The Saga of The Great Medicinal Cheese Heist
(Who was St. Remedius? And why is a medical college named after him?)
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While the term “cheese cave” sounds silly and fabricated, the concept behind cheese caves is both solid and ancient. Using caves to store and age meat dates back to the Denisovians (a fact that functionaries with the Denisovian Embassy note with significant boasting), but contemporary humans were the first to combine the cool temperatures of caves and mines with additional food growing, aging, and storage. The famed Missouri cheese caves are just one example of underground food and drink caches, and with Texas’s wide range of caverns both public and private, any number of entities run cheese caves both natural and artificial. Not only is it unsurprising that St. Remedius Medical College had its own cheese cave outside of the town of Weatherford (as well as access to four decommissioned ICBM silos, which were used for food science experiments, laser optics manufacture and calibration, and SCUBA dive training), used for producing one of its most successful and outstanding spinoff products, medicinal cheeses.
The history of St. Remedius medicinal cheeses started long before the founding of the Medical College. In the early days of the Order of St. Remedius, the order financed its operation with sales of unique cheeses, wines, and other idiosyncratic consumables. Instead of a specific secret recipe for a singular item, such as chartreuse, the monks of the Order found a particular talent for making cheeses with a medicinal twist, ranging from the stomach-calming Trask to the energizing Harkaman to the sleep aid Spasso. By the time of the original founding of the first Medical College, the list of cheese recipes with specific medical benefit ranged over 130 varieties, and by the time the College moved to Dallas, Texas, that list contained over 1000. Antiparasitics and antifungals without deleterious side effects, accelerated bone healing and rebuilding, temporary ability to store additional oxygen, vampire and daemon attraction and repulsion, limited precognition, emotion buffering and enhancement, psionic clarification…the Order had even worked out a variety of mozzarella with a short-term psychic projection component for both time and space, which the famed Interstellar Pizza in Acro Alley used to great effect. When the combined efforts of St. Remedius’s Advanced Technologies and Metaphysics departments focused on additional cheeses, the number increased exponentially: who didn’t want a Gouda that both removed malignant tumors and made them sing Broadway show tunes as they climbed out of their hosts?
Such was the reputation of St. Remedius cheeses that individuals, organizations, and governments regularly attempted to finesse, dissect, or extort their secrets out of the cheeses themselves or out of those involved with their production. Spying attempts via nanodrone and scrying window were as useless as brainscans and hypnotic drugs (one of the secret varieties of St. Remedius cheese was the Valkanhayn, which repelled any sort of psionic or thaumaturgic probing, and no one cheesemaker had access to the complete recipe for any of the cheeses for additional security), and state and governmental threats to require access to cheese recipes merely moved production to friendly locales via quantum pockets. Ultimately, the cheese cave returned to Weatherford every time: access to major highways, unique geologic features in the early Cretaceous limestone of the area, and the annual Parker County Peach Festival were all listed as contributions.
For all of its security, the St. Remedius cheese cave had one major weakness, and that was its distance from Dallas proper and its easy access to Interstate Highway 20 and several small airports in the vicinity. This led, in the summer of 2001, to one of the strangest thefts in Texas history, where a team of 10 bypassed electronic and thaumaturgic alarms, detectors, and glyphs, climbed down elevator shafts to the main cave area, and stole approximately 150 different St. Remedius cheeses, loading them onto a waiting truck and escaping in the night. Whomever they were, they were extremely resourceful, had extensive financial backing for the heist, and obtained top-quality intel about the cheese cave and its security procedures. The initial investigation suggested an inside contact, but St. Remedius personnel quickly were found to be blameless, either for conspiracy or incompetence. The team behind the heist was simply that good.
Even so, the individuals behind the Great Medicinal Cheese Heist were soon found in an industrial park warehouse in Abilene, but their motivations or obligations are still unknown. This was because one of the cheeses gathered was an accidentally mislabeled cheese codenamed “Bentrik,” undergoing testing at the time of the theft. A defect in its rind allowed it to outgas into the warehouse, and since Bentrik was being developed for suspended animation for longterm interstellar space exposure, all ten thieves are still encased in a self-extruded amber-like polymer that resisted and still resists all attempts at mechanical, chemical, or thaumaturgic removal. Any answers are dependent upon removing the polymer, and since continued work on Bentrik produced a cheese that easily facilitated the polymer production but showed no signs of its dissipation, some familiarizing themselves with remaining St. Remedius lore after the school’s disappearance suspect that the thieves will remain perfectly preserved and intact long after our sun burns out. Some time travelers hinted that this was indeed the case.
(And full credit goes to both Amy Hoy and my beloved fiance Sarah for the inspiration.)
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.
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