St. Remedius Medical College: "The Island of Misfit Sex Toys and Other Horrors"

Sometimes, routes to worse things than Hell can be found literally in one's back yard

Point the First: contrary to popular opinion, travel to alternate realities is neither easy nor effective. Or, more accurately, the travel is easy but a complete return is nearly impossible. The quantum membranes between universes and subjective and objective realities are remarkably porous, with objects, life forms, and even concepts slipping between final reality states with a determined effort or even a random sneeze. This happens with every known universe, millions of times every second. While the barriers between realities can be breached like a sandblasted condom, realities themselves refuse to accept that sort of flexibility, and any intruder without a sufficient outlay of energy and mental effort runs into a phenomenon often referred to as “The Law of Conservation of Reality”(Leiber, 1956). The actual process is called “remapping,” where the reality reshapes the individual and its history to fit the situation. Hop to the next universe over without sufficient protection to visit a parallel version of oneself, the reality shifts slightly to accommodate the visitor, and the visited now has an identical twin with an entire history of having been there since birth. Travel to wider-ranging realms, and experience more changes to the universe to accept the visitor. Go far enough out from one’s prime reality, and there’s always a chance that disincorporation is less destabilizing than remapping, but obviously anyone discovering this never reports back. The remapping process is not absolute, and occasionally memories, perceptions, and hints remain in the traveler’s psyche, accessed only in dreams and responses to jump scares.

(Note 1: Remapping, for the most part, rarely affects anything of moment. Most reality travelers are both tiny and incredibly common, and with very rare exceptions, nobody notices if a sand grain on a beach came from that reality or one where photons have mass, just to bring up a wild example. However, St. Remedius physicists make a point of monthly axe-throwing competitions with a printout of Bell’s Theorem as a target, just to get their feelings across.)

(Note 2: On a purely theoretical basis, a traveler to another reality might be so outre that remapping the universe instead of the other way around is the least disruptive option. This is backed by evidence of a vague echo of a reality-spanning disruption hitting our universe approximately ten years ago. What the universe was like before the disruption is unknown, but what makes things even more confusing is that based on perturbations in the data assessed so far, the disruption may have occurred twice at the same exact moment.)

Point the Second: A significant point of argument within the St. Remedius Metaphysics Department, sometimes but not always leading to violations of warranty involving chainsaws and rubbing alcohol, involves certain vaguely noticed poles of poles, as far beyond law and chaos and as unaffected by them as law and chaos are beyond and unaffected by good and evil. Attempts to map these influences rapidly fall apart due to a lack of reference, metaphor, and prior knowledge, with the famed St. Remedius professor Terry Martinson saying “it’s like trying to explain to a prion why the Dallas Cowboys will never win a shutout World Series pennant. Or why that’s funny.” Dr. Martinson later settled on rough analogies for each of these poles, with one set named “Chocolate,” “Strawberry,” and “Rocky Road,” and the other named “Raspberry,” “Pineapple,” and “Blackberry/Blueberry Gelato.” (A very controversial paper by Dr. Martinson before his totally expected disappearance suggested two even more distant influences on these six, tentatively named “French Vanilla” and “Venison Sorbet.” but further elaboration is impossible without discovering the key to the cryptogram he left behind: “If Caltech Can Be Silly With Its Nomenclature, Why Can’t We?”)

As the prions comprising St. Remedius’s metaphysical researchers attempt to learn why the Dallas Cowboys are down three innings against the Arizona Coyotes, they also learned that all of these influenced each other. Like the Trojan points between the gravitational influence between Earth, the moon, and the sun, the poles also left a seeming dead zone between them, if such a concept had any real meaning, where each pole’s influence was cancelled out by that of the others. For five years, the automatic assumption was that this place would be as inhospitable for prions, er, human life as that of any of the other poles, with any individual viewing it remapped to incomprehensibility. Terrifyingly, though, the center was extremely easy to visit and potentially to leave, if only to map itself over the whole of existence.

The breakthrough, as with many similar horrors, started with a dust mote that started the avalanche. As with similar cities, the people of Dallas, Texas had a problem reconciling their needs and urges to the perceptions and attitudes of their neighbors, leading to personal repression that often moved to public repression as well. Nowhere was this more noticeable than in erotic tendencies in the general North Dallas area. Adult bookstores and “marital aid shops” ranged all over the area, fluctuating in success and profitability with the waxing and waning of influence of the Dallas Police Vice Squad, but purchasing was less fraught than disposal. Anywhere else, family and friends would be accepting of a recently deceased cohort’s sexuality and quietly acknowledge their seeming quirks, but Dallas residents so often had to hide everything. Did family need to discover Grandpa’s extensive collection of Robert Mapplethorpe-branded bullwhips? What happened to the neighborhood when that law-and-order appeals court judge dies and the clueless family dismantles the built-in dungeon and puts the contents out in the front yard at the estate sale? And what about the well-loved gimp suit alongside the spare ties and dinner dresses in the master (pun intended) bedroom closet? If there was time to prepare, most of this disappeared right about the time the death certificate was signed, but if not, a very singular location in Dallas earned its name as “The Island of Misfit Sex Toys” for a reason.

For the most part, quick and easy disposal of sex apparatus is easy if hiring experts. If experts aren’t on the budget, tossing them in the garbage just means they could be found by neighbors, trashmen, and random passersby hoping for spare cans for recycling. Due to the various materials used in their construction, recycling isn’t often an option, either. Worse, so many average or impulse-buy sex toys have no resale value, even if cleaned and sanitized, so they tend to pile up in random corners alongside defunct camcorders and dead DVD players until the eventual estate sale, leading back to the original problem. The people of North Dallas, though, found an alternative. Off Preston Road between Keller Springs Road and Arapaho Road is a stretch of grassy greenbelt separating road traffic from the expensive McMansions in the vicinity, with a large area invisible from the road and rarely visited by pedestrians and cyclists. This spot became a sex toy Sargasso Sea, with a regular supply of objects, components, composites, assemblages, varieties, and collections delivered by vehicles without lights or emergency flashers, dropped by individuals with dark and unrevealing clothing before returning to their vehicles and speeding away, and left to greet the sunrise without perusal by the thousands of morning commuters traveling south on Preston Road.

If the Island were simply the local equivalent of a “Need a Dildo, Take a Dildo” tray, this would be of no note to St. Remedius staff. They had enough mysteries all on their own without kinkshaming anybody, particularly anyone previously deceased. A few grad students discovered the Island on early-morning bicycle rides and took in the ever-changing array of erotic detritus every trip. That’s when they realized that while the pile’s variety constantly changed, the volume never increased, and the more expensive items remained. Almost like bait.

Now THAT was of interest to several departments at St. Remedius, and the students rapidly organized protocols for a study to check for extranormal traps and cages. Very rapidly, they discovered that the Island of Misfit Sex Toys took objects from our world and took them Somewhere Else, but not anything living. They then determined that a similar process was occurring all over the area, in garages and closets all over the area. Things were leaving, but nothing was coming through the other way, with no distinction as to what. Very rapidly, the heads of Metaphysics, Physics, and Applied Demonology compared their notes and realized that this might be a possible avenue to a parallel reality that did not remap everything to its template.

What they found was so, so much worse.

What lay under the Island of Misfit Sex Toys was a portal to another realm. A realm at the absolute center of reality, between the poles that influenced the shape of everything, both perfectly aligned and opposed to all of the poles. This was a realm of absolute mediocrity, a plane of mundanity, a cosmos of meh. For millions of years, the completely average output of human culture slipped from our world and entered a place where it was perfectly suited. Phil Collins songs on the wind and Piers Anthony novels and issues of Entertainment Weekly underfoot. Books, movies, sculptures, paintings, prints, and periodicals sometimes inexplicably popular for about 15 minutes but rapidly forgotten and rejected, and hints of people that perpetually brought the question “Is this person still alive?” The air buzzed with lost television and radio programs captured on their way to Proxima Centauri and never put on anything approximating a permanent physical medium, with additional rustlings from stacks of weekly newspaper film and music reviews and printed-out PowerPoint slides of telecom business plans. The mountains of debris occasionally slid like glaciers of kipple, revealing innumerable UnCandles and bread makers still wrapped in wedding gift paper. The first explorers to come across were in awe of the spectacle, if standing there with curled lips and exclamations of “WHY?” qualified as “awe.”

This was the first and last expedition to the realm, and the few survivors gave important reasons to keep the Sphere of Meh from being visited again. The realm was inhabited, whether by actual beings or echoes of our world was unclear, that attempted to neutralize the slightest derision of any item with overwhelming screeches of “Well, I like it!” and ”You’re just JEALOUS!” The shades guarded their realm unceasingly and viciously, with the force of a job applicant listing their achievements in grade school on their resume, and the hint of anything remotely negative about the Sea of Suck caused them to school and whine the offender to death, with their shades wandering under yellow skies crying about “Sounds of the Nineties” CD samplers long turned to microplastics in our world. If this realm had a dark lord, then its Beelzebub looked over its kingdom with Jerry Seinfeld’s sneer.

Since then, no other realm under the poles of reality has been accessible, at least not with any technology, magic, or force available to St. Remedius or anyone else. The concern now is less about any subsequent visits, but instead about the portals running in reverse and returning its contents to humanity in a Vesuvius of vapidity. As such, the Island of Misfit Sex Toys is one of a multitude of portals carefully watched, not out of pulchritude but out of legitimate concern should an adjoining reality start to vomit.

(Many thanks to Billy Martin for the discussion of the [completely real and not at all made up] Island of Misfit Sex Toys that inspired this report.)

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.