This one time

3:28am as I finish this sentence.

An hour ago, I was sound asleep. An hour ago is also when the fire alarm decided to go off.

White fire in my head. I bolted up, took a good 15 seconds to register that this wasn’t a dream, and flung myself out the door, where the entire floor was scrambling toward the side-exit, all while being deafened by the dozen blaring herculean mutant crickets inside the fire alarms, an automated robot intercom lady telling us there was an emergency, and a zillion “is this real? is this a drill? is this actually happening? dude, what is going on?”

Within minutes, the entire building was out by the field. To make things worse for us and better for the this-better-be-a fire, it was drizzling out. A firetruck, contributing its own blaring noise, came up and delivered four or five firefighters slash policemen that went in through the front entrance. Meanwhile, the crowd of us standing outside in the cold chatted, complained, hypothesized, and joked.

After about 10 minutes of waiting, a lot of us gave up hope that we’d be getting back in our rooms anytime soon and walked to Wawa. By the time we got back just under half an hour later, the crowd had just started heading in and it was understood that the whole thing probably definitely wasn’t a drill.

Anyway, now we’re all back in our rooms and nobody not directly involved in whatever happened knows what happened. There’s no immediate visible damage or apparent cause, and it doesn’t seem like anyone was hurt. So unless there’s an announcement or notification or something, any other news will be à la grapevine. Watch it be burnt popcorn.

UPDATE:
Apparently someone got drunk, sprayed fire extinguisher everywhere, and pulled the alarm. College!