St. Remedius Medical College: "Fruit Of the Vine, And The Crystal, And The Apparition"

St. Remedius history with beers, wines, infusions, liquors, and less identifiable libations

(Who was St. Remedius? And why is a medical college named after him?)

Photo by TSD Studio via Unsplash

While St. Remedius Medical College’s ranking in annual reports of “Top Party Schools” was less with neighbors Southern Methodist University and University of Texas at Austin and more with Brigham Young and Caltech (with the I-20 Road Rage race drawing a suitably impressive collection of Caltech graduates and alumni over the years), nobody could say that its students and faculty were immune to an appreciation of drink. The popular gastropub The Glass Glyptodont could be found on any night full of patrons discussjng the history, the process, and the distribution of any number of mind-altering, mind-settling, and mind-blasting brews, distillates, concoctions, solutions, and precipitates, with anyone bringing up absinthe, pulque enemas, or Kriek lambic being sent to the back and made to think about their choices. This was a discussion in which all departments at St. Remedius had contributions, with wildly surprising results.

St. Remedius itself had a long tradition of distillation marvels, starting with the allegedly defunct Order of St. Remedius. As with the Order of Carthusians behind chartreuse, the Order of St. Remedius monks experimented with herbs discovered during their investigations, and invented the drink cerulean sometime around 1640. An absolutely stunning drink, described in 1978 as “a glass full of liquid tanzanite,” cerulean was made in tiny batches once per year for two reasons. One was that some of the ingredients were so rare that the monks needed a solid year to gather enough to make a barrel, and the other was its effects upon its imbibers. For those suffering regular nightmares or otherwise particularly tormented sleep, a glass of cerulean per week guaranteed restful, uninterrupted sleep without narcotic side effects. For those with narcissistic or self-obsessed tendencies, though, a week of dreams destroying their self-importance, usually leading to wild screaming and soiled bed linens, guaranteed they would never touch it again.

As a rule, the friendly rivalry between the Advanced Technologies and Metaphysics departments led to all sorts of shenanigans, usually involving crystal infusions, exposing standard beers and wines to catarrhic, orgonic, or even psychotronic energies, and nanobot and post-life harmonics. The Botany department, though, had a lock on unique beverage ingredients, particularly involving herbs and other plants found nowhere else in the present day. An initiation ritual verging on particular cruelty involved finishing a mug of perinool, a drink popular with the Harkun. Derived from fermented and macerated fruit of the now-extinct tree Ginkgo digitata, only surviving in the St. Remedius herbarium, it was a beautiful yellow-orange froth that to species derived from archosaur ancestry smelled of absolute heaven, but to mammalian descendants, or to just about everyone else, could, to quote one expert, “burn the nose hairs out of a dead nun.” Sadly, as most of Earth’s indigenous intelligent species during the Cretaceous Period had about as much of a sense of taste as iguanas or parrots today, the main cues for drinkability were visual and olfactory, with the ginkgo fruit ranking high on notes of “fresh cat shit” and “armadillo vomit” even before brewing. Getting through a mug of perinool was therefore a particular display of dedication to esoteric botany, usually only made for diplomatic efforts with displaced Harkun and the occasional gustatory masochist, and the subsequent intoxication effects helped explain why so many members of the Botany department became lifelong teetotalers. Just mentioning perinool in a department meeting could bring on spontaneous vomiting, so, such as with Macbeth among theater students, it was always referenced as “the parrotface drink.”

Since the disappearance of the school, all cerulean production ceased, with a limited supply carefully tended by dedicated collectors and students of medical lore. Hints from time travelers and quantum pocket explorers suggests that the formula was reverse engineered sometime in the 31st century Earth time, with one bottle being given as a gift at the last great Time Traveler Ball. The last known source for the ginkgo fruit that produced perinool was lost with the school as well, but the Harkun living past the present day found a suitably noxious alternative.

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.