By the fall of 1993, Chimera consisted almost entirely of a gaming organization. There were no meetings held during this time period; the group would not ressurect itself until late that semester, when I was nominated president and (last-minute) planning begin to run Chimeracon during the spring semester of 1994. However, there were still regular gaming meetings held bi-weekly (or more often) on Tuesday nights in the 2nd floor of Saunders Hall. These meetings would later die off as people begin to hang out at Cerebral Hobbies.
One one night, most of the regulars had gathered, where Mark Manlapas was running a game of Mage: The Ascension. Also present were Mark Swift, Matt Legget, Isaac Rockoff(sp?), Chris Kirkman(sp?), and Greg Dreher. So, we're sitting around playing Mage when we hear someone shrieking. This is ignored for a few moments, until we realize the shrieking is right outside of Saunders, and doesn't sound like it will shut up anytime soon. We all go to the windows and see that there is a woman laying on the sidewalk and howling at the top of her lungs, while two other women are standing over her. Mark leans out the window and asks if they need any help, at which point one of the standing women yells up, "Oh, ya'll, please help us! I'll give you ten dollars!"
Damsels in distress? Chimera to the rescue!
We immediately tear out the door, with character sheets and dice flying in all directions. We all run out of the back of the building (with Isaac staying behind to "make sure we didn't get locked out"), ran around the wrong side of the building, doubled around, and ran back to the front, where Saunders was faced by Murphey on the opposite side.
Lying in the middle of the sidewalk was a large blonde woman. And I mean large. Very large. She was also crying and bellowing incoherently at the top of her lungs. The other two women were a tall blonde with a thick Southern accent and a short, dark-haired woman who glared at us and said nothing whatsoever the entire evening. The blonde looked up and said, "Oh, ya'll, thank you so much! We've got to get her home! I'll give you ten dollars." She then knelt down next to her screaming friend and assured her that help was on the way. The big girl ignored this and kept screaming, at which point the blonde started slapping her repeatedly. "It'll be all right!" *SMACK* "These guys are going to help us!" *SMACK* And so forth.
Matt moved forward and got the blonde out of the way by explaining that he had been trained as a volunteer fireman and was going to pick the big girl up. By this time, she had stopped screaming, and was instead sobbing quietly. She was also, really, really drunk. So, Matt attempted a fireman's carry of the girl; while he was able to stand up after exerting a heroic amount of effort, Matt almost gave himself a hernia in the process. After standing, Matt found himself unable to walk while carrying the girl, and was starting to turn beet-red; we quickly convinced him to drop the girl back on the ground. All during this time, the blonde girl kept thanking us and offering us ten dollars.
Eventually, we all just carried her at once. There was a person holding each limb, with Mark carrying the head, which left me to try to hold up her middle. We slowly begin to stagger towards north campus, and quickly realized that the reason there are no 12 legged, 6 headed animals is because it really does not work. At any one time at least one person was tripping, while the other five valiantly attempted to shuffle forward.
When we asked where the girl lived, I briefly had nightmare visions of having to carry her to South Campus. Fortunately, she lived in one of the dorms at Conner Beach, so we set on our way. At one point Chris gave the quote of the evening, "Why we couldn't we have been football players instead of gaming geeks?" Mark made various grossed out noises as the girl kept slobbering on his shirt, and the blonde walked beside us, trying to keep the girl's shirt from slipping up. All this time she kept whimpering, but at least she had stopped screaming.
As we slowly moved down the back road that goes beside Davis Library to the back of Lenoir, pedestrians moved away from us as quickly as possible. A Point To Point van pulled up near us; we waved at it, but the van driver saw us and quickly drove away. We asked the blonde girl what had happened. "Oh, we were at a hall crawl down at one of the frats. She had never drunk liquor before."
After a subjective eternity of trying to carry this woman down the road, we finally arrived at her dorm. With much effort, the blonde was able to get the girl's dorm key out of her pocket and we went inside. At her room, we pounded on the door for a bit; after a few moments, the girl's roommate appeared along with her boyfriend. They both looked a bit dishevelled and more than a bit annoyed; the annoyed look changed to one of stunned horror as our entourage trooped into the room - a 6 headed, 12 footed Chimera Rescue Squad carrying a nearly passed out drunk girl, trailed by the tall blonde, "Oh thank you, y'all - I'll give you ten dollars!" and the quiet, sullen brunette.
At this point, Matt left off carrying and started lecturing the girl's roommate about the dangers of alcohol poisoning, and how she would have to stay up with her roommate all night long and try to give her water. The roommate didn't say anything, and her boyfriend kept saying, "Okay, look, we'll take care of it. Get out." Unfortunately, we were busy trying to find a way to get the big girl onto her bed; we weren't able to manouver her onto the bed without having the rest of her slide off.
After a moment, we said, "To hell with it", and started counting off as we swung the girl back and forth. At the count of three we flung her in the direction of her bed. She quivered in mid-air for one gravity-defying moment before slamming down onto her bed. As we stood around stretching our sore arms, we heard a sort of muffled screaming. Trying to locate the source of the noise, we counted and realized that Mark Swift, who was very, very skinny at the time, had somehow gotten trapped underneath the girl - we saw one arm waving frantically while both his legs twitched spasmodically. We were able to extract him from underneath her, and the boyfriend threw us all out of the room.
The blonde girl kept trying to give us cash, at which point I explained that we weren't going to attempt to split $10 6 ways, and that she could keep it. We made our way back towards Saunders, where Isaac was waiting and wondering what all the excitement was. The blonde girl explained that they were going to go back to the hall crawl and, with the dark haired girl giving us one more sullen glare, they left. We staggered back upstairs and decided that we weren't going to bother trying to go back to playing Mage. Chris and I attempted to play Magic, but our arms were too tired to be able to shuffle the cards, so we just sat there and stared at our decks. For several days afterwards, everyone had terribly sore arms. We never saw any of the girls involved again.