St. Remedius Medical College: "The Shady Underside of Pest Control"
The Real Backstory Behind the great Avalon Theater Fire
(Who was St. Remedius? And why is a medical college named after him?)
Prologue & Main Investigation
While St. Remedius Medical College built a justified reputation as a last stand against forces throughout space-time that threatened or at least severely annoyed the various residents of Earth, it must be understood by students of its history that its focus was not on being a planetary peace force against extranormal threats. At various times in its history, its resources assisted and sometimes replaced national and regional government organizations in repelling, containing, or assimilating threats, but only when those issues intersected with research interests. Part of this was to discourage governments and organizations from depending upon St. Remedius to remediate their bad decisions, but also to keep St. Remedius from becoming the world’s cleanup crew for incompetent efforts to horn in on its turf. Thus, this was why St. Remedius zoologists rushed to the desolation west of Fort Worth on rumors of variant velvet ants that developed social behavior and a sudden need to use human maternity wards for egglaying sites, possibly instigated by oil and gas fracking waste water containing abnormally high levels of radioactive elements, and completely ignored the great walking speckled trout invasion of Galveston Island, probably from the same cause, a year later. Whether both were connected to the subsequent massive paleoarchaeological dig known as “the Weatherford Xenomorph Site” is still unclear.
Probably the best example of why this policy was so vital came from a minor incident in Dallas popular history, almost completely forgotten by the time of St. Remedius’s disappearance. The once-famous Avalon Theater, a Depression-era movie theater located off the intersection of Skillman and Abrams roads converted for live shows in the early 1980s, had been empty since its closing at the end of the 1990s, with the usual talk about updating and renovating the registered landmark never working out. By the early 2000s, rumors ran through the area of shadowy figures seen on the rooftop at night, especially as redevelopment of retail and apartment spaces expanded through the area, but most of these were written off as squatters until a bizarre attack confirmed the presence of vampires.
Necessary Digression
Out of all of the vampire species dependent upon physical feeding, earwax vampires (Sanguinare cerumensis) rate at the absolute bottom of the undead hierarchy, even below those feeding on sweat, sebum, and sacculitis byproducts. Between their feeding habits and their ability to transform into swarms of insects remarkably similar to the extinct Labidura herculeana, most other vampirids attack them on sight, thus forcing them into particularly desolate and afflicted environments. Anthropologists surmise that repeated depredations from earwax and mucus vampires might explain the tendency of peoples living in higher latitude toward aggressive nose and ear hair growth, with one family endemic to Liliesleaf, Roxburghshire, Scotland famed for an annual festival measuring nose and ear hair by stages of “hirsute,” “impressive,” and “Tom Baker scarf.” According to legend, a joint pack of mucus and earwax vampires were destroyed by an all-woman commando team who demonstrated the strength and vibrancy of their vibrassae and trigi by tying rocks into theirs, some weighing up to five stone, and beating the vampires to death by swinging and slinging the braided rocks to deadly effect. Today, the annual festival celebrates the vampires’ destruction with competitions on scarf length, individual hair thickness, and boulder-slinging separated by age from age 5 to 95-plus.
Interestingly, an infestation of earwax vampires on islands off the coast of Japan explains the popularity of both the earpick known as mimikaki and its regular inclusion with the kogai hairpicks traditionally used as an accessory with katanas. Not only did regular cleanings dissuade earwax vampires from becoming established in Japan, but the collected wax was often used as bait. A single statue on the island of Odo is the only tribute to a massive slaughter of earwax vampires, all attracted by a ball of wax produced from five years of dedicated harvesting and weighing approximately two kilograms, in 1606.
Earwax vampires, like many other vampirids, can reproduce via a bite infected with the vampirism virus, with their turning individuals generally able to handle the shame carried by their species, thus explaining nests in anime conventions and generative AI conferences. In contemporary times, the main population control is hunting by other vampires, with only the rare vampire and cryptid hunter focusing on them instead of species with more impressive reputations. However, in the 33rd Century, a trade deal with the Wolfram Tor allowed them exclusive hunting rights to all Earth vampires, and earwax vampire pelts became such a fashion accessory that the species was relegated to preserves and genome zoos by 3430.
Resume Story
Under normal circumstances, the report of the corpse of a fire marshal found behind the Avalon Theater never would have made it past the evening news, even when the autopsy report included twin blown eardrums and severe sucking trauma to both occipital brain lobes. If anything, that would have led to jokes about the fire marshal catching the rehearsal for a Quarterflash reunion tour, which happened anyway when the Avalon caught fire and burned to the ground about 18 hours later. Official Dallas police and fire department reports mentioned little more, with further information only becoming available with the opening of the St. Remedius archives. The backstory, as with everything else involving St. Remedius, was far stranger than initially suspected.
What can be pieced together from the archives was that everything started with a call to St. Remedius night shift doctor Ron Ashcraft from the Dallas county coroner on duty, trying to ascertain the cause of strange neural swelling in the fire marshal’s cerebellum. Dr. Ashcraft recognized the damage as being from a specialized animal control tool, currently in the college’s Advanced Technologies collection, whose vibrations induced permanent paralysis in humans. The tool in question was still in the collection and untouched, with any other comparable tool separated from it by about 1500 years and 350 light-years, immediately setting off alerts with several St. Remedius departments. A hastily assembled team, joined by a small security support detail, arrived at the empty Avalon parking lot and quickly became confused as to the dumpster in back full of the distinctive tarry droppings of earwax vampires. Nevertheless, they continued, lobbing in gas grenades before moving in.
The team was prepared for earwax vampires with guns and improvised incendiary devices. It was prepared for earwax vampires with advanced-for-the-time weaponry. It was completely unprepared for earwax vampires kept awake past daybreak with massive doses of cilantro extract, or for earwax vampires smart enough to procure and maintain military-grade gas masks. The resultant sunfire gun shootout and its aftermath were inevitable, with half of the theater in flames before the last vampire was blasted through a wall and into broad daylight to melt into a goopy mess, but even more surprising than the resistance was the small arsenal of exceedingly high-tech weapons they had on hand. The biggest surprise? 23 earwax vampires in an area with no other reports of their presence and no obvious signs of how they got sustenance. Only a lone mimikaki out front, squashed flat by fire trucks arriving at the tail end of the battle, gave any clue as to why they were there in the first place.
Very rapidly, the St. Remedius team realized that the Avalon Theater was a setup. The Avalon’s owner was a hopeful commercial real estate mogul with a huge trust fund and little else, and his purchase of the Avalon was at the height of a real estate boom where he stood absolutely no chance of charging enough rent to pay the note or being able to flip it to a greater sucker. The arsenal matched weapons rumored to be in the private collection of a Dallas billionaire already under police and FBI investigation for activities hard to describe in most written languages, but apparently involving amputee armadillos and spearmint jelly, and a subsequent FBI raid turned up innumerable other surprises but no alien artifacts. Troughs with traces of cerumen at the bottom were among the few things surviving the fire, suggesting that someone or something was offering food to attract the vampires and keep them there. The final piece, though, was the owner promptly suing St. Remedius for damages and projected income from a theater revival, with several typos suggesting that the suit paperwork had been completed about three months before the ambush, as well as turning up with an updated insurance policy for considerably more than what the Avalon at that time was worth.
According to the St. Remedius archives, the suit was dropped two days later, and the file included scans of a receipt simply reading “MISSION ACCOMPLISHED” and listing the price of a Central Market jar of spearmint jelly. The site itself was stripped, bulldozed, and prepared for retail takeover, with not so much as the parking lot remaining. After that, though, any St. Remedius investigations of private property always included extensive release forms and prior surveillance surveillance, both via technological and thaumaturgic means, as well as an extensive background check via known prophecy books. This paid off shortly after with the construction of the second Reunion Tower overlooking the neighborhood of Oak Cliff and the nanoscorpions inside, with the negotiations for St. Remedius involvement still sealed by the City of Dallas. However, Creative Commons aerial photos taken by local drone pilots are both curious and impressive, suggesting that the negotiations were very short and direct.
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.