"Okay, I know that we probably shouldn't panics or anything under the circumstances, but I do have one question," said Kathy. "But, uh…where are we?!"

"Seems to be an underground cavern system," Larry responded, taking out the map, which had survived the "journey" by pure miracle. He unfolded it and examined it. "This cave isn't on the map. It says that there's lot of caves around here, but they're all in the mountains. It doesn't say anything about a system of caverns underneath or behind the waterfall."

"How are we going to get out?" Greeny said in a terrified tone. Patty tried to comforting him. "It's okay, Greeny. We'll get out."

"We'll we definitely can't go back the way we came from," said Roger.

"Yeah, not only is the current too strong, but we can't swim without life jackets and we might cut ourselves on something," said Lilia.

"And it's impossible to swim up a waterfall," said Rudy.

"Yeah, and unless you guys want to explore a little…" Larry said in a hesitant voice. He looked at me. "Have you got the satellite phone? Maybe we can call help."

"I don't think there's going to be good signal down here," Dimetroodon said.

"Still. Won't hurt to try."

Uh-oh. About that satellite phone….

I scratched the back of my head and stammered. "The satellite phone?"

"Yes. Don't tell me you forgot to bring it."

I quickly shook my head. "No, I did bring it for the trip."

"Well, where is it?"

"Um…remember when Dimetroodon accidentally ripped off my pants with his fishing line?"

"Yeah…"

"Well…when I changed, I left it in the pocket and I forgot to, uh…"

Larry rolled his eyes and groaned. "Oh, Spiny. And I thought I was the clumsy idiot."

Before I could dragged into another senseless argument with him, Darla popped in and said, "I'd like to explore this place. I don't know why, but I've suddenly gotten curious."

"Well…" said Larry.

"Me too! I'm starting to like this place. I mean, we're underground, underwater, behind a waterfall, and we might find some cool stuff no one's ever heard of!" said Lilia.

Everyone looked at me. They were waiting for me to make the final verdict. "I guess it's okay. Sure, why don't we take a look around?"

They all whooped and cheered. "I'm glad you said that. Because I brought these!" Larry pulled out some headlamps, and handed it out to all of us. Even Greeny looked excited with his own!

"Let's go then!" I took the lead and Larry walked near me with the supplies that we still had. We had apparently come up into an air bubble within the walls of rock. There was a slit in one side where we fit through a tunnel-like system.

The walls of the cave were toned a faint blue-gray color with sparkling minerals reflecting our headlamps. "How come no one ever knew this was here?" Robert asked.

"Maybe anyone who did manage to get down here probably either drowned or died from a head injury during the current. It was pretty violent beneath the waterfall. And I think that on most days, the mist wouldn't be covering the edge," said Larry.

"So if we'd set out on the canoe sooner, like after lunch, we wouldn't have ended here," I mentioned.

"Most likely," said Roger.

I was admiring a piece of cave ceiling when Lilia suddenly pushed me to the side. "Spiny, watch out!"

"What? What happened?"

"You almost got spiked."

"What?"

She pointed behind us where I'd been walking. There was a razor-sharp, four-foot tall stalagmite.

In front of us, you could see more stalagmites and stalactites, water dripping off their pointy ends. There were some pretty impressive crystals coming out of the walls of the cave. There was calcite, quartz crystals, selenite, and aragonite.

Larry's voice echoed through the cavern. "Hey, guys! Look at this!"

I picked up some minerals and placed them in my pocket, then ran after the others before their headlamps left me in darkness. As I pumped my legs towards the sound of Larry's voice, I noticed a change in the air.

It went from warm and muggy to cool and moist. And the silence was faded by the sound of rushing water. I got very excited and ran faster towards the sound. We finally stopped on the edge of the bluest, clearest, and quietest river I have ever seen.

The reflection of the water ripples caressed the ceiling and walls of the cavern in a soothing and tender glow. The water was so crystal clear that it lighted up the place with a fantastical blue-green light.

"Wow," was all I could say. We were all hypnotized beyond words. "I've never seen water so…so clear…and beautiful," I said softly, in respect to the wonder that was being demonstrated in front of us.

Rudy stepped forward and leaned down on all fours on the riverbank. He leaned his head forward and opened his crocodilian jaws to scoop water into his mouth. "Hey, this water is sweet! I'm not kidding. It's like sweet. Like sugar-kind of sweet. But it has nothing in it. Just water."

I leaned down and scooped up some water in my hands, bringing it to my lips. The savor of the water was divine enough to make my tongue explode with saliva and my hunger went skyrocketing.

The sweetness made me shiver and I even got a little dizzy!

"This is…this is really something, isn't it?" Lilia said, now kneeling down beside me.

"It sure is."

"Let's go see what's at the end of the river!" Patty said in enthusiasm.

I laughed. "Okay, okay. Come on, troops! Let's go see where this leads too."

As we followed the river's path, I heard the sound of crunching behind me. "Greeny, stop eating rocks!"

His cheeks were bulging and when he spoke, tiny crumbs dropped out of his mouth. "Im mugh emgh rocmhs!"

"What? Spit that out!"

He spit the rocks and the saliva out…in the river of course. Well, there goes the cleanest water on Earth. Well, I'm sure that it has a way of keeping clean. No water can stay that clean for thousands of years. Or even more.

I returned my gaze back in front of me. The river went through another small slit or conduit. Larry went in first. He gets very excited about discovering new places and seeing things first before anyone else.

He ran several yards ahead of the rest of us. We were still about 30 feet behind him when I heard him say, "Oh, wow!" His voice became much more distant and the echo sounded more long-lived. More than back at the place we ended up. "Guys, look!"

We all ran to see what the excitement was about. The river led us to a huge chamber of the cave, like a massive room. The stalagmites and stalactites disappeared and so did the minerals in the walls.

The chamber illuminated with a brilliant, almost blinding white-yellowish radiance. Standing in front of me was a huge colony of the biggest quartz crystals I'd ever seen. My breath escaped from me as I contemplated the scenery around me. It was almost alien-like.

We were all speechless. We simply had no words for the moment.

Finally, Darla said, "Question. Are we still on Earth? I think that current made us cross dimensions or something."

"This is…incredible!" said Roger in awe.

"Looking at this, I'd say that these crystals must be at least…fifty feet tall!" Larry said, surprised by his own estimations.

"Fifty feet? That's almost as tall as the Palace!" Patty said.

I was admiring the way my image reflected on the bottom of the giant crystals when Roger yelled. "Hey, Spiny! Come over here! Look at the cave walls in the area!" I turned around, my gaze lingering slightly.

I ran up to where Roger was standing. The wall in front of us radiated out in several hundred small, green lights. "Spiny are those…what I think they are?"

I rubbed my eyes and shook my head to make sure I wasn't dreaming. "Those…those are not emeralds, Roger."

"And it's definitely not kryptonite!"

My hand grabbed the odd-shaped green form that was growing out of the wall. "Roger, these are…green diamonds. Naturally-occurring green diamonds!"

"I thought they didn't exist in nature!"

But there we were, looking at the evidence right before us. Larry and the others heard the commotion and jogged over to the place we were standing. Larry's eyes almost bugged out of his head. "Is that a green diamond?"

I showed it to him. "See for yourself."

He grabbed the diamond ever so gently as everyone leaned in to take a closer look. "Spiny…I've…I've dreamed about a discovery like this. And if this is a real, green diamond…what else have we yet to see?"

"Can you imagine what more there is to be discovered?" said Patty.

"Well, what are we waiting for?" Lilia said with a smile.

"No time like the present. Let's start looking!" Larry shouted with the smile beaming off his face. He was truly enjoying this. I was glad he liked it.

We all ran in separate directions. I found what seemed to be a tributary of the river. Not only was it also as clear as its parent river, it also had numerous alluvial gold deposits on the bottom of it!

The hue was eerily close to that of yellow of a hazy summer sunset.

The water was only about two or three feet deep. I reached down to touch the gold, which easily came into my hand. Now very excited, I started grabbing more and placed everything in Larry's pack, along with stuff the others found.

"Hey, guys! Look at this!" I heard Dimetroodon's voice echoing. His voice resonated from about fifty feet to my right. I dried my hands and we all ran over to where he was. We followed his voice to a small cavity on the side of the cave.

It was not just a cavity. It was…a doorway?

"Are those…doors?" Rudy said, perplexed.

It was unmistakable. They had the same color and texture of the cave walls. But there was a dividing line down the middle that was perfectly straight. They were doors. Almost without knowing it, I reached out and touched it with my fingers.

There was a loud noise and the doors opened, revealing a smaller chamber in the cave. This was different. There were no natural shapes nor minerals in the walls. This was all made by someone who'd been down here before.

The chamber was about five hundred or so feet in size and the ceiling was now six feet above us, instead of almost a hundred back in the room with the crystals. In front of me, on the floor I saw some white-gray things coming out of the floor.

"Are those bones?" I said.

"Yeah…they're dinosaur bones!" said Roger.

"Those are Spinosaurus bones!" said Robert.

Yeah, they were. The spines on the back that formed our distinctive sail and the upper crocodile-like jaw with just a few teeth.

"Hey, I think that's my ancestor!" I said, laughing.

"It could be," said Larry, looking dead serious. "What I don't get is why, who, and how they got down here and built this room. Why did they? I mean crystals and green diamonds, yes, but…"

His sentence was interrupted when a loud noise startled us again. We looked behind and watched in shock as the doors shut tight. We ran to them and started pounding. "Hey, what's going on?" said Kathy.

"Uh-oh!" said Larry.

"What do you mean by that?" Lilia asked now sounding very concerned.

"I think this room is a trap. An old trap."

"Trap? How old? And why does it still work? Wouldn't that mean that the victims hadn't come before?"

He shrugged and noticed something behind him. He scurried over to what seemed to be another fossil. "Hey, this is a Velociraptor. And, unless I'm mistaken, this one's covered in metal!"

"Metal? A metal fossil?" Robert asked.

"Yeah."

I walked over to the supposed metallic fossil and clinked my fingers on it. "Yeah, it's metal. Iron?"

"No, I don't think so. I think it's iridium. Yeah, it's iridium."

"You sure?" said Dimetroodon.

"Sure, because the only ones who use iridium armor are the…" Then his eyes got huge and he dropped his bag, the crystals and diamonds clinking. "Oh. My. God."

"What is it?"

"The only ones that I know of that use iridium in their armor are…The Red Eyes."

The silence was so great you could've heard a crystal starting to grow in a cavity in the cave. "You're joking, right?" I said. My pulse accelerated and I felt my heart pounding in my throat.

Larry shook his head with the same look of horror on his face. "I'm not joking. This isn't a fossil. It's a long-dead Red Eye who still had his armor on. But what I don't get is why…" he started pacing around. "Why did he come all the way down here? I mean, the Red Eyes have plenty of precious minerals. There must've been something even more valuable than green diamonds and fifty-foot quartz crystals."

At that moment, a blue light suddenly turned on from the farthest corner in the room. It wasn't blinding, but bright enough to light up the room completely. "Whoa, what was that? Is somebody here with us?" Kathy said, jumping behind me for protection.

Larry went to investigate. Then I saw what was causing the glow. There was a hand-carved pedestal or stand with a glowing cube about the size of a human palm on it. "Could this be…no, it couldn't be! Or could it?" Larry examined it, but didn't touch it.

I heard him gasp and mutter something under his breath. Then, with an expression I've never seen before, he said to us, "Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the Terra-Track."