Drachenerwachen Chapters 33: Getting Ready to Go

Finally, the holiday weekend arrives.  Frau Tossilo has been made redundant from her job at the nearby shoe-shop, and, although she has been offered jobs in other branches, she decides that it’s not worth the long commute and that she will wait a while before looking for another job.  After all, her mother has left her a surprisingly large amount of money, so she isn’t in immediate financial need.

Hmm - in my experience of trying and failing to find a job, it’s difficult to persuade employers that you are worth hiring if you aren’t currently in work, preferably paid work (though voluntary work in a charity shop is better than nothing).  After all, Frau Tossilo can hardly put ‘spending quality time with my dragon’ on her CV as a valid reason to take a break, the way that a teacher or crèche worker can list taking time out to bring up their own children as relevant work experience.  But I suspect that Frau Tossilo’s life may be taking off in dramatically different directions, and that she might not want to go back to selling shoes anyway.

In the meantime, Johann and Janka are getting ready to go camping with Frau Tossilo, while their parents prepare to go on a holiday of their own, to a club by the Baltic Sea.  They will be out of communication, since apparently the club does not allow telephones, which sounds ominous.  I could understand if the place just didn’t have good mobile reception (living in the Mendips, I can barely get mobile reception at home, let alone in certain lanes while out for a walk), but specifically forbidding telephones, so that callers can contact holidaymakers only through the manager, makes me wonder whether the club is part of Black West’s conspiracy.  Or probably I’m just getting paranoid.

At any rate, when Frau Tossilo, leaving her neighbour’s flat, bends down to pick up the wrapper from a raspberry-flavoured sweet which someone has dropped in the lift, I am sure that is an important clue – if not necessarily the kind of Chekhov’s Gun that actually performs any function in itself.  It is simply too trivial to be mentioned if it wasn’t relevant.

Frau Tossilo, the children and Kurmo discuss travel arrangements, with the humans setting off in the car by day and Kurmo spacing himself out of the building to follow them after dark.  Since this time Kurmo will need to take the laptop with him (instead of simply stashing it behind a flower-pot on the balcony), Johann asks him how he plans to carry it, and Kurmo demonstrates that his back opens up to reveal a luggage compartment (and that the skin closes over it to make sure that nothing can fall out or get rained on). 

Ri-i-ight.  Kurmo grows into a weirder dragon every time we meet him, and now he’s starting to remind me of E. Nesbit’s ‘Last of the Dragons’ who eventually becomes the first aeroplane.  Johann, impressed, asks, ‘Have you got any more special features?’ to which Kurmo only replies, ‘Maybe.’  Whatever Johann may have thought in Chapter 11 about real baby dragons being a bit disappointing compared with computer-game dragons, and whatever he said to the boys he met in Chapter 14 about it being better to wait for the next edition of dragons, I think Kurmo has surpassed even his expectations by now.  After all, Kurmo has had an upgrade since then!

In the meantime, Frau Tossilo needs to nip out to the shops for some last-minute provisions (though after Johann jokingly suggests living off the land, she is starting to reflect that this might actually be more fun).  Johann settles down to play a computer game set in a beautiful fairy-tale landscape, with Janka and Kurmo watching him.  After a while, he asks Janka to bring him Frau Tossilo’s model unicorn so that he can demonstrate something.  My guess is that he has found a way to space objects from the real world into the world of a computer game, though it isn’t clear whether the unicorn would remain just a piece of glass or might be transformed into a real live unicorn once it enters a world for which this would be appropriate.

However, they are interrupted when Kurmo senses that something has happened to Frau Tossilo.  It isn’t simply that he is suffering from separation anxiety because she has been away for more than two hours, as he might have done when he was younger.  He has enough of a telepathic bond with his adoptive mother to sense that she is in danger and that he needs to fly to her straightaway.  He can feel himself drawn in her direction.  He threatens to smash the window if Johann won’t space him right now.

The children try to calm him down, with Johann suggesting (after trying and failing to phone Frau Tossilo) that maybe they should call the police.  But when Kurmo continues to insist that he needs to go to her in person, Janka points out that he can’t do anything if he flies out in broad daylight and gets captured, so that he at least needs to wait until nightfall – and that she and Johann are going to come with him. 

So, at last they’re going to get the chance to go dragon-riding, if not under the circumstances they’d expected.  The chapter ends with Janka looking for something she can use as a saddle, as a dragon’s back isn’t comfortable to sit on even if you can wedge yourself between the spines.  She probably also ought to talk to Ben in Drachenreiter about straps to act as a seatbelt.