Escape of the Gem Dragon
Written by @NateD1226 & @b-wolf95
Amended by @PerGron in Veto prompt
When the Ottoman explorers landed on the mysterious island, there was this one explorer who was destined to find the rare purple gems of Cave Draguna. His name was Dr. Rhinestone. Dr. Rhinestone has searched far and wide for Cave Draguna and finally found it in a hidden rock forest. He is determined to go into the cave to retrieve the purple gems to sell to his merchant friends. But, he needs help searching inside the large mysterious cave. That is why he is recruiting guests to come join him in this adventure. You may even get to keep some of the purple gems if retrieved. But beware, Cave Draguna is filled with lots of unknown territory so make sure you are prepared for anything that can come your way.
Queue
As you enter the entrance of the ride, you walk around the jungle with cool artifacts from past explorers like maps, treasure, and personal belongings. There are also some small AA creatures like Screeching Terrors , protolemur, and Island Hyrax. All of this leads you into the rock forest where you load into your vehicle, an EMV attraction in the vein of Dinosaur and Indiana Jones Adventure. The steampunk feel of the land will be present in steam-powered mining drills that have been constructed on the island for mining the incredibly dangerous Cave Draguna. Voices echo throughout the caves of the queue; voices warning of a cursed beast that lives within the caves and destroys all who enter. The beast, described as “Draguna” is featured in cave paintings along the queue, as are other enchanted beasts. These cave paintings represent those created by the original Maori settlers who used the cave as a resting place.
Once guests enter the attraction, the drills make their way into the cave, passing by massive crystal stalactites and stalagmites. We hear an earth-shaking roar and (using projection mapping) the stalactites begin to collapse down on us. We high-tail it out of there, entering into a crystalline grotto. The colors are rainbow sparkling as shadows of bats flying around. There is a waterfall pouring into a limestone pool. We hear more shaking and rumbling as shadowy figure snakes through the crystals, projecting it to be as if it’s in a fun mirror, with different proportions as it goes around, not allowing guests a very good look at it.
We move into the next room where we see another drill with giant claw rips through its side, suggesting something big has been here. We hear echoes of screaming down a tunnel, and we turn into the other tunnel, instead, but that turns out to be a bad decision as the path crumbles below us (by use of the vehicle rumbling and shaking) and we slide down a hill into a cavern below. Here, statues of a mysterious rainbow serpent with glowing red eyes illuminate down a pathway towards an opening in the cave. We head towards that cave where we enter, coming into contact with the giant animatronic Gem Dragon. It is more inspired by a Chinese dragon, with a serpent-like design rather than the European Dragon.
The dragon rears up as its eyes glow, it’s mouth opening, fire-spewing out, which we narrowly avoid by diverting down to the left, into another tunnel. We see at the end (by use of projection) the eye of the beast that slunk by us. We do multiple turns, avoiding the dragon at each turn, before spilling out into another cavern. We see a projection of the dragon on the roof of the cavern before he lands, smoke, and dust clearing to reveal another animatronic. The dragon gets ready to attack again, but as it lands too hard, it shakes, and the massive drill at the front of our vehicle “drops” (actually it is made to slide under the vehicle as storage and can pop back up before new guests load) and the dragon notices and calls off its attack. We see that the dragon isn’t evil but instead is there solely to protect the cave and the precious riches within as the animatronic is clouded by fog again and we see the projection of the dragon flying away. We make a final turn and reach the exit loading dock.
