Wunschbrunnen

Nina Reiter, a teenage girl, born into a family of pilots with a weird obsession of flying, with only her and her mother being somewhat normal. Living her luxury, popular school live with only one year till graduation in a misty, gray Hamburg summer. But an eruption of the volcano Fujisan in Japan, uproots her and her family’s comfortably life. Erupting a thick cloud of ash into the atmosphere for many months, spreading across the globe, causing a global aviation crisis. Vulcanic ash in the atmosphere poses a danger to modern jet airplanes with only few vintage planes still being able to fly, causing many airliners to being grounded and pilots getting being laid off. Her father, a former airline pilot turned test pilot for a Hamburg based jet manufacturer is one of the first to lose his job in this global crisis. But his inherent obsession with flying, after months on the ground, makes him accept a low paying offer as a firefighter pilot of a vintage CL-215 waterbomber from his twin brother in a remote lakeside town deep inside the mythical black forest mountain range in south west Germany. Uprooting not just Nina but also her little brother Niko, an unpopular kid, which never really fit into the school live, because of his inherent obsession with planes and flying, just like his dad and uncle.
The now struggling family, in order to make ends meet with her dads reduced pay, moves in with her grandmother into her remote, traditional black forest farm house near the small lakeside town. Being upset about moving away from her friends and her life, far away from any city, into a very remote part of Germany causes the tensions to rises between her and her family. The boy on the other hand is excited and goes on adventures in the wilderness, sometimes watching his father flying a CL-215 waterbomber at low level during the peak wildfire season, while his big sister is mostly staying depressed at home.
Her ninety-year-old grandmother is the reasons for the pilot obsession that runs in the family, she is also one of the first female fighter pilot in the world. But she is no longer nimble like she used to be so in order to ease a bit of the tension in the family, she hatches a secret plan together with her old dog for some reason, being fully aware that tonight will be a full moon, she tells Niko, to go into the darkest, furthest corner of the basement, and retrieve the last two special gold coins, she has hidden away in an old chest. She then tells the boy of a secret, that if he finds an old well, situated on an exposed treeless mountaintop, and cast a wish with one of the gold coins during a full moon night, that it may grant him and his sister one wish.
In order to do so, the little brother would have to traverse a hidden path over the now dark black forest mountain range that can only be seen in a full moon night, because the moonlight will reflect of a very rare flower that lines the secret route to the well. The boy, super excited to go on another adventure, grabs his backpack and runs off into the darkness. Excited, but also worried, her grandma then begs Nina, to go after her little brother, to make sure he is safe out there. After quick hesitation and resentment, but deep down still loving her brother, she then runs after him together with grandma’s dog, that resembles a white wolf, just like she had planned.
The two are slowly catching up to the boy but he refuses to return. He then tells her about the super-secret well that can grant wishes, so she can cast her make her wish come true of returning to Hamburg. After a scary climb up the mountain, the three finally spot the old, broken well in the distance. Wanting to return quickly, Nina quickly casts her selfish wish of returning back to Hamburg, but Niko is selfless, he’s just wishing for his sister to be happy again and then drops his gold coin into the well. But the coin gets stuck on a steel bar, that prevents people from falling in, so he climbs on top of the crumbling wall of the well to free his gold coin and to make his wish come true, when he suddenly scream’s as he falls through the broken bars into the well. His panicking sister, not knowing what to do, wants to call for help, but there is no signal to make an emergency call. She then climbs onto the wall to look into the well, to see her brother, but even though the full moon lights up the entire well, she can only see a faint gold shine from the bottom of the water inside the well. In this awful quietness, sneaking up from behind, the dog then deliberately pushes Nina into the old well as well with his nose.
Total darkness, total quietness!
Nina is slowly waking up, being washed up on a tropical beach on a small tropical island. Confused, franticly looking around for her little brother, she suddenly catches a glimpse of her brother floating in the crystal-clear water nearby. Luckily, after coughing out some water both appear to be fine. But now they are stranded on a small, wired, uninhabited island, nobody knows were. When touching the sand, they realize that something is off, they realize that the entire island is made up of those gold coins, some broken up by the waves to create beautiful fine gold sand.
In search for help, in the morning they luckily find a young guy fishing, sitting near the beach, on the top wing of a red vintage bi-plane float plane, an old two-seater with an open cockpit and wooden propeller. Scaring the boy to death, the two then beg the fisher for help and also ask him where they are. He answered confused that there can’t be any human on the island, it is impossible, because he is the only one that can fly and even reach the island, because only he has the only existing floatplane in the entire world. Begging the fisher to bring them to someone that can help them, he agrees to fly them to his hometown, and to bring them the king that rules this small kingdom to ask him for help.
Niko is super excited being able to fly in such a beautiful vintage red floatplane, but his big sister not so much, not just because of the desolate state of the plane, but also because it has only two seats. Hesitant and having a bit of fear of flying in that thing, she boards the plane with her little brother sitting in her lap. Finally, they safely take off from the waves with the fisher at the controls, smoothly flying through the clouds. Niko is the first that can spot the kingdom up ahead, with the big castle overlooking a beautiful bay, but something is off. The ground does not appear below the plane but above. Almost like they took off inverted from an ocean in the sky. The fisher explains to them, that they took off from the infinite ocean, that is covering the entire sky of the magic world. After landing off the coast of the kingdom, as promised, the fisher brought both siblings safely to the great hall inside the castle to meet the king.
The king asks the fisher if he has been flying again, even though it is forbidden for normal people to do so. He just replays that that’s the only way he can get to his favorite fishing place where he still can catch some fish for the starving kingdom. At this moment, a young girl, a magical fairy with wings flies down from cleaning the windows at the top of the hall to the fisher and looks into his bucket, laughing at the few fish he caught. That’s all you have from the secret fishing spot you always tell me about, she asks. He explains that he found these two kids on the island and brought them back as quick as he could. The king asks the kids for their names, when Nina states her name and last name everybody gets super quiet. The confused Nina asks what it is, and the king happily replies that there has not been a Reiter (rider in English) in this world for decades, this must be destiny, now they maybe have a chance to save the magic world from destruction. In the eyes of the king and the people of the kingdom, these kids are not just normal humans, they are what they call “skyrider”! Legendary heroes, that fly in magical machines that only appear whenever the magic world is in great danger to safe everyone. They inherent a magic gene, that makes them able to create, operate and fly any and every plane with absolutely no training or experience.
(In the meantime, a missing person search is underway near the family house, with police and firefighter searching for the kids)
The three kids then go back to the shoreside workshop of the fisher to rest, where the next day he starts working on fixing his old floatplane for the task ahead. He is a genius when it comes to fixing things, so Nina hands him her phone and asks if he can fix it as he has never seen anything like it, but all he can do is to help drying it. Niko also gets super excited and is helping with his knowledge of modern aviation fixing the floatplane as he shows the fisher his precious scale model of a similar floatplane, a PBY Catalina that his grandmother once gave him when he was little and which he always carries around in his backpack. The fisher jumps up into the air and asks a lot of questions about it, when he suddenly pulls out one of the many magical gold coins which he brought back from the tropical golden island on one of his many fishing trips. He then tells Niko to fuses the coin and the scale model and to throw it into the sea. He does, and when the model plane hits the water, everything lights up in a bright flash of light, when it suddenly pops up above the water and becomes a real, working and flying floatplane. With this second plane they can now safe the world he explains and wants to do a test flight. Niko and the fisher are very excited, Nina is very much skeptical about everything. But the moment her little brother touches the controls of the Catalina his eyes light up blue, and he can see all the instruments, characteristics and controls of the plane in his head, even with his eyes closed, because of his magical genes.
They fly around the bay above the kingdom and every inhabitant of the kingdom is looking to the sky in awe! Seeing a different plane in the sky for the first time the king requests a second meeting, in which he explains the dire situation to the kids. A large wildfire is burning on the other side of the world, poising the air and the water, causing a food crisis which is threatening the survival of the entire magic world. The kids need to set out on a journey across the world, gather supplies, retrieve a magical weapon and then fly to the wildfire and fight the fire in order to save the world, and all that before the next full moon in three and a half weeks. Because if the skyriders stay to long in the magic world, they can no longer go back, so they have to hurry. Skeptical the two kids learn more about the world and also about their family’s history, that about eighty years ago, another skyrider, a young girl saved the magic world once in the past.
At this point the kids also meet up with the fairy from the castle. She is the best friend of the fisher and she wants to join them on their journey because she lost her parents in the last catastrophe, and she owns her life to the kid’s grandmother, the first skyrider. The fisher wants to try something and tells the boy to remove the gold coin from his old, damage floatplane, that he found crashed in the jungle, and carefully dismantled and repaired over many years. When Niko removed the coin the full-sized working plane suddenly became a small, palm sized scale model of the original plane. The gold coin then crumbles after loosing all of his magic energy. But after inserting one of the new fully changed coins, the plane again becomes real and also all of its damage is magical fixed. Now with both planes ready and in working order and with two skyrider at the controls the four of them then set out to their first challenge.
On the first leg of their long journey across the magic world they have to cross the ice mountains. A very high, frozen mountain range that surrounds a small kingdom, called the frozen kingdom on three sides. After encountering a storm, heavy snow and ice, flying in the small floatplane with the open cockpit becomes extremely dangerous so they shrink it again and continue only with the bigger more suitable PBY plane across the mountain. After a very dangerous and long flight they make it safely to the frozen kingdom. A world of ice and snow, after a tricky landing with the floatplane in the deep, powdery snow, they start marching onwards to the castle in the distance. With a letter of referral from the king, which explains everything in detail to the ruling wolf queen they make quick progress. The frozen kingdom is willing and eager to help them with what they have and what food they can spare. Also, they hand over to the kids their most prized possession, what looks like some type of gun, that can store a lot of magical water and that uses gold coins as a fuel. Before sending the party off to safe the world, the wolf queen asks the kids one final question, how is my son doing? The kids are confused, who is she talking about when they come to realize that she looks a lot like grandma’s old dog. Which turns out to be in reality a prince of the frozen kingdom that serves his live protecting his savior, the kid’s grandmother better known in the frozen kingdom under her callsign “rider one”.
Taking off from the snow their next stop is the mountain forests. The fairy has to explain that this is not a forest, growing on a mountain, no, it is a mountain made of gigantic trees that grow way above the clouds, which is also the home of the fairy kingdom and the magical tree of life. Here they have to find a place to land as high up as possible, so that they don’t have to climb much, luckily the branches of the tree of life are so ginormous that they can easily land on them like on a bumpy runway. After first meeting with the fairy queen they learn, that if the massive wildfire is reaching the tree of live, then the entire magic world and the human world above will die. Having not much time, they are being let to what looks like a big bee hive with friendly black and blue bees the size of a hamster. They have been collecting the pollen from the blue flower that grow on the tree of life and made the magical blue honey that their grandma loves so much. They are being told that the honey has special properties, it can heal injuries and extend life if consumed. After filling up a few glasses with the help of the friendly bees, and stocking up on vital supplies, they once again takeoff to save the world.
Now they fly over a vast forest, having occasionally to add a coin to the PBY as new fuel until they finally reach a huge peninsula, which is covered entirely in a gigantic forest. They start smelling the wildfire, with black smoke reaching high into the sky in the distance. These fires have been burning for many months now, a large area of the green forest beneath them has already turned black. But even though the fire has been raging for months, the area that has been effects is comparably small, that’s because the trees that are burning are gigantic and it takes many months for them to turn into ash. The heat from the fire and the smoke rises to the sky, turning the infinite ocean above black and heating up the water, causing the ocean floor to be exposed and melting it into red hot lava, which drops down fueling the vicious cycle of destruction.
After getting a quick overview over the situation the team lands at a small nearby lake to craft a plan on how to best tackle the wildfire. Niko learned a lot about the tactics and strategies to fight wildfires from his uncle. The best way is to use both planes at the same time, with Niko and the fairy flying the small bi-plane to tackle the fire, and Nina and the fisher circling above in the PBY to give instruction over the radio. they load up the water gun with water from the lake, add new coins to the planes as fuel, create a mask to protect against the smoke and slowly take off. At first their efforts show no effect, until Niko decides to fly much lower, which is the most dangerous type of flying, not just because of the terrain, but also because of the reduced visibility and the massive turbulences caused by the hot air rising from the fire. After reloading the water gun with new water and new coins multiple times, they start seeing the fire getting smaller. After days of hard and dangerous work it seems that the fire is under control until the red-hot lava above is dropping down again, reigniting the fire with the wind pushing it towards the small and only lake in the area where they have been reloading the water gun. Now they are out of options, they have to make due with what they have and they can no longer safely land at this lake. They have to finish the job now, so that they can make it in time to the nearest golden island for next full moon. But Niko’s small plane only holds little fuel, and it only takes one gold coin at a time to refuel they need to refuel fast. But they have used up all of their coins to reload the water gun and now have nothing left anymore. Luckily, Nina and the fisher still have some coins left, but with no place to land they only have one choice. The fairy proposes and volunteers to climb on the lower wing of the bi-plane and to grab the coins from the fisher in the bigger PBY. A risky plan, but if the fairy falls she will be able to safely fly and land on the ground, so they line up both planes, slow down as much as possible, idle the number to engine of the PBY and slowly close the gap. The fisher is holding onto the rear right cargo door of the PBY and reaches out as much as he can and Niko is slowly closing the gap between both planes. After a scary moment the fairy is able to grab the coins and climb back into the front seat. Now they can refuel the bi-plane and make one last ditch effort to finally extinguish the forest fire. Giving their best they finally succeed in putting out the fire and after circling for a while they can no longer see any smoke or flames coming from the forest below and the lava that has been melting off the ocean floor above also stops to drop down. On one of their circles one of the last gold coins gets loose and falls towards the ground. Quickly after it hit the ground the ashes of the forest turn green again, using the magic energy inside the coin to regrow the forest at an incredible rate.
The team decides to land and meat up again at the small lake they took off from earlier to plan their next step. Seeing the sun slowly setting they realize that tonight is the next full moon and their only chance to return to their world above. They check the old map that shows a golden island not far away from the forest. But they are now down to their last fuel and have no spare coins left. With the remaining fuel in both planes they are unable to make it to the nearest golden island above. Until the fisher is having a brilliant idea. They will remove the last coin from the PBY turning it into a scale model once again, then use the remaining magical energy in this spare coin to fuel up the bi-plane, which uses much less fuel as the big one. Not wanting to leave the fisher and the fairy stranded on this lake they decide to sit on each other’s lap in the two-seater bi-plane. This time, Nina will be sitting with the fisher and Niko will hold the fairy and will be the one flying the plane.
They finally make it to the golden island with only minutes of fuel to spare. They can see a faint moon light in a perfect circle in the water below, near the beach. They quickly grab some more coins from the beach, say their goodbyes and make a promise to one day return to the magic world. They paddle the floatplane right above the mysterious light on the ocean floor and Nina and Niko quickly jump into the water and dive to the floor. Once near the light, two of the gold coins they are carrying activates and the light sucks them towards the floor. With the fisher and the fairy being left behind, the watch the two kids disappear in the water. With the new coins, the fisher and the fairy can now also make their way home in the small plane.
Grasping for air the kids surface in a moonlit wishing well in the real world. Interlocking their arms and pushing with their legs against the wall of the well, with their backs firmly pressing at each other they are able to climb out of the well. Exhausted and tired the look at their surroundings only to find themselves near the ocean nowhere near their home. Nina quickly checks her phone that was wrapped watertight but the battery is already dead, in only turns on for a minute, in which she receives a million messages and missed calls from her parents, but she brushed them aside to quickly check the map where they are. And in shock the map shows them being on the other side of the world at an old abandon shrine at the coast of Japan.
Resting the night inside the shrine, drying their clothes they realize that they have no money, no passport and no way of contacting home after the phones battery finally dies. But Niko has an idea, he pulls out the PBY scale model he has in his backpack, fuses it with a coin he brought and it works, the scale model, once again turns into a full-size, working airplane in the real world. With his knowledge of modern navigation, the can now safely fly home. Once they are prepared for takeoff, Nina says to her little brother that she will be flying, she now loves flying and she wants to fly them home. She sets the callsign of the PBY to rider4, and takes off towards the rising morning sun. They now have to make a turn towards the west when they can spot the volcano Fujisan in the distance, which is no longer erupting lava and ash into the atmosphere, but appearing much taller than in the pictures shown on the news.
When their grandmother overhears the police telling the parents that Nina’s phone for a minute logged in from Japan, but disregarded it as an error, she and the dog now knew that the kids are safe and on their way home. They could track the flightpath on an app, as they made steady progress, on their twenty-hour long return flight. Once reaching their destination they overfly their house in the black forest with grandma and her dog looking up and waving at them as they make a flyover. After quickly landing at the nearby lake and shrinking the PBY again, they make their way home on foot. After more than four weeks away they are finally back home, with their parents overjoyed with happiness having to come up with a comprehensive story to keep grandma’s secret. After the dust has settle they sit down for a nice family breakfast the next day, where on the table you can spot a glass of the magical blue honey.
Nina will later become a fighter pilot just like her grandma, flying the fastest jets in the air force after finally settling to becoming a waterbomber pilot just like her dad, Niko will set out to win multiple air races, until becoming an astronaut and flying the brand-new NASA moonshuttle to space. Occasionally visiting the magic world again, and meeting with their new friends that they made along the way.
The end