Hellmouth Community College Mathematics Department
The Hellmouth Community College Mathematics Department is a nomadic collective of research mathematicians who live autonomously in vehicles in the vast desert surrounding the Hellmouth. They prefer their full title, "Hellmouth Community College Mathematics Department," to the shorter "Mathematics Department," but will accept either. However, under no circumstances should they ever be referred to as the "Math Department." If you do, they will show up outside of your home and harangue you with advanced mathematics.
Despite their extreme isolation, the Mathematics Department fosters many flourishing collaborations with other academic research institutions. The collective does not communicate directly with outside entities; rather, the collective employs a "fixer" lawyer, who makes visits to various institutions and persons on behalf of their client.
Membership
The Mathematics Department is an elite collective of research mathematicians - mainly number theorists, although occasionally mathematicians from other branches are invited to join the collective. Within the Mathematics Department, mathematics with no practical purpose is the most highly prized. The Mathematics Department discourages its members from attempting to find practical applications for the mathematics they research. There are no applied mathematicians, computational mathematicians, or engineering mathematicians in the Mathematics Department collective.
Rules
Rules are taken very seriously in the Mathematics Department, and the first rule of the Mathematics Department is that no one is ever allowed to write a decimal number. In one notable incident, a group of mathematicians were banished for life from the collective when they were caught sharing volumes of tables of physical properties of steam - hundreds of pages of tables filled with decimal numbers. The Mathematics Department sealed the books in a lead-lined container, buried them deep in the desert (they weren't sure how deep, but it could surely be represented by using an integer larger than 10), and placed permanent, passive markers capable of surviving extreme desert climates for hundreds of years, with the purpose of warning future generations of the extremely noxious material buried beneath.
Chuck Wagon
As a result of their refusal to use mathematics to do practical things in the real world, the Mathematics Department is hopelessly incapable of basic repairs, calculating water or food consumption, making purchases, or managing finances. In order to ensure the well-being of the Mathematics Department and make sure the collective doesn't perish, the Hellmouth Community College sends a weekly delivery of food and water to the Mathematics Department. This weekly delivery is nicknamed The Chuck Wagon.
