St. Remedius Medical College: “The Harryhausen Weekend”

What Happens To the Various Organisms Previously Threatening Earth? They Go To the Zoo.

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

To casual observers with no understanding of how ecosystems work, Earth’s biome would appear to be a pristine vista untainted by other life. The reality, as St. Remedius Medical College researchers, field teams, and mitigation crews understand far too well, is that the quantum and thaumaturgic membranes keeping our planet reasonably uncontaminated are, as Dr. Terry Martinson described in his classes, “a condom fending off howitzer rounds.” Quantum pockets opening and closing, biology experiments from the stars and discarded familiars from summoning circles, animals and plants from locked-off caverns and pits, organisms modified by radiation, gene editing, or metaphysical augmentation: Earth has been saturated with exotic fauna, flora, fungi, and bacteria for billions of years, and most of their encounters with modern humans have been accidental. After being contained, restricted, or neutered, they have to go elsewhere.

Off the coast of Newfoundland, near the French islands of Saint Pierre and Miquelon, lies a similar archipelago of occasionally isthmus-connected islands. Like Saint Pierre and Miquelon, the islands of Freydis, Thorvald, Thorstein, and Thjodhild are surrounded by hundreds of shipwrecks over a thousand years from Norse longboats to modern nuclear submarines. Unlike Saint Pierre and Miquelon, those wrecks rarely had survivors, thanks to a series of rotating quantum pocket outlets dropping their still-wriggling contents onto the islands and the surrounding Atlantic waves. After several particularly nasty events, including an incident involving a prototype Northrop YB-49 bomber on unnamed tests in 1949, the area was declared verboten in 1956, and St. Remedius won the contract from a joint Canadian/French/Danish commission to facilitate, augment, and maintain facilities to keep its singular residents from escaping. Thus began The Zoo.

The main issue with The Four, as the islands were referred to by St. Remedius teams, wasn’t with the organisms, as deadly as many were. The main concern was with humans, whether gawkers, game hunters, or post-2006 Washington State tourists. So many could not be returned to their original locales, often because nobody was quite sure where those were, so The Four were often their only potential home. A constant Canadian Coast Guard presence keeps away the curious, but shortly before St. Remedius’s disappearance, the entire archipelago was wired for video. That changed everything.

Today, the original system of Webcams, microphones, infrared and ultraviolet cameras, and X-ray lasers continues to broadcast live audio and video to the rest of the world, available to anyone with a Web browser, in efforts of nearly-complete transparency about the organisms on the islands and their lives. Some become so popular that representative samples are loaned to zoos and private breeders so more can view them in person, but even the most dangerous pika species had 24/7 coverage, as well as specialty documentaries and reality shows involving them and their veterinarians. St. Remedius veterinary medicine graduates had a short lifespan, but they usually became famous in the process. Freydis and Thjodhild had special considerations for extraterrestrial and magical organisms, respectively, but they ran the same way: things come in, they are supplied with food and medical care, and otherwise allowed to run free on their respective island or moved to quantum pockets with more amenable conditions for their livelihood unless they were simply too dangerous to be released. Very rarely did encounters between organisms turn violent: one of the most popular streams from Thjodhild, in fact, was the deep and lasting friendship between a Norfolk dragon, usually viciously opposed to contact with any other life form, and a thuppagill from the Chatham Islands that normally turned itself inside out, thereby exposing venomous spines to potential attackers, when encountering just about anything other than its own kind.

With all this, one question still exists about The Zoo, and that involves organisms either on the edge of sentience or those with intelligences poorly understood by carbon-based life. Officially, all rumors of a fifth island on the edge of the North American continental shelf for budding intelligences were roundly denied, both by St. Remedius and the UN. However, after St. Remedius’s disappearance, receipts and allocation reports turned up that suggested some body to those rumors. What or who was on that island, or where it was located, is still unknown, but one word survived whatever cull of the St. Remedius archives removed all other mentions: “Clathrus.”

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.

Clathrus Dr. Terry Martinson island St. Remedius The Four The Zoo