St. Remedius Medical College: "All the Long-Leggedy Beasties"
How To Preserve and Monetize Cryptobeasties While Preserving Their Habitat
(Who was St. Remedius? And why is a medical college named after him?)
A regular complaint from St. Remedius detractors and those who hope to negg their way into a new job, the Venn diagram of whom resembles an annular eclipse, involves the perception that the Medical College archived, hoarded, and sat on the mysteries it gathered during its various investigations. Somehow, if they could just get inside and open up the archives, the secrets of the universe would spill out for all to gather up. Anything short of a complete gutting was an affront to humanity and its future, and St. Remedius needed to share everything or be shut down.
As with most things involving St. Remedius negging, the reality was a lot more interesting in the concrete, not in the abstract. Yes, St. Remedius had a tremendous library of knowledge and artifacts dating to its founding, and yes, its librarians were prepared and ready to fight to the death to protect its integrity. (If anything, the last St. Remedius head librarian, Wisteria Williams, trained in four different martial arts in case her expert skills with firearms, edged weapons, pole arms, and pointy sticks failed to dissuade raiders, invaders, and vandals.) However, most of the “secrets” were merely research projects in development. The mission of St. Remedius was to share its revelations with the world, but sometimes the revelations needed to simmer for a while before serving.
A classic example involved the hodag, Megalogamimimenosaurus brueggemanni, an extant rauisuchid reptile of the forests of northeast Wisconsin. For over a century, loggers and hunters told tales of a giant bull-horned reptile with fangs, claws, and huge back and tail spines that haunted the area around the town of Rhinelander, but all alleged hard evidence of its existence turned out to be hoaxes. That lasted until the summer and fall of 1983, when a series of campsites were raided while their occupants were away and drained of beer. A St. Remedius investigation team summoned to the area rapidly discovered that not only were the legends true, but the reasons why the hodag survived in an area hostile to modern reptiles completely overturned modern cryptozoology and physics at the same time.
While the concept of particles and waves emerging from the all-encompassing quantum foam was well-understood, what was confirmed during the Rhinelander Expedition was that much larger objects could and would fall into pockets into the foam, like dropping a rubber duck into a bubble bath. Many times, this consisted of an individual object or organism, which remained in a quantum state until the pocket reopened on our universe. In certain circumstances, the object or organism remained connected to the pocket, being pulled back and vomited back out on a regular or irregular basis. Those pockets were constantly forming and consolidating, thereby mixing their contents before release, causing multiple excursions of different quantum pocket contents with little to no warning. Some of these pockets opened randomly, while others opened only under specific conditions, and yet others floated outside of our continuum waiting for the right stimulus.
As best as could be ascertained, M. brueggemanni was derived from the rauisuchids, a group of large predatory reptiles distantly related to today’s crocodylians that thrived in the early Triassic Period. Commonly mistaken for dinosaurs, the rauisuchids were large-headed ambush predators that filled the apex predator niches across Earth, keeping down the ancestors of the dinosaurs as well as other long-gone reptiles of the time. The quantum pocket into which the hodag’s ancestors fell had a huge area, scooping up a large space of what would later become Lake Superior and transporting an entire pack of cousins of the famed Postosuchus into the quantum foam. For unknown reasons, the pocket only opened when outdoor temperatures exceeded 50 degrees F/10 degrees C, allowing the pack to run free to hunt and reproduce until temperatures dropped. When the critical temperature threshhold closed the pocket, not only were the original rauisuchids pulled into the pocket, but so were descendants and deceased individuals, thus explaining why no remains of dead hodags were ever found. With the pocket opening approximately every 25 years, areas stripped of game by hodag predation had the chance to recover, and as prey and competing predators changed over the millennia, so did the hodags. They became much larger, exceeding two metric tons (the oft-told legend of hodags having no knees was due to their preferring to sleep standing upright while leaning against trees or boulders, as getting upright from a prone resting position became harder as they grew in size), developed their unique horns and spines, and developed a taste for mammal prey. The pocket’s temperature criteria kept the hodags safe during the multiple glaciations of the Pleistocene, and they had only started to reemerge to a new world when they ran into their first real competition since the Triassic: humans.
Once the nature of the quantum pockets was known, their presence was relatively easily detected and mapped. Multiple pockets were found in Loch Morar in Scotland (Loch Ness turning out to be completely bereft), Lake Okanagan in Canada, various spots in Texas and Louisiana, and even more in the Australian outback, all full of strange and wonderful descendants of life thought to be extinct for millions of years. Still others wandered, causing sightings of anomalous or extinct life across the globe.
As for the hodags, St. Remedius used them as ambassadors to cryptozoology, showing that sightings of anomalous animals, and sometimes plants, had an unorthodox but relatively reasonable explanation. By the 1990s, St. Remedius researchers not only learned how to open sealed quantum pockets, but also how to unanchor the organisms therein, leading to hodags, bunyips, sasquatch, ahools, waitoreke, cadborosaurs, and rows in nature preserves all over the world. In addition, captive-raised hodags turned out to become what hepetophiles call “dog-tame” around humans, leading to experiments on breeding them for size, color, and temperament. The next time one sees an International Hodag Association and melt over the toy and teacup breeds (the “Neenah Needle” is known world-wide, but the “Menasha Gnawer” is unfortunately still rare), thank a St. Remedius physicist and biologist.
Essential Reading
Fossil Remains of Mythical Creatures by Bob Slaughter (Smilodoness Books, 1996)
Cryptozoologicon, Volume 1 by John Conway, C.M. Koseman, and Darren Naish (Irregular Books, 2013)
Want more hints as to the history of St. Remedius Medical College? Check out Backstories and Fragments. Want to get caught up on the St. Remedius story so far? Check out the main archive. 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. And feel free to pass on word far and wide: the more, the merrier.