User blog:DreamingOfDragons72x2/The Driller Dragon's Helven Cousin

I just read A Hero's Guide To Deadly Dragons (personally like its other title, How Not To Celebrate Your Birthday) late last night. That one had A LOT of dragons in it - which stands to reason, but it meant I had to look every dragon over carefully to see if I could come up with a Helven counterpart. Fortunately my #1 rule narrowed things down a lot: The dragon for which I create a Helven counterpart must have its own stat page in the book and have a critical interaction with Hiccup in the story. That left about four or five, but two of them broke rule #2: No dragons that are under half a pound. Can't make me believe that the Itchyworms or the Piffleworms reach that weight. That left three: the Stealth Dragon (way too easy: Jack Of All Trades, Master Of None), the Mood Dragon (genetic mutation for any dragon), and the Driller Dragon. Based on this blog's title, I think you can guess which one I picked to recreate.

The most interesting part about this dragon is that drill horn on its face. That exact weapon can't exist on a Helven dragon, but it can have a drill on the end of its tail and have Whispering Death jaws (not in number, but in design). In order for drill-type weapons to have any prayer of functioning on a Helven Driller, it would need its Earth and Air stats to be exactly the same; also its Fire and Light stats. From there, it would need unbelievably high Shadow stats and unbelievably low Water stats; therefore, the Helven Driller would be a Fear-class crossbreed plain and simple. 50-all stats, except for Shadow at 95 and Water at 5. That would give it not only whirling jaws and a drilling tail, but also drill-claws. It would also be at 27.5% of whatever size cap it is in, so it's one of the smaller dragons; once you're talking about Draconis maximus, however, it's not exactly all that small.

Then, of course, weaponry. That one would also require carefully synchronized stats. Now, the Driller Dragon has no mention of firepower or venom, so I think we can safely assume it doesn't have any. That's a 5 for venom. Now, as many of its other stats have to be balanced as possible, which then maxxes out its Spiny stat; those would be some long teeth and claws, and long spines!

Here's a question: can Helven dragons speak human languages? The answer is, once you set aside as a separate question whether they understand what they're saying, they can - depending on the type of dragon. In order to have the power of speech, they need two things: high Air stats to increase their atmosphere-radar (the two ears they actually use when aboveground and abovewater) so that they can tell the difference between human sounds, and high Light stats to increase their focus so that they can observe how humans are making those sounds. Earth and Fire stats are detrimental to the dragon's power of speech; Earth tends to thicken the tongue and throat, making their ability to shape other sounds more difficult, and Fire makes them a bit spastic, giving any human word they did manage to shape a most dreadful stutter. Perhaps the best speaker would be a quad-cross, having 95 each in Air and Light while 5 each in Earth and Fire. The reverse would be the worst speaker. As for whether they understand what they're saying, well...that would be the million-dollar question. They don't shape their own sentences, particularly, choosing instead to parrot whatever they hear...but sometimes one would repeat a phrase that is exactly appropriate for a situation (ever heard a parrot say "good morning" as you come up to them with their breakfast?).

Slight detour into Riders of Berk: how many people think that Hamish the Second was a previous Hiccup Horrendous Haddock? I mean, presumably Hiccup has exactly the same name in the movie and show as he does in the books (nobody's said otherwise), and if he's the Third, then somewhere in Berk's history must be a First and Second. If the runt is called a "hiccup" and Hamish 2 was a runt, it would make sense (and as a side note, support my theory that once a kid outgrows the need for a terrible name in that universe they ditch it for a better one). And we don't know how many Hiccups were painted as buff young men on that wall...



Anyway. As always, there's another side to the coin for the Helven Driller. Toothless but toxic, powerful swimmer but has no spooky properties, and is 72.5% of whatever weight cap it's in...I really have nothing to say about this thing. Really, this particular journey has been a disappointment; the non-dragon part of the book was more interesting, what with thinking about dragons speaking human tongues and Hiccup finding out he had an ancestor with his name. I hope the next book provides a more exciting, imagination-firing dragon.