St. Remedius Medical College: "Introducing the Roamers"
Friend, Foe, or Something Completely Different?
(Who was St. Remedius? And why is a medical college named after him?)
As could be expected from the name, the Quantum War was a conflict that spread across all of time and all of space simultaneously, with scholars emulating the blind men and the elephant when trying to understand its beginnings and its ends, much less why it happened in the first place. Most of the first nanoseconds of the Quantum War involved organizing forces throughout reality, but one of the many confusing aspects involved those forces. St. Remedius archives chronicled multiple encounters with beings, forces, and colors associated with a major player in the War, with anywhere between six and 2700 distinct armies or other accumulations of force ready to fight at the War’s singularity point and gathered from every possible species and every possible social, political, or artistic spectrum. Some estimates hold that as much as 15 percent of all self-aware life in the universe, including pocket universes with more than microscopic connections to our main, was actively recruited for the Quantum War, with possibly another 65 percent directly or indirectly motivated toward actions that involved the War. For one zeptosecond of real time, the Quantum War washed over everything, before ending for reasons not understood or possibly not yet encountered.
One of the many, many curious participants in the Quantum War, their involvement as mysterious as the War itself, involved a series of beings known generally as the Roamers. Out of voluminous files on the Roamers full of empty pages and random speculation, what was known for sure was that they were robotic forms utilizing organic technology and DNA computing, arriving on worlds at particularly turbulent times in its history, and building bodies roughly comparable to the main sentient inhabitants from locally available materials. All known Roamers appearing on Earth in the recent past appeared superficially human, in long coats or cloaks, wearing strangely glowing masks or helmets and moving with silent deliberation, communicating with others cryptically or not at all. Obviously, the form changed in earlier periods, with surviving records of Roamers among the Vuun civilization of Australia during the Vendian Period being some of the most enigmatic. More importantly, the Roamers qualified as Von Neumann constructs: no Roamer started its mission until ensuring the construction of multiple replacements, with all information gathered by one Roamer passing to a central storage system and reallocated to a new replacement upon its decommission or destruction. Said decommission or destruction was incredibly rare, as Roamers could generate a truly impressive number of weapons, ranging from cutting implements to space-time warp generators, from their own bodies for defense as circumstances warranted. The official policy on Roamers at St. Remedius started with the same incident that allowed St, Remedius researchers to access the very partial remains of a Roamer: a confrontation between a single Roamer and the combined might of the neofascist Knights of DeVos in 1952, which wiped every trace of the Knights from the planet approximately ten minutes after initial engagement. That policy is “Leave them the hell alone.”
Active engagement wasn’t the same as passive surveillance, and quiet study from a distance revealed that the Roamers were hunting, or at least gathering. Only one Roamer ranged on a world at a time over an approximately six-year period, and they regularly observed and tracked individuals that had two things in common: a disinclination to hew to social mores, and a high degree of mental flexibility. They then appeared in front of that person, had a very short discussion, and the both disappeared without a further trace. Apparently the individual’s leavetaking was completely voluntary: the one human ever to receive an offer from a Roamer and remain said “I can’t tell you what it said, but it sang to me, and the only reason why I didn’t go is that I couldn’t leave my grandmother right now. Somehow, it understood and approved.” Roamers would respond to others, but with sentences and syntax that still defy analysis by the most dedicated cryptographers.
A final St. Remedius assessment of Roamers in 2018 catalogued multiple Roamers in various parts of Earth through the first part of the 21st Century, concentrating their harvests in particular areas. The catalog names reflected a mockery of a then-popular contrived pop culture villain and a comparison of each Roamer’s communication style with non-targets, with code designations starting with “Kylo Sven” and expanding from there. As such, Kylo Beavis wandered London in 2002, with Kylo GIR in Melbourne in 2004, Kylo Jay Sherman in Buenos Aires in 2008, and Kylo Spongebob in Nairobi and Kylo Toot Braunstein in Seattle in 2014. The most famous as well as the deadliest, though, ranged closely around the St. Remedius campus in Dallas, Texas, with Kylo Boomhauer wandering among goth clubs, bookstores, and wilderness parks between 212 and 2016. Without fail, the toughest and most resourceful St. Remedius researchers backed off and moved away upon hearing the cryptic “Dang ol, man, if, like, y’all go to Z’ha’Dum, man, like, you’re gonna die, I tell you what, man” and followed the official engagement policy. Anyone who had other ideas usually became large collections of buckminsterfullerene.
Unlike so many of its brethren and sistren, though, Kylo Boomhauer left the shadows and made itself a more open presence. Once per week for years, a mysterious Youtube channel featured the Roamer conducting what could only be described as “a cooking show for dedicated surrealists, with Kylo Boomhauer showing off the end results of seemingly randomly selected items. Whether these videos contained subliminal messages intended solely for the individuals it was seeking, they were disinformation intended to distract investigator attention from other activities, or if they were simply an attempt at artistic expression from what was after all an incredibly sophisticated mech is still a mystery, but the last video coincided with the disappearance and seeming destruction of the St. Remedius campus, suggesting a possible connection.
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.