#worldbuilding art

Photo from around ~2002 inside one of the fully enclosed trails within the Mystery Flesh Pit National Park. These trails were some of the most expensive to both construct and maintain, offering unparalleled access to the interior of the park to people of all physical conditions. 

Want to grab one of these? Head over to https://mfpgiftshop.storenvy.com/. They are very limited; only 70 of these iron-on, exclusive embroidered Mystery Flesh Pit National Park patches are in stock, and once they are sold out, they will be gone forever.  Sold Out!

P.S.Patreon subscribers at the “Park Benefactor” tier each received one of these for free as a surprise giveaway. If being included in that kind of super-secret content is appealing to you, consider becoming a patron! 

Like many aspects of the Mystery Flesh Pit, the more visceral reality of the pit was usually glossed in a more clinical veneer by the professionals who studied and worked within it. This treatment extended to the often cryptic vocabulary used to refer to different elements and fields of activity surrounding the pit. Shown here is a chart which illustrates the differences and similarities between these interconnected scientific, political, and commercial fields.

As any Park Ranger could tell you, no volume of safeguards or training will prevent a park guest from interfering with wildlife. The notoriously dangerous environment of the Mystery Flesh Pit National Park necessitated a highly specialized corps of rangers to respond to incidents involving wildlife and guest safety, but this was often not enough to prevent tragedy. With the 2007 closure of the Mystery Flesh Pit removing much of the context surrounding the activities within the former park, it is easy to look at these sorts of ephemeral traces of hazard management with a sense of detached wisdom that mischaracterizes the fundamental draw of the park in the first place: the danger was a heavily-marketed, inherent thrill and a major attractor of visitors. It was the management of those hazards which presented the real and insidious problem of the pit. 

Scans of an in-room service brochure from the Resort-Hotel constructed within the Mystery Flesh Pit National Park, most likely from around 1998-2000.
The Interpark Wellness Resort was one of the most ambitious achievements of the NPS/Anodyne partnership and saw healthy attendance and continual growth throughout it’s ill-fated service life. This service brochure gives a glimpse into the scale of development that was occurring within the National Park, and should indicate the degree to which Anodyne and its partners were making fortunes from the exploitation of the Permian Basin Superorganism. 

These sorts of items are hard to find in this condition, as the Interpark Resort suffered tremendous damage after the 2007 disaster. Structurally, the facility was built into the wall of the Greater Gastric Sea in the location of an existing ulcer and was anchored by hundreds of hydraulic rams and suspension cables. After years of neglect and abandonment, many speculate that the resort is at great risk of collapsing into the churning acid sea surrounding it. 

The Venterial Environment Excursion Vehicle was developed by Anodyne, Inc. in the late 1970s to act as a mutlirole utility vehicle platform for applications within the Mystery Flesh Pit. The vehicle architecture employs a set of twin counter-oriented screws for propulsion, as the wet and uneven interior of the Mystery Flesh Pit anatomy makes wheels, tracks and other conventional locomotive strategies ineffective.

Though cargo, flatbed, liquid transport, and wildlife transport variants of the VEEV could be found throughout the park, the “Safari” variant was the most familiar to park guests. For the price of an “AmbulaTour” ticket, visitors to Mystery Flesh Pit National Park would be driven on a 3-hour tour of some of the most spectacular and inaccessible locations within the park, all while sitting in complete comfort. The tour vehicles comfortably seated eight guests, with room for one stewardess/tour guide, and two drivers located in a low cab beneath the front of the vehicle. Inside the main cabin were eight rotatable plush seats, a small lavatory, and a small galley kitchenette for serving refreshments. Powerful lights on the exterior of the vehicle allowed guests to view the otherwise dark pit interior through large reinforced cabin windows. The vehicle was powered by two diesel engines connected to a proprietary transmission which provided the necessary horsepower and torque to easily traverse the interior of the Mystery Flesh Pit. For navigation, a large ultrasonic instrument in the nose of the VEEV provided drivers with a three-dimensional map of anatomy within a ~40m, 30deg cone directly in front of the vehicle.

Tragically, several dozen guests were trapped and later died within these vehicles during and following the 2007 disaster. At least one vehicle was crushed completely flat, while the door hatch of another was forcefully pried open by opportunistic and hungry park wildlife during the chaos. Perhaps the most well-known incident (As portrayed in the 2012 film Fire in the Deep)involved an armedMining Rig and its crew which were able to escort and protect two full tour vehicles until they could safely escape to the surface, though the crew and tunneling vehicle were gruesomely destroyed by large parasitic organism.

The grim legacy of the VEEV has not diminished the utility of the craft, however, and the vehicles have continued to be used by the Permian Basin Recovery Corporation well into the present day to shuttle researchers and other limited personnel through various sections of the former National Park.  

Official Discord: [LINK]
Official Subreddit: [LINK]
Like this work? Support me on Patreon! [LINK]

In the early 1970s, prior to the involvement of either the Anodyne Corporation or the National Park Service, exploration of the Mystery Flesh Pit was a crude and arduous exercise undertaken by local agriculture & oil field workers. These young men, many of whom possessed no formal training in caving, improvised a variety of methods to aid in these early missions of discovery. An early attempt to mechanize the task of crawling through the viscera of the fleshscape took the form of field modified work trucks. Like the surviving GMC C/K truck shown here (formerly on display within the Upper Visitor Center), these jury-rigged vehicles lacked standardized designs and were highly experimental in nature. Though lacking the safety and articulation features common to later purpose-built machines such as the Grumman-produced Internal Anatomy Vehicle, these simple trucks were relatively instrumental in early exploration efforts to survey the Permian Basin Superorganism, with two or three surviving in service well into the 1980s.

The first Mystery Flesh Pit National Park Trail Map was published in 1981 and was the first mapping of the superorganism to conform to the NPS graphic standards. Early trail maps were compiled from hundreds of individual surveys and measurements by spelunkers, explorers and eventually park engineers to form a more comprehensive picture of the Mystery Flesh Pit’s internal anatomy. With the addition of lighted and air-conditioned reinforced tunnels in the late 1970s, the park became more accessible to visitors than ever, necessitating the need for a concise, easy-to-read map familiar to any National Park visitor.

The edition shown here is scan is from 2000 and commemorates the 20th anniversary of the park’s absorption into the National Park System. Notable additions to this map over older prints are the Hilton Intrapark Thermal Wellness Resort, as well as re-drawn property lines of commercial extraction areas. The monorail line is notably missing from this map, as its development would not be announced to the public until May of 2001, only to finally open after dozens of delays in the autumn of 2006. 

Some of the many NPS & Contractor staff you might encounter during a visit to the Mystery Flesh Pit National Park

(I thought I would upload the large/clean versions of these designs since they are a little lost on a small kiosk photo. I’m also curious if formatting the art like this increases the amount of reach it has. My suspicious is that it might.)