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The sun set on the harbor as a blonde teenager, toddler and bruises in tow, appeared on the beach. The three-year-old looked around at the hubbub, seeing and hearing and smelling all sorts of grownups, from neatly groomed ones with shiny copper brooches and baggy silk pants to scarred ones with iron collars on their necks and clanking chains between them.
"IT'S GETTING LATE!" yelled a young man holding an armful of large leather sacks and walking along the shore.
"Yogurt again?" muttered a middle-aged brunette settling down between the cross-braces of a short boat.
"Tie it up better this time!"
"COZY NEW SLEEPING BAGS!"
"...I should have bought more ale on this leg of the trip..."
"I don't want to drift out on the tide like we did last night!"
Eventually she looked in the direction her mother was carrying her, seeing a man with an orange-red beard he had tied up in pretty bows talking with another with an oar for an arm on one of the beached boats. Nobody she could see on this boat wore a collar.
"Excuse me, are you the traders from Berk?" asked her mother once the redhead stopped talking and looked at where his friend was pointing his oar-arm.
"Yes. W– what happened to you?" he gasped as he saw the bruises on her face.
"It's not what happened to me, it's what happened to her," she said as she picked up the girl and pulled up the girl's left sleeve. The man saw more black-and-blue marks on the three-year-old's arm and gasped.
"That's terrible!" he cried. "You poor thing," he said, before turning to face the mother. "To hit a child...who does something like that? Another child? No, you have a black eye too..."
"Daddy," said the girl quietly.
"What?! Can't you get a divorce?"
"Ha! Leaving the house was hard enough, forget about finding witnesses," she snapped back. "Besides, I have nowhere to go. I'm only nineteen so I can't set up house for another year. My parents were happy enough to see me raped and to spend my bride price so their house is out of the question too," she said quickly, rushing though the words to get the older memories over with. "Thank you for your sympathies, though." she said a moment later in a softer voice.
The three were silent as he watched her, at a loss for words.
"I have money," she said as she fished hack silver out of her apron pocket. "The silversmith who cut my necklace said 'Look for the ship with no slaves at the oars. The traders from Berk are here.'"
"We sure are! I am Stoick, the chief of Berk."
"I am Ingrid, and this is my daughter Astrid. Say hello, Astrid," said the woman.
"Hello," said Astrid quietly.
"Hello Astrid! I have a child your age too," Stoick replied before facing her mother again. "Welcome aboard, and get some rest. We have spare sleeping bags and food, and some extra room for you to stay while we row–"
"Thank you," Ingrid replied, "but I want to help row with the first shift. I may have little money and no trade goods to offer, but I can work. I want to leave here under my own power." As they walked along the boat, she looked more carefully at the villagers.
"Hello, I'm Hoffer," said one of the young men. He seemed about Ingrid's age, with medium brown hair and eyes and a tan everywhere except his neck. "Have a seat!" he added as he patted the empty space next to him on the bench, "We can share an oar..."
A dozen years later, the Night Fury lay on the floor of her new den, next to her human's nest, half a turn of the moon after the fight with the Big Bad dragon from the meeting-island. She worried – the nestling still wasn't even awake. The Big Bad dragon had beaten both of them up, but she could at least open her eyes, why couldn't her nestling?
She saw the hand of the other human near her head. This one smelled like hers, as if they were related, but was much bigger and had those skinny scales not only on the head but also on the face and torso...
...though not the belly. Was this one about to lay an egg? She remembered her parents and big brother, and how they pulled the scales off their own bellies so eggs and babies could nestle right up to soft, warm skin when she was little.
At any rate, if there was an egg on the way, and it hatched, she knew they'd be fine. Her human was still alive, after all, and she'd watched this one change before her eyes from pushy and mean to patient and helpful. She pushed her snout into a big hand, and felt gentle pats as she saw the big human's other arm wrap around her human's shoulders. She reached one front wing across to cover the nest, warming all three of them, and heard them settle down and start purring before she fell asleep herself.
Near sundown, Hiccup landed from his first flight since he awoke from his coma. The other teenagers followed...and from the ground, Astrid's parents Hoffer and Ingrid joined them.
"You're grounded!" shouted Hoffer.
"For a month!" Ingrid added. "You're not going anywhere except training without one of us to supervise!"
"Grounded?! But I just got a dragon!"
Ingrid faced Hiccup. "Hiccup, two people can ride a Nadder at once, right? I could have sworn I saw you hitch a ride with Astrid to that last battle..."
"Um, yes–"
"What did I do?!"
"Stoick told us everything. How could you hit the boy you like that way? We came to Berk to get away from those customs!" Ingrid snapped, before she turned back to Hiccup. "I'm so sorry, you deserve better than that."
"Um, thanks, but I'm, I mean I'm not mad at–" the teenage boy said as he was at a loss for more words.
"All these years we told you that you don't have to put up with a man hitting you like your mother's first husband hit her. Wasn't it obvious that you're not supposed to start the hitting either?" Hoffer sighed in exasperation.
"Let's go home, honey," Ingrid told Hoffer. "Do you want to take the dragon with her, or should I?"
As he saw the sun reach its highest point one day the next week, it shone through the windows of the forge. Hiccup put down his hammer, picked up his lunch, and went outside to head for the pasture outside Astrid's house. She sat on the fence with her meal on her lap and her shepherd's crook learning against a post.
"Hi, um, hi Astrid, how are you?" Hiccup stammered.
"Still grounded, but fine. Do you want some of my cheese? There's herbs in it."
"Thanks. Umm..." Hiccup smiled but his eyes didn't. "Are you dating – well, not dating dating, you're grounded – but are you seeing Fishlegs? I saw him go in your house last Saturday."
Astrid's eyes narrowed and her voice sharpened. "I don't care what other people do and who Fishlegs dates. Don't make it my business by making Stoneface think he's cheating on her with me."
"Fishlegs has a girlfriend?"
"Yes, and they both play this story-telling math game with my parents."
"Really?"
"Gobber's old enough to be Stoick's father and they're best friends. Hey, you could see for yourself! Come over this Saturday, after the baths and saunas and dinner, and play too."
"Hold it, you said they play the game with your parents. You didn't say they play it with you. If you don't like it, why suggest it to me?"
"You don't like throwing axes and I do, so maybe you'd like a hobby I don't like? Besides, if you get bored halfway through and stop playing, you can still hang out with me..."
After dinner on Saturday, Hiccup knocked on Astrid's front door.
"Hi Hiccup!" Astrid said right before she kissed him. "You came!" She then turned around and yelled to the people on both benches aside the dinner table, "Everyone, Hiccup's playing today!"
"Welcome!" Hoffer yelled back as he lifted a tankard of ale.
Hiccup walked across the longhouse's main room and sat on the bench where two unfamiliar teenagers made room for him. Toothless followed him in, sniffing at the unfamiliar surroundings. Astrid stayed on her feet while she made introductions.
"Hiccup, you already know my parents and Fishlegs. Meet Stoneface," she said, gesturing at a girl about as old and tall as her but with medium brown hair and a port wine stain on her face, "Knutjob," at a brooding younger teenager with blond roots showing under his surprisingly dark dye, "and Gunshy," at an ash blonde young woman.
"Hi everyone! Astrid, how do I play?" Hiccup asked.
"Why ask me? Don't be shy, they'll tell y– TOOTHLESS! " exclaimed Astrid as the dragon went for a stash of dried fish near the hearth. "Come on, let's hang out while they play," she added as she led the dragon to the other side of the wide-open hall.
"Here's the Swords and Sandals Rulebook!" said Gunshy, shoving another book at Hiccup.
"Gunshy, that's not what matters fir–" said Ingrid.
"If it doesn't matter then why do we keep score?!"
"Oh well, nothing really matters..."
Across the room, the grounded girl rolled her eyes as she sat down with a book in her hand and her back against the grounded dragon. As Hoffer dealt with Gunshy's whining and Knutjob's moping, Stoneface faced Hiccup and tried again.
"We make up a story by each of us each playing one of the characters, and Hoffer sort of playing the setting and keeping its rules straight–"
"Like how in an Edda the setting is consistent instead of having random magic?" Hiccup asked.
"Yes! And these dice, well, they play chance."
Fishlegs whipped out a piece of lined paper. "I'll help you get started! First, roll for your starting strength–"
"Fishy, wait! We need to tell Hiccup where he'll be joining in the story."
"Oh yeah, sorry Hiccup," Fishlegs said. "Valas the Parthian Horse-Archer with Attack x2 – that's Stoneface – and Fireball the talking Gronckle – that's me! – met Nuwayyir the Djinn with Fire Spells +7 in the mountains of Asia Minor..."
"We started with just three players and a Desert Master. Hoffer and I take turns playing as Nuwayyir and the DM," added Ingrid as she unfolded a paper titled Nuwayyir's Stats.
"...Journeying through Germania where we met Munderic the Goth Mage–"
"Damn right I'm playing a Goth," muttered Knutjob.
"–and eventually we picked up a nitpicky Pict Gladiatrix from the stadium in a Roman outpost of Gaul–"
"Artystone is at Level 4 and don't you forget it!" added Gunshy.
Ingrid looked up from the papers. "Yes, that was a good campaign..."
Nuwayyir, Valas, Fireball, and Munderic stood outside a Roman outpost of Gaul.
"If we're going to save the tributes we need to get in the arena first," said Munderic. "How?"
"Through the vomitoria during intermission!" piped up the Gronckle. "We sneak up on people when they puke and steal their tickets!"
"Tickets? Romans don't sell tickets for bread and circuses!" replied Nuwayyir. "Valas, you guard our stash out here. Fireball, you hover outside the wall until we whistle for you."
"Got it, I can't exactly pass for a Roman or a Gaul. Can you?"
"Let me double-check the Items Inventory...OK, I have the tunic and stola I need to pass for Roman, and I can hide my fire until we need it. Munderic, you're coming with me through the vomito–"
"I thought you said we don't need to steal tickets!"
"Vomitoria aren't where nobles go puke to make room for the next courses of a feast, they're where arenae swallow up the crowds before the show and vomit them back onto the streets afterwards..." the disguised djinn said as she and the Goth joined the crowds, rattling their dice in their hands.
As they found their seats in the stands, they saw water cover the arena floor. "WOOHOO, A NAVAL BATTLE!" yelled someone in the audience
"Ladies and gentlemen, today we start off with two of our tributes from the borders of Pictland!" yelled the master of ceremonies while the stage crew opened the gladiatorial doors. This arena, nowhere near as massive as the Colosseum in Rome, smaller even than Berk's arena, still had room for the two small boats the crew pulled out and dropped on the water before pulling out two people and dropping them on each of the boats in turn. The two teenagers on the boats struggled to stand in their ill-fitting armor and holding heavy shields and tridents.
"I can't finish my bread. Here you have it!" yelled someone else as she tossed half a loaf onto the boy's boat.
The gladiatrix and gladiator half-heartedly swiped at each other with their tridents.
"Sister, I don't want to kill you!"
Nuwayyir considered how much room all that water could take up in different states and at the same time was pleasantly surprised by an Initiative Bonus.
The crowd went wild, calling for blood!
"Brother, if one of us dies at least the other can fight again another day!" She then looked up. "Wait a minute, isn't he an NPC?"
Munderic readied 5 Magic Points to spend on a one-time whole-enemy-party Memory Wipe spell, just in case.
The crowd went mild, muttering about these two gladiators not showing enough bloodthirst for each other.
Nuwayyir shed her stola, leaping out of her seat and lighting up like a Monstrous Nightmare, jumping into the water and whipping up large clouds of steam.
"COOL, MORE SPECIAL EFFECTS!" shouted yet another audience member.
"Help!" cried the teenagers. "The steam's hiding us like fog, but we can't run through boiling water!"
"You won't have to!" said Nuwayyir, and whistled.
Fireball burst through the fog, picking up the one teen with his hind paws and the other with his front and 2 Experience Points, barely missing a beat as he lifted off agai–
"Stoneface, how come you didn't get to do more? Don't archers have a lot of range?" Hiccup asked.
"I was home sick that day, and they didn't want to play my character behind my back too much."
The Monstrous Nightmare coasted in the sky, alone this time instead of carrying her human, and looked around for signs of schools of fish. In the corner of one eye she saw a semi-familiar island, and headed for it to take a look.
When she got closer, she could see a ring of rock with a pit in the middle, like the meeting-island but without its rocky top. The pit had a lot of hot wet rock, the kind that was too hot even for her skin which she comfortably set on fire so often. She was curious, and went closer still.
BOOM!
The wet rock jumped up from the pit! She counted herself lucky as she dodged the splash, narrowly missing the globs of rock.
If this island's wet rock pit could jump, and the meeting-island had a wet rock pit too...
The dragon turned tail and pumped her wings, her brain racing almost as fast as the rest of her body.
...where was another place she and her fellow dragons, who spread themselves out in vast hunting territories, could use to meet and mate each other...?
She dodged a flock of those little dragons before remembering that they could divide around her and regroup.
There was the human-island, but...
She rushed home to her human.
Whom she saw posturing in front of two other humans, even as she landed. The dragon barked and fidgeted impatiently, waiting for him to stop showing off and start paying attention. At last her human ran inside the little human den and came out with her backpack. She stopped fidgeting long enough for him to strap the backpack on her and strap himself inside.
Finally, she could show her human the problem! Using the human-island for a new meeting-island might be easier if the humans saw the problem first. Better to show than to tell.
She dove close enough to the splashing-island for them to see the wet rock jump but didn't go close enough to get splashed by it.
When her rider got loud again, she stopped circling around that island. The noise from the backpack went down as they crossed the waters, but got faster and louder again as she approached the meeting-island and flew right for the entrance.
Her human got louder and louder, seemingly more and more excited, as she flew over this island's wet rock pit and barked and yelped at the other dragons...
...a shadow loomed across the evening sands on the outskirts of Carthage.
Marcus, the young Roman soldier who had placed his conscience before his commander and gone AWOL, drew his sword so quickly that the Basilisk fled, leaving behind a shiny Experience Point for the newest member of the party of adventurers.
"Thanks Marcus!" said Nuwayyir as she stoked the campfire a little more and the rest of the group assessed their Items Inventory.
"Good job for a Level 1 player!" added a voice that seemed to come from the Desert itself.
Suddenly more growls came from the darkness. Fireball growled back, but got no clear response – these were not his fellow Scandinavian dragons, not even the local Punic dragons who never flew as far north as the snows. "Sounds like trouble. Who's next up?"
Valas carefully stepped forward and drew his doubly-curved bow as the sun rose...
"Stoneface rolled an 8. What did she get?" asked Hiccup.
"Heat Wave!" replied Hoffer.
"Sorry, we all lose 2 Initiative Points now," added Fishlegs as he jotted down another note on his stats sheet.
Astrid overheard this, stuck a bookmark in her book, and spoke up from her perch in a chair covered with bearskin. "Why not put on extra layers and sit uncomfortably close to the hearth fire to play the role of being in a heat wave? It's more realistic than fudging numbers."
Gunshy rapidly flipped through the rule book. "Can we do that?!"
"Does 'Don't Pick On the DM's Kid' need to be in the rule book for you to understand that?" groaned Knutjob.
"No seriously, I like Astrid's idea," replied Gunshy, "but do the rules let us do that...?"
"–so gimme that, I wanna try!" yelled Tuffnut as he stood next to their family loom, trying to pull the shuttle out of his sister's hands.
"No! Go take that spade over there and dig up some weeds. It's got a sharp edge on it, boys like sharp edges."
"Ruffnut, let your brother try the loom," said their father as he tended the hearth. "This is Berk, not one of those sexist villages. You can go to dragon training class even though you're a girl, let him learn to weave even though he's a boy."
"Yeah!" cried Tuffnut as Ruffnut blinked in surprise and loosened her grip on the shuttle.
Across the fence in her backyard but not out of earshot, Astrid rolled her eyes before turning them away from the twins' house and back to her own Deadly Nadder. "Good boy," she said as she scratched the dragon's chin, "you're much nicer than them. All your friends are nicer than them too, even the ones Snotlout and Fireworm just brought to Berk."
"Worst. Neighbors. Ever." added Ingrid's voice from through the window as Ruffnut and Tuffnut kept yelling.
Back in his house, Tuffnut settled down at the loom and started weaving, smacking the shuttle across the warps of wool. "I'm gonna be the best-dressed guy in Berk!" Back and forth it went for several minutes, until it flew right across the room and into Ruffnut's arm.
"Oops! Well, now that one's got blood on it!" jeered Tuffnut.
"Does not!"
"Does too!"
"Take it outside, kids!" snapped their father before he returned to ignoring them.
The left-paw head of the Zippleback watched its humans emerge from their den. They made loud mouth-sounds at each other until its twin stuck its head between them. While the two humans petted the twin's head and their body on the right-paw side, this head looked around at the den, the grass, the sheep...
One of its humans, the one who didn't bind up the long skinny scales from its head, came into view. It proffered a yummy fish and kindly waited for the dragon to finish the snack.
Then, the human turned to the side and bent over partly.
What for?
The dragon got the concept as soon as it smelled an odor not entirely unlike its constant companion's weapon breath, and lit up.
Fwoosh! Some hearty flames went out before they burned up all the gas and died in the air.
The other one of its humans, the one who did bind up its long skinny head-scales, looked and yelled and stomped and waved. This one then got in that same position.
Meanwhile, the wind shifted...
"–How historically accurate is this?" asked Marcus as Nuwayyir lit the arrow Valas had nocked and ready to loose.
"I based Swords & Sandals on the more fanciful stories us galley slaves told each other before we broke free and I left the Mediterranean, and on half the books I bought in Byzantium on trading missions, and..." answered Hoffer.
As her husband went on, Ingrid added, "Not very."
"I play a talking Gronckle who has +60 speed," pointed out Fishlegs. "How realistic is that?"
"On the other hand, I can even smell those flaming arrows right now," said Knutjob.
Stoneface nodded. "Cool, Knu– NOT COOL!"
"FIRE!" yelled Astrid from outside.
"Game over!" added Hoffer.
The party rushed outside to see a fragment of the fence in front of the farm go up in flames. Astrid, and a red-faced Ruffnut and Tuffnut, ran over with small buckets of water, but couldn't put it out.
"If only I had Ice Spells x10 in real life!" cried Fishlegs.
The Gronckle was jolted out of his nap by his human's voice, much louder and sharper than usual. This could be the kind of thing for which he slept so much, for which he saved up so much energy!
He flew over, and saw the flames. That fire was about to reach a human den. Humans and their dens weren't fireproof!
Good thing he'd gotten plenty of rest.
The dragon immediately remembered the big cylinders full of rainwater near so many human dens. He dashed to the closest one, grabbed its top edges with his hind paws, and flew over the fire that was roaring up from one of those odd wooden territory-lines and sending sparks dangerously close to the den.
SPLASH!
As the fire in the middle died down, humans gathered around the edges to stomp out the last few embers. His came up to him and petted him. Some of the others pointed at him and voiced at each other. The bigger of the two humans who lived in the Night Fury's den looked at him and made a happy face...