How to Be a Dragon Star 1

Chapter Eight - Close Calls

Time seemed to speed up after that, with leaps and bounds in the development of Hiccup's two lives.

His hidden life, with Toothless, was something he looked forward to every afternoon. He would finish training and head to the pit. He discovered something new every day.

His other life, the personality everyone saw him as, was becoming more and more mysterious.

After the chaos of Hiccup's first flight on Toothless's tail, he vowed to make up a better way. Apparently, Toothless couldn't fly without something to open the tail fin Hiccup had made for him. The simplest way would be to have Hiccup manage it, but there had to be a better way to do that than slipping a saddle onto Toothless's tail.

He needed a saddle either way, so he got right started on making one. It looked pretty good when he finished it, but Toothless wasn't sold on the idea. However, when Hiccup finally got him calmed down, he found he could use a string tied to the tail fin to control it from Toothless's back.

Then he needed to work on how the tail fin worked. He wrote down specific tail fin commands on a sheet of paper— what twisting it did, what pulling the fin up resulted in, and how to do those commands. He designed a whole upgraded system with makeshift stirrups that, in a nutshell, meant by pressing down on one stirrup, a system would set off, moving the tail fin for him, so he didn't have to hold on to that dreaded rope every time he flew.

His other life was improving mysteriously quickly as well. While training with Toothless, Hiccup discovered that dragons have a soft spot for a weed-like plant called dragon-nip, so he used a few little stalks for his advantage in dragon training. All Gobber and Hiccup's peers saw was the Gronckle barreling toward him, Hiccup holding out his hand and rolling it to the side, and the Gronckle following the movement and slumping onto its back as if it had succumbed.

He also discovered how to sedate dragons. Toothless loved being scratched behind his ears, but when one day Hiccup accidentally moved to under his chin, Toothless was out cold instantly. The next day, in the ring, when Astrid's axe failed to connect to the Deadly Nadder's soft spot, Hiccup waited patiently for it to come after him. When it did, he forced his arm forward and began scratching the dragon's snout. He moved to the Nadder's chin, and the next second he was up, the Nadder breathing peacefully at his feet.

In the eyes of the others, these were miracles. Hiccup found himself becoming almost popular— no, not almost. Very popular. Where he used to sit and eat in the Great Hall by himself, he found that whenever he entered the room and sat, all the teens except Astrid would leap up from their table and fight for a place next to him. He was getting so barraged from their ecstatic interrogation that sometimes he would leave early from a throbbing headache.

It was hard keeping up the lies and ducking their questions about how he'd figured out all this. But Hiccup was dreading something more than anything else, that would come in just a few days.

His father's homecoming.

Meanwhile, Hiccup began getting creative and testing things rather than relying on accidental discoveries to keep him excelling in Dragon Training. He discovered that like many other animals, Toothless was fascinated by a moving light. Using the sun reflecting off a shiny hammer, Hiccup observed that the Night Fury would follow the mysterious dot of white light all around the pit, pouncing occasionally like it was a live creature.

I can use that tomorrow, Hiccup thought gleefully.

The next dragon was unlike any Hiccup was expecting.

"Meet the Tiny Terrible Terror!" Gobber exclaimed. A dragon the size of a Chihuahua popped out of what looked like a cat-flap and blinked up at the teens. Its tongue came out like a gecko and it licked its eyes.