trans_9 | Open Hours [open]

Hiccup was seated in his forge, the fire was turned off to keep things cool and more comfortable, and various plans for machines and weapons and other interesting gadgets scribbled on parchment and pinned up to a cork board. Candles procured from Orongo were lit around the room, though the wide windows let a light of light in, creating a comfortable workspace. Right now, he was sketching out the intricate designs for...something. It may have been designs meant to go on an axe. Perhaps.

After putting out his omnicomm message, he waited to see if anyone had something to say.

"Here goes nothing, bud," he said, the "bud" tacked on out of old habit, before his eyes widened slightly as he was reminded by the following silence, once again, that a certain dragon wasn't there to listen like he usually was.

That was okay, though. He was going to keep busy. Throw himself into doing the best he could to help the crew. Not that it took much more than a few fish to earn the dragon's love and affection, but Toothless would be proud of him when he finally woke up again. His father would be too.

And you know what? If he did this right, and helped people that deserved helping, deserved someone else working towards their best interests, he could be proud of himself.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

"I fought for her release," Zetta said, mildly. "I would've done it if I wasn't on the Council, too. In her position I'd probably have done something pretty similar. And this is exactly what I'm talking about. You make a decision that someone spoke against, they feel ignored. Whether or not you listened and just didn't agree. THAT's nothing new, dealing with people, though.

"What I mean, though, is that it's not just 'us vs. them', 'crew vs. Council'. The bigger problem is 'crew versus crew'. You wouldn't have to look too hard to, I don't know, find ten people who think torture is always bad, and ten people who think we should torture a prisoner if it'd get us information we needed. They're never gonna agree. The way I see it, the best thing to keep everyone playing nice is not to give them a formal place to shout at each other. Keep their arguments directed to the Council, not each other. As much as we CAN anyway."

"They won't agree but they need to be able to see why others think differently. It's not hard, and they need guidance to do it. That's what I mean with the decisions. My dad, he has this way of explaining things so that even if you completely disagree with him, you at least see the sense. You see the sense of why he does things the way he does them. He was always like that at moots. People would yell at each other and sometimes yell at him, and his voice would go quiet and he'd just...explain things in this way where people who saw completely opposite on something, they'd understand the other wasn't just set against him."

"It means even more talking, yes, but the end result would be more trust, more faith in the Council's decisions, and a smoother running crew. It's how the talking goes that has to change and that can be--well, not controlled but influenced."

"Everyone at your meetings came from same culture, though," Zetta said. "Same town, same world, same basic underpinnings. And from what Ruffnut tells me you put a lot of emphasis on your tribe."

Even someone as dense as Zetta could learn a thing or two from even someone as dense as Ruffnut.

"There's lots less common ground here. And some people are set against each other. Let's face it, I can't see the sense in a LOT of the things you humans do, and you'd probably think a Netherworld was the worst place you'd ever seen. There are gonna be things that explaining just can't get through."

He frowned, thinking.

"We can at agree that Councilors should be available to talk to and people should feel okay doing that with at least one. And the Council needs to not keep secrets of any sort, I think we can agree on that one too. I'm with you on that for sure."

"The problem is to survive this? We have to be a tribe."

Hiccup scrunched his face.

"There's a word. I know there's a word for it. On the tip of my tongue. It was for when people of different cultures come together and sort of blend... melting pot! Okay, so it was two words, anyway, we're a melting pot. There's going to be conflict, yes, because of the differences, but we have to learn to understand other people and how they think to even do what we need to do. Enough for people to care about protecting the warrior at their side. That's going to mean a lot of yelling it out, and it's going to be harder than my dad's moots, yes, but it has to happen, and unfortunately for the Council, decisions on public policy are going to be the battleground where everyone has to duke it out until they reach mutual understanding even if not mutual agreement."

Wiggling the pencil between his fingers idly, he said, "I'm telling you, we can do this. There's also other things we can encourage other people to do. Like...I remember that Aang kid mentioning the idea of community dinners? Places to eat and discuss things, share cultures? The Council could make themselves available there, help host them, get people talking. Make the lumps in the melting pot melt together more. It'd look good too, the Council trying to bring people together that way. Seems more inclusive and more like we're on their level."

"We need better dinners for that. Good food improves morale. The stuff we get..."

Ugh.

"Actually, that gets me to something else I seem to have different feelings on than a lot of the Council. The election I ran in, everyone was talking about getting people to work together and live in harmony and crap. Now, sure, that's important, I get that. But, call me crazy, it seems to me the best way isn't to sit around talking it out. It's to do stuff. Grab a bunch of people, get 'em working together on a project, and trust them all to figure out a way to work together to get it done. Builds connections, improves communication, and at the end of it everyone can feel good that they did something important. There's a ton of stuff we could do to make life and the war go better for us all, and it's a lot harder to tell the guy next to you he's a mindless idiot when you just spent a week building, I don't know, a dining hall that's made of stuff that ISN'T the ship."

"...You actually have a really good point there. you know, back home, we had to rebuild the village practically every other week for the longest time because of the dragon attacks? And...it was a lot easier to break up a fight when you reminded someone that the person they were fighting with helped them rebuild their house and gave them a week's worth of milk from their cow."

"There's a lot we could do on this ship, and I think the Council should be doing some more to direct the departments," Zetta said. "Both for the sake of the improvements themselves, and the feeling that people are working to make things better. The bathhouse is popular and that was done by what, one dragon in her free time? So how about this: we toss the idea of focused projects out there for everyone to chew at. Try it your way, because I don't think people are gonna have deep-seated, ironclad moral positions on building a housing complex in the City, for example, so there probably won't be much real anger under any arguments."

"Sound like a plan."

The book grinned. Hey, they had managed to have a productive conversation! Who knew it was even POSSIBLE?

"That just means we gotta get a meeting going to run this by everyone else."

"This is the part that worries me. Are they going to listen? I know Kang will, because he and I are friends, and that alone means he'd take what I said seriously, but they don't seem to be aware there's a problem, at least from what I've seen."

"If we sell it as a way to get people working together, I think that'll get us some leverage with a couple of the others." Zetta considered a moment. "Should be enough to get us going. There's not really a good reason for the others to say 'no', really."

"Then it definitely sounds like a plan." Hiccup grinned broadly.

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