St. Remedius Medical College: “Heart of Stone, Brain of Stone, Kidneys of Stone”

Gemstones Aren’t Always Just Gemstones

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

While popularly and justly derided when promoted by the “Sorta Shannara” set, the powers of gemstones and crystals and their use took up a significant amount of space in the St. Remedius Medical College library, and with good reason. Besides the Gem Witches, any number of thaumaturgical orders and disciplines harvested gems for their mystic properties, sometimes manufacturing synthetic stones or clarifying natural stones for better effect. This also applied for hypertechnological use, as with the Technomancers using inclusive elements in diamonds for quantum memory storage, locked DNA in organic gems such as amber and pearls for more memory storage, fire and black opals recording psychgraphic haloes of dying artificial personalities, and lumogarnets for gamma and X-ray detection. Most of the great battles between thaumaturges and technics in history, both before and after the days of St. Remedius, involved access to gems and crystals with one specific use with one group and a completely different one with another. Worse, some of the classic efforts to clarify stones (heat treatments, boiling in oils, or exposure to hard radiation) that made a stone perfect for one group’s needs made that same stone unusable for others.

To make matters even worse, many cutting and clarification techniques exist mostly to wipe data, spells, or psionic resonances from an existing stone, sometimes for security and sometimes to facilitate the stone’s sale or donation to another user. The vacancy centers produced by diamond fabrication adding such elements as nitrogen, as well as from plastic deformation, to the crystalline lattice can store both photons with specific spin and geomantic summons, making them highly valuable for both quantum computers and for elemental summoning and storage. “Resetting” the stone for another user often involves cutting and shaping to remove cataloguing cues, much like reformatting a magnetic hard drive, and sometimes to extreme effect. Very few viewing the Hope Diamond today know that the Hope is “clear”: completely free storage potential, moreso because of the vacancy centers imparted by the boron that causes the Hope’s brilliant blue color. The backstory on the original stone was obscure through most of human history, and cuttings to produce the French Blue made that stone particularly valuable to several different groups taking advantage of the French Revolution to seize it. As the Order of St. Remedius was still located in France at the time, it joined a quintet of some of the greatest eccentrics of the Eighteenth Century in a madcap chase to recover what, if anything, was stored within. The results of that chase seem to be missing from the college’s annals, but apparently it was recut and sold in England as a compromise to stop the fighting and restore mystical peace in Europe. Only in the 80th Century Gregorian was the original stone discovered to be loaded with vital information…the biggest collection of Harkun pornography, and thus the greatest visual emetic for the rest of the galaxy, ever compiled.

The irony that “the greatest treasures are often in plain sight” is that while gemstones are nicely impressive to most sentients, other minerals and rocks are even better storage media than diamonds or rubies. Never underestimate the storage powers of flint, especially within stone tools. The best part about flint storage is that most techniques to date and catalog flint also wipe the information therein, as discovered late in the 23rd Century Gregorian when the optically stimulated luminescene techniques developed to date eccentric flints from the Mayan Late Classic Period also sterilized them on an informational basis. Discovering which surviving ones could still be read, and what techniques were necessary to read them, took up a not inconsiderable amount of time in Earth culture until its sun expanded to its red giant phase, a slog not helped by both explosive cantrips added to protect the stone from unapproved readers and the amount of “poisoned data” added specifically so the information inside could not be used gainfully once drawn forth. These early but extremely sophisticated systems, known as “DeVito standards” after the researcher first cataloguing them, were actually a focus of extraterrestrial intelligences visiting Earth in human-prehistoric times, but to learn from humans instead of the other way around.

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.

eccentric flints gemstones Harkun Hope Diamond lumogarnets St. Remedius