St. Remedius Medical College: “Signs, Portents, and Blatant Advertising”

When the Sigils And Guardians Remember, Even When The Corporate World Doesn’t

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

Most of St. Remedius Medical College’s thaumaturgy and applied mysticism majors, after passing their Zwinge Foundation certifications, famously went on to long careers in corporate magic, and most stayed close to St. Remedius for their entire careers. It wasn’t because of college nostalgia or a desperate fear of moving on: that’s what distinguished Dallas from Austin from the earliest days of Texas statehood to the present. Those who didn’t continue their employment in Dallas still found themselves coming back on a regular basis, partly for additional training, partly for career counseling opportunities, but mostly because St. Remedius was an excellent research resource with collections unmatched by anyone else in this hemisphere. Far too often, its alumni came back not just because they needed further information on specific situations or phenomena, but because they needed further elaboration on situations that threatened to overwhelm themselves, their employers, and sometimes their cities, timezones, and all of space-time.

Any clerk in a municipal planning office will tell anyone who asks that official plans and schematics for buildings and complexes doesn’t necessarily match reality, much to the surprise and detriment of overly hasty crews attempting to retrofit offices with fiber optic cable or reichite nexuses. Officially, changes to water mains, electrical inputs, or sacrifice pits are supposed to be registered with the planning office, so crews a decade or a century later don’t nick a water line and flood an underground parking garage or release the cacodemon interred to stabilize the foundation. Unofficially, some plans are inaccurate due to honest errors and some are inaccurate due to deliberate misdirection or malfeasance. In Dallas, a regular issue involved additions that neither would have passed inspection or property tax assessment, and that only drew notice years or decades after everyone involved was dead, disincarnated, or otherwise out of the reach of municipal or state law enforcement. Nowhere was this more noticeable than with signage.

Besides its expected role in advertising and announcing, building signage was often an excellent way to hide protection sigils and glyphs in plain sight. Official protectionates required registration that both required registration fees and application fees, with said application being done by Zwinge-certified mages, and if Dallas developers had a universal mantra, it was “I don’t know why I have to PAY for this. Far, far too often, tornado and hailstorm deflection runes and fire suppression glyphs were conducted and activated in the middle of the night, usually done by the well-known contractor firm of “my nephew will do this for FREE,” with a handy new mural atop it. Besides hiding potentially or blatantly illegal protections, the murals also gave the opportunity to owners to credit additional value to the property or prevent or slow required upgrades or renovations, especially when the murals became local landmarks. (The fact that the murals were usually never turned into actual legally protected landmarks was itself a protection, such as with the public outrage of a famed and popular mural being removed glossing over that the reason why it was removed was that it was a signpost used by local necromancers to tell customers where to turn in.)

This often led to problems, especially when the individuals behind a mural or other art project were dead, moved away, or (more often) in memory care. The giant baby mural on the side of 1201 Pacific Avenue in downtown Dallas, covered with advertising banners for decades, was less to beautify a parking lot than to seal off the unquiet ghosts of long-dead freelancers trapped in the demolished Dallas Times Herald building, the last trace of which was an unpainted scar on the side of the parking garage on the site. Forcing those spirits to sequester within the parking garage wall built up stresses that finally burst free in the Great Mural Meltdown of 2023: the Times Herald site was converted into a parking lot in 1992 to prevent any development of the locale after the demolition was completed, and some 75 cars were buried in ectoplasm when the mural glyphs exploded and the parking garage wall turned to jelly. Thankfully, nobody was hurt, but this was a warning about other potential catastrophes. Other issues came when illegally installed glyphs were subsequently overlaid with other, mutually contradictory protections: many visitors to Dallas note the I-35 Waterfall Billboard, but only a few remember or care to remember the vapor dragon that used to rise from the waterfall every night at 9:00, at least until a quickie sigil repair freed it to run amok in the Oak Cliff area.

This sort of issue was not limited to mystic projections and productions, either. Several admold murals on the east side of downtown Dallas facing Central Expressway promised state-of-the-art signage during rush hour, but a refusal by the installers to pay for proper signage firmware meant that the murals were easily hacked, leading to a 20-story live feed of Uncle Bill’s Seriously Messed-Up Universe, featuring the installment focusing on male oceanic anglerfish, on Christmas Eve 2017. Similarly, a planned holiday holography show in the suburb of Frisco utilized previously owned hardware and software improperly formatted and wiped, thus giving approximately 3000 families for The True Story of Christmas about 45 minutes of the holoporn hentai classic Tentacles of Yog-Sothoth. (The nearly universal response from the Frisco audience was “What’s with the amateur shit? I thought we were here for a show.”) Many nanotech frescoes and statuary in downtown Dallas suffered similar failures, with the most famous being the nanite statue atop the former Adam Hats factory building in Deep Ellum, which reset to default firmware after the statue was struck by lightning in a May 2018 thunderstorm. Unfortunately, a wag involved with developing the firmwareafter its installation in 2007 reset the default from “plain” to a sign reading “This Bastard Doesn’t Pay Contractor Bills,” complete with phone number and email address, in case the client refused to pay after installation. The client was one of the few in Dallas who did pay bills, on time and for the stated rate, but the sign remained up for two months until the firmware could be isolated, accessed, and reset to its intended form. Suffice to say, nobody was happy.

The talismans and nodules of previous thaumaturgical and technological promotional projects also went small. Nearly every big Dallas company involved in the dotcom boom of 1996-2000 pumped out truly heroic amounts of swag to be given to customers, employees, and potential interns, with many containing everything from ten-year utility lights to earwax vampire spray (both for repelling and attracting) to employee biorhythm trackers. After the companies moved, shut down, or found themselves assimilated by larger companies, or the individual projects they hyped were shut down due to being obsolete or a spectacular waste of money by clueless management, most of these chunks of corporate detritus ended up dumped in the thousands at flea markets, garage sales, and thrift stores. Many were retrofitted for new use, but others were just dumped.

The most extreme version came when the former tech giant EDS was purchased by HPEnterprise, and cleaning crews at the old EDS headquarters found room after room stuffed full of cheap plastic talismans imprinted with cartoon characters in bright primary colors, apparently to keep the interest of EDS managers. Not only were the grounds festooned with the talismans, often buried inside overturned EDS coffee mugs also found by the tens of thousands, but apparently the entire original EDS campus lay atop a thick layer of “Earl Squirrel” medallions in the greatest “This Place Is Not A Place Of Honor” technological waste dump warning in this quadrant of the galaxy. The purpose of the talismans remains unknown, but their presence in the previous EDS campus closer to downtown Dallas, as well as their reworking and repurposing by the subsequent tech company that took over that campus, suggest a slight protective effect per medallion that was concentrated by the sheer number at each dump site. As to what the medallions were supposed to protect against, no record remains, but some experts suggest that much like the legends of vampires having to stop to count every grain of spilled rice before entering a domicile, these were spread through the area to preoccupy dotcom-era management so employees and contractors could get gainful work done every day. Increasing amounts of evidence suggests that this was the case, especially with the problems with EDS and Texas Instruments executives needing to look down during rainstorms so they didn’t drown in the parking lots.

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.

glyphs signage St. Remedius talismans Waterfall Dragon Zwinge Foundation