St. Remedius Medical College: "Find An Ultrapowerful Alien Artifact? You May Be Entitled To Compensation"

It’s not that wizards and alien scientists never plan for the future, but for the most part…

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

One of the great tropes of legend, urban and otherwise, is the ancient artifact that saves the day. It could be the mighty sword associated with a famous or notorious lineage, of which the eventual wielder is the last of the line. It could be the reservoir of magical power necessary to send a prediluvian nightmare back to another thousand years of confinement and/or torment. It could be the skull of a long-extinct beast necessary for a final bit of spellwork that threatens to change the whole planet, or the control system to a billion-year alien repulsion system intended to stop a wave of automated planetkillers manufactured shortly after Earth’s first indigenous life bobbed and sloshed in its first oceans. Or it might be an experiment, instigated by a tinkerer or sorcerer who never actually intended to activate it, but built “just in case” or merely because one could. Some are mere blocks of potential; others are alive and aware of their purpose. Trusting the legends, Earth, its moon, and most of the solar system is full of incipient weapons or shields, just waiting for the correct code word, correct genome, or correct activation sequence to roar to its destiny.

All of those legends are absolutely true, much to the chagrin of St. Remedius Medical College. One of its primary functions is not stopping these from being activated, but in doing something with the pieces.

As most students of the exonormal discover to their own frustration, the biggest enemy of legendary solutions to legendary problems lies in time. Many of the great relics of the golden age of the Vendian Era, including most of the wonders of Earth’s first indigenous sentients, the Vuun, were dependent upon energy from naturally occurring nuclear fission reactors such as the one at what is now Oklo. Obviously, those and ones throughout our solar system gradually depleted themselves millions of years ago, with only partial success in subsequent sentients finding alternatives. Other artifacts succumbed to accidents and geological disturbances: many eventually being subducted into Earth’s mantle via plate tectonics were destroyed, but some survived and returned to the surface via volcanic activity, as the people of Aotearoa and Snelandia discover constantly. Some were found by humans, who may or may not have had an idea of their importance, but they were just as likely to be found by the various prehuman civilizations and reworked: fully half of the known Vuun artifact remnants currently in human collections were reworked by the Chree before they left Earth forever, including a significant number of grave goods from very early in the Chree’s history. Others were barely recognizable as such by the time geologic processes finished: the secret behind the potentially telekinesis-inducing boysenberry patches of Ballston Spa, New York lay with a psychic beacon left by an otherwise unknown lifeform in the shallow seas that covered the area 650 million years ago. The size and dimensions of the beacon are unknown because the great Laurentide ice sheet covering much of North America, Europe, and Asia gradually ground it to dust and scattered that dust over the area approximately 20,000 years before the present.

Thaumaturgically created artifacts often ended up in the same state as technological artifacts. Bone crumbles, wood cracks, and stone shatters, especially when wielded to stop menaces from beyond time or reality. Sometimes the activation source disappears due to deliberate efforts and sometimes just due to time: one massive war was averted with the extinction of the great mantichore bat and the relatively short time its carcasses remained magically active. Others turned to lumps when the last person knowing its activation rune died, or due to counterspells that were themselves forgotten and never neutralized. Sometimes the magic was absorbed by local trees and shrubs, and sometimes it never left the container in which the artifact resided. Over the centuries since its formation, St. Remedius discovered the existence of artifacts only known because of properties imbued to their arks and crypts, and one only known from an endocast found in the pumice deserts of the late Mount Mazama.

As can be told, the various research teams at St. Remedius all dreamed of perfectly preserved and still active artifacts, but usually only tiny fragments and residues remain when discovered and excavated. Those bits are still extremely valuable, both for their basic attributes and for their applications. One of the more secretive research departments at St. Remedius was Applications, which worked with reactivating functional artifacts, reworking nonfunctional ones, and reconstructing and replicating both for their original purposes and for new solutions. Earth may not have had much use for sentient soul-stealing runeswords or evolutionary uplift convertors at the present time, but going through their fragments led to any number of technological, thaumaturgic, medical, or psychological innovations. That wizard’s amulet may have had no purpose in a world generally empty of dragons and hodags, but beautifully reworked industrial gems and gems specifically created for other functions could give it a life well outside its intentions.

Even with its accumulation of knowledge and expertise from throughout space—time, even the boffins at St. Remedius (and many absolutely loathed being called “boffins”) came across items that either defied analysis or that required technologies or magics well beyond even its purview. In the time since the college disappeared, rumors continued about a great archive of artifacts, possibly held in a quantum pocket, existing just out of reach, including ones explaining St. Remedius’s disappearance itself. The vital concern is that even if it were rediscovered, the time dilation or contraction within the quantum pocket would have left everything, even the toughest and most age-resistant ceramics and pseudometals, as nothing but dust.

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.

artifacts relics St. Remedius Vuun