Associated Organizations & Individuals
In addition to its full-time faculty and administrators, St. Remedius Medical College regularly reaches out to individuals and groups, particularly former St. Remedius personnel, for specific functions and circumstances.
Organizations
The Samhain Trio
One might assume that the various afterworlds open to the recently deceased exist in relative detente, only interested in increasing their power and influence in the mortal world but not crossing borders for the souls of the already dead. That assumption is deadly wrong, especially when the wars between afterlifes spill over onto our continuum. With new afterworlds constantly forming, splitting off, or slowly fading away as worship, deference, or fear fade, the spirits in any given afterworld are currency for their supervisors and maintainers, and new defenders rise to protect the souls gravitated toward these new realms. The Samhain Trio consisted of three protectors, the moonblade mystic Elizabeth Corwen, the lantern wraith Big Jack, and the hellcat Dinictis, summoned inadvertently thanks to a combination of Raven Silverwolf spellbooks and really bad merlot on a Halloween night renfaire event in 2004, who discovered that they could do more good, relatively speaking, on this side of the veil. Sometimes working with Hell, sometimes with Hel, and sometimes with Mictlan, the Trio tend to show up after incidents of mystic leaks and spills, misused Elder Magicks, and influxes of Halloween Spirits in attempts to regain balance with the darker afterworlds. Occasionally they partner with others for dealing with common threats, but only on Halloween Night do they stay long enough to do more than annihilate the threat and move on. Halloween is Dinictis’s night, and he expects scritches after a long calendar year.
SPG
The acronym is obscure, but SPG’s work is very well-known in exonormal circles. SPG consists of four English college roommates who decided to start their own exonormal research and investigation group after graduation, known to most in the business only by their initials. Between R. (linguistics and philosophy, astronomy), N. (pharmaceutical and organic chemistry, Eastern metaphysics, law enforcement), M. (negotiation, political science), and V. (medicine, demolitions, rodent husbandry), they already had built a solid reputation for investigations before aligning themselves with the mysterious Russian business leader “Mr. B” and his family, who gave them the connections and resources to move their sphere of research outside of the UK. When not on the track of escaped murderesses or wandering demons, they built an additional reputation for supplying questions for University Challenge competitions and headlining musical interludes throughout the UK, particularly at video festivals, summer holiday events, the random impending council demolition and KGB alumni gatherings, and searches for higher meaning in the lyrics of popular music.
The Knitting Circle
While exonormal investigation is not a field of employment conducive to a long and restful retirement, some long-timers occasionally cross the finish line with most of their extremities and brain cells intact. Many of these go on to more restful careers such as asteroid demolition or roller derby, but they often miss the adrenaline rush and rejoin as research reservists. The Knitting Circle, still operating in the Dallas, Texas area, is an assemblage of some of the best minds in the subjects of metaphysics, advanced or extrahuman technologies, prophecy and prognostication, hallucinogenic influences, and forbidden literature, collecting every Sunday afternoon, within reason, at a different location every week to discuss world developments while busying themselves with their particular crafting specialties. As the name suggests, the Knitting Circle started with knitting and quilting, but in present times runs into electronics design, squash carving, and Warhammer 40,000 figure painting. Outsiders are tolerated and sometimes allowed to ask the Circle for advice or information, but only those who bring food are invited back, the more homemade baking the better.
Individuals
Agata Wiśniewski
Agata Wiśniewski was a monster. She knew she was a monster, from the moment she awoke in an alcove in a maintenance tunnel by a cemetery in Warsaw. Her last memory before her new unlife was of contemplating college geology homework before something grabbed her as she was walking home and a sudden bout of incredible pain knocked her out. She awoke hearing the air around her move, smelling people moving on the streets above her, and the first pangs of the hunger that never stopped and could never be slaked. Directly over her lurked her progenitor, another monster that expected her to refer to it as “Sire.”
This was in the fall of 1908. The relationship didn’t last very long. Agata made sure of it. “Sire,” like most vampires, had a complex relationship with the sun, one made much more complex by the steel staples that kept him pinned to a brick wall at daybreak until every last greasy trace burned away. Nobody, certainly not Agata, mourned his return to Hell.
And thus started the chronicles of Eastern Europe’s most famed vampire. As far as any living relations were concerned, she had disappeared without trace, and she retained enough humanity and sentience that she wanted to give them a life free of a monstrosity. Her hunger screamed for blood, and when she discovered that animal blood was an unacceptable substitute, she moved further underground. The indigenous fae that survived the transition to city life, particularly the grouls that inhabited Warsaw’s cemeteries that fed on mental wisps retained by the dead, were so much more satisfying than humans, and Agata singlehandedly wiped out every last changeling and mimic in the city by her third decade of unlife.
On September 1, 1939, Agata’s life became both more complex and considerably simpler. The first day of the Siege of Warsaw was as much a threat to to Agata as every other life form in the city, because German bombs that didn’t directly hit her could open her underground lairs to the equally destructive sun. When Warsaw capitulated to the Nazis on September 28 and the German occupation started in earnest, among those who rose from the rubble was one who looked at the destruction and decided to change her favorite prey.
Stories of the “ghetto girls” of the Warsaw resistance do not include Agata’s name but should: she no longer considered herself to be human, but she still considered herself both a Pole and a Jew, though even whispering prayers under her breath caused her debilitating pain. She considered herself a monster, and she followed through. Very little survives of her time as an unofficial resistance fighter, but stories of “Piękny Koszmar” (“Beautiful Nightmare”) continued long after the end of the war in May 1945. That was what the Warsaw resistance fighters named her when catching glimpses of Agata climbing up the sides of buildings and then throwing broken German bodies down. German soldiers, the ones who saw her moments before their own screams rang in their ears and they became intimately familiar with the color of their intestines, simply knew her as “Tod.”
Eventually, inevitably, Agata was caught in January 1944 by a special SS force dedicated to capture and exploitation of exonormals for the war effort, and spent over a year in a chamber under the Wehrmacht bunker number 31 in Mamerki, as she was slowly and methodically vivisected and studied by the best exonormal researchers in the Third Reich. None of them, or the troopers assigned to guard the chamber, survived her escape: no known witnesses survived her rampage upon her newfound freedom, but Agata intimated decades later that the St. Remedius Medical College Advanced Technologies head Bennett was involved, an allegation that he steadfastly but confusedly denied. (In the documentary Piękny Koszmar, released in 2002, Agata commented on Bennett’s black hair, a decided shock to those who only knew him as a ginger. The fact that he only became involved with St. Remedius in the 1990s only confused the situation.)
Agata may have been a monster beholden to the resistance, but she was still a monster, and the end of the war gave her additional impetus to leave Europe and lurk elsewhere. After spending some time in Transylvania and Albania following the trail of Transylvania’s most famous nobleman, she found herself a new and extremely profitable career after destroying a pack of clokurs in the Tyrolean Alps: exonormal hunter and, if her targets were intelligent, toecutter. With a combination of extreme subtlety and fashion sense, she rapidly became the terror of particularly obnoxious vampires with more wealth than common sense. Stories of the vampire enforcer and hitwoman known by the nickname “Rudowłosy” ultimately gained the attention of St. Remedius by the early 1970s, and after a remarkably enthusiastic acceptance, Agata was considered a member of the notorious St. Remedius Bromley Contingent until the school’s recent disappearance.
After the school’s disappearance, Agata’s whereabouts are unknown, probably very deliberately so. Rumors that she will return to Warsaw as its greatest champion in its greatest time of need may be optimistic, but probably accurate.
Joseph Phillips
At any given time, the universe is full of individuals who either meet or exceed the minimum definition of “immortal.” Joseph Phillips exceeded the definition: his immortality gave him immunity to cell death and destruction from anything, and without requiring crude and nasty inputs and catalysts such as ground emeralds or human sacrifices. The specifics of his immortality are still poorly chronicled, but it involved access to a very specific artifact pursued by St. Remedius field teams for close to two centuries, with standing orders to reacquire, deactivate, and secure the artifact at any cost. When Colonel McGarry, dean of St. Remedius, learned of the situation, his subsequent orders changed the future of St. Remedius forever.
To understand the how of the circumstances, one must understand the why. Phillips was an actor. No, he was an Actor. Surprisingly, his skills and craft equalled his ambition and ego, but that wasn’t enough. Big audiences, small audiences, ampitheatres, pop-up tents…all of that was the same, so long as he had exposure. Living forever just meant he had more opportunities for the world to appreciate his talents. For over 300 years, he went from theater to theater, regaling his audiences of kings and commoners, moving on before anybody noticed that he had been playing the part a little too long. Every fifty years, he went to ground for a decade, holing up and practicing his next dream roles, and then re-emerged under a new name for a new generation, found new outlets, and started the cycle all over again. He wasn’t addicted to the fame: he was addicted to the work, which was fortunate for everyone with no interest in dealing with an immortal John Wilkes Booth or Robert Blake.
The beginning of the Twentieth Century changed everything for him. Not only did he adapt admirably to movies and television, but his roar made him perfect for radio. That, strangely, was his mistake, as people would recognize his distinctive roar from a radio play in New York or a department store ad in London and want to know more about the face behind the voice. Heading further afield became harder and harder as the world became smaller through videotape and satellite feeds, and his usual plan to reappear as a new person every half-century ran smack into government databases and Web searches. Being unable to give up the stage and increasingly unable to avoid technology, he pivoted and became one of the great voice actors of the century, all without anyone knowing his real name.
The reason why Joseph Phillips was such a subject of St. Remedius attention had as much to do with his particular form of immortality as his career path. Specifically, following steady work in the animation field, Phillips found himself in a tiny sound studio in Toronto in 1987, cast as the voice of Captain Adrian Johnston for a new animated adventure series titled Space Battleship Edmund Fitzgerald. Neither he nor his young costar Duncan McGarry, nor anyone else on the production, had any idea what a cultural sensation they had created, and Phillips fled Canada for more ephemeral work about the time McGarry joined the Royal Canadian Army, both because of too many questions and too much fan mail. Phillips returned several times to Toronto to reprise his role as Captain Johnston for several series seasons and a feature-length movie, always leaving after final editing was completed, and he and McGarry were the only unknown faces when the rest of the voice cast began touring anime conventions in the 1990s and 2000s. That mystery only inflamed fans’ determination to discover the true identity of “Terrance Lampasas,” and he remains an avid subject of discussion and conspiracy, with some even holding to connections to the Order of St. Remedius. As the Colonel would prefer nobody knowing about his time on the series, this means that efforts to retrieve Phillips’s artifact moves very delicately, but eventually Phillips would have no choice but to give it up…and continue as the greatest anime voice actor of the age.
Benjamin Willard
Once upon a time, Benjamin Willard was on the top of the world. It was the golden age of weekly newspapers, where chains were buying up individual papers, laying off the writers and columnists who made them readable, and replacing them with extruded writing-like “content” from central sources, and Benjamin was a Play-Doh Fuzzy Pumper packed full of spite, spoken of with the same reverence as Harry Knowles, David Manning, and Walter Monheit. As the Twentieth Century closed, not only were his film and music reviews appearing in dozens of absolutely identical weekly papers across North America, but his contract insured that his 30,000-word sycophantic interviews with comics creators and science fiction writers were reprinted, without a word modified or shortened, in most of them. “Willard” even became an adverb, as interview subjects slammed in print for giving insufficient deference and freebies chuckled “Yeah, I got Willarded,” especially after seeing unwarrantedly vicious reviews written without the reviewer passing within 500 meters of the venue or event. Yes, he was hated and derided by one and all, but that meant that at least he was being read, and everything was to show off to the high school classmates who openly wished he’d been kidnapped. They’d regret giving him his first swirly, making his first creeper report, and inviting him to meet them at a dying local mall on Friday night and wait there until they arrived, driving by on Sunday evening to find him asleep on the grass out front. They only had jobs and houses and retirement savings: he’d met all of the stars of Space Precinct personally. He had publicists and publishers and film distributors on speed dial, and if he didn’t get that super-special publicity preview that allowed him to see an upcoming hit movie three days before other critics and four days before the rest of the planet, they would PAY. All shall love him and despair!
And then the Internet happened, and with it the vast flow of swag and attention gradually dried up. The smart film critics got out of the business as publicists realized they could spend $1000 on Facebook ads and get a better box office return than a year of junkets and freebies for self-important twerps whose sole motivation was to be quoted on movie posters and intone “You, OF COURSE, know who I am, don’t you?” He tried television, with a six-segment show on cable public access cancelled because sponsors said their children had pattern nightmares after a single viewing. When the majority of weeklies died and the survivors realized they could pay in contributor copies and exposure, he tried moving into politics. He promptly became a textbook case of life imitating art, particularly with former coworkers standing at the bottom of the high-rise office from where he was planning to jump and singing the theme to Attack of the Killer Tomatoes. He invested his termination severance in a new bar and “video lounge,” only for his new business partner buying him out because of the plumbing costs from the autographed 8×10 glossies he handed out clogging up the urinals. Everywhere he went, from Salon to Star Wars Insider, every journalistic venue he could find told him to go play in Central Expressway traffic, with some magazines starting up for a single issue solely to reject his resume before shutting down forever. Even the local regional magazines that existed solely as workfare for otherwise unemployable journalism and marketing majors, who parlayed listicles of “101 Drinks That Mask the Taste of Rohypnol” to pretend that the graduate unemployment rate wasn’t as dire as reports threatened, passed on him, even on a freelance basis.
Most people in his position would have conceded themselves to the inevitable: a life of emceeing trivia competitions at anime conventions and getting paid in waifu body pillows while while working toward a management position at the corner 7-11. However, Benjamin had dreams. Big dreams. Dreams of fire and revenge, covering over the sounds of laughter outside a closed shopping mall. He held faith that as God as his witness, he was popular, and taking heart from his idol and hero, asked “What would James Lipton do?”
Benjamin Willard looked at the prevailing journalistic winds, and did what innumerable other has-beens and never-weres did when faced with his situation. He started a newsletter.
Watching St. Remedius started as a tantrum: Benjamin applied to an open for a St. Remedius publicity officer, and promptly got into a pissing match with the interviewer over the superiority of Deep Space Nine over Babylon 5, arguing both positions as the interviewer sat back in incredulous shock. Upon getting the “We regret that this position has been filled” form letter, he reverted to form and decided “Well, I’ll show THEM,” using his keenly honed journalistic powers to focus on the mysteries behind the college. Six months later, the newsletter had 360,000 paid subscribers, Benjamin was a regular guest on every dudebro podcast in the hemisphere, and his listicle collection “50,000 Things St. Remedius Doesn’t Want You To Know” made the New York Times bestseller list, amazingly enough without a dagger alongside. He couldn’t be a Clark Kent, or even a Jack McGee, but this was almost as good.
What Benjamin didn’t know, or more likely didn’t want to know, was that the Watching St. Remedius newsletter was a personal favorite among its subjects, especially on Monday mornings when they needed a good laugh. Colonel McCarry made a point of sending “anonymous tips” through secure channels to goose readership, both to publicize St. Remedius events and projects that would otherwise be lost in news churn and to flood the zone so as to deflect attention from projects not yet ready for release. The newsletter was also a great way to check for leaks coming from within, and considering Benjamin promoted anything that came in from a presumed St. Remedius mole, smartalecks were publicly and officially discouraged but not forbidden to send in completely fabricated tales of horror and woe and irresponsibility in research topics, especially if they came with severely photoshopped images of the submitter’s feet and with handles like “Everett C. Marm,” “Yossarian,” and “James Holden.” The more ridiculous, the better, and Benjamin ran them all. The really inventive stuff, though, could always be spotted if one knew the real identity behind “Mike Hunt,” “Ben Dover,” and “Al Kaholic,” but it was often so cunningly presented that one “scoop” drew the attention of SPG, to their eternal regret. The same was true of the sponsorships: most of the money for the newsletter came from various shell companies under St. Remedius, but some came from competitors and adversaries (including the aforementioned SPG), unrelated entities wanting to reach the credulous basement-dweller market, and the occasional MLM essential oil seller.
After the disappearance of St. Remedius, Benjamin Willard was left a broken man, relegated to the role of Senior Media Columnist on NextDoor after the newsletter audience faded and the St. Remedius subsidies ceased. However, the self-proclaimed “Candiru of Fandom” could come back to full form, especially with a promised revival of the long-dead comics convention series The Dallas Fantasy Fair.
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.