Weigh Out Way-In

CHAPTER 50

'Huanying wo de hao pengyou (欢迎我的好朋友), welcome my dear friend Panda to Lapland.'

'Kiitos, Magpie, minun ystävä.'

'You have learned some Finnish.'

'And you some Chinese.'

After the preliminary introductions have been done and they've got on Santa's bus, the Chinese experience yet another surprise because Magpie asks them to cover their eyes with their woolly hats.

'Why?' wonders Panda.

'You know nobody has ever seen the secret route to Santa's Hideaway, let alone visited the place in the last two hundred years. And Santa likes to keep the location secret also in the future. So if you just do me the favour and follow my instructions please and I, as Santa's representative here, would be very pleased.'

Panda explains the situation and the request to the Chinese travellers, who talk about the matter for some time. Then Panda turns to Magpie and pulls down his woolly hat, setting an example to the other travellers, who follow suit. It doesn't cross anybody's mind to pin the locations on their GoogleMaps this time. If it does next time, they will certainly notice it is of no use because all Santa's vehicles have location distractors.

The bus jerks to motion. First it leaves the parking lot and drives along a winding road. Then takes a few turns this way and that way, left and right and right and left.

After some fifteen minutes and after so many twists and turns that they must have lost count, it feels as if the bus has just entered a huge building or a tunnel or something.

Quite soon after that the bus comes to a screeching halt. Magpie turns to his friend Panda and urges him and his co-travellers to uncover their eyes.

The bright lights make them blind for a short while but then they can see well enough to follow Magpie through an opening in a tube. They get on a trainlike vehicle. Magpie ushers them to their seats.

'This is the head driver speaking and beside me is my co-driver.

And this vehicle is the Santa-Co-Motion and is powered by thermal energy, found deep down underground, and combined with solar energy, found high up above ground.

You just embarked on a journey nobody else has made before. We have done a lot of test runs before coming to this unforgettable moment. We are really happy to have you here as our first passengers on board. However this is not meant to be a one-off even though all the materials used for this transportation system are recyclable but will have a regular timetable of six rides a moon in near future.

Have you found yourself a nice place and a nice friend for this journey to Santa's Hideaway? If not, press the button on the armrest of your seat and a friend will be sent to you immediately because this is a CO journey. Nobody is left travelling alone.

Ok. It seems I cannot see any friend-request lightbulbs on on my dashboard, which means that everybody's got nice company for this journey. This in turn means that it's time to depart.

You don't have to fasten your seat belts because we don't have any. Instead you are protected by the Super Shield. You cannot see it but you can feel it, especially if you try to stand up quickly. It presses you down. However if you get up slowly, it allows you to do so, although I have to remind you of the fact that while we are accelerating you won't be able to get up at all. I'm delighted to inform you though that the acceleration time lasts only 15 seconds and then we have reached the ideal travel speed, which is one million elves' height per each three thousand six hundred seconds. And I have to point it out to you that we elves think vertically while you humans and other creatures with you think horizontally. You may still wonder what kind of speed that is in human terms but it is easy to count because, as you may already know, one elf is 100 cm. So you can, with certainty, especially if you are equipped with good enough mathematical skills, come to a conclusion that the velocity of our amazing vehicle is two hundred thousand elves higher per sixty minutes than that of the slo-mo plane that you were on when you arrived in Rovaniemi.

By the way, did you notice that I just managed to express myself with a well-constructed sentence constituted by fifty, or was it fifty-one, words, which is more than the thirty-five-word-long sentence that I said earlier in this eloquent speech of mine.

To put it in other words, - now I'm returning to my original train of thoughts- this is faster than a passenger airplane.

And now, to make you more acquainted with this superb transportation vehicle, I'm delighted to share the following information with you:

This is a pure wonder, not made of any metal like your plane for Rovaniemi, but, surprisingly, not to us elves though, of wood.

Yes, you heard me right, of wood.

Nevertheless, not just any wood but the kind of wood that is lighter, thinner and tougher than steel.

You may wonder how this is possible?

Well, our hi-tech elves came up with a game-changing invention, with a considerable assistance from some American and Chinese biotech elves, through thousands and thousands of tests and experiments. We joined forces and managed to find the right proportions for the ingredients, for example by taking away some, but not all, of the lignin in the wood and then pressed it until it reached one fifth of its original thickness. Then we combined these with several other ground-breaking

- sorry for a bit disturbing use of the adjective ground-breaking because our actions are meant to to conserve the ground, not to break it -

e x q u i s i t e tricks such as bathing the wood in a solution the ingredients of which are, of course, kept top secret.

The reason why I want to tell you this is that Santa takes today's environmentally-friendly aspirations very seriously. Not only thermal and solar energy is used to run the Santa-Co-Motion but also it has been built in the most eco-friendly way possible.

But, by the way, you may have already noticed that I, your driver, your co-traveller and your fellow-creature, have a liking for expressing myself not only in a few words but in so many words as I am allowed to do and as come to my industrious mind, the habit of which my co-driver is right now reprimanding me of, because it seems, judging by the way he is trying to draw my attention to the time on his golden wristwatch, that we are running behind the schedule.

- Am I now getting quite close to a hundred words a sentence?-

So it seems we now have to activate the safety and the acceleration features to get this thing going to our destination.

And I had just only begun expressing my not-so-lengthy introduction to the environmental wonders of...'

But is interrupted by the co-driver who in way too few words, at least in the head-driver's opinion, just retorts,

'Here we go.'

and presses the activation button.

As a result, the doors get locked, the passengers get tied to their seats, the engine starts humming and the Santa-Co-Motion glides forward at an accelerating speed.