Drachenerwachen Chapters 39-40: The Escape

Meanwhile, Johann has come back from searching for water to find that Janka and Kurmo have disappeared.  He wonders what to do, and whether he should phone the mountain rescue service, just as, when Frau Tossilowas first kidnapped, his first thought was to ring the police.

This book plays with what has been derided in How Not to Write a Novel and on TV Tropes as the Cellphones Are Useless problem: the question of how, in a modern age when nearly everyone has a mobile phone, any character who gets into danger would not simply take out their mobile phone and call the emergency services. 

Personally, I think it is unrealistic to assume that everyone does have reliable mobile phone access.  Even now, living in a rural area of a developed, densely populated country, I have patchy mobile reception at best, and we don’t know whether it would work in whatever secluded area Black West have their headquarters.  But it might – if Johann decides to call the mountain rescue services, and if he can find out what number to call in this area, and how to tell them where he is.

In much fantasy fiction with a modern setting, electronic technology doesn’t function in a magical school, or functions erratically in the presence of trolls, or similar.  PDB11 looks at things from a slightly different angle in his novella People Trafficking: if you’re a werewolf, how do you operate a mobile phone while in wolf form?

In this book, it isn’t that magic in itself disrupts technology – you simply don’t want to attract the attention of the authorities when you have a dragon who needs to stay hidden.  Although Johann tells himself, both in Chapter 33 and here, that he can simply explain the problem without mentioning the bit about having been brought to an unidentified country by a dragon seeking his kidnapped adoptive mother, he doesn’t really want to do this until he is sure that there are no other options.

He decides to make the most of having some free time to play computer games uninterrupted: an adult-rated game with a complex plot, involving a mysterious woman in a long black dress who at different points in the story may seem to be an ally or a villain.  This reminds me of the black-clad woman whom Frau Tossilo apparently met on the journey over, and makes me wonder whether we will see her again – and whether her role in Drachenerwachen, or that of any of the other staff at Black West, will turn out to be equally ambiguous.  This is the beginning of a series, after all.

At any rate, Johann can’t settle into the game without thinking of the others – for example, how much Janka would enjoy the game’s music.  After waiting a long time, worrying about Janka, crying, and repeatedly putting off phoning for help, he closes down the game with guns and the woman in black, and returns to the fantasy game that he had been showing Janka and Kurmo back in Chapter 33, and the program that he had been working on.  We might be about to learn for sure what he is up to, instead of just having our suspicions…

Except that at this point Kurmo returns, grabs Johann (who is still holding his laptop and his rucksack) and sticks him in the luggage compartment along with Janka.  Janka is struggling to maintain mental contact with Kurmo and keep him reasonably sane, but eventually she has the chance to explain what is going on, before Kurmo dives back into Black West’s headquarters to make another attempt at rescue.

So now we have the whole adventure party assembled (in a literal dungeon, at that!).  Kurmo flies back in with the children, to find not only the thin-lipped man but also Sarvas.  He, in contrast to the thin-lipped man, greets Kurmo politely by name, promises him that his ‘mother’ is unharmed and that nasty business with the sword won’t happen again, and claims to be a friend to dragons.

Hmm – do we trust him?  I must admit, I’d like him to turn out to be a sympathetic character, and the computer game that Johann has just been playing does seem to foreshadow the idea that people’s real motivation and allegiances can be difficult to discern.  But from what we have seen so far, he certainly doesn’t seem to have had any moral objections to Black West’s plans, nor to be some unwilling underling.  In Chapter 27, when we hear the thin-lipped man trying to placate him over the phone, it sounds as though he is complaining about Black West’s incompetence in losing the dragon egg, and apparently his only doubts are about the practicalities if the dragon has already imprinted on someone else.  The thin-lipped man’s line at that point, ‘You’ll get your money soon now, Sherpa Sarvas!’ could have meant either that Sarvas is an investor wanting to make money out of the dragon through Black West, or that he is an independent dragon-expert whom Black West is employing, but he seems to be some sort of business partner.

So, are he and the thin-lipped man playing ‘good cop, bad cop’?  This seems the likeliest – though Sarvas could turn out to be a spy who had joined forces with Black West only in order to reveal their abuse of dragons.  Or he could pretend to be this.

At any rate, he seems to be able to gain control of Kurmo even more easily than the thin-lipped man had – or so Johann and the reader are led to fear, until Janka confirms that she can feel that Kurmo is still in his right mind.  He is just lulling his would-be captors into a false sense of security – and giving Johann the opportunity to rescue Frau Tossilo by teleporting her out of her glass prison, so that Kurmo can grab her with his tail and set her on his back and they can all make a clean getaway.  Yes, the guards are firing at him with their mysterious ‘sticks’, but they can’t stop him.  It can’t really be this easy, surely?

No, of course it can’t.  As soon as our heroes are on the point of freedom, a massive electric shock shoots through Kurmo, knocking him unconscious and causing him to crash to the floor below.

So… we cut to Kurmo in a dream/memory of a past incarnation/forward-dream to his next incarnation/who knows?, to find himself being drawn back to his present reality by the voices of his human friends.  Clearly, he isn’t going to be flying any time soon in his present state, and if he did he would only be knocked down again.

So – he needs to transcend his present state.  This time, stepping out of his skin isn’t a simple matter of moulting his old set of scales.  Instead, he seems to be stepping out of his former body, turning himself into a cloud that can drift away upwards, unseen (and yet is somehow able to take his three human passengers with him).  As far as the Black West gang are concerned, the corpse of the dragon is still lying collapsed on the floor.

As Kurmo flies higher, he manages to regain his physical form, except for his scales – he now has a gauze-like, almost translucent skin.  The downside to being corporeal, of course, is that he is now exposed to the electric-shock barrier all over again.  Johann decides to space them through the barrier – and the noise alerts the dragon-slayer army, who realise that the real Kurmo has escaped, and fire at him with something called ‘arrow-powder’.

So – our heroes seem to have got away, but with three chapters still to go, how safe can they really be?  And do they at least get to have a Long Rest and regain some hit points?