This piece is entirely satirical as a part our April Fool’s edition, the Trinibonian.
First Cocaine Bear, then Methgator, and now we have Meth Rats. The rats are cooking meth.
It’s no secret that various labs on Trinity’s campus conduct research involving animals. There’s a bird lab, a lizard lab and, of course, a rat lab. While the research being conducted with these rats is perfectly ordinary, what the animals do in their free time is far from expected.
It was an average Wednesday in CSI and I was walking out of my chemistry lecture. I had stayed a little late to ask my professor some questions, so by the time I walked out the hallways were `empty. As I wandered past classes, labs, and offices, I saw a fuzzy flash in the corner of my eye. I turned to see what it was and had to do a double-take to confirm the scurrying specimen’s identity: It was a rat.
I couldn’t believe my eyes! The rat scurried into an elevator and I stopped in my tracks. I stared at the red numbers counting the floors as the rat moved upwards. 3-4-5-6 — wait, 6? CSI doesn’t have a 6th floor. I pressed the button to call the elevator back down and sure enough when I stepped in, there it was. The number 6. Curiosity got the best of me and I pushed the mysterious button.
Watching the numbers rise from the inside of the metal chamber, I felt my heart beating out of my chest. As I stepped off the elevator, I noticed a long hallway with a dim light at the end. I cautiously stepped along the path and the light appeared closer and closer. Upon approaching, my jaw dropped to the floor. There had to have been at least 20 rats there, scurrying around in perfect coordination.
There were medieval-style cauldrons laid out around an entirely glass room, bubbling with various suspicious-looking liquids. Each rat was fitted with a tiny blue lab coat and goggles. I felt like I had entered a Disney animation, only it smelled awful. I can only describe the odor as rotten eggs mixed with urine. I reeled back, holding my nose and bumped a wall behind me with enough force to make a loud thudding noise. The rats froze and turned toward me.
My eyes widened in amusement and terror as the rats looked at me, at each other, back at me, and back at each other, as if communicating about how to handle the unexpected visitor in their midst. A few seconds later, one critter dropped an unknown chemical into a cauldron and scurried away with his companions. A giant BOOM set off the building’s fire alarms.
With all the rats suddenly cleared, I took my chance to escape and ran back through the long hallway toward the elevator from which I came. Conveniently, there was a staircase next to it that appeared to lead to the ground floor. I ran down and out the main doors to join the congregation of annoyed students and professors forced to evacuate from their classes. I was in the clear.
Now I was faced with the dilemma of what to do with this newfound knowledge. I had just discovered a meth lab run by rats on a nonexistent floor of CSI. Suddenly, the frequent fire alarms made a lot of sense, meth-cooking rats were causing all kinds of explosions! I couldn’t go around telling people, because they would never believe me. I was also slightly terrified that the rat mafia would try to shut me up, so I kept quiet. Until now.
You don’t have to believe me, but if you ever find an elevator in CSI that has the option to ascend to the 6th floor, please take a fire extinguisher with you before investigating.
