#getting scruffed by your own dragon and put in air-jail for being naughty

[headfullof-ideas]

After exhausting myself storyboarding, i decided to do some more doodling. And then i got thinking about certain aspects of the riders dynamics.

Having four fifteen to sixteen year old teenagers traveling with a twelve and thirteen year old leaves a lot of room for the older kids trying to take care of the younger kids. And the aspect of that that I was thinking of was how they handle danger.

Kari has mild anger issues due to an unstable home life with unreliable role models. She will and has gotten into fistfights with other people, something the older kids wished she didn’t do. Ant is younger than her, three inches shorted, and just attracts trouble. This kid will go a whole day purposefully avoiding anything that might end in trouble, and still end his day being chased by bandits through the woods. The older kids grow increasingly distraught at the sheer levels of chaos that Ant just attracts, usually ending in bodily harm on his end. The twins went a whole month being atheists against Loki specifically because they thought their favorite god cursed Ant with bad luck as some sort of prank.

Ant does not always purposefully attract trouble. Kari sometimes purposefully does. They are both tiny, squishy, untrained tweenagers. One of them is missing a whole foot, and is absurdly small for his age. The older kids desperately want them to stay out of trouble. As much as they can with half the Archipelago and then some after them.

So the older kids devise a super thought out, carefully constructed system of fishing them out of danger. And that is simply picking them up and running in the other direction as fast as they can.

Kari and Ant are both considerably smaller than the other riders, being considerably younger. Ant even more so, being small and light for his age. Kid weighs sixty pounds soaking wet (i had to google twelve year old boy weights to find an accurate weight for teeny Ant). They are both very easy to pick up. Carry away, now that depends. Kari kicks and bites and screams indignantly when they do it. Ant goes limp like a scruffed kitten at first, but then he gets comfortable with being around them, and soon also starts squirming and wriggling when he gets picked up and ran off with. Turns out getting kicked by a metal prosthetic hurts a lot, but they have butts of steel from riding dragons everywhere, so what’s a few bruised shins and ankles?

It’s a surprisingly effective method, especially when Ant and Kari fall behind with their much shorter legs, and when Ant was first adjusting to his prosthetic. The other riders start trading tips on where to grab the littlest riders in order to avoid the widest of their horribly frustrated swings and kicks.

It gets a little hard to do their by-then habitual scoop-and-run method when Ant and Kari stop being so little though.

Doesn’t stop them from trying.