Faculty & Administrative Staff

The world-renowned faculty of St. Remedius Medical College is available for consultation on any number of exonormal issues. To make an appointment, refer to the appropriate administrator. (This section is updated regularly.)

Faculty

Bennett – Advanced Technologies

The last head of the Advanced Technologies Department at St. Remedius was also the most mysterious, even by the school’s standards. At the tail end of a tremendous storm ten years before the present, a large metallic cylinder crashed on the campus next to the statue of St. Remedius in the main courtyard, with a singular individual crawling out of a large hatch on the side and repeatedly asking witnesses to the impact “When am I?” before passing out. Details on his subsequent medical examination and discharge were wiped from the existing archives, but the results of blood tests and EKGs were disturbing enough that Colonel McCarry was called out of a dead sleep to be briefed on the situation. All anyone knew was that the traveler’s name was Bennett, short for “Benetalistantrumaine,” the cylinder was referred to as “the Silver Machine,” and that he was exceedingly taciturn as to exactly who he was and where he came from.

Thanks to his efforts in helping with several incidents on and around the campus, including yet another incursion by the Harkun and the first modern encounter with the Roamer known as “Kylo Boomhauer,” Bennett was made a member of the Advanced Technologies group on a provisional basis shortly after being discharged, noted for his multipocketed camera vest festooned with an always-changing collection of buttons and his keen expertise with technologies of the distant past. Since that provision coincided with with issues with an upgrade to the campus power web, Bennett became head of the department upon the early retirement of several predecessors. Since then, he built a reputation of refusing to take credit or acclaim from his team, regularly bringing promising students to the attention of other departments, and cutting off the typical flood of academic politics within the department, at the knees if necessary.

If he shared his secrets with anyone, it was with his wife Calliope, because anyone else trying to learn more about his personal life was promptly diverted or subverted. Every once in a while, though, hints would sneak through, usually as he muttered under his breath while inspecting a new artifact or device, with only the historian Blake Starshadow having any clue as to their meaning. One thing was certain: he had some significant connection to one Miss Christine Ketterley of London before her disappearance in 1898, as the archives refer back to voluminous correspondence between them, but what that connection was, aside from her time travel proclivities, is still unknown.

Calliope Pendergast – Metaphysics

Even before her appointment as the head of the Metaphysics Department at St. Remedius, Calliope Pendergast was world-renowned as one of the greatest sorcerers of the age. Her thaumaturgic pedigree ran back centuries, tracking back to Celtic mages repelling Roman invasions, but her extensive studies into Olmec, Lungshan, and Denisovian magic systems made her particularly versatile in both informational and confrontational sorcery. As such, she was a grateful student of St. Remedius, reciprocating her evaluations by the Zwinge Foundation by becoming one of its toughest and most skeptical judges. By the time of St. Remedius’s disappearance, “pendergast” was a verb among Metaphysics students for “deserving that ass-chewing you just got.”

One of the more confusing aspects of Calliope’s records in the existing St. Remedius archives is the variability of her description. Not only do descriptions of her tend to vary as to her height, hair color, and facial features, but this seems to apply to the few photos and one sculpture of her as well. She was always recognized by others in her life, but when asked to discuss whether her hair was long and red or short and grey, eight people who had just seen her would give eight different answers, all seemingly consistent with each other. One absolute, though, was her expression when displeased, with the words “bowel-looseningly terrifying” used by adversaries, colleagues, and students alike. As noted repeatedly, these glances were often aimed at her husband Bennett, especially when he interrupted spell research with his own revelations or just with lunch.

However, further delving into the archives revealed further mysteries. For all of her lineage and history, strange discontinuities appear, as if she were wedged into the timeline and the occasional hint of a pre-Calliope world were buried underneath. During her time with St. Remedius, she laughed about those touches, sometimes a little longer than necessary.

Dr. Karla Eltdown – Archaeology

At the time of its disappearance, St. Remedius’s best archaeologist was probably known for her television appearances as she was for her published papers. She knew she was the member of her department everyone wanted for elaboration and analysis of the latest St. Remedius discoveries and announcements, even if all anyone really wanted to see was her ability to juggle machetes and rappel down mountain faces. She knew that she was contacted by public affairs program publicists and talk show organizers alike because of her looks and her easy style of breaking down complex concepts to simple news bites, as well as her array of Olympic gold medals in gymnastics, fencing, axe-throwing (tied with Dr. Sarah Carter of Miskatonic University in 2012), and karate to go with her one Nobel Prize for her work on the Timeanchor site. All loved her, all looked upon her and despaired, and she. HATED. IT.

By the time of St. Remedius’s disappearance, Dr. Eltdown’s main focus besides her main research was outreach in public schools to dispel cliches on archaeological research. She wanted six-year-olds to get excited about microfossils and pollen analysis and microwear on stone tools. She wanted teenagers to get excited about radioisotope dating and stratiographic analysis. Most of all, she wanted to scream at high school graduations that archaeology wasn’t just about stopping alien superweapons and defusing mystical artifacts and killing legions of Nazis, as much fun as the last could be. She wanted to build up suspense in the little things that were the most important for the science, and get a whole new generation of archaeology students actually thrilled in the seemingly boring and monotonous aspects of the field, because all of the flashy adventures and escapades rested on that firm sediment and that’s all she ever really wanted to do in archaeology in the first place.

Dr. Terry Martinson – Metaphysics

In a place such as St. Remedius Medical College, where personalities and egos had to be oversized just to keep up, only a few former faculty could be considered “larger than life.” Dr. Terry Martinson, professor of Metaphysics, was one of the only figures in recent St. Remedius history who came close to that description. Besides his singular work with metaphysical poles, which gained him multiple awards and a marriage proposal from the beautiful Warsaw vampire Agata Wiśniewski, Dr. Martinson was known for his insights on other exonormal subjects, including mapping of quantum pockets in Earth’s LaGrange points, finding nonintrusive methods to track vital signs on the cryptids of Carl’s Corner, and tracking down a potential copy of the once-broadcast Andy Kaufman Writhes In Hell Variety Hour. Colleagues and even rivals regularly used the term “jealous, but in a good way” when reading Dr. Martinson’s papers, and the ongoing joke after his disappearance among researchers stumped by results was to ask “Have you brought this by Terry yet?”

The last time anyone alive saw Dr. Martinson, he was walking out of the office of Colonel McGarry, dean of St. Remedius, with a replica Stradivarius Stratocaster, made specifically for him by the St. Remedius Music department, on his back. Whatever was said to the Colonel, it was without rancor, and the Colonel never discussed it. Some stories related that Dr. Martinson had been particularly fascinated by the presence of exotropic energy from the millions of extraterrestrials that died on Earth through its history, and that the Trota Bands, a thaumaturgical parallel of the Van Allen radiation belts, prevented that energy from escaping to the beings’ preferred afterlives. This was supported by recollections of his joking about becoming an “alien exorcist,” but his subsequent advisory work with the Zwinge Foundation suggested that he might not have been joking after all. Occasional rock formations and wood carvings within pika-infested quantum pockets give hints that Dr. Martinson went on an extended walkabout after leaving the Colonel’s office, and some expected that he planned to return at Earth’s darkest hour or when he got word of an especially tempting lecture series. So far, though, Dr. Martinson remains at large.

Administrative Staff

Colonel Duncan McCarry – Dean

Most esoteric and exonormal investigation organizations took advantage of freshly retired military officers from around the world as leaders, partly due to tradition and partly due to a desperate need for moderation and exasperated incredulousness, and the last ten years of St. Remedius had that in spades with Colonel Duncan McCarry, known to everyone, formally and informally, simply as “the Colonel.” One of the highest-ranking Black officers in the Royal Canadian Army at the time he left, McCarry served with distinction on multiple exonormal operations in and out of Canadian jurisdiction, including efforts to capture and study the first of the Vancouver Kaiju, exploration of a massive buckminsterfullerene deposit of extraterrestrial origin in Nunavut, and surprising evolutionary developments with the flower emblem of Newfoundland & Labrador. Shortly after reaching the rank of colonel, the St. Remedius board reached out to offer him the position of dean, which he gratefully accepted before resigning his commission, admitting that “Ontario winters get a little old after a while.”

In his time at St. Remedius, the Colonel worked unceasingly to break down silos between departments and research groups, particularly between Advanced Technologies and Metaphysics, to the point of being best man at the wedding of the two heads, Bennett and Calliope. He had a well-known attitude of “gigantic melancholies and gigantic mirth,” often at the same time, and was well-known for moving heaven, earth, and the occasional quantum pocket to help subordinates, friends, and family. (The last he kept very private, with most St. Remedius personnel only knowing he was married because of his platinum wedding band.) His intolerance of fools was only matched by his hatred of bullies, as such nemeses as the Harkun discovered repeatedly and to their eternal regret.

One secret that the Colonel held to the end of St. Remedius, though, was his history before joining the Royal Canadian Army. While still in high school, he worked in various Toronto movie and television productions, starting as a gofer for two Irate Ian movies and later moving into voice acting, all under a stage name at his mother’s insistence. He took his commission with the Army partly to escape efforts to learn his real identity, especially when reruns of the popular CBC animated series Space Battleship Edmund Fitzgerald became a surprise hit in the rest of the world in the late 1980s and voice actor appearances at conventions and Canada Tire grand openings were regular occurrences with the rest of the cast. His concern in particular involved the amount of fan mail sent to him from younger fans who had terminal crushes on his character, the intrepid, brave, and very white Harrison Blake, and fan mail was occasionally forwarded to him from those dedicated viewers who had no idea of his real identity. The only reminder he had of that previous life was a reference model of the Edmund Fitzgerald from the show, refitted with a dart-shooting wave motion gun, on a bookcase behind his desk, and only one person on staff made the connection. That person stayed quiet until the day St. Remedius disappeared.

Samar Ashour – Dean’s Administrative Assistant

The Colonel’s administrative assistant, Samar was as much a collection of contrasts as her superior. Because of her dedication to her privacy, rumors ran rampant, until mercilessly squashed by senior St. Remedius staff, that Samar had a previous life, involving either espionage, bounty hunting, or commercial vehicle repossession. This was because she handled world-spanning emergencies with the same aplomb that she used for dealing with recalcitrant equipment suppliers or overly obnoxious investigative reporters: nobody actually saw her last action against anyone or anything threatening St. Remedius interests, but the autopsies and necropsies afterward tended to reuse many otherwise unique phrases such as “blood aerosol.” On a typical day, she could expect to deal with at least four emergencies, two concerns, and at least four insurance adjustors, all with a quiet, gentle smile and a twinkle in her eye, especially when anticipating deliveries of rare books and rarer artifacts.

The reality, of course, is instructive. Samar lived nearly her entire life in the Dallas suburb of Richardson, Texas, as part of the large Middle Eastern community that grew there starting in the 1980s. She first caught notice as a student at Richardson High School, where her voluminous reading habits led to teachers and fellow students joking that she had been voted “Most Likely To Be Found Dead In a Library” her senior year. Her academic career at St. Remedius was at first spotty because of her wide range of interests, from New Zealand natural history to urban drag racing, and not even her family (she was the middle child of three, and equally protective and supportive of her older and younger brothers) knew she taught herself to play guitar solely to understand the composition of the Hawkwind song “Angels of Death.” That changed when she started studying steganography in her junior year, a passion that stayed with her for her entire life, becoming obsessed with the history and bibligraphy of the famed mathematician, astronomer, and philosopher Ibn al-Haytham. A devout Muslim, she actively avoided late-night gatherings at the Glass Glyptodont, but was very happy to moderate alcohol-free student and faculty gatherings at Siouxzi’s Coffee and Books, which was where easily half of her take-home pay went. Samar’s record disappears along with that of St. Remedius, but rumors swirl about seeing her in various rare bookstores and libraries at various times since, with at least one case of her allegedly being seen in both Rome and Sydney by observers of absolutely impeccable reputations at the same time.

Dr. Ron “Civvie” Ashcraft – ER Doctor

The number of activities on the St. Remedius campus, official and otherwise, that could lead to death, dismemberment, disintegration, reintegration, cyber-conversion, hyper-evolution, devolution, and petrifaction gave St. Remedius medical students a wide range of experiences impossible for any other school to offer during their internships, as Dr. Ashcraft, the night resident of the campus hospital, knew far too well. Ashcraft originally started with a musical career, culminating with his becoming Las Vegas’s first licensed GG Allin impersonator with the capability to conduct weddings, before unknown circumstances threw him in the direction of the Colonel while he was still only a lieutenant. Neither party revealed exactly why, but the Colonel’s nickname “Civvie” stuck for their entire friendship. Whatever happened, Ashcraft rapidly applied and was accepted to medical school, where he became a specialist in bloodborne diseases, tissue grafting, and magnetotherapy. Even at the end of St. Remedius’s run, he kept up an impressive schedule of publishing, including defining characteristics of obscure exonormal species (before him, no field work had ever been conducted with earwax vampires), expansion of veterinary techniques with venomous cryptids, and the cataloging of DNA-coded computer viruses, including the still-classified Ellison AI Incident.

An aspect of Dr. Ashcraft’s life not found in St. Remedius archives, but occasionally alluded to in CIA and Interpol files, was his long and passionate relationship with former St. Remedius roboticist Dr. Morag Feinstein. Perhaps “passionate” is not strong enough: because of their schedules, they would usually only see each other one weekend per month, where they alternated as to who chose the weekend’s activities. On weekends where he picked the activity, he usually returned to the hospital about an hour before his shift started, borrowed a suture kit, and started the shift with at least one new and interesting scar-in-process, of which he would NOT talk. On weekends where Feinstein chose, nurses and interns often found him curled in a catatonic ball on the front ramp, where he would obligingly revive before the shift started. The two were incredibly dedicated to each other, but the likelihood of the relationship advancing was summed up by the Colonel noting “I don’t worry about them. I worry about the continent on which they have the wedding reception.”

Blake Starshadow – Historian

One of St. Remedius’s most noted historians, the nearly universal comment about Dr. Blake Starshadow was that she seemed to be an organism developed to survive only in suburbs. As such, that made her perfectly evolved for life in the Dallas area. Even her name was suburban, taken from the intersection of streets near the house where she spent her entire life when she was old enough to change it. While she could and did travel, the one place where she was most comfortable was her neighborhood, where she spent her spare time wandering local parks and ransacking local bookstores. By the end of St. Remedius, she was unmarried, without children, and without any family whatsoever, having inherited her parents’ house, and she was supremely, deliriously happy with the situation.

Part of this came from her general temperament, but also from her being a carrier of the so-called Jeffty gene. Leave her in any place long enough, and little bits of the world gradually turned into their analogues from the 1980s, particularly from her final year in high school in 1989, but only the good and quiet things. While this never affected integral or critical systems and never, ever affected anything living, eventually streaming music started shifting to 1980s hits, copies of OMNI and cans of Jolt Cola emerged on counters, and calling the number on the random copies of Judge Roy Bean Cantina & Grill, Black Eyed Pea, and Filling Station takeout menus got a response other than “this number is no longer in service.” This meant that Blake’s office was in a building able to withstand the gradual temporal metamorphosis, but this also gave new life to the 1980s-era magazines, journals, and building plans that surrounded her. The only time things became strange was when the happily working Conair landline phone at her desk (cellphones either became unusable or became much bulkier in prolonged proximity) received calls, usually from very confused individuals at the other end, or when televisions became locked on marathons of the Canadian anime series Space Battleship Edmund Fitzgerald, one of Blake’s secret pleasures.

The only issue with Blake carrying the Jeffty gene is its effect on others with the same gene, especially those locked onto a timeperiod significantly older than the 1980s. Minor effects included their cancelling out each other, but sometimes the gene’s effects tried to cancel out the other’s carrier instead. In a severe example that required the whole of St. Remedius to remedy the situation, Blake encountered another gene carrier with a lock on the 3130s, which did not end well.

Captain Jane Rosen – Pilot

The Colonel was famed for his ability to find talent for St. Remedius in the strangest places, as well as finding employees willing to stay with St. Remedius no matter the offers to go elsewhere. Jane Rosen’s previous career as a US Marine helicopter pilot ended only because she could never reconcile career for time with her toddler son Justin, and St. Remedius gave her the opportunity to reconcile both. While she may have given every indication that she was a born pilot, Justin practically lived in the air, and Rosen soon discovered that the only way she could get him to sleep at night was by keeping him there. The front of the helicopter was fitted with a special child seat, just so he could see everything, and even the worst conditions flying could throw at them just made him giggle with glee. Turbulence, crashes, evading missiles, pterosaur attacks? The kid slept like a rock afterwards. The only worry anyone had was what happened when Justin was old enough for school, and the Colonel proactively paid for a full scholarship and supplemental classes in anything avionic-related, including astronaut camp. Rosen didn’t mind: like mother, like son, and time spent on the ground was suffered until the next launch.

Dale – Who The Hell Knows

Every company and every organization has That Guy ensconced somewhere within. The individual whose voice runs like fingers up rusty sheet metal, whose every utterance is expected to be taken as the Word of God. The guy whose software project is three weeks late because he spent six months augmenting the user interface with Star Trek and Space Battleship Edmund Fitzgerald images with blithe disregard for corporate professionalism or copyright infringement. The guy who not just thinks that deodorant and soap are frivolous expenditures that take money away from purchasing Sailor Moon body pillows, but that discussing ratings systems for hentai videos in the corporate cafeteria is a vital subject, comparable to squaring the circle, that should be debated at as high a volume as necessary. That Guy has Opinions and Big Thinks about cryptocurrency, politics, and The Last Jedi. That Guy usually works alone, mostly because everyone else in the vicinity wants to set him afire after choking him to death with his moth-eaten “Han Solo Shot First” T-shirt, and discussions of company picnics and holiday parties are run very quietly for fear of That Guy making suggestions and recommendations that make everyone in the vicinity shove pencils up their noses until the pain goes away.

Dale was a perfect example of That Guy. Built like a bowling ball and about a third as subtle when used for eye surgery, Dale technically had the minimum skills necessary to accomplish his stated purpose within St. Remedius’s IT department, with his going on and on and ON about his 26 years of experience at an unstated tech company notorious for driving off anybody with any sense of hope or shame. Technically. In practice, Dale was sidelined at every available opportunity by the competent members of the IT department before he could cause any lasting damage, so his time was spent either Websurfing for the most ridiculous and unbelievable rumors he could find online or from terrestrial radio DJs, from rattlesnakes evolving to hide in bluebonnet patches to Jewish space lasers, or wandering the halls to find people to stun with said rumors. Anyone in his vicinity on a regular basis learned to run when they heard his mating call, “I ain’t never heered of nuthin’ like that!” Some suggested putting together a book entitled “Everything Dale Ain’t Never Heered Of”: preliminary calculations suggested that if each fact took up one page of standard 8 1/2×11” paper, said book would be the general weight, diameter, and volume of the planet Jupiter…at volume one of at least 57.

With most companies and organizations, the reason for a That Guy is painfully obvious: to have at least one living being aside from houseplants that makes the members of the c-suite sound intelligent, with no ambition or ability to make management look worse than usual. That Guy can be viewed as ballast in the bottom of an old sailing ship, general junk sitting in bilge to keep the ship from bobbing too high when the rest of the crew is thrown overboard. That ballast also comes in handy when the remaining officers need something to poke with sharp sticks and hatpins. Compared to high school, where he was so obnoxious and unlikeable that he had the shit beaten out of him every day by the anime club, That Guy is usually the last person to leave when the whole company gets sold for parts, with managers wanting to see if there’s a market in Redbull-saturated organs on the black market, because of his ability to ignore constant comments, hints, threats, and suggestions to “go play Russian roulette with an automatic.”

At St. Remedius, though, Dale served a vital function besides being a reminder for staff and students to go home before he leaves his workstation and follows them back. Unbeknownst to everyone save a very few members of the faculty, Dale was the end product of centuries of extensive breeding and inbreeding to develop a human completely immune to prophecy. Since shortly after the end of the third Peloponnesian War, the need for an individual who could block the best efforts of astrologers, card readers, entrail chroniclers, and pretty much anybody else attempting to divine the future was a goal of innumerable esoteric studies organizations, with St. Remedius achieving the first verifiable successes in the late 1800s. The end result of nearly 2500 years of selecting those least likely to accomplish anything of note, Dale not only, completely unknown to himself and unable to be articulated even if he did, acted as a blind spot for his immediate area, but could be channelled to wipe specific groups or locations from the awareness of even the greatest sorcerers and prophets of the age. As such, anyone trying to scry passcodes or other security measures only got a head of “I ain’t never heered nuthin’ like that” over and over until they died. Having to listen to him pontificate for days about how he should be hired as an “accuracy consultant” for a revival of the Britcom Spaced was a minor price for that level of security, which explained why St. Remedius spent most of the 1990s perfecting human cloning in the hopes of producing Dale backups in case the original tripped on the carpet pattern and broke his nonexistent neck.

(The current whereabouts of these clones are unknown, with most desperately hoping that all ten were removed from the time-space continuum in the same act that removed the whole of St. Remedius. Thanks to their singular abilities, confirming this may be impossible. The biggest worry with St. Remedius chroniclers is that at least six Dale clones were kept on perpetual standby, as a textbook example of Mutually Assured Destruction, and would be unleashed upon the continuum if anything happened to the college or its staff. The fact that they have not been spotted wandering aimlessly, anywhere and at any time, suggests that whatever removed the school did not set off the deadman switch…yet.)

Wisteria Williams – Librarian

Although considerably more accepted than in previous years, those with a taste for gothic culture, especially in less thaumaturgic fields, don’t always identify as such when at work. In her position as head librarian of the St. Remedius Medical College research library, Wisteria Williams was the height of professionalism in a place with a tolerance and even encouragement of positive and enthusiastic eccentricity. Like most librarians of rare collections, Wisteria could kill at 20 paces with a sharp raise of her eyebrow, and that went with her expertise in four martial arts and her especial skill with pole arms. From behind her desk, she was implacable. At her car, she was inevitable. In the field, in those rare circumstances where she was the only individual in that spot of space-time with the knowledge and skills to, for instance, defuse an activated Leiber Codex, she was magnificent. Her attire, though, was always perfect.

As much as her St. Remedius colleagues appreciated and enjoyed her company, Wisteria was sufficiently private that most of them knew nothing about her private life. They were all extremely shocked to discover, on the tenth anniversary of her starting at St. Remedius, that not only was she an enthusiastic member of and role model in Dallas Black goth culture, but that she had won four awards for “Best Local DJ” from multiple publications and Web sites in the area for her work at Club Scintilla. The few who sneaked in to see her in the booth, resplendent in a Victorian funeral dress highlit with meters of red EL wire, never brought it up with her out of respect and out of fear of having to participate in her famous Endurance Karaoke.

What nobody, not even her St. Remedius compatriots and not even her wife, knew about Wisteria until after the school’s disappearance, she was a double agent of sorts. She was a librarian for St. Remedius, but she was also a Librarian, and she spent most of her decade at St. Remedius carefully copying non-compromising and non-defiling information from the school and offering it to The Library for study tools and access to non-human Library resources. The scale of the transfer only became known when she cashed it all in the final days of St. Remedius, and when colleagues joked about her using all of her available book credit, they weren’t really kidding.

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.