St. Remedius Medical College: "Aside From THAT, Mrs. Kennedy, What Do You Think Of Dallas?"

The Quiet Forces Keeping The Timeline Stable

(Who was St. Remedius? And why is a medical college named after him?)

In the annals of regional holidays, November 22 is particularly special to the people of Dallas. On that morning every year, the streets around Dealey Plaza start filling with spectators, all looking to the east toward the intersection of Elm Street and Houston Street. Many show up dressed as time travelers from fiction, including multiple variations of a certain perambulatory Doctor and his 300-pound Sontaran attorney. Others come out in costumes of their own design, singly and in groups, often in fantastical floats and other vehicles. By noon, the streets are packed, with even more sitting and standing along the famed Grassy Knoll and in the Sixth Floor Museum, all making a show of checking watches, chronometers, clocks, and sundials. At 12:30, everyone stands up, holds up their timepieces, yells “WRONG YEAR!”, and runs off, mostly toward the bars and restaurants in Deep Ellum.

Started in 1983, the Dallas Time Traveler Fun Run is now an institution, with spectators and participants from all over Earth there for a few hours of japery. Every year, it’s also the biggest accumulation of actual time travelers this side of the Time Traveler Balls, and for much the same reason. Every November 22, all of the Dallas area is considered neutral ground, so cohorts, competitors, and mortal enemies rub elbows and other parts for a day (some of history’s greatest love stories involving time-crossed explorers only able to see each other at a particular place and date drew their inspiration from one Fun Run or another), so the temporally aware use a Fun Run visit as an excuse to compare notes, get caught up, plot and scheme, and share notes, discoveries, and resultant children and grandchildren. Combine this with decades of sponsorship by St. Remedius Medical College, with the heads of the Advanced Technologies and Metaphysics departments leading the race back to the party at the Glass Glyptodont, The Time Traveler Fun Run is a Dallas spectacle comparable to the Greenville Avenue St. Patrick’s Day Parade, the Dallas Fetish Ball, and the Running of the Coke Dealers at Southern Methodist University.

One would think that Dallas on November 22, 1963 would be full of chrononauts from all over the continuum. November 23, certainly, if only from curiosity collectors picking up the previous day’s Dallas Morning News for its, erm, singular house ad. Those seeking spare medical waste from Parkland Hospital, in the hopes of gathering enough DNA for cloning, would be disappointed to discover that everything was gathered and incinerated the day before. (The genetic material from Lee Harvey Oswald was nowhere near as controlled, and several civilizations, including three on Earth, serve Lee Harvey soup from cloned stock as a good luck talisman at the beginning of their calendar year.) November 21? Dealey Plaza was full of investigators, journalists, and documentarians setting up cameras, scanners, and other sensors both to chronicle the event itself but also to monitor other temporal visitors. However, when it came to the entire day of November 22, EVERYTHING not of that precise time was inaccessible. The cameras and sensors disappeared, with only mounting bracket holes and traces of adhesive remaining at midnight on November 23. All of North Texas on November 22, as well as parts of Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Louisiana, are a massive black hole as far as time travel is concerned. Anyone attempting to enter the zone, whether to facilitate the assassination, prevent it, or chronicle it, both never returned to their own times nor showed up in any other.

At this point, considering its extensive work in time travel and exploration, it shouldn’t be a surprise that St. Remedius was directly involved with preventing any visitors to that precise date and locale from changing the timeline. Contrary to popular fiction, the process of instigating a new parallel timeline is both immediately stressful to the inhabitants to each new line and when they inevitably collide and cross-contaminate. Over the lifespan of the universe, tribes, churches, vendikosks, and other organizations without number have found themselves working to preserve the sanctity of the current timeline, and for a bright shiny moment, St. Remedius was one of the best, making sure not only to stop temporal interference, but sometimes to start it.

The reason for the November 22, 1963 dead zone was the subject of whole sections of the St. Remedius library archive, and that was just one of multiple dead zones to keep the timeline running smoothly. Whether for malevolent or well-intentioned purposes, time meddlers tended to attempt interference at major nexus points, where any of multiple factors being changed could warp the future beyond repair. Birthdates of despots and saints alike were obvious targets, as were their death dates: October 9, 1940 and December 9, 1980 were the destinations of so many vehicles that their names fill whole memorial satellites dedicated to the timelost. Many were coordinated by St. Remedius alone, but its teams often found themselves working with other aligned groups for the same purpose, as temporal marauders discovered repeatedly when attempting to cause particular damage on December 1, 1955 in East Los Angeles and dealing with both St. Remedius security forces from 2017 and a whole phalanx of bioweaponeer Eagle Warriors from the Alianza Aztlan of 3131. Of those incidents, most information was relegated to the Alianza, and its forces refuse to say why.

Back to November 1963, recently revealed information from the St. Remedius archives detailed the operation in Dallas on the 22nd, with the beginning of the operation starting in 2015. That year was when St. Remedius Advanced Technologies teams learned not only how to open certain quantum pockets at predetermined times, but to pre-emptively empty them. Two years of going through reports of every potential chrononaut disappearance, past and future, connected to the arrival date led to advance knowledge of literally thousands of arrivals, and they were faced with quantum pocket openings as soon as they materialized. Timeships, pilots, weapons, defensive apparatus, scryers and chronal projectors…all pulled into a neutral temporal pocket with a nice mirror of thirty square kilometers of downtown Dallas in 1963 and absolutely no way out.

As for interlopers who arrived early to wait out the Kennedy motorcade, most were picked off early as they were setting up. Some had been there for a very long time: the reconstruction of downtown Dallas after the catastrophic flood of 1908 concealed several excavations of sleepers, both organic and otherwise. The most potentially deleterious to the timeline, though, was from a force of Axon Corporation marauders that knew about the timeship Sargasso in the temporal pocket and arrived just before midnight. Famed St. Remedius pilot Ginni “Hummingbird” Snyder, in a stealth helicopter of her own design, led the efforts to distract, confuse, and enrage the AxCorp hovercones, leading them on a nap-of-the-earth chase through a sleeping city and right into the first pocket opening of the day. By midnight local time on November 23, St. Remedius had accomplished the seemingly impossible: clearing out every possible interference to the normal flow of the timestream, without so much as hinting to the effort to timeline natives, and without losing a single soldier or researcher either to interlopers or the local police force. In time intervention history, this record was never exceeded, at least until the events involving Cleveland on May 27, 1934.

And on one final note: know that anyone attending a Dallas Time Traveler Fun Run, no matter the year, will probably share space with multiple time travelers. Some years, such as 2013, 2038, and 2103, visitors outnumbered timeline natives by as much as three to one. The trick, of course, is knowing what to look for, and half of the fun for visitors from any time is blending in while in plain sight.

Want to get caught up on the St. Remedius story so far? Check out the main archive. Want more hints as to the history of St. Remedius Medical College? Check out Backstories and Fragments. Want to forget all of that and look at cat pictures from a beast who dreams of his own OnlyFans for his birthday? Check out Mandatory Parker. Questions, concerns, and disgust over generative AI? Check out Contact, Privacy Policy, and AI Policy. And feel free to visit the St. Remedius Medical College Redbubble shop for all of your Mandatory Parker needs.

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