LIGHTNOVELONLINE Chapter 1470: Chapter 1470 Park Entrance
--- Sylvie ---
Getting through the ticket gate hadn't taken all that long. Apparently turning up half an hour before opening time let you skip most of the line… even if you had to wait a bit for said line to start moving. Sylvie found she couldn't complain. Mouse Land was a very popular theme park that managed to stay in business despite the original company folding a few years back.
Apparently they just really knew how to make theme parks. They'd branched out in the years following, but Mouse Land was the original, and still received regular updates.
Penny and Alice seemed to be just as interested, though Penny in particular clearly needed a firm hand. Sylvie found herself pulling her friend along as she zones out and examined the fake buildings surrounding them at the entrance. *Honestly. I'd expect this sort of behaviour from Alice considering her fascination from architecture. What has even captured Penny's interest so quickly.*
Alice was taking a much more casual, if energetic view of things. She was skipping around the group and taking in a bunch of details from all over the entrance.
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The big water fountain in the middle with all sorts of anthropomorphised animals running around it was clearly a big interest for the blonde haired girl as her eyes kept returning back to it despite the wide variety of other things already on display.
Once the group got to the map, Vivian asked, "So where do you all want to go?" her voice was upbeat and cheerful, full of so much more energy then it had been not even an hour ago. Callisto had given in and supplied the blonde with some coffee against her better judgement.
Now Vivian was bouncing around like a kid on Christmas, and it might make one wonder who was this trip was actually for if you were just basing things on excitement levels.
There were maps strewn out across the main square and they'd pulled up next to one. It showed the main district and all of the largest attractions in each. That is, if you didn't count the park 'entrance' as a section all by itself. All of the other parks were a good distance away and you could take the 'Mouse Express Train' which was now a mono-rail, over to the distant sections.
Sure you could walk, but that would take forever. Here in the entrance there was a lot of little side attractions and of course, a massive amount of giftshops.
There was 'Old Timey Town' which was actually more of a weird mish-mash of time periods based around an old premise of a crazy guy with a time machine and a plucky young sidekick. It had a mix of futuristic attraction and old wild-west stylings.
It was both the oldest or the newest section of the park depending on how you counted things, having been built first but recently renovated completely after a large section of it had burnt down.
Next to it was the 'Wet and Wild Waterways' that had actually managed to create a separate spin-off chain of parks all by itself. Here it was the dedicated water section but didn't get quite as much love as the rest of the park due to that.
It had a long winding river you could float down that covered essentially the entire park as its main attraction, with plenty of food and drink stalls built against the banks… but other than that it just had a large pool and a few water slides. Sylvie didn't personally have any interest in it.
Perhaps if they lived closer by, but with only two days to do everything they wanted WWW was probably getting cut.
The next section of the park was 'Fairy Land' which was rather nature themed. Sylvie found herself most interested in what she'd heard about that section of the park. The theming was not just that you'd entered fairy land, but that you'd shrunk down to their size as well.
The park attendants all had to wear wings for their costume and there was a lot of glitter built into the paints and stuff… but that wasn't the cool part to Sylvie. No, that was the fact that the entire area was meant to make you seem tiny.
It had giant mushroom houses, blades of 'grass' for shade. Various displays of giant items that made it seem like they'd been lost at the forest at one point or another. It promised to be really cool effect, and it even had quite a lot of rides. Granted, they were all supposedly on the tamer side of things but that was fine by Sylvie. She wasn't too interested in the scarier things…
Like Haunted Hill. Sylvie would call that the 'Halloween section' of the park but it was quite diverse in its scares. The park had thrown these massive nets over huge swaths of area that looked a lot like giant spiderwebs. It both kept that section of the park looking a lot darker and gave them a place to put all the giant spiders.
It had a bunch of thrill rides, two haunted houses and a laser tag section. Admittedly laser tag sounded interesting but Sylvie knew there was similar facility in Old Timey Town and hoped that was good enough for the group.
Finally, there was the cheese caves. That was actually built under the original Haunted Hill and was more upbeat. It had since grown up into and over the old Haunted Hill while the new one had been built on land that had been purchased later in the park's lifespan. The cheese caves were a real mess of theming. They went heavy on the Mouse stuff but had sort of just thrown everything at the wall.
They had a coaster that was split into a 'cat' care and a 'mouse' car that chased each other around, bumper cars, and even a movie theatre. There was plenty more things down there, but yeah it was a bit of a mess. A lovable mess for many, but still a mess.
"I want to go to Haunted Hill," said Alice seemingly out of nowhere.
Sylvie huffed at her friend. "Why would you want to go there Alice. I know it's not THAT scary but those big coasters aren't really what I'm interested in. The drop just seems like asking to throw up as well…"
"The designs are FASCINATING Sylvie. I want to see how they managed the giant spiders and they happened to have a small museum for the parks history tucked into the corner. Which, I think is a little weird, cause like, why wouldn't that be in Old Timey Town, or like maybe the main square here? I think it USED to be here in the main square but I could be wrong about that.
"Besides the haunted houses aren't actually that scary but they are really awesome in their design. The fact that they can pack so much into comparatively little space is awesome, plus I have some interest in the mechanics of the attractions even if that's not my specialty. They might have some interesting design applications anyway…
"Plus even if I don't care for actually riding the rollercoasters, because yes I admit it, I can be a bit of a baby when it comes to those things, seeing the designs up close is just… fascinating! The safety tolerances on so many of them are just… outstanding. Sure they get a lot of use, but a lot of people don't consider just how over-engineered a lot of attractions are, especially the newer ones.
"Which, I guess makes sense because like, thousands of people are constantly using them just about every single day of the year for potentially decades so I guess if you're going to over engineer anything then that IS the thing to over engineer but its still a bit crazy. Then again, you need a much less then one percent failure rate when the park sees tens of thousands of people every day.
So like… even if it was only a zero point one percent failure rate you'd still have injuries every day!"
Sylvie let out a long sigh as it became clear that apparently, she was doomed to go to Haunted Hill first. This was confirmed when Penny agreed for some reason. "Indeed, the tolerances involved in designing them. Did you know that there is only around one injury for every million park guests? Or that the last fatality was in 2004 and had nothing to do with ride safety?
It was actually due to an employee that had, against regulations, stepped onto the track before opening day? Or that a large percentage of injuries actually occur when getting into or off of rides instead of during them?"
Sylvie wanted to point out that yes she did actually know that. It was information that had come up when she was researching the park before coming but Vivian cut in and started patting the two girls heads. "There really are better things to be thinking of you know. How are you meant to have fun if you're thinking about how likely you are to be injured?"
"But statistics are fun," retorted Penny with a huff. Vivian just found this retort, if anything, more adorable.