St. Remedius Medical College: "The St. Remedius Bromley Contingent"
Not All Heroes Wear a St. Remedius Class Ring
(Who was St. Remedius? And why is a medical college named after him?)
100 meters (328 feet) long. 60 meters (196 feet) high. A rough resemblance to an armadillo, but more like a glyptodont, complete with a club tail covered in spikes. Tank treads instead of hind feet. Biomechanical claws peeking out from underneath a synthesis of flexible organic and metallic armor. A pair of 155-millimeter cannons above the claws, surrounded by missile and fragmentation bomb launchers, microwave blasters, and neutron lances, bracketing an armored head with flamethrowers for nostrils, radar guidance ears, and visual sensors capable of exploring the whole of the electromagnetic spectrum, from radio waves to gamma rays. Self-repairing and self-reloading from surrounding materials, fueled by a prototype fusion reactor capable of extracting fuel from most water sources, able to withstand pressures from vacuum to 4000 meters of water, and operated with a cybernetically-enhanced monitor lizard brain not sequestered in the head but buried deep within the body to protect it from damage. This horror was commissioned, financed, and completed by the deadliest of all life forms on Earth: a billionaire techbro with a fixation on 1970s prog rock and absolutely nobody in his life telling him “No.” Within five minutes of the cyborg going live in a hidden factory in the town of San Marcos, Texas, it exploited a glitch in its firmware (a glitch left by a software developer contingent upon getting paid for months of overtime, whom the techbro fired upon being asked to keep prior promises), annihilated everyone in the facility, including the techbro’s family and friends (such as they were), and scrabbled out of the wreckage and onto Highway I-35. Within 30 minutes, downtown Austin was a smoking crater (some would say “the best it’s looked in decades”), MoPac was a melted mausoleum, and the monstrosity headed north using I-35 as a guide, drastically improving highway traffic around Round Rock and Leander on its way to Temple, Waco, and Dallas. Without a means to stop or slow it, it would reach the last within six hours.
The Texas State Police, not having the resources to do anything other than become toe jam for a homegrown kaiju, wisely backed off, cleared traffic off the highway in both directions, and prevented gawkers from entering I-35 to get a better view. A few managed to evade the barricades, thereby significantly increasing the average IQ of the hemisphere when Code Name Tarkus rolled over them. Local and state police also put out the call for superior forces, most notably the III Corps and First Cavalry Division from Fort Cavazos between Austin and Waco. Three hours of furious battle with the best non-nuclear arms and forces the US Army had to offer only slowed it down, and self-repair systems scooped up the metallic and organic remnants for raw materials and kept going.
After hour three of Code Name Tarkus’s activation, emergency missives went to any potential force capable of stopping the beast spread across the planet, aggravated by the fights over succession of state command after Austin’s vaporization. The most obvious was the Advanced Technologies department at St. Remedius Medical College in Dallas, and the assembled teams there would have been glad to assist had they not been called to emergency action for an unrelated incident outside the town of Thargomindah, Queensland, Australia. The lack of St. Remedius influence fired up international, federal, state, and private organizations determined to get exposure by one-upping it, and wave after wave of semimilitary, technocombat, and augmented-human forces ran, drove, flew, and teleported into the path of CNT. Some fragments were actually recognizable as such after radiation levels dropped enough to allow human and drone support to approach. These times, CNT took seconds to slow its rumble to Dallas, if it took any time at all.
In retrospect, St. Remedius was involved with taking down Code Name Tarkus, but not in a way that most expected. Morag Feinstein was originally a top scientist with the St. Remedius Advanced Technologies department, but took issue with, as she put it, “having to save the goddamn world on Sundays when I’m busy” and quit in a very loud and very in-character manner, involving a chainsaw duel with the dean, before settling in the town of Avalon to raise exotic plants. At the time Code Name Tarkus came to the edge of the Waco city limits, Feinstein was already furious with traffic delays caused by a Baylor Bears football game in Waco keeping her from a cactus convention and show in San Antonio, and the sight of a gigantic biomechanoid armadillo made her break into a smile that terrified everyone, colleague and adversary alike, who saw it. Repeated attempts to debrief her as to how she ascertained an inherent weakness in the construct’s internal structure leading to its brain center have gone nowhere, but after “borrowing” several pieces of gear from a nearby Best Buy and tools from a Harbor Freight, all abandoned as their staffs evacuated, she then commandeered a news helicopter by promising “There’s no f-in’ way you won’t get a News Emmy!” While Code Name Tarkus focused on a late-coming superhuman team in their lifetime quest to become subatomic particles, she led the helicopter pilot into scudding across its back armor between its two rear microwave emitters, blasted an otherwise indistinguishable area of its armor with a ultrasonic beam, and backed off to watch its eyes go dark and its treads go silent.
While St. Remedius prides itself on recruiting and retaining the absolute best of the best in extranormal studies, sometimes those brightest and best have other goals. Some get tired of the constant intrusions from the worst things in space-time, others weary of being just short of completing a new paper that will make their reputations before a new discovery makes it completely obsolete. Others just pray for something approximating a work-life balance, and get sick of being awakened at 3 in the morning with yet another routine galaxy-destroying emergency. Even more tire of missions that take hours or decades of subjective time, but resolve themselves seconds after they start as far as the rest of the universe is concerned. The stresses even led to a union organization effort to get St. Remedius pushing for all time spent in mechanical or temporal stasis to be paid as overtime. Not many leave, but enough.
As to what happens, that depends upon the individual. Some disappear with separation bonuses. Others attempt to start private companies plowsharing St. Remedius discoveries, or with developments that nobody at St. Remedius noticed at the time. Others dedicate their lives to travel on their terms. A couple joined opposition forces, mistakenly assuming that what they knew gave a strategic advantage in efforts to destroy, delay, or delaminate the college. Most, though, essentially become privateers for St. Remedius, exchanging their skills for access to St. Remedius knowledge and equipment before going back into isolation. And let’s face it, some of those privateers miss the adrenaline rush and only pretend to be miffed or disgusted. These last are known internally as the “St. Remedius Bromley Contingent,” and like their namesakes, they often went on to their own significant contributions to extranormal studies with minimal to no official support from St. Remedius. Every once in a while, though, they miss being able to crash the party.
Morag Feinstein was probably the most famed of the St. Remedius Bromley Contingent, as much for her retro riot-grrl wardrobe as for her Ph.D in the flora along the North American Seaway during the Conacian Epoch, many of the holotypes of which, both living and fossil, she described herself. Officially, she was an outcast after her “retirement.” Unofficially, she never lost most access to St. Remedius archives, a favor which she returned by adding plans, schematics, and white papers on handy devices that later saved innumerable lives. In the case of Code Name Tarkus, when the St. Remedius cleanup crew arrived to move the beast off the Texas prairie and free up access and repair efforts on I-35, her only comment was “Just give me five minutes with it when you’re ready to move it. The brain is still alive, and I just need to check something.” No official records exist that confirm whether she was, or what she found, but one discovery may have been a major turning point in the still-mysterious Quantum War.
As for other members of the St. Remedius Bromley Contingent, some are still accessible even after the disappearance of the college. Approach at your own risk.
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.