St. Remedius Radio: “Shine On You Crazy Diamond”

St. Remedius Field Agents And Their Playlists

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

Museums weren’t the only organizations that hired dedicated wanderers to explore during the summer and prepare specimens in the winter. Inspired by the famed fossil hunter Roland T. Bird, St. Remedius Medical College offered stipends for its own explorers, not just to check on rumored phenomena but to act as advance scouts for impending trouble. The pay was sometimes inadequate, the travel through temporal portals and quantum pockets dangerous, and usually the only recognition came from what few skeletal remains still connected to a St. Remedius dog tag were given last rites, often after mandatory vitrification in heavily leaded glass.

To hear the scouts tell it, though, the risks just added to the adrenaline high. This doubled with “relaxation” in downtime, such as racing razor bike pirates in the lost Vietnamese city of Tan Thien, the great quantum pocket enclave that only connected directly to our world every thousand years, or cliffdiving on the outskirts of the Denisovian Embassy. They used any number of transport: hovercraft, gliders, jetbikes, submersibles, chronal jumpers, and the always-popular Leather Personnel Carriers. They carried cameras, microphones, sketchbooks, sampling canisters, holographic sidescanners, and scrying crystals. When they came back, they always had stories. When they left again, they left with music, and sometimes came back with more than what they started.

Starting in the 1980s, with the surge in popularity of mix tapes, St. Remedius scouts often left multiple tapes to keep up pace and morale, and often built up additional tapes, both of their own compositions on everything from flute to bagpipes to mammoth bone and recorded performances in some of the strangest places of space-time. Whether they came back of their own or followup scouting found their tape caches alongside what was left of them, those tapes were both archived within the St. Remedius library and played as special tribute shows on the St. Remedius Radio station. By the late 1990s Gregorian, Friday nights at 9:00 were reserved for “Mating Calls From The Deep,” a specially curated show which ran until dawn, each night comprised solely of one particular scout’s mix tapes, CDs, and later downloads. All the way to St. Remedius’s end, MCFtD was so popular that fans recorded the shows, made their own mixtapes, and melded them with art, dance, architecture, and even cuisine, with some segments famed for their reuse and sampling but with few knowing their origins. Sometimes that led to issues, and some of those issues still affect such aspects as Harkun diplomacy to this day.

And while you’re at it, the request lines are now open, complete with playlist.

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.

Denisovian Embassy Harkun Mating Calls From The Deep scouts St. Remedius Radio Tan Thien