Drachenerwachen Chapters 41-43: Freedom

Once Kurmo lands in a concealed spot in the woods, our heroes finally get their camping holiday – if not quite the one they had intended.  Kurmo even manages to find a cave for them to sleep in, just as they had discussed back in Chapter 28!

As the humans clamber stiffly out of Kurmo’s luggage compartment, they tell themselves that no-one has followed them and that at last they are finally free, and their only worry is whether Kurmo’s scales will grow back or whether he will be stuck with skin like an elephant’s for the rest of his life.

We have already seen Kurmo’s experiences of going into another life after crashing to the floor of Black West’s premises.  Now, the humans describe their experiences, each of which had been different.  Johann comments that he had thought that they were dead, but then he felt very hot, which didn’t seem to fit with being dead and he had heard a kind of singing, like his parents singing to celebrate his birthday. 

(I would add: well, feeling hot probably doesn’t mean you’re dead, unless of course befriending a dragon is a mortal sin which takes you to an appropriately fiery hell.  I certainly don’t think it is or does, but some people have violently dracophobic theology, as the following tale of a Louisiana Christmas demonstrates:

Her Neighbor Hated Her Dragon Nativity Scene. So She Got More Dragons.)

Frau Tossilo had experienced their near-death as a thick, fluffy cloud on a hot, blue summer’s day.  Janka had experienced it as music, but differently to Johann: ‘No singing, but a stringed orchestra, in which each person only ever played their instrument briefly.  As if every stroke was infinitely precious, every note a whole world.  And somehow, I was carried by these notes.’

Johann asks, as we all want to know, how Kurmo actually managed to do whatever it was that he did.  I don’t know whether we’ll get an answer to this – so much to do with dragons seems to be beyond words.  But in the meantime, everyone just needs to rest.

The next chapter opens with Johann waking in the cave the following morning, and his stomach noticing that he is awake and promptly growling to be fed.  In spite of Janka’s joking comment that Johann’s staple diet is his computer, he’s a growing lad and they’ve finished off the sandwiches last night.

He tries to think what people had eaten in primitive times, before there were bakeries around, and reflects that they probably lived on hares, roots, mushrooms, and berries, but that it’s the wrong time of year.

Well – the wrong time of year for berries, anyway.  In a European wood, some of the mushroom species that might be around in spring include morels (edible after cooking, which isn’t difficult if you have a dragon),  St Georges mushroom, and Fairy Ring Champignons should be around.  However, there is always the danger of making a mistake if you’re not an expert – for example, the false morels look deceptively like morels and are poisonous.  Also, it doesn’t help if you aren’t sure what part of the world you are even in (though the landscape looks fairly European).

Johann certainly doesn’t have the experience to identify mushrooms, nor to catch prey – when he sees a squirrel, he just calls out a cheery greeting to it.  Despite his joking suggestion in Chapter 33 that he could forage for food, he is probably the least outdoor-orientated of any of the characters.

While out in the woods, he hears a helicopter.  No – helicopters.  Somehow, Black West have a way of tracking their quarry (of course!).  He hurries back to the cave to warn the others, and notices a strange yellow patch on Kurmo’s tail.  This, it turns out, was the ‘arrow-powder’ mentioned in Chapter 40.  It’s a tracking device which eats into the target who is shot with it, and it is impossible to remove.

The characters argue briefly about what to do.  Kurmo wants to fight to protect his human friends, but Frau Tossilo points out that he is in no condition to fight.  There’s no point in searching the cave for a back exit, since Black West can track him anywhere in the world.  So, obviously, the only alternative is – another world.  At last, we’re going to see Johann’s latest project in action.  I had suspected ever since Chapter 21  that something like this might be necessary.

Zinck deliberately averts the trope here that teleporting feels extremely uncomfortable.  Janka reflects that she had imagined all kinds of horrible sensations, when in fact, ‘It was as spectacular as if you were sitting on a kitchen chair, and in the next moment you were still sitting on a kitchen chair.’  However, that doesn’t mean she isn’t going to have disturbing experiences after arriving.

If this was a film, this is where it would go from live action with CGI to wholly animated.  Johann ‘spaces’ himself and his companions to the top of a pyramid-shaped, violet-coloured hill in his fantasy game, in the world of lilac-coloured mountains with snowy peaks, and ‘lindgrüne Grasebene’.  

This phrase took me by surprise, as it seems to mean ‘lime-green grassy plains’, but that they are the green of limes as in linden trees https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tilia , rather than the green of limes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lime_(fruit) as in citrus fruit (which would be Limonen).  Of course, real lime fruits and real linden trees can vary in colour, but in the context of the computer game, I’ll assume that the hills look about the colour of this text.

It is an uncannily silent place compared to the ‘real’ forested mountain they have just left.  No insects buzz and no birds sing (since they are neither important to the plot of a computer game, nor a broad-scale part of the landscape that can be drawn in easily.

Looking around, Janka notices, first of all, how different Kurmo looks here.  He is now completely white, and looks somehow bald.  His claws and his facial tentacles have disappeared, and she can’t decide whether the pattern on him is scales or just pixels.  She realises that she herself, even though she feels normal, looks like a cartoon character, and that her voice sounds strange and flat.  Even walking is different here, since your toes touch the ground before your heel, and every step is exactly the same in length.

If I were in Janka’s digital shoes, I think I’d start screaming about now.  Just being in the world of a badly drawn computer game sounds horrific.  And that’s before you get to the bad things that can happen to characters in video games, even games as seemingly innocent as Tetris, as MrsCatherineWinter’s story Pressure reminds us.

There probably isn’t any reason why Johann and Janka can’t return immediately to their home world (assuming that spacing works correctly, and that it doesn’t teleport them into the middle of a solid object.  And – as PDB11 has pointed out to me – if Johann has actually been able bring his laptop with him to a world in a game inside his laptop.  I don’t think the laptop is actually mentioned again, but after all, a person spacing themselves while holding the laptop usually still has the laptop when they arrive in their new position, so probably it works even in circumstances as meta as this.  As PDB11 put it, ‘We’ve gone into Permutation City!’  I’m not familiar with Greg Egan, but it reminds me of a scene in Terry Pratchett’s Sourcery where a group of characters have to travel inside a magic lamp – while one of them is holding the lamp.  They are warned not to talk about it too much, in case the laws or reality notice the flaw in the logic of this.

At any rate, apparently Johann and Janka are able to go back.  Kurmo, on the other hand, is safe only if he doesn’t return to the world that he has come from, and Frau Tossilo has no particular wish to go back – after all, she has no job, no partner or close family waiting for her, and, seemingly, no friends apart from Kurmo, Johann and Janka. 

As it’s not going to be much fun for Johann and Janka just to go home and sit around on their own until their parents return from their own holiday, they decide to explore the strange new landscape together, at least for a while.  It turns out that if you leave the mountains and go into the soft green hills, there are insects after all: swarms of decorative glow-worms.

Not only that, but there is a soft music playing: the game’s theme music for when you level up.  So they’ve just got to go and find what adventures await them on Level 2, haven’t they?  After all, this is only Book 1 in the series.  But for now, I’m going to read something different.

I don’t want this to sound as though I’m glad to be through with Drachenerwachen for the time being, as if I’d found it boring.  It’s a fun, increasingly surreal story with engaging characters, and I’m looking forward to meeting them again.  It’s just that blogging about reading it has taken me a lot longer than reading it did, and I’ve been trying not to read too far ahead on the next book on my reading list, but as this next one was part of my favourite fantasy series, I couldn’t really resist.  So I’ll be here again soon, to blog about Der Fluch der Aurelia by Cornelia Funke.