Nightmare Fuel / Mystery Flesh Pit National Park

Worse things have happened in the Pit.

When you're prancing around the innards of an unfathomably huge creature that science still cannot explain, even with a tour guide, nightmarish experiences are inevitable.

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• The Abyssal Copepods, aka blind, territorial and absolutely massive (they are stated to be able to grow up to 20 feet long^note roughly 6 meters, almost the length of a London double decker bus) Giant Enemy Crabs with concerningly humanoid hands. And Anodyne apparently thought it was ok to put these things in petting zoos and let them near children (though at the very least they did declaw them first).
  • A lot of the park's other fauna aren't much better in terms of looks. You know how animals that live in caves and/or deep underwater tend to look rather freaky due to the extreme adaptations they had to evolve in order to survive? Now imagine that, except the cave is the throat and gullet of a giant Eldritch Abomination in a similar vein as the sarlacc (minus the whole "being digested and repeatedly mind raped over a thousand years" part). Some highlights include the Venous Shamble (a worm-like creature with veins for limbs), the Greater Ballast Siren (a giant, fleshy, tentacled... thing that secretes ballast fluid) and the Amorphous Shame (a loose tangle of organs, veins and membranes that's actually a mustelid relative)
  • Things seemingly get worse as the Pit goes deeper, and its insides get more and more detached from Earthly biology. The last known expedition into the Blue Tissue layer (past 17 kilometers) was cut short when the exploration pod lowered into the actual tissue was attacked by a mess of a creature whose shape couldn't be properly identified, its size in excess of 1500 feet tall, just casually floating there otherwise. And it only attacked the pilot, leaving the rest more or less intact enough to provide a picture.
• The 2007 Incident Report is the culmination of Anodyne's carelessness crashing directly into the Pit's nature and biology at its worst. Like any disaster, it starts with a series of negligent attitudes and events that seem harmless until they snowball into something unstoppable. In this case, rain, electric problems, and utter neglect of various pumps leads to the Pit having a choking spasm at the worst possible time and swallowing much of the park's infrastructure... and then, the failsafe only makes things even worse, as instead of paralyzing the Pit's musculature, the toxins injected into the beast instead make it experience a violent spastic fit until it projectile vomited, melting everyone inside, spewing dangerous wildlife far and wide, and nearly awakening. That day, only ill-understood Native American artifacts stood between humanity and a potential apocalypse.
  • The timeline is detailed enough, yet clinical enough, to be unnerving.
    10:16 PM July 4th - Many guests attempting to flee the stalled elevator near the entry orifice attempt climbing out the upper moisture crop but are ultimately unsuccessful due to torrential rains causing the surfaces to become very slippery. Many end up falling back into the maw.
    10:27 PM July 4th - Peristaltic action crushes one of the tour vehicles and sucks the other two vehicles back into the nexial cavity and down into a digestive organ. These vehicles are presumed destroyed.
    11:42 PM July 4th - Radio contact established with ranger vehicle trapped within "Oyster's Shame." Due to ventricle closure, no feasible rescue strategy can be developed before complete mastication occurs.
    12:35 AM July 5th - Three inter-pit lifeforms are identified as having been ejected onto the surface. Fifteen visitors are injured and seven are hunted by inter-pit lifeforms during panicked evacuation of surface resort.
  • The second to last entry on the incident states that apparently, despite some being injured, 38 people crawled their way back into the Superorganism's mouth from the medical tents. It's never explained whether they attempted to Mercy Kill themselves or the creature lured them back in.
    • This is somewhat alleviated in a November 2021 Q&A, where Roberts explains that the general consensus is that most of the people who went back into the Pit were simply trying to go back and rescue their loved ones who were still trapped inside.
  • To make matters worse and give a scale for how massive this thing is, hundreds of people died, thousands were gravely injured, its spasms completely destroyed the park and undid nearly three decades of Anodyne's hard work, it caused earthquakes as far as the Dallas-Fort Worth area, a part of its body erupted from the ground nearly 100 miles away from the orifice, and the Pentagon was even prepared to nuke the thing to prevent further damage. From the perspective of the Superorganism, however, all it did was cough and stir slightly in its sleep. What would happen if it actually woke up ENTIRELY?
    • Also of note is a report from the Department of Energy (probably developed in the wake of the 2007 disaster, although this is never stated explicitly), exploring the likely outcome if the military had chosen to exercise its nuclear option. Only the cover is seen in the post, which leaves a lot of details to the imagination, but the overall conclusion is obvious anyway. Nuclear weapons, bombs more powerful than anything else made by mankind, capable of ending Western Civilization over the course of an hour or so, would be utterly useless if the Permian Basin Superorganism were to wake up and "enter an active phase."
    • Flipping perspective to the point of view of the superorganism itself, imagine waking up one morning to find that a colony of ants had crawled into your mouth while you slept and were now stripping your cells and nerves for resources. YMMV on whether the superorganism itself is actively malicious or simply so impossibly large that even the most minute display of life would result in harm, but either way it cannot feel good to have what amounts to a metal straw jammed down your throat for decades.
  • In a comment on Discord, Word of God had this◊ to say about the 'intra-pit lifeforms' that hunted people on the surface during the 2007 disaster.
  There are bigger and angrier things in the deep. Things that hunt abyssal copepods. Things that the pit actually notices.
• Here's a bit of fridge horror to chew on: The Superorganism was discovered by complete chance during an oil drilling expedition and there just so happened to be a man intrigued (and not freaked out enough) by the blood spurting from the ground instead of oil to investigate it further. But nobody ever said this was the only one in existence. Do you live in an area known for occasional earthquakes despite being otherwise tectonically stable? Yeah, have fun sleeping tonight.
  • And it gets so much worse. NASA scanned Venus' surface using X-rays and found something there.◊ In a Wham Shot to remember, there's what appears to be the fossilized remains of an Immanis colosseus buried underground, and hydrazine^note a key ingredient in rocket fuel was found in the rocks around the fossil. The implications are very clear considering what we know about the Pit, and they're not good.
• In a disturbing subversion of the Monster Clown trope, the Circus Clown Chymus deserves special mention. As the result of a circus stunt above the Superorganism Gone Horribly Wrong, 50 circus performers fell down the Superorganism's throat. After hours of searching by rescue workers, they found all 50 stunt performers melted together by digestive fluids And in an attempt to reduce the acidic effects of the fluids on the performers, the workers sprayed the mound with an antacid. However, the spray instead flash-calcified the screaming mound, creating a birthday cake-colored rock formation out of the mound. It's never stated whether or not the performers are still alive, which is very much a possibility in this universe.
  • Even worse, Anodyne saw fit to make this an attraction in the park. Granted, they mentioned it's a reminder to obey safety instructions and stay on trail in the park, the fact they turned the frozen corpses of malformed people into another tourist spot (even calling it "hauntingly beautiful") speaks volumes about their ethics.
• Related to the Circus Clown Chymus, the usual fates of "Amalgamated" humans if they managed to survive being surgically removed from the amalgamation and being fitted with life support equipment. Anodyne marketing described the end results of these as "cyborgs," but the narrator describes a fate barely a step above Brain in a Jar.
  It's important to note here though that, despite the claims Anodyne made at the time at Pharmaceutical trade expos, the quality of life of these "cyborgs" was horrific and incredibly expensive for family members to maintain. The full procedure, if even possible, often ballooned into costs exceeding several million dollars to perform, with the end result being a room-sized nest of life support plumbing and boxy beige computer equipment prone to overheating. When the company was dissolved in 2008, much of this research became property of the U.S. Government, which has repeatedly rejected my FOIA requests for more information on this issue.
• Another formation within the pit worth noting is the Peeking Druid. Hundreds of years ago, a stampede of a thousand migrating buffalo were swallowed by one of the Superorganism's orifices, and underwent "simultaneous mass amalgamation," merging into an enormous, immobile mass of constantly suffering animals, that was able to survive for centuries by eating itself. Eventually, the Superorganism grew a cocoon of flesh around the fused stampede in an attempt to digest it, but the hundreds of horns were able to pierce a hole into the tissue (forming the Druid). Up until 2007 at least, the majority of the herd was still alive, trapped and tormented, but nonetheless displayed to hikers and guests just like the Chymus.
• Yet another formation is the Well of the Abhumans. A fluid duct discovered in the early 80s that was cut open and found to be not only full of formaldehyde, but also contained the remains of three heavily decayed mammals partially preserved by the formaldehyde. Their remains were initially believed to be human, but careful examination suggested otherwise. The scary part comes from the radiological dating of the bones. Not only are two of the three organisms dated long back (one dated from the 10th century A.D., and the other all the way back to 35,000 B.C.), but the third specimen was determined to have bones made from a plastic polymer material.

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