St. Remedius Radio: “Onward Spring Break”

What Did St. Remedius Students Do For Spring Break?

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

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Spring Break. A pause to gather resources and catch breath before the black-diamond race to Finals, or an understanding that college students are as feral as grade schoolers and giving them a week of rampage keeps them from setting everything on fire. Every school in Texas offers Spring Break on or around the third week of March, with students choosing to return home, head out to the coast, or drunkenly debauch and projectile vomit in place. St. Remedius Medical College recognized and celebrated Spring Break, too, so the Friday before was the day to turn off the stasis collectors, seat the control rods in the fission reactors and cap the neutron guns, make sure someone stayed behind to feed the lab rats and heliodaemons, turn on the aether cameras to catch folds in the quantum foam around our universe, and make sure the time scoops had fresh traps in the bottom. Some faculty stayed behind behind to perform unspeakable experiments that needed plausible deniability, but others just showed up to get caught up on reading. Everybody else, though, was GONE.

Not surprisingly, St. Remedius students tended to be averse to the usual Spring Break antics, something they shared with their contemporaries at Caltech, MIT, and Brigham Young. In fact, this was usually a great time to get caught up with their contemporaries, as St. Remedius always had a need for gluons packed in dry ice so they wouldn’t melt and uranium-saturated dinosaur bone. Therefore, many hit the road for parts east and north. A surprising number of them went west, though, participating in an annual fossil dig that inadvertently contributed to St. Remedius’s disappearance.

Texas has a long reputation of public fossil digs, including the famed Arlington Archosaur Site, and the town of Mineral Wells, on the edge of the Edwards Plateau, has its own reputation for well-preserved fossils. The Brazos River bed on the west side of Mineral Wells was famed for its high-quality petrified wood, and black opal was a popular gemstone from the sides of the Plateau until the late 1930s. The St. Remedius crew, though, were going after bigger prey. Every year, hundreds of students broke out tents, packs, and rockhammers, drove or bicycled or apparited to a special spot between the city limits and the Brazos, and went to work on what was, 320 million years ago, the mighty Mount Briscoe. Self-reinforcing artifacts first turned up in the area in the 1980s, and while everyone at the dig swore to secrecy and kept it, enough rumors swirled about what the dig uncovered that various organizations and governments have spent years attempting to discern what St. Remedius was excavating. Some were actually true, such as the Wolfram Tor webship found intact in Pennsylvanian sediments from Mount Briscoe floods, but most were drastically off-track and honestly quite ridiculous. Even today, most of the government reports, no matter the government, remain classified or otherwise inaccessible, and many of the corporate records disappeared at the same time as St. Remedius. Whatever was found in the dig, and the dig site was opened years later to discover nothing of significance, it still captivates the curiosity of St. Remedius enthusiasts 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.

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