So. Much. Dust.
(Who was St. Remedius? And why is a medical college named after him?)
As Spring Break ended at St. Remedius Medical College, students returned to a campus significantly cleaner than they had left. Most of the mess was inevitable: approximately 4000 students, faculty, administrators, and support produced a lot of detritus, and visitors and honored guests generated even more. Just the human contingent alone produced kilograms of dead skin, hair, eyelashes, sputum, vomit, and other less recognizable traces every week, and it was only the herculean (some say sissyphean) efforts of the St. Remedius custodial crew that kept St. Remedius from being buried in dunes of dandruff and earwax. Then there was the inevitable leftovers of new research, replicable experiments, and discarded projects: whatever the custodial crew was paid, it still wasn’t enough, either from students who assumed the space underneath their beds was a perfect growth medium for self-copying fast-food wrappers or from the wildly unauthorized abiogenesis experiment that led to a short-lived plague of diorite gromes taking over the student cafeteria. Faculty and postgrads were just as much to blame, especially when the unofficial slogan of most department heads when confronted midway through research was “Well, you’re home early.”
Spring Break, even more than Holiday Break, was a major campaign against entropy for the custodians, especially with the idea of getting ahead of the Cyclopean messes at the end of the year. This meant a carefully developed regimen of technological, thaumaturgic, nanorobotic, and biological controls to strip the unwanted from halls and dorms, from the Dean’s office down to the front gate. One day, better documentarians than this chronicler need to dramatize the annual Spring Break Cleanup, for many years were the stuff of song and legend. Bedbugs and dust mites the size of softballs, the snot stalactite in the middle of one commons restroom, the barely-tamped neutron gun left running and the cell replicator accidentally left uncleaned, the pizza party remnants independently evolving their own version of Zoroastrianism, the Brazilian pepper grow room in one closet, the dorm completely filled with Harkun hentai DVDs…all these and more were battled by the warriors of the broom and mop, and many had more scars from frostbite from leaking single-point generator coolant than from burns, cuts, and bites.
In these days after the disappearance of St. Remedius, offer to cover the bar tab for former St. Remedius custodians, no matter how expensive their tastes. Compared to what they faced, leading strike teams in Antarctica, putting out magma well fires, or organizing hipster music festivals may be a relative vacation, but they still deserve the respect they earned from their time at St. Remedius. If you’re lucky, they might even tell St. Remedius tales, such as the unobtanium/hopium/caltechium spill, the pet desert centipede left with a terrible addiction to nicotine that resorted to ransacking other rooms to get its fix, or the inflatable aether raft that went off mid-week and almost took an entire dorm to the edges of the universe with it.
This was a request from Bo Bolander, age 7. 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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