Whatever Happens To St. Remedius Surplus?
(Who was St. Remedius? And why is a medical college named after him?)
In addition to the detritus of exonormal research, one of the legacies of the disappearance of St. Remedius Medical College involved the intended end products. Even with the College’s disappearance, the greater Dallas area was loaded with toolboxes, repositories, accumulations, dumps, and armories of necessary, obvious, and opportunistic devices, mechanisms, collectives, manifestations, and echoes. Some were accessible by anybody who encountered them, some were logged and trapped for specific individuals sometimes in the distant past and sometimes in the far future, and others just awaited the absolute best or worst person to bring out their potential. Some were engineering or thaumaturgy thesis projects, some were items either “liberated” or openly given away when an individual left St. Remedius, and still others were personal projects using St. Remedius proprietary materials, technologies, or theories. In the past, most of these were processed, approved, and eventually sold in surplus auctions. With the disappearance or retirement of those inspectors, everything from caches of Kirby Suits to Nogha Anomaly exoskeletons was open season. Sometimes government agencies showed up to pick up zero-point energy generators or nova cannons, and sometimes higher forces came to take back phylacteries or tiaras traded or bartered centuries before. Many times, though, the contents of a storage locker, a tinker shed, or the top floor of a nearly abandoned Las Colinas highrise puzzled even the greatest exonormal savants, often to their detriment when attempting to figure out an item’s purpose, function, or operation.
Other times, though, those little items changed the world in little but incredibly beneficial ways, such as with every cyclist’s friend, the Wind To Your Back amulets. Originally found in an assemblage of thetamagical prototypes left in a home workspace by a recently deceased St. Remedius professor, the amulet, once decoded and replicated, guaranteed that the wearer only faced rear winds when activated, even in hurricane-force storms. The amulets were so successful, in fact, that they became contraband in most bicycle races and competitions because of their decisive advantage, thus proving their value to commuters and Sunday morning touring enthusiasts. Before the Wind To Your Back corporation transferred the dweomer from amulets to tattoo ink, thousands of amulets went into the enthusiastic hands of couriers and explorers; after the transfer, that number of happy and thrilled users moved into the millions.
For every success like Wind To Your Back, though, there were multiple near-misses and expensive failures, the most notable of which was a food additive that suggested that it allowed limited telepathy between those tasting the same item. A company specializing in corporate espionage spent millions of pounds Sterling to develop this to allow spying between agents in a particular organization or group, only to discover that an essential component was left out of the recipe, and it only passed information via flatulence. That said, it became a massive hit, for obvious reasons, with members of the entertainment press, most of whom were already used to the sensation.
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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