St. Remedius Medical College: Dramatis Personae - 4
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?)
Dr. Terry Martinson
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.
Benjamin Willard
Once upon a time, Benjamin Willard was on the top of the world. It was the golden age of weekly newspapers, where chains were buying up individual papers, laying off the writers and columnists who made them readable, and replacing them with extruded writing-like “content” from central sources, and Benjamin was a Play-Doh Fuzzy Pumper packed full of spite, spoken of with the same reverence as Harry Knowles, David Manning, and Walter Monheit. As the Twentieth Century closed, not only were his film and music reviews appearing in dozens of absolutely identical weekly papers across North America, but his contract insured that his 30,000-word sycophantic interviews with comics creators and science fiction writers were reprinted, without a word modified or shortened, in most of them. “Willard” even became an adverb, as interview subjects slammed in print for giving insufficient deference and freebies chuckled “Yeah, I got Willarded,” especially after seeing unwarrantedly vicious reviews written without the reviewer passing within 500 meters of the venue or event. Yes, he was hated and derided by one and all, but that meant that at least he was being read, and everything was to show off to the high school classmates who openly wished he’d been kidnapped. They’d regret giving him his first swirly, making his first creeper report, and inviting him to meet them at a dying local mall on Friday night and wait there until they arrived, driving by on Sunday evening to find him asleep on the grass out front. They only had jobs and houses and retirement savings: he’d met all of the stars of Space Precinct personally. He had publicists and publishers and film distributors on speed dial, and if he didn’t get that super-special publicity preview that allowed him to see an upcoming hit movie three days before other critics and four days before the rest of the planet, they would PAY. All shall love him and despair!
And then the Internet happened, and with it the vast flow of swag and attention gradually dried up. The smart film critics got out of the business as publicists realized they could spend $1000 on Facebook ads and get a better box office return than a year of junkets and freebies for self-important twerps whose sole motivation was to be quoted on movie posters and intone “You, OF COURSE, know who I am, don’t you?” He tried television, with a six-segment show on cable public access cancelled because sponsors said their children had pattern nightmares after a single viewing. When the majority of weeklies died and the survivors realized they could pay in contributor copies and exposure, he tried moving into politics. He promptly became a textbook case of life imitating art, particularly with former coworkers standing at the bottom of the high-rise office from where he was planning to jump and singing the theme to Attack of the Killer Tomatoes. He invested his termination severance in a new bar and “video lounge,” only for his new business partner buying him out because of the plumbing costs from the autographed 8x10 glossies he handed out clogging up the urinals. Everywhere he went, from Salon to Star Wars Insider, every journalistic venue he could find told him to go play in Central Expressway traffic, with some magazines starting up for a single issue solely to reject his resume before shutting down forever. Even the local regional magazines that existed solely as workfare for otherwise unemployable journalism and marketing majors, who parlayed listicles of “101 Drinks That Mask the Taste of Rohypnol” to pretend that the graduate unemployment rate wasn’t as dire as reports threatened, passed on him, even on a freelance basis.
Most people in his position would have conceded themselves to the inevitable: a life of emceeing trivia competitions at anime conventions and getting paid in waifu body pillows while while working toward a management position at the corner 7-11. However, Benjamin had dreams. Big dreams. Dreams of fire and revenge, covering over the sounds of laughter outside a closed shopping mall. He held faith that as God as his witness, he was popular, and taking heart from his idol and hero, asked “What would James Lipton do?”
Benjamin Willard looked at the prevailing journalistic winds, and did what innumerable other has-beens and never-weres did when faced with his situation. He started a newsletter.
Watching St. Remedius started as a tantrum: Benjamin applied to an open for a St. Remedius publicity officer, and promptly got into a pissing match with the interviewer over the superiority of Deep Space Nine over Babylon 5, arguing both positions as the interviewer sat back in incredulous shock. Upon getting the “We regret that this position has been filled” form letter, he reverted to form and decided “Well, I’ll show THEM,” using his keenly honed journalistic powers to focus on the mysteries behind the college. Six months later, the newsletter had 360,000 paid subscribers, Benjamin was a regular guest on every dudebro podcast in the hemisphere, and his listicle collection “50,000 Things St. Remedius Doesn’t Want You To Know” made the New York Times bestseller list, amazingly enough without a dagger alongside. He couldn’t be a Clark Kent, or even a Jack McGee, but this was almost as good.
What Benjamin didn’t know, or more likely didn’t want to know, was that the Watching St. Remedius newsletter was a personal favorite among its subjects, especially on Monday mornings when they needed a good laugh. Colonel McCarry made a point of sending “anonymous tips” through secure channels to goose readership, both to publicize St. Remedius events and projects that would otherwise be lost in news churn and to flood the zone so as to deflect attention from projects not yet ready for release. The newsletter was also a great way to check for leaks coming from within, and considering Benjamin promoted anything that came in from a presumed St. Remedius mole, smartalecks were publicly and officially discouraged but not forbidden to send in completely fabricated tales of horror and woe and irresponsibility in research topics, especially if they came with severely photoshopped images of the submitter’s feet and with handles like “Everett C. Marm,” “Yossarian,” and “James Holden.” The more ridiculous, the better, and Benjamin ran them all. The really inventive stuff, though, could always be spotted if one knew the real identity behind “Mike Hunt,” “Ben Dover,” and “Al Kaholic,” but it was often so cunningly presented that one “scoop” drew the attention of SPG, to their eternal regret. The same was true of the sponsorships: most of the money for the newsletter came from various shell companies under St. Remedius, but some came from competitors and adversaries (including the aforementioned SPG), unrelated entities wanting to reach the credulous basement-dweller market, and the occasional MLM essential oil seller.
After the disappearance of St. Remedius, Benjamin Willard was left a broken man, relegated to the role of Senior Media Columnist on NextDoor after the newsletter audience faded and the St. Remedius subsidies ceased. However, the self-proclaimed “Candiru of Fandom” could come back to full form, especially with a promised revival of the long-dead comics convention series The Dallas Fantasy Fair.
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.