Thanks for reading, fav'ing etc! Keep being awesome. Please constructively review, I will try to individually answer them. Yes, I do want to talk about what happened to Hiccup and Jack after Chapter 1, but we haven't met the all of the Big Four yet! Don't worry, you'll get to know all the details of that bit soon enough, plus more Astrid backstory. So, onto…

Chapter 3, in which people are being people, the last-introduced of the Big Four is being a badass and Olaf is an albino platypus. Featuring half of the Big Four, Elsa and Anna in the same place, with a load of canon character cameos for good measure.

Disclaimer: *insert usual disclaimer*

Content warning: violence, implicit racism

The distinguished crowd was loudly vomited into the arena. Aristocrats, burgeoisie, adventurers, inventors, tradesmen, philosophers, patrons, doctors, generals, men in top hats and gold spectacles, women with telescopic binoculars and refined parasols, old and young in white gloves and leather boots, miniature golden watches as cufflinks and exotic feathered pets perched on shoulders. All the high-end names around the region had received an invitation. It was a debauchery of grandeur, a festival of faraminous fortunes. Sponsored in overwhelming majority by the almighty Company of the Southern Isles and their patriarch, Mr. Frederik Andersen, in a breathtakingly lavish display of their supremacy. It was undoubtedly the largest arena ever built inside a zeppelin, for who would ever want to host a whole festival fifty meters above ground?

"Weaseltown, of course. Our host."

"I am the Duke of Weselton," corrected the old weasel, er, man, in an offended gesticulation.

"Of course. What a pleasure."

"Pleasure which, of course, is returned. Stoick the Vast, the living embodiment of Berk Steel, the flourishing company that provides the metal for our sugar bowls and our aerogliders. This is going to be a great day, sir. Actually, it is not going to be a great day, it is going to be a great week, a great exposition. The greatest Weselton exposition there has ever been across all the Southern Isles of the Continent of Extremesia. As well as, evidently, across Old Centralesia, Western Extremesia, the Continent of Elephantine and the Faraway Lands of Kangaria… In fact, the greatest and most wonderful exposition that ever occurred in the history of the Universe, the most spectacular Universal Exposition that ever graced this world - "

"- and also, the first."

"Oh, I was being forgetful. That only adds to the honours and the excitement! The very first and foremost Weselton exposition – "

"It's the first time in forever, I am sure it is going to be a resounding success," agreed a comely red-haired girl with a fashionable silver streak in her braids, enthusiastically flapping her lime green fan, assorted to her elegant striped dress. "Will there be animals? Jaguars, lizards, great parrots from the jungle? Will there be singers, dancers, musicians?"

"And many more, milady. And many more…"

Stoick suppressed a relieved sigh as the ginger aristocrat, that younger baroness of Arendelle, bouncily walked away through the rows of seats with the old Duke. The girl gave a discretely cheerful sign towards them. He saw her rejoin her blonde sister, who looked stunning in a turquoise gown ornated with natural flowers.

Sighing, Stoick the Vast extracted a small handkerchief from the pocket of his tight black jacket to wipe the sweat on his brow. The atmosphere in the arena was suffocatingly warm. All around, the human mass was cheering and shouting. The afternoon was going to be long. Of course as an honoured guest, he sat in a dedicated box with some of his clan. The seat to his right was empty. Hiccup was supposed to come, but he had radiomessaged in an hour earlier apologising for a damaged wind turbine. What an idea it was, he thought, to try and grow a single crystal the size of a finger. Stoick knew some about metallurgy, certainly, but he was no man for detail. He was a master of the big picture, of the immense markets, of the minds of all clients and shareholders alike. He was a more than capable businessman, who had expanded a familal empire in the merciless competition of the colonies.

"The DunBroch mercenaries are opening the show! Do you think there's gonna be fights?" wondered Ruffnut, one of Hiccup's friend, fanning herself with the paper programme. Her platinum blonde tresses almost matched the tone of her lace ivory dress.

"Obviously, you stupid! I wonder whether there's gonna be deaths!"

That was her twin brother, the equally unnerving Tuffnut, fidgeting with his new explorer's hat.

"Really, you brainless rat?"

Ignoring the siblings' bickering, Stoick borrowed a pair of binoculars off Astrid, his adoptive daughter, to scrutinise the crowd. The DunBroch clan sat in the front, near the Stabbingtons and the Weasel – Weseltons themselves. These mercenaries, originally troublemakers shipped away from the rainy harshness of Northern Cornucopia beyond the wall, had been nothing more than troublemakers across the ocean. Until Fergus DunBroch had started to selectively recruit them and train them as archers and men at arms. Fergus had then offered his services to the noblemen around the Isles, including the weasel people and the stabby ones, to fight off Drifters and diverse scum. But his name and his dark bear emblem was hardly heard of until he had struck that blasted landslide contract with Corona & Sons themselves, for the latter to exclusively employ DunBroch soldiers in their militia. Coronas who, Stoick noticed, were surprisingly absent from the exposition. All the notable clans and families had been invited to the 'Universal Exposition', also their absence presaged nothing good.

Fergus DunBroch was a broad man, as large as Stoick himself, dressed in the ridiculous skirtish fashion of the people of his land. He was a warrior at heart himself, who had lost a leg to an oversized robot in some tournament. His wife, the elegant Elinor, looked minuscule by his side, clad in nude pink, as she attempted to reprimand her daughter's sitting position. The young girl, whose hair as orange as her father's was desperately hirsute, crouched ungracefully in her heavy dark blue skirts, rudely hiding her face behind a guest list booklet.

The first trumpets resonated. Astrid nervously shifted in her seat. The eldest Arendelle baroness rested her hand on her pet albino platypus. The youngest lowered the sorbet she was shaping into a snowman. The Andersens of Canis Major, in the largest of the boxes, pulled out their metallic binoculars in synchronisation.

A flock of aerogliders pulled a black veil onto the titanic arena, plunging them into darkness.

The first performers poured into the arena. It took the viewers' eyes some time to adapt, and understand they were no mercenaries. The dark-haired, tawny-skinned, scantly-clad figures were natives, rythmically dancing to the sound of the flutes and maracas and regrouping at the centre of the arena, holding large wooden discs.

Astrid's heart was in her throat. She liked combat, understood war – but this? She hoped it was not what she expected.

And then the first steam-powered chariot emerged, illuminated by a constellite lanterns, followed by a dozen of identical machines. Cheered by the audience, they rode smoothly until they surrounded the dancers, who stood in a smaller circle, holding their targets before their armour-less body as sole shields. In turn, each strung an arrow and aimed at a wooden disc. All constellite arrows met the exact centre of their targets, lighting up an indigo spot in the darkness. Astrid swallowed her saliva. Both warriors and weapons were impressive. The chariots spun in a perfectly circular orbit, while the archers lit up more and more constellite lights.

Then the platform on the arena's ground, where all the natives were standing, started to spin in the opposite way, drawing the dots into blurred lines of mesmerising purple and blue. The militians continued to ride around and shoot at each target, unperturbed, with shocking speed and precision. And then, the target-holders started to dance, rotating their vertical discs along the vertical axis. The lines of lights became patterns, and it was disturbingly beautiful. Their dance became more and more intricate, as the circles accelerated their rotation. The blue patterns blossomed into vivid abstract images, almost geometrically perfect. The audience was hysterical. Shouts, tears, cheers tore through the repetitive music.

Astrid was somehow aware that Hiccup was in his seat by her side, looking dashing in a dark blue ensemble and well-combed hair. She gave him an acknowledging nod. She wanted to ask after his latest flight, but she would have to wait for that.

The patterns came to flow impossibly fast, until the eye could no longer distinguish anything but a magnificent blur of indigo, and all emotion had turned into wonder.

And suddenly, the light came back. The blinded guests vaguely distinguished the small motor less aeroglider – Berk Entreprise Dragonfang 200, noted a satisfied Stoick – tear through the thin black veil and spiral downwards towards the centre of the arena. Before the attention reported back to the central rotating platform, it had been lowered by a mechanical system into the ground, carrying whatever might have been sensitive to watch into the colossal zeppelin's stomach. It was a truly sensibly designed performance. The pilot performed a looping and a series of cartwheels, earning impressed whistles from the audience.

"You're better than that," whispered Astrid to Hiccup.

Her childhood friend blushed slightly.

With the deployment of small balloons, the glider landed onto the arena's sand, the line of archers running after it. The aircraft slowed down as they grabbed onto it, nearly coming to a stop, while they inserted their arrows into dedicated rings under the wings. Hiccup liked what would come next. The militia members shared a look in order to synchronise and shoot, to launch the plane back into the air.

In that short time, a peculiar figure ran across the arena. Reached the glider's tail. Ran after it while it was propelled upwards. And skillfully stood up over one wing. The public gasped in awe and admiration. The silhouette wore a blue gown larger than it was high, a mess of rebellious red curls pouring down her shoulders as she discarded her hat. Drawing a glaive from her belt, she ripped off a large panel of her skirts, leaving it roughly mid-thigh length at the front and knee-length at the back, and revealing striped blue and gold tights. Astrid was clapping gaily at the fellow warrior girl.

As she noticed the seemingly confused archers, she guessed this wasn't part of the planned performance. However, if the pilot looked absolutely mad at the redhead, no one else in the arena did a gesture to take her down. Until the pilot decided to draw his own bow and aim at her.

The rest happened in a split second. Which ended in the pilot's arrow very neatly split in half mid-flight by the girl's. The audience gave a collective gasp. She wielded a unique bow model, adapted to her size and strength, with a clever system of pulleys to amplify exerted force at smaller deformations, as well as constellite-powered gyroscopes in the centre to stabilise the arrows' direction in flight. She drew long, thin coalstring arrows from a slender belt quiver and held them on the right size of her bow for shortened response time.

Instantly Hiccup shivered. He hardly knew the implications of this, but the arrow length and weight as well as the firing technique seemed to match…

But whatever was planned, the showrunners had decided to get on with the demonstration. When the central platform rose again, Hiccup and Astrid could not decide whether what it supported was better or worse. Perfectly motionless was an oversized combat automaton, all covered in dented steel armour, the shape of a giant bear. The small clockwork eyes glimmered with constellite, like the threatening glare of a berserker. A bear, symbol of the DunBroch Clan as well as the very same type of machine that had taken Fergus's leg. For the audience's entertainment, Astrid conjectured they would not take it down immediately, but rather play with it for a few amusing and violent minutes.

She was right. A first warrior deployed some blades from the machinery of his bow and effectuated an acrobatic fight choreography to approach the creature. He managed to stab its stomach before retreating rapidly, earning some audience claps in the process. One of his comrades gestured to another, before initiating a symmetric attack to shoot at the bear's arms and pin them down, but the armour deflected both. If their hit rate was actually that far from perfect in daylight, Astrid forbid herself to think about in what state the dancers could possibly be…

Somehow they had angered the clockwork beast. With a powerful swing of its forepaws, it sent one of the soldiers to the ground. The man reached for one of the arrows his quiver had dispersed onto the floor, not quite fast enough to string it before…

A coalstring arrow fell very vertically onto the robot's head, ineffectively bouncing off but distracting its programmed attention. A second later, the girl in blue, in a blossom of skirts, jumped down from the aircraft onto its shoulders. Before the constellite eye cameras could see her to shake her off, she drew her glaive and placed it in between the powerful jaws to keep then open. Drew an arrow and shot straight at the infernal mouth. Once. Twice. Thrice.

The bear fell to the sand. The crowd had no refinement left. Loud sobs as well as dramatic screams resonated through the arena. The girl landed quite elastically onto one knee and one hand. The soldiers around her were too confused to intervene. In a sudden berserk rage, the automaton lashed a powerful paw at her. She narrowly avoided it with an unladylike backflip. And surprisingly heavily fell to the ground, sending the sand to fly all around. The beast's combat algorithms could not compute with the multitude of particles. Taking advantage of its momentary blindness, the female warrior drew the robot's head towards her with the string of her bow and swiftly sliced it off with her glaive.

There was no point in making a superhuman combat robot that could be beheaded in a single blow by an average blade, or whose whole computational and directional power was placed in the head. None, but the sake of entertainment and the semblance of logic when it came to the public's reaction. Such that the bear moved no more, and the redhead scrambled to her feet, delivered an ineffective kick at the clockwork carcass and met the audience's positively stunned eyes with a rage-filled determination.

"Sorry, but I have some doubts you're better than that," Hiccup murmured towards Astrid.

"Can I plead not comparable? I have no idea what she can do with an axe and a shield. Classic female warrior generalisation."

"Ah, er, sorry."

"Also, please stop apologising."

"Sorry about… er… s… um, yeah."

They shared a mischievous grin. By the time they reported their attention to the arena, the performance had come to an end. Some stewards were cleaning up the bear's carcass and the chariots. A loudspeaker announcement by Weaseltown invited them to join the first night's gala ball. The human mass was pouring out of the theatre into the rest of the zeppelin. They had to get bathed and changed before the celebrations of the evening.

In the DunBroch lounge, the warrior girl stomped her way in, hair messier than ever, glaive in one hand and bow in the other.

"Merida, what do you think you're doing?"

Eleanor DunBroch's stern voice made her freeze for an instant, but she made no reply.

"Merida, you risked your life, the performers' and the audience's in that little tantrum of yours. They could have killed you had they not recognised you as our daughter. Haven't you done enough inconsiderate things this week?"

"It wasn't inconsiderate. I saved that lad's life."

"The fight was choreographed, not on the robot side for obvious safety reasons but on the human one. The bear's reaction was predicted, he was at no risk. The pilot would have pinned it down with a net and the mercenaries would have finished it off. That effect was just for drama."

Merida shrugged, laying her bow down on the lounge's table as she playfully threw a cookie into one of her younger brothers' mouth. The kid caught with delight.

"Chat was aweshome sis!" he commented while chewing.

"Hamish, no talking with your mouth full. Merida, no weapons on the table."

The girl picked up her bow, shooting a deadly stare at her mother.

"What now? A bow on a table? Did that endanger the lives of thousands and thousands of people? Seriously?"

"I'm not finished yet, Merida. You want to talk about that skirmish at Plant Alpha, let's talk about it. You shot an arrow directly down from our zeppelin's deck onto a plane. You blew up a glider, in a constellite-fueled explosion. You had no idea how large or well-contained the constellite sample could have been. That detonation could have blown you up, blown all of us up. There were so many flammable balloons all around, a very high human concentration, not even to mention the pilot in his ship."

"The pilot was outside the ship. He fell off straight after the impact and didn't explode."

"And what for? Just because Fergus was on his trial week with Corona & Sons and would not let you fly out with the militia. So you threw a childish tantrum. And the same thing today. You were damaging our image by behaving so disgracefully in public, even before that scandalous intervention of yours into the performance. I sensibly told you to stop and you reacted like this."

"Scandalous? I impressed them. They liked it."

"Maybe you were lucky this time, but you won't always be! Do you even know what it takes to be a soldier, Merida? Not just luck and skill with a bow and notions of how to hold a glaive. But discipline. Trust. Communication. And you've got none of that. As long as you don't listen to anyone, talk to anyone about your plans or swallow your angry pride, don't be surprised if you can't fly with the soldiers, because you're not one."

Merida could take it no more. As an ultimate sign of provocation, she sank her glaive into the table's wood and stormed off in a ruffle of torn skirts into her changing room.

"What did I say about weapons on the table? I haven't even mentioned how expensive that dress was or how long I took to deal with your hair and makeup!"

Ignoring her mother's cry, Merida DunBroch slumped onto the colonial style fainting chair, amongst a ludicrous collection of party dresses. She could hardly care less about her gown. Or her hair. She was not a lady, she was not a soldier, she was a warrior, a brave and skillful one. And no one ever saw her as such, even after such a convincing demonstration. In this world of cogs in wheels where every piece had to fit in with the next, she was a free element, like a sample of raw constellite that could not be tamed. She had no place here. She had no planned future.

"Merida," yelled her mother through the curtain. "I spoke to Fergus and we're flying back to Plant Alpha in an hour. We've spent enough time here. And the Coronas need him."

Merida regretted she'd left her glaive on the table, for she gladly would have used a blade to cut off that silly corset. Suddenly, she sat up with new fiery determination. Her fate lived within her, and she was brave enough to see it. To change it, even. The social engine was great, it was strong, but strong she was, too. And if there was no way she may fit in the machine, like a tough sand grain she'd slip in and break it.

Fun fact: Canis Major. Totally unforgiveable, I know. Canis Major - Great Dane - Denmark. The in-universe ersatz for the insular Danish region with Copenhagen and Odense. Canis Minor can be the less economically/politically important mainland region. Andersen is a Danish name, and in the Frozen context it does make sense that Hans's family would be from somewhere around there. (This is an alternate universe, so the map given in Frozen Fever may qualify for description as well…).

[Random note: I gave Merida a glaive instead of her two-handed broadsword. I thought it fit better in-universe, and matches her fighting style better. She is small and fast, as exemplified during her riding-shooting session, so a shorter and lighter blade fits better. Additionally, she can hold each of her weapons, bow and glaive, in each hand, which shortens weapon-switching time. Feel free to be mad at me.]

Announcement: upcoming exams (Cambridge finals, kinda big deal?) so won't be able to update as much in the next few days. As usual please R&R, F&F. Do complain about my author's notes, my obsession with physics and with outfits, my, ahem, slightly unrealistic fight scenes, my despair for comments etc. etc. etc.