Background on Major St. Remedius Personnel At the Time of Its Disappearance

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

At one time, St. Remedius Medical College had extensive files on staff members and administrators going back nearly 500 years. After the school’s disappearance, only fragments survived the catastrophe, with what little we know about the people that made St. Remedius unique coming from other, equally fragmentary, sources. Some remain absolute mysteries to this day, but some, a rare few, either continued with wild exploits or had other reasons to remain in the public record, or sometimes in the geologic record. Please note that the following biographies are by necessity biased, incomplete, and categorized somewhere between “apocryphal” and “complete and utter bullshit.”

Bennett

The last head of the Advanced Technologies Department at St. Remedius was also the most mysterious, even by the school’s standards. At the tail end of a tremendous storm ten years before the present, a large metallic cylinder crashed on the campus next to the statue of St. Remedius in the main courtyard, with a singular individual crawling out of a large hatch on the side and repeatedly asking witnesses to the impact “When am I?” before passing out. Details on his subsequent medical examination and discharge were wiped from the existing archives, but the results of blood tests and EKGs were disturbing enough that Colonel McCarry was called out of a dead sleep to be briefed on the situation. All anyone knew was that the traveler’s name was Bennett, short for “Benetalistantrumaine,” the cylinder was referred to as “the Silver Machine,” and that he was exceedingly taciturn as to exactly who he was and where he came from.

Thanks to his efforts in helping with several incidents on and around the campus, including yet another incursion by the Harkun and the first modern encounter with the Roamer known as “Kylo Boomhauer,” Bennett was made a member of the Advanced Technologies group on a provisional basis shortly after being discharged, noted for his multipocketed camera vest festooned with an always-changing collection of buttons and his keen expertise with technologies of the distant past. Since that provision coincided with with issues with an upgrade to the campus power web, Bennett became head of the department upon the early retirement of several predecessors. Since then, he built a reputation of refusing to take credit or acclaim from his team, regularly bringing promising students to the attention of other departments, and cutting off the typical flood of academic politics within the department, at the knees if necessary.

If he shared his secrets with anyone, it was with his wife Calliope, because anyone else trying to learn more about his personal life was promptly diverted or subverted. Every once in a while, though, hints would sneak through, usually as he muttered under his breath while inspecting a new artifact or device, with only the historian Blake Starshadow having any clue as to their meaning. One thing was certain: he had some significant connection to one Miss Christine Ketterley of London before her disappearance in 1898, as the archives refer back to voluminous correspondence between them, but what that connection was, aside from her time travel proclivities, is still unknown.

Calliope Pendergast

Even before her appointment as the head of the Metaphysics Department at St. Remedius, Calliope Pendergast was world-renowned as one of the greatest sorcerers of the age. Her thaumaturgic pedigree ran back centuries, tracking back to Celtic mages repelling Roman invasions, but her extensive studies into Olmec, Lungshan, and Denisovian magic systems made her particularly versatile in both informational and confrontational sorcery. As such, she was a grateful student of St. Remedius, reciprocating her evaluations by the Zwinge Foundation by becoming one of its toughest and most skeptical judges. By the time of St. Remedius’s disappearance, “pendergast” was a verb among Metaphysics students for “deserving that ass-chewing you just got.”

One of the more confusing aspects of Calliope’s records in the existing St. Remedius archives is the variability of her description. Not only do descriptions of her tend to vary as to her height, hair color, and facial features, but this seems to apply to the few photos and one sculpture of her as well. She was always recognized by others in her life, but when asked to discuss whether her hair was long and red or short and grey, eight people who had just seen her would give eight different answers, all seemingly consistent with each other. One absolute, though, was her expression when displeased, with the words “bowel-looseningly terrifying” used by adversaries, colleagues, and students alike. As noted repeatedly, these glances were often aimed at her husband Bennett, especially when he interrupted spell research with his own revelations or just with lunch.

However, further delving into the archives revealed further mysteries. For all of her lineage and history, strange discontinuities appear, as if she were wedged into the timeline and the occasional hint of a pre-Calliope world were buried underneath. During her time with St. Remedius, she laughed about those touches, sometimes a little longer than necessary.

Blake Starshadow

One of St. Remedius’s most noted historians, the nearly universal comment about Dr. Blake Starshadow was that she seemed to be an organism developed to survive only in suburbs. As such, that made her perfectly evolved for life in the Dallas area. Even her name was suburban, taken from the intersection of streets near the house where she spent her entire life when she was old enough to change it. While she could and did travel, the one place where she was most comfortable was her neighborhood, where she spent her spare time wandering local parks and ransacking local bookstores. By the end of St. Remedius, she was unmarried, without children, and without any family whatsoever, having inherited her parents’ house, and she was supremely, deliriously happy with the situation.

Part of this came from her general temperament, but also from her being a carrier of the so-called Jeffty gene. Leave her in any place long enough, and little bits of the world gradually turned into their analogues from the 1980s, particularly from her final year in high school in 1989, but only the good and quiet things. While this never affected integral or critical systems and never, ever affected anything living, eventually streaming music started shifting to 1980s hits, copies of OMNI and cans of Jolt Cola emerged on counters, and calling the number on the random copies of Judge Roy Bean Cantina & Grill, Black Eyed Pea, and Filling Station takeout menus got a response other than “this number is no longer in service.” This meant that Blake’s office was in a building able to withstand the gradual temporal metamorphosis, but this also gave new life to the 1980s-era magazines, journals, and building plans that surrounded her. The only time things became strange was when the happily working Conair landline phone at her desk (cellphones either became unusable or became much bulkier in prolonged proximity) received calls, usually from very confused individuals at the other end, or when televisions became locked on marathons of the Canadian anime series Space Battleship Edmund Fitzgerald, one of Blake’s secret pleasures.

The only issue with Blake carrying the Jeffty gene is its effect on others with the same gene, especially those locked onto a timeperiod significantly older than the 1980s. Minor effects included their cancelling out each other, but sometimes the gene’s effects tried to cancel out the other’s carrier instead. In a severe example that required the whole of St. Remedius to remedy the situation, Blake encountered another gene carrier with a lock on the 3130s, which did not end well.

To be continued…

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.

Bennett Blake Starshadow Calliope Pendergast St. Remedius