried to brush the splinters off his face without embedding them in his skin instead. “So, how pleased is my father with my achievements this time?”
The look which Gobber gave him just about said it all. Hiccup sighed, and tried to stretch out the crick in his back.
“Great. Another proud day for the Haddock family.”
“Oh, it’s not that bad,” said Gobber. “You didn’t set anything on fire this time.”
“Thank you for that vote of confidence.”
He couldn’t deny it, though, especially considering the fact that ‘anything’ could actually include himself. It probably said something that they were so short of men nowadays that they even let Hiccup into the forge to help out. Hiccup let the matter slide, and it wasn’t until after Gobber had doled out the usual breakfast portion of uninspiring porridge - made the Viking way, so thick you could stand your spoon up in it - that he spoke up again.
“So, where is Dad?”
“Going over the armoury, to make sure the wildling didn’t get anything from it. Last I heard it was only food that was missing so far. Then I’m meeting him at the Arena to check over the dragons. The Gronckle’s got a dicky stomach - you should see the-”
“Woah, thank you!” Hiccup threw up his hands defensively. “I don’t think I want to hear the, Gobber, thank you very much. You want me at the forge today, then?”
Gobber shook his head, pausing to lick a bit of porridge off one end of his moustache. “No, not today. Going to be Arena business anyhow. But you keep yourself out of trouble!” he added, as Hiccup took the opportunity to slide out from his seat and make a break for the door.
“I will!”
It was probable that Gobber muttered something disbelieving in his wake.
Berk was getting towards the end of its annual attempt at summer, so it was only spitting with rain as Hiccup made his way back around the edge of the village to where he had so thoroughly made a fool of himself the previous night. There was even a nice hacked-off edge to some of the foliage to indicate where Astrid had been about to try to kill him. He wandered in the direction that he had seen the wildling, but they had not been following a path and he couldn’t see any footsteps. Probably wouldn’t have been visible by the time that half the village trooped over to see what was going on, anyway.
He was fully aware that he wasn’t that good at throwing things. Which meant that if the bushes were there, and the person had only looked to be about this far away...
Then his net had probably ended up under the large firethorn bush at the base of the hill. Somehow, Hiccup felt that he should have predicted something like that happening. With a sigh, he shrugged off his vest and wrapped it around his left forearm, hoping that it would at least keep out the worst of the thorns, and set about levering back the lower-to-the-ground branches in search of his net.
He frowned when he saw the hole in the ground instead. Sure, they were on limestone here and there were more than enough caves to go around, but normally the men of the village went round plugging up the local ones with clay. It stopped children falling in, not to mention the general paranoia about wildlings. Of course, though, this one would be open to the sky so that it could swallow up Hiccup’s hard-won trollwart net.
“Could one thing go right today?” he asked no-one in particular, then flinched in full expectation of receiving a thorny branch to the face. Mercifully, it didn’t happen.
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The vertical tunnel gave way to a horizontal one, not quite tall enough to stand up in, with a silty, muddy floor. At the far end, more light was visible. What was not visible, however, was Hiccup’s net.
“Oh, great...”
He glanced back where he’d just climbed down, then to the flat tunnel. Probably worth at least seeing where it came out before he put the effort into climbing back up again. He put his vest back on and made his way down, muttering curses on firethorn bushes as he picked a few stray thorns out of the fur. One of the relatively few advantages of being the chief’s son was that he always got new clothes, not second-hand ones, although where Gobber had turned out to be such a dab hand with a needle and thread was anyone’s guess. And the smell of yak had just about been washed out of this one.
The tunnel opened out into a sinkhole, with enough of the roof still clinging on to provide shelter from the rain. Hiccup looked around and wrinkled his nose. Looked like it was going to be a climb back up after all. Just as he was going to turn around, though, he glanced down, and stopped abruptly. His were not the only footprints.
The mud at his feet looked fairly worn, but there was at least one very clear print of a bare foot on the ground right in front of him. Hiccup drew the knife from his belt, wished that he had something more substantial, and then wished as well that he was really capable of using something more substantial. He looked around the sinkhole again: a small stream ran through it, widening in the centre to something of a pool, and clearly the collapse had been long enough ago for grasses and ferns to start establishing themselves around the pool’s edge. The edges of the sinkhole were darker, disappearing into worrying shadows.
He edged around the large boulders to his left, only to find himself looking at a makeshift lean-to against the wall. It looked like the remains of a tent, though it was dirty and looked in places like the felting was wearing away from the wool. A fireplace was not far from it, and a few pots and baskets. No weapons, though, and no sign of movement.
Barely daring to breathe, Hiccup stepped closer. The mossy floor, at least, was quiet enough to be considered in his favour. He picked his way around the edge of the camp, round to the open flap of the tent, and then whirled round and presented his dagger to the occupant.
Who was asleep.
A young woman lay on the floor of the tent. She didn’t look much older than him, though it was hard to tell. She looked skinny, her hair dirty, her clothes ragged and worn. Hiccup’s net was on the ground beside her. As he looked more closely, though, he saw the sweat on her forehead and the way that she twitched in her sleep; as he peered towards the far end of the tent he could see her bare feet, and the fact that one of them was swollen and limp at the angle.
“Oh, Thor...” Hiccup muttered.
At his words, the girl jerked awake, and looked around desperately before turning and fixing Hiccup with a look of absolute terror. It wasn’t something he was at all used to. She sat upright and tried to pull away from him, only to cry out and clutch at her ankle instead.
“Hey, hey, it’s okay!” said Hiccup, then realised that the hand he was gesturing with still held the knife. That probably wasn’t helping. He dropped to one knee, putting the knife on the ground, and held both hands out in placation. “I’m not going to hurt you.”
She looked straight at him and said something, but the words were meaningless. When Hiccup frowned, she spoke again, more slowly, but he just shook his head.
“I’m sorry, I have no idea what you’re saying. But you’re hurt, aren’t you? Come on, let me see if I can help.”
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Hiccup frowned, and looked over his shoulder. It took him a moment to process what he was seeing, and recognise the chunks of ice scattered on the ground.
“Wo-argh!” He rolled sideways and to his feet in a movement of which his father might actually have been proud, backing away from the flap of the tent and, he realised a moment too late, his knife. “You’re a wildling! You’re... you’re...”
He trailed off, though his heart was still pounding. For a start, if he couldn’t understand her then she probably couldn’t understand a word that he was saying either. Secondly, all that she knew was that she had woken up to find a stranger with a knife looking at her. And thirdly, magic or not, it was a bit hard to really be scared of a girl dressed in rags and with an injury that clearly left her in pain.
Breathing deeply, Hiccup lowered his hands again, and walked back round so that he was in sight of the mouth of the tent. The girl was watching him warily, one hand still outstretched, but she made no move to grab for his knife or to attack him again.
Nobody was quite sure who - or what - the wildlings were. They were pretty sure that they were human, although even that was a matter of some debate after a few drinks or when everyone had been sheltering together in the Great Hall for a week or so. But Arendelle denied any knowledge of them, and were more than a little smug about the great crevasse that cut off the southernmost quarter of the island from the rest of it. Arendelle controlled the only bridge, not that it was much used, and to hear them tell it was enough to keep out any wildlings.
All that the Vikings knew was that they attacked in the night and stole from Berk. They had been responsible for more than a few deaths over the years, although the Vikings had probably managed to return the favour in the number of wildlings they captured and killed. And a lot of them used magic.
Hiccup had never seen ice, though. Well, he’d seen plenty of ice - this was, after all, Berk - just not of the magical sort. Usually if there was a wildling with magical abilities out there, Hiccup managed to run into them in some horrifyingly embarrassing manner. At least with dragons you knew just from looking at them what they were capable of.
“I’m not going to hurt you,” he repeated. In the spirit of honesty, he added: “And I would really appreciate it if you didn’t hurt me either. Deal?”
He slowly started to close the distance back again. The girl just sat there watching him. At one point, her hand twitched and Hiccup flinched away, but she did not shoot more ice. He could not helping the fact that he could see his breath on the air, though, and that there was ice creeping across the floor of her tent. It spread to within a few inches of the trollwart net, then stopped.
“Well, at least that worked.”
He took another step closer, but a look of panic crossed the girl’s face and she scrambled out of the tent. Her ankle seemed to fail her, and she stumbled back against the wall, where ice immediately began to spread around her.
“Woah, hey, hey!” Hiccup protested, holding up his hands as if someone was threatening to use him as a knife throwing target again. “Look, I just want... I want to help you.”
Even as he said the words, part of him was surprised at himself. The only thing that most Vikings hated more than wildlings was dragons. But dragons were dragons, and the wildling girl in front of him was looking very human and very hurt, and Hiccup just couldn’t summon up the appropriate hatred for her.
“Sit down,” he said, “let me have a look at your ankle. Maybe I can help.”
Healing was supposed to be Gothi’s job, the prerogative of women in general, but any Viking was expected to be able to help a comrade in battle. Besides, Hiccup had sustained more than a few injuries of his own over the years.
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She fell the last foot or so with a grunt of pain, injured ankle stretching out in front of her. Hiccup crouched down beside it, eyes not leaving hers and trying to look as reassuring as he could. Possibly even as if he knew what he was doing here. Finally, the girl gave the tiniest of nods, and he looked down towards her ankle.
“I... yeah, that’s bad,” he said. Her ankle was clearly broken, foot practically hanging beneath it, swollen and bruised. Her legs were scraped, and he glanced up to see that her arms and cheek were as well. Hiccup winced as he realised that his net could well have caused her to fall down the tunnel that he had found. “And I’m a terrible person.”
She was a wilding, part of his mind was still screaming. He was supposed to want to kill her. But instead Hiccup carefully wrapped one hand around her ankle and the other around her foot, and tried to move them back into alignment.
The girl gave a hiss of pain, trying to pull out of his grip, and ice started forming on Hiccup’s vest. He dropped her foot as quickly as he dared. “Okay, okay! I know, it hurts. But if it’s dislocated, then it needs to go back or you might lose it.” Lost limbs were more often due to dragons, but there were a few around the village that had been broken rather than eaten. And Hiccup himself remembered dislocating a finger when he was a kid. “Please,” he said earnestly.
Her hands curled into fists, and she turned her face away with her eyes tightly shut. Hiccup took that as a yes.
“It’s a really good thing that you don’t know I’ve never done this before,” he said, taking hold of her leg again. Gobber had put his finger back into place, and the terror of the moment had never quite left him. It was probably going to be worse with a larger joint. “Okay, three, two, one...
He felt the grate of bone on bone as he pulled on her ankle then let it pop back into place. She gave a short, harsh scream, and the ice around her cracked and fell to the ground in shards; Hiccup flinched.
“Sorry! Sorry... that should help, though, honestly...”
There was sweat on her forehead, but as he watched it froze and fell away. The ice around them retreated, curling back in towards the girl, and Hiccup actually felt the air around him get warmer. He looked up at her face again cautiously.
“Is that better?”
For a moment she kept her eyes closed, still breathing heavily through her nose, then she turned her face back towards him again. Her knuckles were not so white either. She said something; Hiccup cocked his head uncertainly, and she said it again, slow and enunciated.
Ah, he had a suspicion what she meant. “You’re welcome,” he said.
He put her foot back on the ground again - she winced at the movement, but only a little - and rocked back on his heels. Even with the bones set, it wasn’t as if her ankle was just going to heal up immediately. The usual next step was to get the person to a healer, or a healer to the person, but that wasn’t exactly an option right now.
“You know, it feels kind of weird not even knowing your name,” he said to the girl, almost conversationally. “I mean, weirder than this whole situation, of course. My name’s Hiccup.”
The girl was frowning slightly now, which may or may not have been an improvement on the fear. She tried to curl her foot back up towards her, but hissed through her teeth and grabbed her calf instead. Hiccup let her sit there for a moment, watching the ice on her hand slowly fade away again, before he caught her eye and pointed to himself. “Hiccup,” he said.
This time, she definitely frowned. Hiccup looked up at the sky for a moment, trying to think of some way to make it clearer he was introducing himself and not making random sounds, until finally an idea struck him. He shuffled sideways to one of the ferns in the sinkhole, and shook one of its fronds like a hand.
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More to his shock than his relief, the girl gave a weak giggle. “Elsa,” she replied.
“Elsa?” he said, and she nodded. Hiccup laughed as well, this time in relief, just as another thought struck him. People assumed that the wildlings didn’t have language, were hardly better than animals. There was no sign that they had homes, or kept animals, and even the clothes that they wore were stolen a lot of the time. It was hardly as if they were people.
But Elsa had a name. A name and a broken ankle, and that added up to so much humanity that it was difficult for even the ice to count against it. He couldn’t even really explain why he wanted so badly to help her - it had just been sort of thinkable not to. He wouldn’t leave Snotlout with a broken ankle, after all, and Snotlout had done a lot more to Hiccup than Elsa ever had. Often he had bruises to prove it.
“So, Elsa,” he shifted to get as comfortable as he could, “do you come here often?” He really couldn’t blame her for looking confused. How did you even communicate with someone where you had no shared language to begin with? Well, he supposed they sort of did in what was around them.
He pointed to a nearby boulder. “Rock,” he said. For a moment, Elsa looked at him as if he was absolutely mad, an expression which he was relatively used to considering how often Gobber used it. His father was more likely to just look disappointed. He pointed to the pool of water in the middle of the cave. “Pond.” And finally upwards. “Sky.”
Elsa’s eyes seemed to light up as she caught on. “Keiven,” she said, pointing to the boulder. “Ruk?”
“Rock,” he said, emphasising the vowel.
“Rock,” she said, more clearly. Hiccup gave another relieved laugh, and turned his attention to the other things around them. Pointing and grunting worked pretty well with the twins, after all.
Elsa was definitely better at this than the twins were. As quickly as rock,they went through plant, sky, tent, fireplace, knife, net, plant, fern - he was fairly sure that he had managed to distinguish between those two one Elsa started pointing to different plants and saying ‘fern’ with a questioning look - and the more topical ankle. At that point it slowed down a bit as they slipped into miming at each other, and Hiccup tried to work out whether Elsa meant fall or break or hurt when she was pointing at her ankle.
He was trying to work out how to mime magic when his stomach growled. Loudly. Feeling the familiar crawl of embarrassment, Hiccup looked up to see that the sky overhead was beginning to darken. This time of year, the days were starting to get shorter, but he’d still somehow lost a lot of time trying to communicate with a wildling girl.
It was probably a good thing that Gobber would presume he was looking for trolls or something.
“Look, I really have to go,” he said. Elsa looked at him curiously. “Me, go,” he pointed towards the tunnel that would lead back to the surface.
Her face fell, and he couldn’t help a pang of regret that he was going to have to leave her here. “I’ll be back tomorrow,” he protested, then realised that wasn’t really going to help all that much. Hiccup paused for a moment, looking around again, then got up and shuffled closer to Elsa. She drew away slightly, but did not move far, and Hiccup held up his hands in placation again.
There was a bare patch of earth near to her. Hiccup smoothed it down with one hand, then picked up his knife. Elsa started to breathe faster, ice crawling out from around her again, and Hiccup quickly put the point down to the dirt.
“It’s okay! I just don’t exactly have a pen with me.” He sketched out a sun on the horizon, facing towards Elsa, then a crescent moon, and another sun with stylised rays around it. “Today,” he said, starting at one end, “tonight, tomorrow. I’ll be back tomorrow.” He tapped the sun for emphasis.
“Tomorrow,” said Elsa. She nodded.
“All right. Now, you should get back to your tent,” he said, gesturing from her to the lean-to and back again. “Do you want some help?”
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“Okay, let’s try again,” said Hiccup. He looked his other arm underneath her shoulder and pulled her straight to her feet, earning a yelp which might have been surprise, pain, or a combination of the two. Turning, he slung her arm over his shoulders and pulled his weight onto her before she had a chance to pull away. “That’s better.”
It was only a few steps back to the lean-to, and Elsa seemed to weigh barely anything. That made a change after living in Berk for so long. He helped her sit back down, then picked up the net and slung it back over his shoulder.
“Tomorrow, all right?”
“Tomorrow,” said Elsa.
It wasn’t until he stumbled out of the firethorn bush that he actually stopped to wonder what in the hell he was doing.
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