PRINCETON — Charter had Fridays. Cottage had Sundays. And even Tower had something. But one club stood among the rest without a day to its name. Quad. The humiliation was staggering. That’s when Quadrangle Club engineers came up with a novel solution. They would invent a new day. An eighth day. “Quad Day.”
In the fall of 2006, Quad’s engineers unveiled the product of their efforts. The Quadrangle Subtemporal Singularity Engine, or “Passbook,” allowed members to open a temporary rift in time, entry into which afforded them an extra twenty four hours to party.
“Quad Day, which occurred sometime between Saturday night and Sunday afternoon, was a spectacle at first,” says Quadrangle Club Historian Richard Butterflies. “Everyone wanted to get a piece of the action.”
But a storm would soon descend, unforeseen, on the happy revelers.
“It all went South when the club’s treasurer attended Quad Day, and returned as an eighty year old man. This raised doubts as to the stability of the temporal matrix on which the Day was founded.”
Quad’s engineers worked feverishly morning and night to fix the problem, and, by reading period of second semester, they believed they had found a solution. Officers decided to hold a special member’s night to celebrate the reopening of Quad Day. But once again, tragedy would unsheathe its steely blade.
As members piled into the Quad Day portal, the Engine driving the machine suddenly short-circuited, collapsing the matrix, and trapping the entire membership of Quad, save one man, Barney Blanks, who was asleep at home, inside a dimensionless plane in time.
But what of Quad’s assertion a mere year after the incident that its membership rates were higher than ever?
“Most of Quad’s members just aren’t observable. When the Quad Day void unexpectedly closed, anyone inside was trapped,” explained Richard Butterflies, “Though they are still technically members, they’re imprisoned in a torturous waterfall of ever-collapsing space time, grasping for escape but only grabbing onto their own freshly crystalline screams.”
Current members say they can still sometimes see these ‘super seniors’ warping in and out of existence throughout the club.
“One time,” explained Kyle Slyman ’15, “I was watching Donnie Darko in the upstairs TV room, when a man appeared right in front of the TV. His eyes were fused to his feet and he was screaming at me in Ancient Latin to ‘Gettttt Outttttt’. But I just kept watching my show, cuz, you know, that’s like pretty common.”
– CJS ’16. Illustrated by AZ ’16.