St. Remedius Medical College: "The Smoothest Liar"
One Would THINK A Major Quantum Invasion Would Make An Impression, But...
(Who was St. Remedius? And why is a medical college named after him?)
August 29, 1987 was generally a quiet day in the Dallas area. A sudden cooling spike hit the area earlier in the week, dropping daily temperatures from the usual Texas blast furnace to something quite tolerable, with torrential rains the previous Thursday leaving the city soggy but encouraging. That is, until 9:51 am, when a massive boom comparable to a fighter jet’s afterburners literally shook late sleepers out of bed in the White Rock Lake area. At that moment, a massive quantum pocket unaccessed for about 85 million years opened up, and the Harkun stepped out onto a drastically different world than the one they last saw when the pocket last closed.
(Image: Two meters tall. Two legs, two forelimbs, and a massive tail for balance and for display. Dark tan skin with short quills popping up in random spots, concentrating on the backs of the forearms and the top of the tail, but not enough to give more of an impression of “bird” than “really big reptile.” A large head with a parrot-like beak, a small flare behind the skull, and two beady golden eyes that looked at everything with a level of contempt verging on outrage. In this circumstance, everything but the head covered with a thin silvery pressure suit with metal cuffs at wrist and neck, and dark brown three-toed boots. Within seconds of emerging, the uncovered face huffed in anger, the flare turning bright purple-red and the open mouth revealing herbivorous but sharp teeth behind the beak. The hands not currently holding weapons rapidly reached for any available, and the huff coming from its mouth turned into a screech, sounding like “Mwah-Mwah-Mwah!” Finally, a body odor as disagreeable as its personality, with both best described as somewhere between “Pickled-egg-and-beer farts in a broken elevator” and “the front of the line at Free Comic Book Day.”)
Considering that for three days the Harkun controlled most of the northern portion of downtown Dallas before an overwhelming response of force from the whole of NATO forced them to stand down, one would think the city would have more recognition of the battles. Today, most of the affected area is covered with high-rise apartment buildings, hotels, and the Perot Museum of Nature and Science, but for years after the incursion, the only things in that spot were grasses and shrubs filling in the missile and disruptor craters (with the exception of the one guided bomb that went off course and landed, thankfully without detonating, right in front of the Hotel Crescent Court). No monuments, no plaques, no tributes, and no parade routes. it’s as if the whole city, state, country, and planet refused to acknowledge the first contact with intelligent dinosauroids in modern times. And it has.
Much like residual self-image, the concept of delusional memory confounds the psychological community, with the aftermath of the Harkun incursion inspiring research that goes on to this day. At first, the steady stream of people coming to the craters where restaurants and stores once stood, looking surprised that the venues hadn’t been replaced yet, made sense as a lack of specific information on the post-battle locale. After a few years, though, the arrivals continued, with visitors looking over grassy fields and yelping “I SWEAR, it was here JUST YESTERDAY.” Most famously, drivers kept driving through barricades closing off a damaged parking garage, launching themselves off the nonexistent sixth floor onto the street below, and their trying to bypass the concrete barriers that replaced the “DO NOT ENTER” signs. Even after the garage was imploded, visitors kept trying to drive into the rubble, flipping off security guards on their way to a very expensive visit with a repair shop. (Without fail, those who rushed the guards had a universal response to bent frames, blown tires, and ruptured fuel lines: “Why didn’t you warn me?”)
The reality, of course, is how many people constantly use delusional memory in their daily lives and only begrudgingly change their habits when confronted by overwhelming physical evidence, grumbling the whole time. Just ask business owners about people seeking a previous tenant gone for twenty years, or those repeatedly calling a disconnected phone number to reach someone dead for a decade. More tellingly, consider the urge when coming across contact information about a locale or person that you KNOW is gone and not returning, and wanting to call anyway “just in case I was wrong.”
At St. Remedius Medical College, the phenomenon was studied for years by both the Advanced Technologies and Metaphysics departments if in case the phenomenon turned out to be caused by extranormal forces. These days, its study remains mostly within Applied Psychology and referred to the derogatory but accurate nickname “nostalgia poisoning.” Efforts to find a treatment or possible cure remain elusive, as those with the worst issues also fight treatment the hardest. Instead, St. Remedius in its latter years focused on ways to utilize it, including the emergency paleoarcheological excavation at 2828 North Haskell Avenue in plain sight at the beginning of 2020. Results on this research disappeared with the rest of the St. Remedius campus, but scryers and prognosticators still roam the area in the hopes that maybe a delusional memory shield explains the school’s fate. These lone souls do not respond well to suggestions that they are influenced by the same phenomenon they intend to study.
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.