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[a_real_viking]

Living on a magically beautiful tropical island and having a dragon at his back, it was easy to feel immortal. It was easy to fly up close to the sun, lean forward to grin recklessly at Toothless, and laugh as he unhooked his leg from the pedal. They were so high up that the air almost felt cool, despite the cloudless sky and warm sun, and the wind

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[honestlyrubbish]

Having spotted Toothless and Hiccup in the air from some distance away, Hermione saw no reason not to take a slight detour on her walk back home. With elections only just having been decided and an accident in the Compound not long ago, Hermione was feeling generally under the weather, and had in fact spent the majority of her time in the clinic in the past couple of days. However, never being one for remaining stagnant for too long, she decided that it was high time she started reaching out to her friends again, one by one. Her feet sifted through the smooth sand, and in her arms she carried a bottle of water, should her throat protest along the way. Fortunately, by the time she reached Hiccup, she was not overly fatigued, sitting down gently next to her friend.

"Find something interesting?" she asked, her voice slightly more hoarse than it might have been normally for the damage done by the poisonous gas.

[a_real_viking]

She moved so purposefully and quietly that Hiccup almost didn't notice her until she sat down, absorbed in scribbling down runes as he was. Still, he was glad to see her and more than happy to rotate the book toward her, giving her full view of one of the illustrations of the Thunder Drum.

"Back on Berk," he explained, turning a page. "When you were training to fight dragons, this was the manual they made you read. Except, you know, I'm not interested in fighting them. So I'm going to make some adjustments."

[honestlyrubbish]

"They had an actual manual?" Hermione asked, fascinated as she moved closer to glance down at the pages, brows raising with the sudden realization that the runes from Hiccup's time were nearly identical to those she'd studied in Ancient Runes. Biting on her lower lip, she scanned the page as quickly as she could, fingers running along the paper as she sounded out the words on the sheet with bated breath. "Thunder... drum? Is that correct? Thunder drum. When... shocked- or scared, or startled, I suppose- they can produce a strong, resonant? Sound that can kill a man from a close distance. Some of the forms are a bit ambiguous, but I've seen runes like this before. I took extensive classes on them, in fact."

Pressing her lips together, Hermione's eyes narrowed as she peered up at Hiccup once more, trying to contain her excitement. "If you wanted... help with this, or to translate it into English, which most people on the island read, I'd certainly love to lend whatever help I can."

[a_real_viking]

"Yeah, that's about right," Hiccup nodded, lightly crossing out the instructions to kill it before turning his head quickly as the ful and proper realization hit him that Hermione had read the runes.

"Wait. Wait. You can translate that!?" Excitement started bumping up in him. "You can read these? I didn't know anyone else could do that!"

Beaming, he grabbed another piece of charcoal and held it out to her. "I can only read some English, so that would be amazing."

[honestlyrubbish]

"Yes, I can," Hermione beamed, nodding rapidly and momentarily raising a hand to press at her lips, knowing that it was probably too late to present herself as anything other than overly eager to tackle the text. It'd been so long since she had the opportunity to do anything of this sort, to learn a language that so many people considered antiquated, worthless- but now, she had only the best of reasons to dive down into ancient runes again, both able to help a friend and to document information about dragons in turn. Dragons the likes of which she'd never really seen in her world, their bodies almost exaggerated somehow; she could hardly picture some of the creatures as being very menacing, the way they were sketched in

[a_real_viking]

"Yeah, this is the only writing we have back home. We used it all the time."

Her excitement was nothing less than contagious and he grinned, quickly turning to a page he hadn't yet marked up. Laughing, he realized it was the Terrible Terror. "Did I ever tell you about these ones?" he asked. "About, oh, this big..." Hiccup circled his hands around an invisible Terrible Terror, no bigger than a lapdog. "And all attitude?"

He didn't read out the translation for her, in case she wanted to try and figure it out for herself.

[honestlyrubbish]

"That size would make sense," Hermione considered with a nod, her eyes narrowing as she tried to picture such a small dragon resting on Hiccup's lap. Most of those that she'd known had been enormous, terrifyingly large in a way that rooted her to the spot, but she remembered watching Norbert- or rather, Norberta- soon after being hatched, and somehow that same image was conjured in her mind with Hiccup's gesture. She pictured them being a bit more unsure in their footing, as though nervous, prepared to step back in case larger predators came about at any point in time. "It says here that their firepower has pinpoint accuracy. To be able to snipe like that, they'd have to be rather small, hidden."

Her nose wrinkled at the line written below in bold. "For each of these, though, it seems that the writer was adamant about detailing the dangers of letting them live."

[a_real_viking]

"Yeah, there's a whole lot of 'Extremely dangerous. Kill on sight' going on," Hiccup agreed, crossing out as much on the Terrible Terrors page. "Until I met Toothless, that was generally the policy. They raided us. We raided them. A lot of blood got spilled that never had to be."

And if he ever got back home, he was going to be doing everything in his power to change that attitude.

"And these ones, especially, don't take much. They're friendly as soon as you feed them."

[honestlyrubbish]

"I can understand why they were worried, though. When you have such a big threat coming your way, even if the threat doesn't mean to do any harm, it's natural to want to defend yourself. Or even natural to wonder if you can do more than just turn on the defensive," Hermione reasoned. For all that Hagrid had done his best in showing them the beauty of creatures most often considered ghastly or monstrous, Hermione still viewed most of them through a lens of strong doubt. "I don't think hunting such creatures indiscriminately is the best way to go, or driving them to extinction, but sometimes people aren't that observant. Or aren't that lucky."

She smiled at the picture, imagining how well Hagrid would get along with Hiccup. "I'm very glad that you were able to learn all of this, though. I am rather fond of Toothless, after all."

[a_real_viking]

"Yeah, we didn't realize..." Hiccup flipped through the 'Rare and Unusual' dragons section and wasn't really surprised not to see the giant queen dragon wasn't represented among the pages.

"There was an island nest they had and there was this one giant dragon controlling them, making them bring food. If she weren't sending them out and back and forth, I'm willing to guess that we wouldn't have had half the dragon problems."

He roughed in an image of the dragon from memory, letting her take up the better part of both pages to give an impression of her size.

"But Toothless and I killed her. It's, uh, how I lost my leg."

[honestlyrubbish]

A leg lost was, of course, nothing that Hermione could even begin to comprehend. For all that she and her friends had lost during the way, neither of her best friends had been physically harmed in such a significant and lasting manner. (Death, she didn't count as such an example, as death was too quick, too fleeting, not something wihch persisted over many years so much as it simply pulled people away from everyone altogether.) Hermione swallowed thickly, not sure what type of comfort she could continue to offer Hiccup over his leg. Or, indeed, if he wanted that type of comfort anymore at all, considering how well he seemed to have adjusted to the loss

[a_real_viking]

"That's exactly how it worked," Hiccup agreed, unable to stop himself from remember that that was exactly how Astrid had described the situation. "And I think they all had different levels of intelligence. Some of the Gronckles seemed a little more like workhorses, you know, and Nadders seemed more aware of things."

He found both Gronckles and Deadly Nadders in the common dragons section. "See? Gronckles are all thick and sturdy."

A smile spread across his face at Hermione's suggestion and he nodded enthusiastically. "Do you think we should group the dragons by world or by type? Or do it by type but subdivide the chapters by world? And I bet there are other people here who come from worlds with dragons. We could interview them and compile more information!"

[honestlyrubbish]

"We could do both," Hermione pointed out, pressing her lips together in an eager grin. "In my world, we had several classifications of dragons too, and while I'm sure that we'd have to tweak the qualifications a little in order to properly sort through so many dragons from any number of different worlds, it shouldn't prove too difficult with time. But having separate volumes from different worlds would be good, too, to allow for a more comprehensive look at the history of the place and how that's affected the evolution of its ecosystems."

Biting her lip, she nodded, poring over the page on Gronckles. "And while I can't speak for the both of us, I know that writing isn't something I ever feel compelled to hold back on."

[a_real_viking]

"Maybe we should get a rough translation of this whole volume first, just to get together a framework," Hiccup suggested, going between the manual and his notebook, scrawling ideas down. "And then we can apply the same framework to each world's volume? Maybe we could even get other contributors."

Excited, he nodded. "I can write pretty much everything...just not in the write alphabet."

[honestlyrubbish]

"That sounds like a marvelous idea," Hermione agreed with a quick nod. "Most likely, we'd be working with looseleaf sheets anyway for something like this. If we plan on including more dragons than there exist in either one of our worlds, then it doesn't really matter what order we'd ideally want them in- chances are we wouldn't be able to best order them from the start. With loose sheets of paper, we could then look to see the best way to organize them, before tying and binding the profiles."

Pressing her lips together and trying to contain her excitement, Hermione let out a breath. "This is wonderful, Hiccup. I couldn't have asked for a project more fun to work on, on the side."