St. Remedius Medical College: Dramatis Personae - 5
Background on Major St. Remedius Personnel and Related Individuals 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.”
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 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.
Wisteria Williams
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.
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.
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