St. Remedius Medical College: Dramatis Personae - 1
Background on Major St. Remedius Personnel At the Time of Its Disappearance
(Who was St. Remedius? And why is a medical college named after him?)
At one time, St. Remedius Medical College had extensive files on staff members and administrators going back nearly 500 years. After the school’s disappearance, only fragments survived the catastrophe, with what little we know about the people that made St. Remedius unique coming from other, equally fragmentary, sources. Some remain absolute mysteries to this day, but some, a rare few, either continued with wild exploits or had other reasons to remain in the public record, or sometimes in the geologic record. Please note that the following biographies are by necessity biased, incomplete, and categorized somewhere between “apocryphal” and “complete and utter bullshit.”
Colonel Duncan McCarry
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
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
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, borrow a suture kit, and start 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.”
To be continued…
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