A harsh cry rang out over Berk, and Hiccup wrenched open the door of his house, only to see a huge, red-orange figure with wings. "Dragons," he said as he slammed the door. Then he opened it again and ran outside.

He maneuvered around the battle-crazed Vikings pretty well, but he tripped. A Viking ran by him, yelling and wielding a battle ax. "Morning!" he said, and ran off again. Hiccup stood, and took off towards the docks.

Along the way, people hollered after him, "HICCUP!! What are you doing outside?!"

Eventually, he ran headlong into a burly man with crazy red hair. "Hiccup?! What are you doing out here? WHO LET HIM OUT?!" Hiccup ran off, but before he'd taken five steps, a girl stepped in front of him. "Hi, Hiccup!"

"Hi, Ember. Wait, how did you get out here?"

She lobbed a rock at a Gronkle. "Same way you did - I opened the door."

She scanned the night sky and added, "Any Night Furies?"

"No. Well, not yet."

Then Hiccup sprinted away. He came quickly to a forge where a man pounding on something with a hammer said, "Hiccup! Glad you could join the party! I thought you'd be dragged away."

Hiccup tied a thick apron around himself. "Who me? Nah. I'm too... muscular for their taste. They wouldn't know what to do with all this." He flexed his skin-and-bone arms.

"Well, they need toothpicks," Ember said with a little laugh.

"Eh? Ember, what are you doing here?!"

"She followed me," Hiccup said.

"You didn't try to stop me! I take that as an invitation."

Gobber chuckled. "Probably had to watch out for falling Gronkles all the way over." He and Hiccup dissolved into laughter.

"For the last time! That was not my fault!" Ember said, but she was also laughing.

Ember was Gobber's daughter. Not by birth, but because Gobber had found her abandoned when she was just a baby and he'd taken her in. Hiccup had been Gobber's apprentice since he'd been little, and Ember had been his best friend for even longer than that.

A Monstrous Nightmare swooped out of nowhere and torched a house. He sighed. Old village, lots and lots of new houses. Then the men brought out the catapults.

They watched as the other kids their age - Fishlegs, Snotlout, Ruffnut, Tuffnut, and Astrid - launched one of the catapults, and dumped water on houses. He stared as Astrid flipped her bangs out of her eyes.

"Oh, their job is so much cooler," Ember said enviously. She turned back to the blazing furnace and doused a red-hot sword in cool water.

Hiccup tried to keep watching them, but Gobber used his hook-hand to bring him back to the forge. "Oh, come on," he said, "Let me out. I need to make my mark!"

"Oh, you've made plenty of marks," Gobber replied, "In all the wrong places."

"Just two minutes," he begged, "I... I'll kill a dragon, my life will get infinitely better, I might even get a date!" He'd had a crush on Astrid ever since... Well, it had been a long time.

Ember raised an eyebrow.

The big man said, "You can't lift a hammer, you can't swing an ax, you can't even throw one of these!" He was holding a long rope with several weights tied onto it. Just at that moment, another Viking took it and it wrapped around a huge Gronkle.

Hiccup said, "Well, yes. But this thing-" He patted a cannon-like machine. "-will do that for me!" In response to the sudden weight of his hand, the device launched a heavy mound of metal out of the window, clonking a guy right in the forehead and nearly hitting Ember.

"HICCUP!"

Gobber sighed. "See, this right here is what I'm talking about!" he said angrily.

"But... but a mild calibration-"

"No. Hiccup, if you ever want to get out there and fight dragons, you have to stop all... this." He gestured with his hands at Hiccup.

"But you just pointed at all of me," he said.

"Yes!" Gobber grinned. "Exactly. Stop being all of you."

"Oooooh," Hiccup began.

"Ooooooooh, yes," Gobber replied.

"You, sir, are playing a dangerous game; keeping this much raw Vikingness contained. There'll be consequences!" He tried to look as menacing as possible.

Gobber's face showed no emotion. "I'll take my chances." He turned away and tossed a huge sword at his apprentice. "Sword. Sharpen. Now."

"One day I'll get out there," he muttered to Ember.

"I'm not the one you should be telling that too," she said pointedly.

Because killing a dragon... is everything around here, he thought, A Nadderhead would at least get me noticed. Gronkles, those are tough, taking down one of those would definitely get me a girlfriend. A Zippleback? Exotic. Two heads, twice the status. And then, there's the Monstrous Nightmare... Only the best Vikings goes after those. They have this nasty habit of setting themselves on fire. But the ultimate prize is the dragon that no one's ever seen. We call it the Night Fury. Just then, a high pitched shrieking sound sliced through the air and a purple blasts of pure firepower demolished a tower. Hiccup and Ember abandoned their work and ran to the window. This thing never steals food, never shows itself, and- another tower got blasted -never misses. No one has ever killed a Night Fury. I'm gonna be the first.

Gobber ran towards the door, and just as he was about to leave, he turned back around and said, "Stay. Put. There. Both of you. You know what I mean." Then he hollered his battle cry, which was completely indecipherable from anyone else's, and ran out to battle a Deadly Nadder that was going in for the sheep.

Hiccup made a split-second decision. He grabbed the cannon and ran out to a small outcropping, ignoring shouts of "Get back inside!" and "What are you doing?!" and "Hiccup-?!" or, in Ember's case, "If you die, I will kill you!"

He plopped the mechanism down and loaded it. He scrutinized the night sky to find even the slightest hint of a shape.

Hiccup heard the telltale shrieking of the dragon building up its blast. He looked harder and - he saw a shape! A black outline blocked out a few stars. He launched a net, but it missed.

The dragon came in and blasted a catapult. It's shape was perfectly defined in the flames. He fired one of the weighted rope-things Gobber had held up earlier.
He heard a long and drawn out cry. "I hit it? I hit it!!" He jumped in the air. "Did anybody see that?!" A Monstrous Nightmare climbed up into the ledge and snarled. "Anybody except you."

The dragon tried to blast him with fire, but missed. Hiccup ran, and if he was good at anything, it was running away. And messing up, but that bit usually came later.

"Ahhhhhh!" He sprinted away, running over the roofs of houses he could reach, hoping to throw off his pursuer.

He threw himself behind a tall, thick pillar. Of wood. And a little metal, which happened to be right at his height. He felt his hiding place heat up as the dragon bathed it in flames.

He panted, trying to get his breath back. He peered around to the left. The dragon came around from the right. Hiccup would've died right then and there if his father hadn't gotten to him at that moment and knocked the dragon away.

It tried to cover Stoic in flames, but it was out, as the burly man observed. He began to beat the dragon senseless. He kicked it under its chin and the thing flew away with a loud cry.

The pillar that Hiccup had hidden behind... was a torch. Thanks to the Nightmare's blast, it collapsed and the huge, flaming bowl rolled down the stairs towards the docks, demolishing a whole lot of the town along the way. Several Nadderheads took the sheep and food. The rest of the dragons flew away as the sun began to peer over the horizon.

Hiccup pressed his lips together. "Uh... Sorry, dad..."

The man stared down at him, and - thinking it might defuse some of the tension - Hiccup said, "But I hit a Night Fury-"

He was seized by the scruff of his shirt as Stoic dragged him away.

"No, I'm serious! I actually hit it! You guys were all busy, and I had a very clear shot! It went down just off Raven's Point. Let's get a search party out there before it-"

"Stop!" Stoic snapped, "Just... stop. Every time you step outside, disaster falls. Can you not see that I have bigger problems? Winter is almost here, and I have an entire village to feed."

"Well, between you and me," he said, "The village could use a little less feeding-"

"This is not a joke, Hiccup!" Stoic yelled. He sighed. "Why can't you just follow the simplest orders?"

"I-I-I can't stop myself! I see a dragon and I have to just... kill it. You know? It's... who I am, dad." Hiccup said. He wanted to make his dad proud. If he got to that Night Fury, and killed it, well, that would be... incredible.

Stoic rubbed his hand over his face. "Oh, you are many things, Hiccup. But a dragon killer is not one of them."

Hiccup's face fell. There goes that dream... he thought.

"Get back inside," he said to him. "Make sure he gets there," he said to Gobber. "I have his mess to clean up."

Ember looked just about ready to explode. She stepped forward. "It wasn't his-"

"Come on, Ember," Gobber said.

As Gobber led him past the other kids, Tuffnut said, "Quite the preformance."

Snotlout added, "I've never seen anybody mess up that bad."

Hiccup kept his gaze towards the ground, but replied, "Thank you, thank you. I was trying."

Snotlout chuckled, having a good laugh at Hiccup's expense.

Ember shoved him to the ground. She was surprisingly strong for such a small girl.

As they neared his house, Hiccup said, "He never listens to me. And when he does, it's with this... disappointed scowl. Like someone skimped on the meat in his sandwich-" he made his voice sound deeper and more manly "-'Excuse me, barmaid, you brought me the wrong offspring. I ordered an extra large boy with beefy arms - extra guts and glory on the side. This here, this is a talking fishbone.'"

Gobber - presumably in an effort to cheer him up - said, "Now, you're thinking about this all wrong. It's not so much what you look like; it's what's inside that he can't stand."

Lacing his voice with downhearted sarcasm, Hiccup said, "Thank you for summing that up."

"Look, the point is: stop trying so hard to be something you're not."

"I just want to be one of you guys," he said in a defeated tone. He pushed open the front door and walked inside.

"Nice going," Ember said.

"He took it the wrong way! I can't do anything about that!"

Hiccup made sure Gobber and Ember weren't paying attention and ran out through the back. He was finding that Night Fury if it took him his whole life.

~~~~

Well, that was longer than I thought it'd be.

I wanted to say thank you to FlamingFrenzy  and IHeartBooks01 for your EPIC comments on the Prologue and for all the nice things you said. You guys made my day.

Also wanted to let you know that I'm sorry for all the confusion earlier, but I hadn't completely formed an idea for this earlier. Now I have an idea and I love it and it's brilliant. (I think.)

And here's ANOTHER apology! I had to re-asses my idea, and now it's good. I'm so sorry to those of you who got no warning about me taking it down yet again. It won't happen again, I swear.

Thank you for being so understanding, guys!

Bye, and see ya!

~ Cinder