Quote:Hiccup is the quarter-human son of the great Fae lord, Stoick, and has ventured out to see the human world against his father’s wishes–even pointing out that his human blood and affinity for iron makes him essentially immune to most of the risks. And he wants to see what’s out there. So he does, and is enchanted by human civilization. So much creativity, so much creation…
Astrid has been a vampire for longer than she would have ever lived naturally, and at this point, she’s somewhat inured to the horror of her existence—the political dance among the vampires being a welcome distraction. She is known as one of the rising stars among the younger set, more adept at moving in this more fast-paced world, and has a lot of jealous rivals. But she remembers—distantly—what it was to have human passions and, in the quiet of the night sometimes, she mourns them.
One night, Hiccup is at the club, drinking in the emotions of the crowd and ends up dancing with this gorgeous woman. But not all is as it seems...

(01-20-2019, 01:32 PM)Norgarth Wrote: A Thing of Vikings
https://archiveofourown.org/works/10408971/chapters/41178950

Corpus Historiae Berkiae, 1396 Wrote:The early Dragon Mail stations were an earnest and generally successful effort in standardization; Haddock and Ingerman explicitly acknowledged the degree to which their designs were inspired by the Imperial Roman Castrum system of standardized layouts. Having experimented with the design in the earliest mail stations in the Alban Isles and Norway, Haddock and his initial construction expedition were able to build the mainland continental stations extremely quickly, typically completing each within a matter of days. Once the physical stations were built, the local merchant partnerships would take over with maintenance, staffing, and other logistical needs.

These early stations, while they had their problems, were generally well-designed, featuring a landing platform on the roof, housing for the staff, temporary quarters for dragons and riders, resting and feeding stations for the dragons, and mail intake and output offices. Due to space requirements, they were initially built outside of the local city walls or municipal limits, but quickly accrued settlement in their immediate vicinity, as additional shops and services found the traffic going to and from the mail station to be a natural draw.

(01-26-2019, 05:47 PM)Norgarth Wrote: Mad Dogs and Englishmen (Spike the vampire in Girl Genius)

The Dragon Millennium, Manna-hata University Press, Ltd. Wrote:Another—typically overlooked—area that was tremendously impacted by the integration of dragons was city planning and design.  Human cities prior to the adoption of dragons were universally two-dimensional (with noted exceptions such as Shibam and Derinkuyu), originating from a smaller settlement, typically next to a river or water source, and sprawling extensively across the landscape with greater or lesser degrees of urban planning, guidance, and support infrastructure.  Buildings were typically only a few stories tall and close together, with narrow, twisting streets.  The reasons for this, of course, are obvious: digging underground without the aid of Boulder-class dragons is time-consuming and labor-intensive, as is constructing high-rise buildings without the use of structural steel, even discounting the additional labor involved in climbing up and down such structures.
Modern cities, by contrast, sometimes seem almost as deep and tall as they are wide, with terraurban spaces extending far below the surface, and high-rises extending far above.  Streets are multi-level and broad, with gentle curves to allow for ease of aerial traffic, and elevators and draconic flight connect the various levels together.  Balconies and bridges are typical building features to allow for ease of transit and landing, while buildings themselves typically have high ceilings and wide corridors to allow for draconic foot traffic.  Additionally, the small infrastructure access tunnels are typically designed with the sizes and capabilities of the small dragons employed as maintenance workers in mind.  Some cities are even formed out of hollowed-out mountains and carved into the sides of valley walls; while to our modern eyes these emplacements seem natural, to our ancestors they would have seemed miraculous, something out of fantastical tales.
The transition, of course, was not smooth, and remnants of the transition are easily found and well-documented, despite the loss of some of the key transitional elements to time and demolition.  But still, while they are humble in comparison with their descendants, those first 20-story steel-framed towers constructed in the 1200s cast long shadows through human history…