Office Cave Theme Park

In a big, dark office building, there was a hidden door behind a large painting. It led into a room with dusty shelves, holding bottles with something cloudy and sinister inside, but I couldn't look closely.

Anyway, that wasn't working, so I decided to come in from outside. It was twilight. I climbed to the roof on a ladder bolted to the side of the building. If I concentrated a little, I could make myself invisible, so I did that on the way up.

On the roof were dozens of women looking anxious. They wore coats and jackets and their hair was mussed by the wind. They were looking for the same thing I was.

I found the door into the building from the roof. The lock was rusty and came off with a little pushing. The women all startled when I made the noise. I went in the door and some of them followed. That is, they went in. I was still invisible, so they just thought the door opened on its own.

I walked down many, many stairs. At first they were lit by standard dim lights, but after a while they were completely dark. Then there stopped being doors to floors on the landings. The women were still following me. I kept going too.

Then there was light again. The lights were human skulls, with some kind of light inside the cranial cavity. That part glowed, but it's not like the maxilla was glowing or like these were blow-molded plastic skull party lights. These were human skulls cunningly fashioned into lamps.

I kept going, and I could hear the women behind me encountering the skull lights.

Finally, the stairs ended and there was another door. It was made of metal and felt very cold. I went in.

It was a huge industrial freezer, lit by fluorescent tubes. Cubical blocks of ice were stacked into mazes and walls. I could see another door across the room, with a red EXIT sign above it. I walked that way.

Tiny little yappy dogs suddenly appeared and barked at me. They tried to bite me but I had thick boots. I just kept walking and ignored them. Then I forgot and reached down to pet one. We currently have a friendly but bitey little ginger kitten, so I guess I forgot that it's not good to be bitten. Anyway, a yappy dog clamped on to the webbing between my thumb and finger. It hurt and the dog's mouth just felt diseased. Ick.

The dog wouldn't let go, so I held its end with my other hand to keep it from pulling too much. I bashed the dog's head against one of the blocks of ice, and its jaw relaxed as its skull flattened. I couldn't tell if I was bleeding or not, being invisible.

Now I was annoyed at the dogs. I started stomping on them. I'm big, these were tiny dogs, and I have good boots. They were pretty easy to kill, even though I couldn't see my foot to aim my kicks well. They lay like bloated rats in tiny pools of blood.

The women showed up during the festival of carnage. There were only four or five of them left. I guess the others had chickened out. It must have looked weird, blood and dogs flying about for no reason. I decided it was a good time to turn visible again, so I did.

I waved at the women, and they looked less frightened. Either I'd killed all the dogs, or the rest were hiding. The room was deserted. I walked out the other door.

All my trouble was worth it! I was in the middle of a huge subterranean theme park!

The room I'd entered was a kind of motorcycle ride. It looked kind of like the student union at the University of Oregon, except with ramps instead of stairs. An attendant gave everyone a sleek cycle, sort of like a motorcycle enclosed in streamlined plastic.

He explained that the motorcycles didn't have engines, but were drawn along the floor by powerful magnets beneath it. We didn't have to steer, just try not to fall over. If the bike tipped over, it would still keep going, dragging the rider along with his leg pinned to the floor by the powerful magnets. If it looked like the bike was going to tip over, best to jump off. A lot of people got their legs torn off by this ride, and so far none of them had sued the park successfully.

The women and I got on the motorcycles. They went really amazingly fast. It was neat. After the ride finished, I walked around the park. The other rides were probably weird too, but they didn't seem like it at the time so I don't remember them. There were very few people in the park; maybe 20 or 30, not counting ride operators.

I went to the arcade section of the midway and spent a long time playing Knock-Em-Down Clowns, that game where you knock over stuffed clown targets with a compressed air gun shooting plastic balls. I used to be an ace at that when I was 12 or so.

I liked this park's take on that game, because as long as you knocked a clown over, you got another ball. I played for hours on one quarter. Eventually, the machine spat out a huge roll of prize tickets.

I went to the prize redemption booth. They had some neat stuff, and I had an enormous amount of tickets.

I ended up with a school bus that had been made into an RV. It was a little shorter than a regular yellow bus, but not as short as the "little bus." It was painted a shiny UPS brown.

I still had tickets left over, so I got some robots. Some looked like Robbie the Robot, except skinnier. Makes sense, because there wasn't anyone inside. They were about chest-high on me. I got two of them. I got another that was about the same size, but looked like an anime heroine, big eyes and blue hair and all.

Then I only had a couple hundred tickets left, so I bought dumb things like temporary tattoos and plastic rings and plastic paratroopers and Chinese finger traps.

The robots helped me carry them to the bus, which a carnie had driven to one of the parking lots for me. There were a lot of cars for so few people. The parking lot was a grassy field in the bright sunlight. There was no sign of the dark building or the city.

I helped the robots into the bus and started off. Leaving the lot was like a Renaissance Faire, except with carnies instead of hippies waving me to the exit.