What Changed With St. Remedius’s Disappearance, And What Stayed Exactly The Same
(Who was St. Remedius? And why is a medical college named after him?)
Both before and after the disappearance of St. Remedius Medical College, Dallas, Texas was a Heisenberg condensate given real estate. There was the Dallas everyone worldwide knew, whether it was the Denisovian Embassy downtown, the fae enclaves and tribes in the north suburbs, or the giant sessile filterfeeding grackles in vacant fields that grazed on the tons of dust and pollen blown up every day from the center of the state. It was the engineered river monsters that fed on the zebra mussels accidentally introduced to the local reservoirs and spawned and made nests along the banks of the Trinity River just off downtown. It was the irony-free subdivisions named “Lost Valley” and “Mystery Spot,” with transplants from elsewhere paying top dollar to live with gorgonopsids and land lampreys digging in their garbage for treats. It was the number of exotic craft from all across space and time in the skies landing at Addison Airport to drop off temporal and spatial tourists, where locals bought anal probe licenses and vampire feeding permits to keep public disturbances to a minimum, and where Portland and Austin had to change their city slogans to “Keep (Blah) Pretentious and Smarmy” to fend off deceptive advertising lawsuits. Dallas was weird in the classic Old English sense and in the contemporary sense, and in centuries in the future, the popular synonym for “DAMN this is weird” was simply “Dallas!”
That was one Dallas. Another was only in vague unsettling dreams, of a dimension of utter boredom. A city where lawyers and real estate developers were the admired careers instead of chronal engineers and corporate mages. A city where “What about them Cowboys?” didn’t refer to the titanosaur punchers goading their herds up the Trinity River Basin to new feeding grounds, and a city where great dull shopping malls full of vapid people with gigantic hair wandered endlessly in places where, in our world, the great Escher Markets brought in goods and surprises from a thousand different worlds and quantum pockets. A city where everyone drove in nearly identical ground vehicles instead of dirigibles and dragonwing coats and Snowboards That Sail On Land And Sea, solely to drive and not to see new wonders at every intersection. A city where the few nonconformists hid the secret and awe-filled places for fear that rich trolls would find them, buy them out, and drive them to extinction. A city not of ten million voices and nearly as many languages with tens of thousands of origins, but of a little over a tenth of that and increasingly one voice, booming “CONSUME” and “GET YOURS.”
Occasionally, those dreams strike a chord among certain people. Most of the time, those dreams go away with counseling, oneiromancers evaporating off the feculence, or occasionally with permanent stents to drain off the horror. Very occasionally, a tiny proportion of those people attracted to those dreams try to chronicle them. They know the reality of our world and are perfectly able to find their way in it, and they also tell dense and detailed stories of their life “before,” even if they can never answer the question “‘before’ what?” In a very few cases, these individuals are obsessed with returning to their “life before,” and will do their utmost to turn things back to “where they should be.” These individuals are Some Guy‘s natural prey.
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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