St. Remedius Medical College: "Stop Me Before I Revenate Again"

A discussion of the serial resurrector plague

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

Before its disappearance, St. Remedius Medical College experts were regularly called upon by law enforcement, inside and outside the solar system and space-time continuum, to engage in solving various crimes against humans and others. Poisoning of urban fae energy hubs, unauthorized time travel slumming, transmutation of gold to urine, retroactive forgery of documents and artifacts…the faculty and students of St. Remedius often negotiated with and occasionally opposed appointed and self-appointed authorities on legal and extralegal matters. Most commonly, researchers in the Advanced Technologies and Metaphysics departments found themselves involved in murder investigations, if only as expert witnesses, but anyone could be called, as the Music department discovered late one October after a bout of Endurance Karaoke at the famed Club Scintilla. One of its strangest cases, though, involved the absolute opposite, with one of the first formally documented cases of serial undeath in St. Remedius history.

By the beginnings of the Twenty-first Century, nearly all countries and organizations on Earth had very stringent and thorough laws and regulations against unauthorized resurrection of any deceased individual, no matter the form. Cemeteries worldwide and on the moon were marked with both wardpacts against zombification and biological/chemical/nanotech/parasitic reactivation detectors in case the reanimation was due to extra-mystic causes, with clairvoyants worldwide engaged in detecting activity in sites filled before 1500 CE. (As a rule, the magic or technology necessary to revive a corpse more than 500 years old was so excessive that the preparatory activity alone was enough to set off alarms across time and space.) Necromancers and houngans were required by international law to be registered with the Zwinge Foundation, with regular audits of their activities to check against illegal raising and moving of corpses, and treaties with vampire and Undead Lord societies allowed legal interference in their affairs should any member decide to test their luck. In some cases, whole areas were marked off-limits: with the return of the Harkun, the return of their old practice of firing failed political and social leaders into the Tycho Crater on the moon meant that monitoring and maintenance of burial sites extended outside of Earth’s atmosphere. In the United States, the Curwen Act of 1928 assigned additional severe penalties to anyone engaging in necromantic activities outside of strictly enforced parameters: just as statistimages were constantly checked to make sure they never interfered in games and contests of chance, so those specializing in the necrotic arts were not allowed to contact the spirits of the dead, much less clothe their bones in flesh and return them to the living, without very tight restrictions as to how and why.

Under these stringent circumstances, a 911 call involving a naked man perched on the median of Dallas’s Woodall Rogers Highway near Klyde Warren Park in the fall of 2013 had no indication that it might involve St. Remedius in any way. If anything, that sort of call was probably one of the less surprising police activities in Dallas on a Friday night. The desk sergeant on duty that night, though, called the St. Remedius hotline when the apprehended streaker claimed he was none other than the founder of the city of Dallas, John Neely Bryan. A hasty series of tests confirmed that he believed that he was Bryan, his DNA matched that of living relations, and that his body showed neither the chronon haloes from temporal travel nor any traces of cloning technology. A quick sweep of the timestream confirmed that this was the original, dead since 1877, as hale, hearty, and completely insane as he was when he died.

As authorities convened to discuss what to do with the Reverend Bryan, particularly his legal status as a formerly deceased citizen, other reports started coming in of similar anomalies throughout Texas. Some turned up naked on bridges and highways; others walked out of the shadows in their now-pristine burial clothes. In some cases, families awoke to knocking on their front doors from former residents dead 50 to 100 years prior, and restaurants and hospitals soon filled with those seeking assistance with their new corporeality. Frantic checks of gravesites and crematory urns revealed no disturbances, so where were these people coming from?

Several things became evident as the dead continued to rise. Firstly, they were biologically and thaumaturgically alive: any tendencies to eat human flesh and wander aimlessly through shopping malls were there before their deceasements. Secondly, all had stories. There was the 1970s-era Baptist pastor who discovered that his former church not only didn’t want to welcome him back, but specifically called the police to haul him away when he demanded access. More than a few had died under suspicious circumstances, and had plenty of tea to spill when they discovered their houses sold, their assets liquidated, and their former empires turned into ever-decreasing piles of Peruvian flake, cryptocurrency, and Funko Pops. Others were very happy to tell stories of elder abuse and neglect about children and guardians who had spent years cornering everyone they could to tell them about their great sacrifices in “taking care of my parent,” when “taking care” consisted of incessant texting while propping up the storyteller to watch Seinfeld marathons. Newsfeeds were soon full of the previously deceased being glad to lead authorities to buried bodies, hidden bank accounts, and previously inaccessible caches of automatic weapons, BDSM dungeon accessories, and Nazi memorabilia, and courts were full up with cases testing whether the dead still had rights to legal representation, or whether those who died after conviction of multiple felonies but conveniently days or hours before their sentencing could be retried on the grounds that justice needed to prevail. And those who found themselves in “accidents” shortly after their revivals and shortly after making the top of the feeds…well, they just came back again, angrier and more determined than ever.

As was discovered years later, even St. Remedius was affected. The dean of St. Remedius between 1960 and 1965, Rancher Matheson, was found clawing his way into a police station and begging to be punished for his sins: most of the files in his subsequent investigation were ordered sealed, but what leaked out hinted to a massive effort to hide still undocumented exonormal activity in what was at that time unincorporated land on the edge of Dallas County. Between this and reinvestigation of several hidden-in-plain-sight cemeteries in North Dallas, including the recovery of a St. Remedius dogtag not assigned to any known member of the faculty or staff, Colonel McCarry, the current dean of St. Remedius, swore further transparency on St. Remedius activities, and freely offered to testify against Matheson in any trial in the future. Whether any such trial happened is still unknown, and while the dead stopped rising three months after they started, the causes and forces behind the mass revenance is still unknown. All indications, though, suggest one single serial unaliver behind every case, with everything from FBI/Interpol/SPG joint alerts to very generous bounties for the identity of the necroneutralizer (the bounty holder’s words, not those of St. Remedius) still turning up empty. As to the process by which said thanaturgy was committed, most of the world’s mystic organizations, particularly the Zwinge Foundation, have their own rewards still uncollected.

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.

revenator SPG St. Remedius Zwinge Foundation