St. Remedius Medical College: “Ghosts, Echoes, and Lipstick Traces”

The Saga of Las Colinas and Its Thaumaturgic Rebirth

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

One of the more complicated aspects of chronicling the effects of St. Remedius Medical College on the greater Dallas area, both before and after the College’s disappearance, involves the various artifacts of city development that might be misconstrued. Was the giant half-ruined castle atop a hill overlooking one of the local reservoirs a mad wizard’s den, or was it the last trace of a dotcom millionaire’s hubris left unfinished when the techbro’s wealth turned back into pumpkins and mice? Likewise, the fae house in the middle of a upper-class enclave an attempt by changelings to acclimate to the human sphere, or the efforts by a Renfaire addict to spend a rich spouse’s money and thereby cut off a stepchild’s inheritance? Were the various portals and vanes put in random places an attempt to collect unknown and unknowable energies, or investments in corporate art for tax evasion purposes? A sacred cenote for human and treasure sacrifice close to one of Dallas’s richest neighborhoods to keep it rich, or the cavity for underground parking for an unbuilt skyscraper left abandoned and allowed to fill with groundwater, mosquitoes, and snakes since the 1980s oil bust? Impregnable and inescapable maximum-security prison or 1970s-era suburban high school? So many strange artifacts and locales in the Dallas area were repurposed, renewed, revised, and revamped over the decades that sometimes their origins are still murky, and sometimes the origin is famous but the current use is cryptic.

One of the best examples is the area northwest of downtown Dallas known as Las Colinas, connected to the city proper the way a sebaceous cyst the size of an apple is attached to the face of a happy healthy teenager and making as much of an impression on passersby. Real estate developers in the area regularly believed in the power of “build it and they will come,” and with various attempts to make Dallas a technology hub, what used to be worn-out cattle ranchland became a prefab tech oasis, full of high-rises interconnected by canals that promised to become IT powerhouses that would, eventually, put Dallas on the map as an international city. In order to sell it to the general public as an actual destination, Las Colinas included art plunked in random areas, the beginnings of an elevated tram system modeled on the transport network at DFW Airport, and even movie and TV production studios best known for unleashing one of the worst horrors the world has ever known, as well as Barney the Dinosaur. As the tech boom of the 1990s expanded and receded, the actual innovators moved further and further north, leaving Las Colinas as a refuge for legacy companies and those too poorly managed to cut it anywhere else, dependent upon state and local tax incentives to stay afloat. By the first decade of the 21st Century, Las Colinas was a shell, better known for its monument to local MBA programs than for any actual technical expertise. The tramways were the symbol of the situation, slowly covered with lichens as developers argued over who would pay to finish the work.

That shell, however, was catnip for corporate thaumaturgic interests, and the area saw a new boom as sages, warlocks, and necromancers took advantage of empty offices and cheap rents for experimentation and implementation. The brightest and best still put up their slates in Plano, Frisco, and The Colony, but Las Colinas proved to be an incubator for the metaphysic arts, letting burned-out mystics mentor novices without distractions such as culture. The boom in multilevel apartments for imported tech minions around the turn of the century allowed novices and servants to live right next to their masters’ facilities, with many reserved specifically for wights, zombies, and other undead until they were called to service. In fact, several former telecom offices were so saturated with despair and latent cruelty that they became beloved by Dallas’s vampire elite, with only the blacking out of executive office windows being the only needed changes for multiple generations of wampyr to operate without fear of the sun. With a power hub came plenty of willing victims for late-night feedings, and even earwax vampires operated openly on Las Colinas streets without fear of persecution.

By the end of the first quarter of the 21st Century, Las Colinas became the main metaphysical core of the Southwestern United States after the disappearance of St. Remedius, and was barely recognizable from its origins. The alligators and alligator gars in the canals were gradually replaced with kelpies and selkies, the skies crackled nightly with mystic lightning, and denizens of the lower realms feasted at the area’s many Scotch bars and gastropubs. During the weekends, the area belonged to the vampires, with amphitheaters and clubs catering to their well-known tastes in polka and prog rock, and only the occasional puddle of partially digested earwax affected the ambiance. Gradually, the old Las Colinas was subsumed and subducted, often in the middle of the night when a wayward mage decided that Changes Must Be Made to take advantage of an astrological convergence or a sudden taste in random monoliths. And the tramways? Most were gradually consumed and concealed with new development, but enough remained to become the core of the only passenger-rated railgun in the Southwest, extremely popular even if it still remains unprofitable.

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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