St. Remedius Medical College: Dramatis Personae - 3
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?)
Dr. Karla Eltdown
At the time of its disappearance, St. Remedius’s best archeologist 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 archeological 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 archeology 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 archeology 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 archeology in the first place.
Captain Jane Rosen
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
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 weeks 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 1/2x11” 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.)
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.